Roads Less Traveled by C. Dulaney

to die, and then just kick over? Literally lose the will to live? This was the thought that kept me awake until past midnight, on the first day of the zombie uprising, when I should have been in bed getting some much needed sleep. This was also the same thought that woke me, screaming and soaked with sweat, all through the night.
    I kept seeing my co-workers all around me. Some looked almost normal, only a small bite wound on their neck or hand to give them away. Others… well others looked like they had been mauled by bears. I was trapped, had nowhere to run, but they never advanced. They just stood around me, their teeth gnashing together. And the moaning, that guttural moaning. No human (no living human), could possibly make that sound. I screamed at them, ‘Why are you just standing there?! C’mon!’ But they didn’t move, didn’t even acknowledge my screams.
    Then suddenly I was home again, in bed sleeping, wondering why the bed was shaking and bouncing. I opened my eyes and saw a zombie sitting on my legs, slowly pulling my small intestine out of the gaping, bloody hole that used to be my abdomen. I didn’t scream, didn’t even want to scream. What I felt was relief. Disturbing and all-consuming relief. I lay there, a deadhead chewing on my guts, blood spattering the sheets and my face, tissue popping between its teeth, and simply waited to die.
    Then all of a sudden I was awake again, screaming, my hands thrust out and fighting off an attacker that wasn’t there. Gus was beside me in bed alert and whining. Slowly I became more lucid. “ Those were dreams, you’re really awake now, this is real, those were dreams, ” I said to myself over and over. I reached out and blindly grabbed for Gus; anything to bring me back into this reality. My bedroom was fairly bright, the moon still high in the sky. As my breathing slowed, my gaze shifted around the room, and that sense of Thinness faded. I remembered reading something once, written by my favorite author, which said “reality was thin.” At times like this, I understood how truly thin it was.
     
    * * *
     
    I spent much of the next morning in a depressed stupor, stumbling about the house with Gus hot on my heels. He would whine every now and then but I didn’t really focus on him. My mind was immersed in those dreams and what I was now sure had been a panic attack the previous evening. I questioned everything now; my every action, my every thought. I was slipping into the same hopeless despair Mrs. McKinley seemed to be suffering from. I had always known I wasn’t the most mentally stable person around, but I never saw myself as weak. Kassidy Stratford didn’t quit, she never gave up. But that’s exactly what was happening. My mind kept telling me, ‘What’s the point? It’s the end of the world, and you’re worried about fortifying the house? It’s meaningless, it’s all meaningless. You are going to die .’
    Just as this unrelenting darkness threatened to consume me, Gus erupted in a series of bays and barks. My head felt foggy and I had to blink several times to get my bearings. I was standing in the dining room and the beagle was raising hell above my head. Being driven by strength I thought had abandoned me, never mind the instinctual drive to stay alive, I turned and made for the stairs, scanning the windows with eyes now clear and sharp as I ran. His bays led me to the guest room just across the hall from my own. I patted his head as I knelt next to him.
    “Good boy, quiet now,” I whispered as I threw open the window. Gus obeyed, his ears perked and nose crinkling as the smell of death drifted in around us. There were four of them, limping and dragging themselves straight for the house. Having Gus with me was a tremendous help, he could smell and sense them much sooner than I could. But his natural reaction was a sure fire way to draw them in. I reached for the .22 rifle I had positioned in this room and rested the barrel on the