1.
Alice drives up to what's left of the factory. Twisted metal, scorched concrete, a corpse of drywall.
- Whenever I see a gutted building, she thinks; I think of the boxes in the storage rooms, I think of the vending machines. I think of the bottled water.
A zombie emerges from the smoke and she blows it apart with her shotgun. That was her last shell; she will need to find more or hoof it with the dinky piece of shit some asshole thought to call a semi-automatic.
- It's sort of comforting, she thinks; all the water was kept there, hidden away from the world, while children went thirsty. This fire here bubbled up, killed all those bottles, released the water into the sky. Now there's more water for people to live.
There is a car on the sidewalk. It obviously had turned during the confusion, had crashed into the building. There is what appears to be a hand sticking out at an odd angle from the window. Alice passes by.
- I wish more buildings would burn down, she thinks.
2.
When Alice kisses Rain's nipples, Rain can only think of the way light plays across the ceiling. This is not to say that she does not enjoy Alice's kisses; it is instead the opposite: Rain never thinks about the ceiling or the way the light plays over it, like the way light plays through the water in an aquarium, except in these moments of ecstasy. The light is a dance, really, and it dances with the ebbing pleasure.
"Oh please," she says. "More."
3.
The zombie looks over to what's left of a street lamp.
And wonders
Is there anything left to eat?
One day, it wanders to the edge of a waterfall, and beneath it
is the edge of the cosmos.
A vast emptiness, filled with nothing but miracles.
The zombie, it says, is the synthesis of human insignificance.
It walks and eats and does nothing
to prove it lives.
4.
There is something about vintage porn that is not like anything else Rain has ever seen. The images fly past her face, her fingers tap on the keyboard.
They look like paintings, is what they look like. Like Grecian goddesses. They look like something women were supposed to be, once upon a time, before thin was in, before Twiggy, before heroin chic.
There's something in their eyes, too, that other pornography seems to be missing, a sort of mischief, or knowledge that what they're doing is naughty. They're enjoying it.
Does Rain look like that when she is with Alice?
She wonders.
5.
The Licker lights another candle and sets it down in a bath.
It's about frigging time, it thinks. It has been clambering around the Hive for days now, days of finding only other zombies. It wasn't until it found the residential rooms, presumably for the former workers, that it began to enjoy itself.
It would go through the cupboards, filling the complimentary mugs with hot water, sticking a tea-bag in, adding sugar (the milk had gone bad days ago).
The Licker lowers itself into the bath, its mug of tea in its left hand, and it breathes in the scent of the candles.
Vanilla.
The little things in life, it thinks.
Like baths and tea. And pancakes.
There was some instant mix back there, wasn't there? it thinks. Just add water.