I was never a firm believer in the supernatural, but given recent circumstances I – and many other people – have been forced to reconsider everything that I've been brought up to believe. What if vampires, fairies and other creatures thought to be mythical also exist? If the dead are able to return and eat the flesh of the living for breakfast, who's to say there aren't also beings who's skin burns (or sparkles) when exposed to sunlight, has no reflection and drinks blood to sustain themselves?

I never believed in coincidence, believing instead that a chain of events led to one event happening, so it may have been a chain of events that led to my survival on the day of my first encounter with the "supernatural".

"What are we going to do?" I asked Susana as we looked out the window, seeing the three men slowly shuffling their way towards my doorstep.

"Help me move the furniture," she said, successfully being able to drag my coffee table.

"What? Why?" I asked dumbly.

"Barricade the door!"

"Barricade the door, right." I did as ordered, moving my chairs and couches towards the door.

After a few minutes of shuffling around my front yard, they finally reached my door, banging wildly. One of them seemed to be banging the wall instead of the door, which made me rethink the intelligence of one of my neighbours. I still look back on this moment, not understanding why I didn't figure out immediately that these things knew no intelligence but to constantly attack anything that still had a beating heart.

I got out my phone and attempted to call the police, and when that didn't work I tried to call the barangay, also nothing.

"Lines are busy. Do you want to call anyone?" I don't know what was going through my mind thinking about that when there were three people attempting to break down my door. Nonetheless, she said no and I put the phone back in my pocket. I didn't know what I was going to do. I stood there looking like an idiot while she ran through my stuff. "What are you looking for?"

"A weapon, anything we can use to keep them away. Do you have a gun? Anything we can use at all," she asked, going through my drawers.

"Yeah, actually, I do," I answered.

"Well go get it!"

I ran upstairs into my room, and searching through my desk drawers I found it: a dusty old Browning I bought for self-defence, never believing that I would use it.

I ran back downstairs, showing her the gun. We stood there for a full five seconds staring at it, not knowing what to do.

"Well?" she asked, looking back-and-forth between me and the gun in my hand.

"Well what?" I asked, totally confused about what she expected me to do with my gun – I didn't even know why I followed her order to get my gun in the first place.

"What do you expect to do with a gun? Throw it at them? They're trying to break into your home!"

"Yeah, I can see that. So?"

"So? So? This means you have the legal right to defend yourself! Shoot them!"

"Well, they technically haven't broken into my home yet," I said, still trying to avoid using the pistol and pointing out that they're still outside while we are still safe inside.

"You want to wait for them to break down your door?"

"Well unless you can see through wood then I suggest opening the door."

"Why do I have to do it?" asked Susana. As I was about to answer I dropped the gun, it let off a loud bang as the bullet flew through my TV screen.

The look Susana gave me was almost comedic, given the seriousness of our situation. "Have you even used the gun before?"

"Of course… like, once or twice. I needed to use it to get a license to own it," I answered, trying to be apologetic about how I treated the gun. "Have you used a gun?"

"Yeah," she answered, before I could ask her when she continued talking. "You wouldn't want to know when and why, give it to me. You open the door."

I gave her the gun, after which I found out that she was telling the truth by the way she handled it. Her form made her look like she's been using guns for ages.

"Open the door!"

After removing the furniture from the door and making sure to avoid the windows (I have no idea how I thought of avoiding the windows), I opened the door and immediately ran back to Susana.

"Sir, if you don't turn around now I will be forced to shoot you," she said, aiming the gun at the first one to enter the door. "Sir, please don't come any closer. I will be forced to shoot you."

The man acted as though he heard nothing, he continued moaning, with his arms outstretched, and walked closer and closer to Susana.

A loud bang, and the man stumbled back as a bullet pierced the centre of his chest – only to continue walking a second later.

"That's – that's impossible. I hit his heart; he should be on the floor squirming in pain!" Susana started shaking. "You try it."

