The twins were already walking down the street when the sun peeked its head over the horizon, putting the crazy lady and her neighborhood further behind them with each step. Neither boy had slept well the previous night and they were itching to move on. Cody judged them a few hours' walk from being officially out of Boston and all its suburbs and that suited them both just fine. The city they'd spent the last few years in felt cold to them now, no longer a home at all.

They'd been walking for about an hour, Zack doing his best to fill the morning air with something other than the sound of their own footsteps since Cody didn't seem willing to participate in conversation, when he called a sudden halt to their march.

"Okay, that's it. Spill it, Cody. What's up? You've said maybe ten words since we left the house. Did I do something to piss you off?"

"No, you haven't done anything. I've been thinking, that's all."

"Anything you want to share with me or is it special super secret Cody-only stuff?"

"Some of it yes, some of it no."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that I'll tell you part of it but not all of it, Zack." Cody could tell his brother was pissed but he'd have to deal with it. He wasn't ready to share everything yet.

"Whatever. What's the part that I get the honor of hearing?"

"Don't be like that, Zack. I'll tell you the rest of it when I figure it out. I promise." He looked at his brother, his eyes imploring Zack to not make a big deal over it.

"Okay, I guess that will work." Zack mercifully let it drop for the time being. "Why don't we head to that gas station and you can tell me what's keeping you so quiet while we eat a quick lunch." He pointed to the Amoco about a half mile up the road. Cody nodded his agreement and they got back on their way.

Once inside the small convenience store, Zack began to raid the uncool coolers for anything sweet and caffeinated while Cody looked for anything besides Slim Jims and candy bars to eat. Zack came out ahead and tossed his brother a can of Monster. "Be nicer if they were cold but I figure we better enjoy them while they're still here, right? I don't think they'll be making them again for a while."

"No, probably not. I don't think soft drinks will be high on anyone's list of things to bring back after, or if we ever get back on our feet as a society." Zack could hear the giant sigh in his brother's voice even though he wasn't looking at him.

"That's what been on your mind all morning, isn't it?"

"Mostly, yes. I've been thinking of how everything is just so...so..I don't even know the word for it."

"Fucked up."

"Not quite the word I would have chosen but yeah. Let's go ahead and assume that we do someday get rid of all the zombies. Do you realize how long it will take for anything resembling our old society to come back around?"

"I'm guessing a long time, right?" Zack asked, hating how stupid he must have sounded to his brother. He hadn't given the idea a single second of his time since zombies began eating the world he knew.

"A hundred years. Maybe hundreds. If it ever happens at all."

"You don't think it will, do you, Cody?"

"Am I that obvious?" Cody frowned and sipped his drink.

"I've known you for a while now, remember? Plus, you wouldn't sound so down about it if you were thinking happy thoughts."

"You're right. I just don't see how it can happen. There might not even be enough of us left to make up a viable breeding population."

"Okay, see, here's the problem with all that, Cody." Zack held his finger up to keep his brother quiet while he inhaled the other half of a Snickers bar. "It's like this. Right now, right this minute, it doesn't matter. Not a bit. Maybe sometime down the road we'll run into your problems but for now I think we have more important things to worry about than trying to rebuild the country."

"Like staying alive?"

"Exactly," Zack said, patting him on the shoulder. "I know that won't make you stop thinking about it because that's how you are but maybe it'll help you keep from thinking about it too much."

"It's hard, Zack. I'll be walking and my eyes will wander over something and my brain tries to figure out how long it would take us to get back to where we could build it." He looked at the ground and tried to collect his thoughts. "This can, for example. How long before there's enough of us to plant a crop of sugar cane or sugar beets to get the sugar for it? Or mine the aluminum to make the can?"

"What's a sugar beet? Never mind, I don't really care. Anyway, I can't believe I'm saying this but I think a quote from your favorite movie applies here. Remember how in the beginning of the first Star Wars movie the old guy Jedi-"

"Qui-gon."

"Right. Him. He told the young guy-"

"Obi-wan."

