Andy was stubborn. He ignored the frantic pleas of his best friend, Lonnie, and focused on loading his favorite sniper rifle instead.

"You need to come with me, Andy!" Lonnie repeated, his usually neat hair messy and disheveled. It appeared that he had simply rolled out of bed and drove straight to Andy's gun shop. "Those retards are everywhere!"

Andy shook his head. He had seen the scenes of chaos and murder on the portable television he kept in his bedroom above the gun shop, and he knew it was futile to try to get past those hungry cannibalistic hordes. He even had a brief but terrifying encounter with them himself, as he drove down to the gun shop a few hours ago. Andy was forced to run them over, and he was still getting over the shock of what he had just done. Somehow he knew, deep down, that his wife and daughter were trapped... or worse. Andy pushed the thought away and focused on reinforcing the windows. Lonnie finally fell silent and began pacing the shop. Finally he raised his head and looked at Andy.

"Fine, if you won't come, could you at least give me some guns and ammo so that I can get the fuck out of here?" Lonnie tossed his Visa on the counter. "Keep the change."

Andy smiled in spite of the gravity of the situation. Wordlessly he handed Lonnie a 9x19 Mamba pistol, a Mossberg 500 shotgun, and an M4 carbine assault rifle. He then added two boxes of ammunition for each firearm, and after a moment's hesitation he added an army jacket and a sharp machete to the pile.

Lonnie eyed his "purchases" warily. "What the fuck is the machete for?"

"In case they get too close," Andy replied, going back to his reloading.

"You're crazy man," Lonnie muttered, hooking the shotgun and rifle on his back, while grabbing the pistol holster Andy handed him. "Well... thanks for everything, Andy. I hope you make it."

Andy nodded and waited until Lonnie left, before sliding the bolts and locks on the front door. He highly doubted Lonnie would even make it to an evacuation center - reporters kept mentioning the army was creating a fortress at Fort Pastor - since the asshole hardly thought things through.

Who knows, Andy mused, as he picked up a pump shotgun from the display case. He might have the right spunk to survive.

Two days later...

I'll be goddamned, Andy thought, as he stared with amazement at the group of people standing on the rooftop of the Crossroads Mall. His gun shop was a stone's throw away from the mall, but his original plan of evacuating his beloved gun shop and move into the mall had been thwarted when a group of mad hungry zombies spotted him and had run pell mell towards him. Andy barely had enough time to dash back into the store and bolt the front door, including the small doggy door he had installed.

He pressed the binoculars to his face, noticing that the people looked as amazed and surprised as he was. Andy quickly dropped the binoculars to his chest and scribbled something on the whiteboard he had kept on the rooftop of his shop.

A few moments later he heard the unmistakable sound of a helicopter approaching.

"Look! A chopper! We're saved!" he cried happily, but of course his voice couldn't reach the other survivors in the mall. They turned in the direction he was pointing at, and he could imagine the relief swelling as they all realized that they were moments from salvation.

That relief and hope was dashed to pieces as the helicopter passed them by, and Andy's shoulders drooped slightly. He knew that the survivors were far luckier than he was: for one thing they had an entire building stocked with food and drink, while all he had was a meager supply of food and water in the small kitchen downstairs. Many times he had resisted the urge to eat the goldfish his daughter, Stella, had given to him last year. It was the only thing of his former life that remained, and he wanted to hang on to it as long as possible.

He saw the survivors go back inside the mall; the Black American cop looked back at him for a split second before following his companions. Andy took one last, longing look at the mall and sat back down on the plastic garden chair.

The moans of the zombies were getting to him, and he didn't want to look down on the parking lot. His idea of using the ammunition to blast his way from the gun shop seemed silly now - although he knew he had 10,000 rounds left, Andy knew that the loud gunfire easily attracted the attention of the other shitheads.

What I'd give for a few bottles of beer, Andy thought wistfully.

Two weeks later...

