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Getting down on his haunches, he looked into her dead, red eyes. She looked back.

"Pele style," he said, standing. He kicked the head into the base of the large pizza oven. The eyes rolled back into the skull. "Eight hundred eighty nine." He wiped his weapon on Eileen’s filthy jeans.

The man strode from the pizza shop with a can of Diet Dr. Pepper and a Slim Jim. He put the can on the ground, the beef treat in his mouth, bent over, and righted an overturned bench.  He sat on the bench and began to people watch.

He snapped a bite off the Slim Jim and pointed at a dead man in a blue smock, "Wal Mart." He pointed at another, one hand in hand cuffs, "Criminal." A third man in a tattered leather vest staggered by, "Hell’s Angel," he continued, "Fireman, postal worker, butcher, executive...," he shook his head sadly and stood up drawing the machete. Leaving his Dr Pepper on the bench, he strode forward and used the weapon to destroy another of the nameless, dressed in pink. "Pre-schooler." He wiped his right eye and sat back down. Eight ninety."

Younger than Sam, he thought, I wonder how she’s doing. Should I have stayed? No, that would have been awful, especially for her. They probably would have locked me up, or killed me. I couldn’t let her see that. Did they tell her who I was? I hope not.

Sam was his friend. He hadn’t met her until the plague had arrived, but he still thought of her as a little sister. She was safe on Alcatraz with her dad and some good people he had met. A little girl was easier for him to associate with than the adults of both the collapsed society, and the new one springing up around him.

The man often stared at the island in the middle of San Francisco bay with nostalgia, longing to go talk to Sam. He thought of sneaking in to see her, but if he got caught it would go bad for him. He sent her messages through the people he had gotten out of the city, both verbal and written. His immunity to whatever made the dead want to eat people allowed him certain liberties, and he had decided to be the good guy. In the time since he fled from Alcatraz, he had personally gotten more than sixty people on boats to go toward the island refuge. All of whom were more than willing to transport a little toy he had found here and there, or a written message.

The man had also noticed a huge black cylinder floating off to the north of the island. Originally he thought it was an alien space ship, which could be the cause of the plague, but then he realized it was a submarine. A big one. Not that he would know the difference between a big one and a small one, but it looked pretty big to him

He had dispatched more than eight hundred of the things that stumbled around looking for human flesh. Not a monumental achievement considering the population of San Francisco, but he was sure nobody had taken out more of them then he had. Especially only with melee weapons.  He was industrious, and the things he used to take the creatures out varied from day to day, although his weapon of choice was the machete. Thin, strong, and deadly, the blade would easily go through even the most stubborn of craniums.  He had used it on one live person too, a really bad person.

Nineteen living humans had also been killed by this man in his post-plague wanderings. While certainly not a saint, had never killed anyone that didn’t need killing... He looked up into the face (well, most of the face) of another of the creatures. This one had stopped and thrown a shadow over him as he sat there pondering. The thing looked atrocious, and it stank. A filthy, matted beard with bits of stuff attached here and there, protruded from the thing’s face, which was mostly obscured by the whiskers. A red baseball cap adorned the thing’s head, but was barely on because it had so much hair. The cap rested on the hair instead of the skull. The thing pointed at the beef treat. He held it out and the creature took it from him, biting off a sizeable portion and then handing it back. It sat down on the bench next to him.

"Hi," it said.

"Hi yourself,"

"Got anything more than a Slim Jim? I’m starved."

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