"Can I make my point already? Thank you. So he told Obi-wan to keep thinking about the present and let the future take care of itself."

"That's not how he said it, Zack." Zack shook his head and smiled. He was obsessed with all things sports while Cody, bless his nerdy heart, was probably the biggest Star Wars dork in the history of the world. Or what was left with it. He suffered through Cody's lecture as he enjoyed another candy bar, not wanting to tell Cody to stow it in case he regressed to the silent, moody Cody of a few minutes ago. He suddenly realized all the times he'd done the same thing to everyone else when he went on and on about basketball and smirked. Was that irony? Zack wasn't sure which of those literature words he wanted.

Zack started listening again for a second. "...and Han Solo told..." Yep, Cody was still at it. Zack nodded in the appropriate places and started wandering around the store and began putting candy and sodas in his bag while Cody rambled. "...R2D2 beeped that he found..." He'd nearly filled it by the time Cody was winding down.

"...and that's what happened after Luke married Mara Jade." Zack had no idea who that was but it didn't matter since Cody seemed to have enjoyed telling his little story.

"Yeah, I guess that all makes sense," he said and Cody smiled. "Now how about we get a move on? We're burning daylight."

"Yeah, we should." They rounded up their bags and left the store, returning to the road after doing a quick scan for zombies. The sun was almost directly overhead now and they began pouring sweat before they'd made another mile. Zack pushed his damp hair from his forehead and Cody adjusted the bill of his hat to shield his eyes.

They exchanged the random chitchat that they'd both grown accustomed to during their trek and it wasn't long before Zack returned to the subject that occupied most of his attention. "We're finding some guns today, Cody. I can feel it."

"I hope so. After yesterday I feel almost naked without one," Cody admitted. "The idea of shooting a gun scares me but not nearly as much as not having one does."

"We will. We're overdue to find some. Besides, I'm getting tired of strolling the streets with just my pretty face and quick wit."

"The survivors in the movies always get guns by now, huh?" Cody tactfully refrained from making a joke at his brother's expense.

"Yes they do. And if we were playing a video game, we'd already have guns and would be finding the good guns anytime now."

"If we were playing a video game I would have turned it off and read a book by now," Cody told him.

"Yeah, that's the truth." Their conversation hit one of its occasional lulls and Zack was trying to think of something to say to keep Cody's mind occupied when he saw a police car with a body laying partially out the door in the median ahead of them. "We might have just got lucky."

"How?"

"Cop car. With what might be a cop in it. Cops usually have guns. Come on." Zack led the way and Cody followed a few steps behind, keeping a wary eye to balance his brother's tunnel vision. "Hell yes!" Zack exclaimed, followed less than a second later by "what the hell?" Cody raced to his brother's side and just as quickly turned away when he saw the mottled skin and the clouds of flies.

"I know what they were and if you say anything about what was all over the backseat of the car, I'm going to puke, Zack."

"At least you aren't in the car with him and smelling it," Zack said as he gagged. "He must have been bitten and took care of things before he turned." Zack pulled the collar of his shirt over his nose and mouth and leaned in and tried to pry the gun from the dead officer's fingers. "Oh come on already, give me the damn gun. You don't need it anymore," he said to the body as he finally managed to rip it away, jerking the body enough to allow a huge amount of decomposition gases to erupt in a massive belch of death.

Zack stumbled back, fumbling for a good hold on the gun as he fell. He was able to to get his hand around the pistol's grip and aim it away from the two of them as he hit the ground. The world seemed to stand still as each boy waited for it to go off and they both let out pent up breaths when it didn't.

"That," Cody said after he forced down a series of dry heaves, "was the most disgusting thing I've ever smelled in my life." His skin had gone a ghostly pale.

"Yeah, definitely worse than me after we did pizza and wings on our last birthday."

"You aren't helping any," Cody told his brother after he'd moved to the other side of the car and sat down against the door. He put his head between his knees and tried to will his stomach to settle.

