By summer of 1945, the idea of a cemetery for the dead was a punchline to a most unseemly joke that had since gone as flat as Chardonnay.

Everyone knew the dead no longer rested in pieces.

Ever since the war, and Hitler's last-ditch Plan Z to raise his fallen Wehrmacht, Nazi zombies walked the Earth.

But despite the carnage and the walking dead all around him, Hector still couldn't stomach the look of cemeteries.

There was just something spooky about the whole goddamn place, even in pitch daylight of a zombie apocalypse.

Something of a perpetual "momento mori", if you will, reminding him that besides a tombstone with his name on it, he no longer had his family estate to go back to in England. His life as a distinguished gentleman would never be the same after his death at in the Alps.

Because even as an Airman officer who'd more than earned his respect by dying in a flaming plane crash over the ocean, being a zombie made him an outsider in the ranks. The bottom notch in the totem pole, in the rotting eyes of both his zombie counterparts and the shifty gaze of his living ally comrades.

The other soldiers still didn't quite trust him, no matter how many times he'd come between them and their becoming another zombie's brain-soufflé.

But Hector supposed when he'd been accidently raised from the dead by Hitler's occult apocalypse, being the "creep" of the ranks came with the whole deal.

Despicable as it was, Zombie-ness would always be apart of him now.

And consequently, he would always be "target practice" to the other soldiers in camp.

At least when his back was turned.

Even so, the click of an empty shotgun chamber behind his head was a joke Hector could never quite find funny enough, no matter how many times his comrades brushed it off with, "Whoa, what are you so angry about? You gonna go zombie on me over a goodhearted joke, Hector?"

Or how many times he'd left his food on an army picnic bench to refill his canteen, only to find his lunch missing, and the other British officers snickering from the next table over, "Oops, sorry about that, my good old chap. I thought this tray was left out for seconds. I was under the impression that you only eat brains."

Actually, Hector did not care at all for brains.

And that was because he didn't much care for meatloaf, and brains were too much like meatloaf in texture and appearance.

He did, however, crave raw lean muscle from time to time. The bloodier, the more exquisite. Much like a blood rare steak.

But that was just the monster in him, whom Hector had long since learned to control.

In fact, there'd only been a couple of rare times Hector had lost control of himself to that monster, and the officer-turned-zombie was lucky it was Karl Fairburne who found him first, and not some other avenging sniper in their camp.

And to this day, he and Karl agreed never to speak of it, if Hector could promise Fairburne that it would never happen again.

So far, Hector had made good on keeping that promise.

But now and then, when Karl came to debrief him on their plans to rescue trapped survivors from zombie hordes in the city, Hector noticed Karl always kept an extra side arm on him with a pouch of divine bullets.

Just in case.