She shoved the gun into my hands. I took aim at the man's chest and pulled the trigger. I didn't anticipate the recoil as the gun hit my nose and the bullet flew straight between the man's eyes.

"Son of a-" I screamed in pain as my nose bled out, after which Susana took back the gun and shot the next two men in the head. "Damn it."

"Let me look," said Susana, putting the gun on the coffee table next to us. "This is going to hurt."

I let out a yell of pain as she put my nose back in its original place. "Oh, damn."

We stood there staring at the three bodies lying dead on my living room floor. "What do we say when the police show up?"

"The whole neighbourhood is going insane. The priest's blood is making them go crazy," said Susana, "with some sort of epidemic going on here I doubt three dead robbers is going to make them worry more than a disease that's making everybody want to eat everything. "

"Were you at the mass last night?" I asked, trying to remember if she was there.

"Yes, I saw the whole thing. Everybody was going crazy to suck on the priest's wound. The priest can go to hell. He practically poisoned half the parish. Were you there?"

"Yes," I answered. "I didn't drink his blood!" I was cautious of the fact that she knew how to use my gun better than I did.

"I know," she said, smirking a little at my reactions. "If you drank his blood you'd be like one of them by now." She motioned to the three dead bodies lying on the floor.

"What do we do about those bodies, by the way?"

"Haul them outside, then," she said, picking up the gun and looking out the door.

"Because I'm a guy I have to do it?" I protested. Why was I being so neurotic about hauling three dead bodies that were littering my formerly immaculate living room floor?

"Yes, actually," she answered as she held out the gun in her hands, "unless you think you're better with a gun?"

"Hey, I killed the first one!" Why? Why did I have to argue?

"By accident!"

I just didn't argue after that. She was right, she was better with a gun, but no way was I going to acknowledge it. Even at that time, even in a country with a culture of empowered women like the Philippines, I still thought pride counted for something. I told her to keep watch as I dragged the first body – the one with the knife sticking out of its chest – out into my also formerly spotless lawn.

"Do you think this is happening everywhere else?" she asked as I went back inside to get the second body.

"I doubt all of the priests had blood that made you go crazy," I answered, exhausted after hauling out the second body.

"Do you exercise?" she asked, I don't know whether she was genuinely curious or she just wanted to fill the silences.

"Not a lot," I answered, dragging the third body by its pudgy arms. "Just enough so I don't look like this guy," I motioned at the man I was dragging, who was wearing a tank top that exposed his round belly.

There was nothing moving in the street. Two high walls surrounding the sides of my house obstructed my view of anything else. One of the few good things about living in one of these gated communities is that nobody trusts anybody. Apparently my house is the only house whose front yard doesn't have a gate, or whose house doesn't have high, concrete walls protecting it from its neighbours.

"So what is this?" I asked. Susana's puzzled look told me that I had to elaborate further. "What kind of disease is this, exactly?"

"Did you ever read Max Brooks or watch a Romero film?" Susana asked. She was on the right track, though I myself at first would think that she was insane for suggesting it.

"What? You're thinking they're zombies?"

"I know it's hard to believe-"

"Because that's fiction," I retorted. I always considered myself to be a rational man; therefore at the beginning it was hard for me to believe that they were zombies. Of course, they weren't, but modern, thinking is yet to find a word more suitable to call them by other than zombies.

"Unless you've got a better explanation, I'm sticking with zombies." It was a waste of time to attempt to argue. We both agreed that we might not be able to defend ourselves if more "zombies" show up, and seeing as how the situation seemed to be worsening, we thought it best to just load my car with food and water and just find the house that looks the easiest to shield ourselves in and just wait it out.

That was as far ahead as we thought. I didn't know if we were thinking that it would be just us, but the discussion of what to do if we saw other people never came up.`

When faced with the ridiculous, right-minded people would contradict the ridiculous. They would use all in their power to prove that the ridiculous did not exist. This time, however, the ridiculous did exist. If Romero is still alive, what the hell was he thinking?