"Sorry." Zack put the gun down between his legs and slowly sat up. "You wouldn't want to see if he has another clip or two on him, would you?" Cody laughed in response. "I didn't think so." Zack crawled back over to the car and searched the man as best as he could on a single breath and retrieved a second.

"Do you even know how to shoot a gun, Zack?" Cody asked once he got things under control and rejoined his brother a short distance away from the car.

"In theory, yes. You do this, this, and then aim and pull the trigger," Zack demonstrated, taking aim at a nearby tree and missing completely. "The sights must be off," he said as the sound of gunfire faded away.

"Yeah, that's what it is."

"Hey, I'm like Shaq. I'll make the shot when it counts."

"I hope so."

Now armed, but possibly not yet dangerous, they continued down the road past swaths of houses and apartments and corner stores. Zack practiced his shooting every mile or so and Cody couldn't argue that he was slowly improving. He could and did argue about Zack going through their limited supply of ammo as quickly as they were going through their water.

"We can find more of both, Cody. Relax. We have the gun and that's apparently the hard part to find around here. We can get bullets, and more water, too," he told his brother as he dumped some over his head. If he didn't know better, Zack would have sworn that it evaporated as soon as it touched his hair.

An hour later they were sitting on a bench in the shadow of a burned-out McDonald's. Cody had called a break when the road started swimming in his eyes and his feet felt like cement blocks. He might have fallen off the bench when he first sat down if Zack hadn't lent a steadying hand.

"Okay, I think we need to rethink our travel plans," Cody said once he'd downed an entire bottle of water. "It might only be the end of June but it's already as hot as the end of August. If we keep walking in heat like this we're going to end up like worms on a sidewalk."

"Yeah, but the zombies are always more active at night, right? Isn't that what you said?

"That's what it looks like to me. But I think that now that we're out of the city and into the 'burbs, we won't see as many so we could probably move at night."

"Or we could steal a car," Zack opined. "I've been watching the roads and they're a lot clearer now than they were just a day or two ago." He waved a hand at the street in front of him and pointed out the double handful cars in sight, only half of them really even in the road.

"I don't think it would really be stealing anymore but I think you're right. We can stock up on supplies and put all this in the rear view mirror. There's got to be a Walmart or something around here."

Zack looked over at him as if he'd just uttered the dumbest thing ever said. "A Walmart? Are you serious?"

"I have the feeling I'm about to get another dose of Zack's Zombie Lore, aren't I?"

"Yes you are. Big box stores are death traps. Everyone rushes to places like that to get whatever they can and if there's one infected person in there, they can infect everyone. It's like that vampire tag game we played when we were little."

"Sounds just like how you said malls work."

"Because it is. Just like a mall, there aren't very many ways into a big box store. So zombies are inside and they're too stupid to figure out how to find a door. But there's a difference between a mall and a big store. We're going in the first one we find."

"We are?" Cody was supremely shocked.

"Yes we are. As much as I don't want to, I think we need to. I was hoping we could pick up what we need along the way but that hasn't exactly worked out so far. We can get everything we need in one place. Hopefully, anyway."

Cody issued a silent prayer of thanks to whomever might be listening and then frowned before he even realized it. That was part of the stumbling block his mind was trying to get around and sort through things. Not now, Cody, he told himself. "We should be able to stock up and if it goes right, we won't even be in there that long."

"One way or the other, Cody, we won't be in there that long. No window shopping. We're going in, getting what we need, and going right back out. Ten minutes, tops. Now let's go."

Cody was beginning to think that they'd used up their quota of luck for the day when they found the gun. They'd been on the move until they were dragging long shadows behind them before one of Zack's ZombieMarts at last came into view. They settled down on a small hill at the edge of the parking lot and surveyed the scene.

"Only a few cars in the lot, that's probably a plus," Zack said mostly to himself as he looked through the binoculars. "Just one geek walking around the side of the building. That might be good or bad."

"Geek?"

"Another name for a zombie. So is gomer. It was in some movie."

"Naturally."