Andy cocked his sniper rifle and heard the dull, metallic clink of the empty cartridge as it landed on the ground. Taking the rather dirty rag he used to clean his personal guns, he raised an eyebrow and looked expectantly at the cop. It was a few weeks after he had spotted the other survivors on the rooftop of the mall, and by exchanging messages with the cop, whose name was Kenneth, Andy had slowly learned their story.

Now, Andy had struck up a quick friendship with the policeman, and they had spent most of their time playing chess. Now, they were trying a new twist to the game "Hollywood Squares", where Kenneth wrote down the name of a celebrity and Andy had the pleasant task of spotting the zombie that closely resembled that celebrity. He had just blown off the scalp of a Burt Reynolds look-alike, and he was ready for another. In a way, the game kept his mind off the hunger.

If only I went with Lonnie, he thought, maybe I would have been able to get inside the mall as well. Instead I'm stuck in this shithole.

But there was no time to cry over spilled milk. Andy noticed that a few of the survivors - Andy racked his brains to remember their names - had joined Kenneth and were watching them play. The blond, whose name was Ana, was talking to the tall, rakish brunette man, Steve, while the teenager, Terry, was saying something to Kenneth. Soon enough Ana went back inside the mall, while Terry, Kenneth, and Steve remained on the rooftop.

By five-thirty, Kenneth bid his goodbyes. Andy smiled and saluted the cop, before clearing away the spent cartridges. All in all they had shot down no less than forty zombies, one who resembled Rosie O'Donnell (an easy one), and two who looked like Abbott and Costello. There was even a tense moment when Andy had spotted the "Olsen Twins", two fair-haired teenage girls who had messy and dirty hair, bruises on their arms and thighs, and who looked uncannily like Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. They were walking around naked, and Andy suspected that they were being raped when the zombie apocalypse began. He didn't know if the men who tried to rape them were among the zombies gathered near the mall or not, but Andy hoped they were. He would have loved to blow the fucking brains off the turds.

Andy grabbed a fistful of the cartridges and tossed them onto the waiting zombies below.

And there were none...

The howls. Those loud, loud howls. Andy never thought he'd hear anything as horrible as the hungry moans of the zombies - will those howls ever end? - and yet here he was, lying in a pool of his own blood, trying in vain to staunch the steady flow. The dog, Chips, barked incessantly, adding to the noise that seemed to vibrate through his skull. Andy heard an unfamiliar voice crackle in the midst of the horrid cacophony and realized that the mall survivors were trying to contact him. Andy found the walkie talkie on the food pack that was strapped onto the dog and pressed the button.

"Hello?" he said, realizing that this was the first time he had spoken to a human being in over a month.

"Hello, Andy?" said the male voice on the other end. Andy vaguely wondered if it belonged to his friend Kenneth, but the dog was barking so loudly that he couldn't hear what the next words were.

"Man they got me good," Andy declared, wincing as he checked the huge chunk of flesh that was missing from his abdomen. He felt himself slowly slipping away, both due to his weakened condition and the lack of blood in his system. "Those things bite hard."

There was a period of tense silence, and Andy wondered if something bad had happened to him. He hoped not. They were going to escape from here, for Christ's sake.

Andy looked at the corpse of the zombie that had slipped inside the store and nearly laughed at the cruel twist of fate. Any zombie could have come in here and taken a chunk of his flesh: a pastor, a bum, or even the local clerk at the supermarket.

But no.

The zombie that lay before him was none other than Lonnie.

I guess he didn't have what it took to survive, Andy thought.

He felt so weak...

Andy barely noticed that he had dropped the walkie talkie on the ground as he made his way to the rooftop.

I need to tell Kenneth, he thought as he bent over the whiteboard. I know they have medical supplies in the mall. I need...

The words barely passed through his mind before he slumped to the floor, unaware of the teenage girl who had clambered through the doggy door below him and was now scooping Chips into her arms. Unaware that his life was over and that a new being had taken his place... unaware that now he was scribbling blood, and not words, on the whiteboard that had connected him to a policeman trapped in the mall a few feet from him... unaware that he would stalk the same girl in order to take a bite of her sweet, juicy flesh... and unaware that he would finally meet his Maker at the end of Kenneth's shotgun.

And then there were none.