"Here's the plan, Cody. We're going to leave our bags by the front door so they don't weigh us down while we're moving around in there. Once we're inside, we grab a cart and throw as much stuff into it as we can and we get out. We grab our bags and find a safe place to go through everything we grabbed and take what we really need and leave the rest."

To say that Cody was impressed would have been an understatement. His brother hadn't ever been known as a boy that thought any further than three minutes ahead. "Zack? I want to know, and I mean this without any kind of disrespect, but how much of this have you thought out?"

"Honestly? You're going to call me a dork but the answer is a bunch." He slipped back down from the small hill's slope and looked at Cody. "There's a file on my laptop back in the hotel called Lunch Meat. It used to be called Zack's Zombie Diary but that sounded too girly so I changed it. Anyway, I thought about certain things I thought we'd be likely to run into and figured out the best way to deal with them. Or at least better than everyone does in the movies. Like what we're about to do. It never goes good because these places are just too big and there's too many places where you could just walk around a corner and be nose to nose with a gomer before you know it. So whenever we went shopping with Mom I'd try my best to remember where everything was and put it in the file when we got home.

"I've had to change a lot of it on the fly, though. When I made all the plans I figured that Mom..that Mom would be with us."

"Zack, I don't know what to say." He put a hand on his brother's shoulder and offered a small squeeze.

"I'll take that as a compliment. Come on."

The twins jogged across the parking lot and stopped behind the car closest to the store and watched for a few seconds. When they were sure there wasn't going to be a massive undead welcoming party coming out to greet them, they scurried the last few yards to the door and dropped their packs and grabbed a cart.

The first thing Zack noticed was that it was a lot darker in the store than he had expected. Even with the skylights in the ceiling it was still gloomy. He led Cody to the left and into the clothes racks. "Underwear, socks, shirts, shorts, and a pair of shoes," he half-whispered. They hadn't heard a sound so far but Zack didn't want to take any unnecessary chances. He stood guard while Cody threw handfuls of packages into the cart, keeping an eye out for zombies as well as to be sure at least one pack of boxers landed in their stash. They took a longer pause at the shoe display and it was making Zack nervous. He'd already thrown a box of boots into the cart and was ready to move on.

"I can't find a pair of Chucks in my size. There's everything but size sevens."

"Jeez, little foot. And Chucks? Come on." Zack rapidly searched the boxes and found a pair of steel-toes in Cody's size and tossed them in the cart. "You can't kick a zombie in the face with a pair of Chucks."

"I don't want to kick a zombie in the face in the first place," Cody mumbled as he followed Zack down the aisle, grabbing a few t-shirts from one rack and a whole handful of cargo shorts from another as he passed.

After a detour during their attempt to find bigger packs, in which Zack cursed whoever designed this particular Walmart for not making it exactly the same as all the others with words that made the tips of Cody's ears turn red, they had new gym bags and were on the way to the sporting goods department, dropping two battery powered lanterns in the cart as they passed them.

"Maybe we can find a shotgun or two while we're here," Zack said to himself, not believing there was much of a chance of that after seeing how picked over the store seemed to be. They found the counter and the locked cases behind it. "Thought so." The cases were shattered and there wasn't a gun to be seen. He heard Cody's sigh of disappointment.

"There's nothing here."

"Aah, but there is." Zack squatted down and opened the bottom of the case and began pulling boxes of ammunition out. "Now we have the shells. We'll find a shotgun." He put four boxes of 9mm and another four of shotgun shells in the cart and they were off again.

"Sheesh, these shelves are about as bare as can be," Cody whistled as they strolled through the food aisles.

"Yeah, someone sure stocked up. Too bad we don't need mustard or salad dressing since that's about the only thing they didn't take." Zack was barely exaggerating. Everything that didn't require cooking or other preparation was gone. A few cans of Spam, a few cans of baked beans, and a box of crackers was all they had to show for their troubles.

"We should see if they have any water while we're here," Cody said as he steered the cart. Zack started to say no but decided it couldn't hurt to check. As it turned out, there was no water but they did manage to find a couple bottles of Gatorade. Zack's attention, however, was drawn to the only partially emptied beer cooler in the next aisle.

"I thought that this would have been cleared out for sure," he said as tried to figure if a case would fit on the bottom rack of the cart.

"That's probably because being drunk isn't a very good way to survive a zombie apocalypse, Zack," Cody chided,his voice taking on his mother's inflection. "And no, you're not taking beer with us."

"Have you ever drank a beer before, Cody?"

"No I haven't."

"After tonight you can scratch that off your list of things to do before you die."

"Drinking a beer isn't very highly ranked on my bucket list."

"Well, since all the girls we've seen so far have been either dead or walking around trying to eat us, you might want to re-rank things and move 'feeling a boob' down a few notches."

"Who said anything about touching girls being at the top of my list?" Cody asked as Zack grabbed a six pack and put it in the cart despite a stern look.

"Touching boys then. I don't care. Let's go already."

"That's not what I meant."

"You mean you...you have not!" Zack all but yelled in the silent store.

"Hush! Maybe I have, maybe I haven't. The way I see it, it isn't any of your business anyway."

"We're brothers. We're supposed to tell each other things like that. I'd tell you," Zack told him, unsure if Cody was simply messing with him or willfully breaking one of the unwritten rules of brotherdom – Thou Shalt Tell Thy Bro When Third Base Hath Been Reached.

"Just for the record, I really wouldn't want to know if you'd done that or not," Cody retorted, and then a giant smile bloomed on his face. "Wait...so since you haven't told me, does that mean I did it before you did? Oh that's awesome." Zack didn't reply and Cody snickered. He turned the cart and told Zack to follow him, that they had one more stop to make before they left.

"What else do we need? We've been in here for too long already."

"Toothbrushes among other things. I haven't brushed my teeth in three days and who knows how many days it's been since you brushed yours."

"Five. Just hurry up." Zack stood guard while Cody went down the aisle and tossed two toothbrushes, some paste, deodorant, and a bar of soap in the basket before he rejoined his brother. "Now can we go? My internal alarm clock is screaming."

"Yeah, we're done here." Zack led the way as they all but ran back up to the front of the store and out the doors. They snatched up their packs and sprinted across the parking lot as fast as they could push the cart and merged back onto the main road. Once away from alleys and side streets, they slowed their pace back to a walk.

"It's getting late," Zack said. "We should find a place to hole up in and check out our loot." They still had at least an hour of daylight left but neither boy wanted to still be looking for a place to spend the night when darkness fell. As if to prove Zack's point, two zombies came stumbling from a back yard, one stopping in mid-lurch and falling on its face when its tattered clothing hung up on a fence post. "But first, target practice."

Zack raised the pistol to eye level, squinted, and aimed down the short barrel. He lined up the sights and had the zombie's head centered. "Later, geek," he said as he pulled the trigger. The zombies spun in a circle when the bullet hit it in the shoulder. "What the hell?" Zack aimed again, this time holding his breath just before he pulled the trigger. The zombie's head exploded and Zack pumped his fist. He offered Cody the gun for the second zombie.

Cody took it and instantly didn't like how it felt in his hand. He was wielding the power to take life and it frightened him. He swallowed hard and braced the gun with his other hand as he pointed it at the zombie as it was ungainly rising to its feet. "Now, I am become Death, destroyer of worlds," he whispered to himself as he pulled the trigger. The thing's body quickly fell back to the ground as Cody did in one shot what took Zack two.

"What'd you say before you shot him?" Zack asked after Cody handed the gun back.

"It's what the man that made the first nuclear bomb said when it was set off in New Mexico. It seemed fitting."

"I guess. Now let's beat feet," Zack said, his dislike of being caught in the open beginning to get the better of him.

"I think I found our place for the night," Cody announced as the road they were on came around a small set of hills.

"A gym?"

"Yep. If I'm right about what we'll find inside, you'll see why." Zack wanted to know why but Cody held his tongue and wouldn't ruin the surprise. They approached the building as carefully as they had any other and found that it, unlike just about everything else they'd seen, hadn't been broken in or burned down. They let themselves in quietly and barricaded the door behind them and stood in the stillness of the lobby.

"You planning on telling me why we're sleeping in a gym tonight instead of a house now?"

"Because this place looked big enough from the outside to have a lap pool in it."

"So we're going to swim?"

"No, because I don't know how good the water will be after this long. What we're going to do is take a bath. It'll still be clean enough for that. I don't know if they ever mention it in any of your zombie movies, but people who haven't bathed in going on two weeks smell. I'm sure I do and I know you do."

"Yeah, you do, Cody. I was just being nice and not saying anything about it," Zack joked.

"Thanks, but it might be one of the things that could lead a zombie to us. The stronger we smell, the bigger we could be on their radar."

"They can smell us, too?"

"I think so. I'm pretty sure that's how they found us when we were sleeping in that apartment. As far as I could tell, none of them saw us go in there and I can't think of any other way for them to track us."

"Man, that's just not fair. They can see us, hear us, and now smell us. That's crap."

"As long as they don't taste us, I don't care. Now let's see if we can find that pool," Cody said as he grabbed the bar of soap and the lanterns from the cart. "We'll go through all this when we're cleaned up."

They walked the halls and passed through the locker room before they found it and Cody was pleased when the water was still smelled faintly of chlorine. They turned the lanterns on and set them next to a stack of towels, their light adding to what still filtered through the skylights. They began stripping out of their sweat-soaked, salt-ringed and slightly ill-fitting clothes. Never planning on wearing them again, they simply tossed them into a pile before hopping into the pool.

"Oh this feels good," Zack said as he floated on his back with his eyes closed. "I feel cleaner already."

"You're still using soap. And stop floating like that. Some things are best left unseen."

"Why don't you just turn around?" Instead, Cody took a breath and slipped under the water, swimming inches above the bottom of the shallow pool until he was directly beneath his brother. He squatted down and thrust upward, his hands making contact with the small of Zack's back. Zack did a backwards flip and landed with a loud splash and came up sputtering.

"I should be mad at you for that, Cody, but it was actually kind of cool. Just don't do it again."

"Don't float with your junk on the surface and I won't."

"Deal," Zack told him even though he was considering doing it again.

The boys spent the next few minutes scrubbing and relaxing before they finished up. Cody was out of the pool and had himself wrapped in a towel from the stack before Zack had a foot on the deck. The older twin shook his head as he grabbed one and pulled it casually around his waist. They strolled back to where they'd left their supplies and put together a small meal from the day's haul.

"It's a good thing Spam isn't disgusting or anything," Zack said sarcastically as he spooned it onto a cracker.

"You can always go back and pick up a bottle of mustard if you want," Cody offered. Zack impolitely declined.

"We're going to have to learn how to hunt one of these days. I don't know about you but I need more than this stuff in my belly."

"You're right. I don't know if you've noticed but we've both lost weight." Zack looked down and saw that his brother was right. He hadn't quite ever crossed the line from husky to chubby despite his typical teenager diet, but the couple of extra pounds that he'd been carrying around for the last year or two had disappeared and he'd taken on a leaner, harder look. His brother looked worse off than he did, having lost enough to pull the skin tight across his ribs.

"Weight Watchers should look into this plan," Zack said as he dusted the crumbs off his chest and the towel. "Let's see what all we have here." He began unloading the cart and soon had it sorted. Clothes made up the biggest pile followed by their ammunition. Food, unfortunately, was the smallest pile. Even with what they had in their old packs, they were looking at no more than a two or three day supply.

"We have more underwear than food. That is so incredibly wrong," Cody said as he stood over the supplies.

"You put them in the cart, Cody. I just watched out for geeks." He rooted through the clothes until he found some boxers and ripped the pack open.

"You're going to put those on right here, aren't you?"

"Um, yeah," Zack said as he dropped the towel and slid them up his legs. "Why?"

"Because I'm right here beside you."

"Okay, we need to have a talk," Zack told him once he had them pulled up to his waist. Cody's insane modesty had always bothered him. He swam with a shirt on until he was twelve for crying out loud! "Here's how it is. I don't know what your problem with being naked is but whatever so here we go. One, I don't care. Two, your body is the same as mine so you shouldn't care. Three, and this is the important one so listen up, the days of going off to some other room to change is over. You might go in there and not come back out. You'll be busy changing your drawers and get bit and then I'm out of brothers. Do you see what I'm saying, Cody? I'm not doing it to show off or make you feel bad. I'm doing it because it shouldn't matter and I don't want to let you out of my sight if I can help it."

"I...never thought about it like that," Cody told him as he pondered his brother's points. "It's just weird to me, I guess. I never played sports like you did or showered with the guys."

"It's not a big deal, really. Everyone is basically the same. Anyway," Zack said as the absurdity of the conversation and where and when they were having it occurred to him, "Now let's go through all this and get to bed."

They sorted through the clothes, each boy picking out a few shirts and shorts to go along with their new underclothes and pushed the rest aside. Cody dressed in his new clothes, albeit shyly and turned to the side, but he didn't disappear to do it and Zack considered that a win. If space and weight were not a consideration, they'd have brought them all along but it simply wasn't possible. Too much gear would slow them down and wear them down physically, not to mention they could always find more if and when they needed it. They stowed everything in their new duffel bags, Cody absently wondering why Zack packed his so fast before his attention returned to his own work.

Zack had, or at least thought he had, moved his stash of porn from one bag to the other when Cody wasn't looking. He had briefly considered showing it to him but after the little talk they'd just had, the time didn't feel right. They'd split the bullets and shells between them and Zack was surprised at how heavy something as small as those boxes could be. He also took the beer bottles out of their box and put them in one of the bag's pouches, wrapping them up in some of Cody's extra underwear so they wouldn't clink against each other constantly while he moved. When everything was sorted and put away, they retired to the locker room by lanternlight and made their beds on the couches.

"Do you think we should sleep in shifts, Zack? Keep a watch?"

"We should. I've been thinking about it since the apartment but we've been too exhausted. We should have been doing it then. Heck, we really should have been doing it even back at the Tipton."

"I'm really not tired right now," Cody said. "I'll take the first watch and you can sleep for a few hours and then I'll wake you up."

Zack thought about it for a second before answering. "There probably isn't a point to do it now since we've only seen a handful of gomers all day, but it would be a good idea for us to get into the habit."

"I'll take the first one and wake you up at around midnight." Zack checked his watch and saw that would give him almost three hours of shut-eye.

"Sounds good to me." He handed the gun over to his brother after making sure the safety was on and showing him how to turn it off. Cody took it and stuck it between his belly and his shorts' waistband. "No, not like that. You're likely to blow your nuts off that way. Put it in the back if you're going to carry it like that."

"Then I'll blow my ass off."

"Better that than the front side, Cody."

"True. How about I just carry it until we can find a holster?"

"That's probably a very good idea. Now don't wander off too far. Even with the gun you aren't really much of a match for a bunch of zombies."

"Trust me, I'm not planning on it," Cody told him as Zack buried himself under his towel-blankets.

Okay, I'm not even going to lie and try to tell you otherwise, I think most of this chapter is rather boring and doesn't move the story along very much. However, it does set up a lot of what's going to happen later on in the story so I guess that's okay.

Someone PM-ed me and asked (and I somehow managed to delete it and don't remember who it was) if I listen to any music while I'm writing the chapters. Usually, yes. Most of Carey's chapter was written to Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero disc (which I think is an incredibly fitting disc for this story), especially Survivalism and The Great Destroyer. The latter of the two is her unofficial theme song in my eyes. This chapter was mainly NIN's Pretty Hate Machine (see a pattern here?)

And for the record, Cody isn't the biggest Star Wars dork in the world. I am.