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The hook of the poker dug into Joe’s jawbone, and when Andy yanked it loose the entire lower mandible tore free from Joe’s skull. This didn’t stop the shopkeeper in the slightest and he kept lunging forward, trying to gum on to Andy with only an upper jaw. Andy almost felt bad for Joe; the poor guy had spent his entire life in quiet humiliation, and here he was embarrassed even in death. But the feeling passed as Andy jammed the fire-poker deep into one of Joe’s eyeless sockets, sending the shambling revenant down to the pavement. Joe let out a gurgled rasp as he let go of his second life, and Andy thought that it almost sounded like a mumble.

Mother didn’t let Andy watch horror movies, so he didn’t know to think of the shambling townsfolk as zombies or ghouls, but he enjoyed killing them all the same. When he passed by Rexall Drugs a woman in jogging pants with a torn-out throat emerged, and Andy cracked her head open just to see what it looked like inside, finding it a moldy blackish green. Figuring it as a sign of infection, Andy resolved not to get too close in case the disease or whatever it was should infect him as well. It made him awfully glad he had chosen the fire-poker to use as his primary weapon, and he took pride in himself for being so forward thinking.

The rest of the day was spent casually re-killing the residents of his sleepy little town. They weren’t hard to find – he could just pass by a restaurant or gas station and a lurker or two would emerge, groaning and grasping for his flesh. They weren’t very fast which made for easy killing, and as the town was sparsely populated to begin with he never faced more than three or four at a time. Most of the shamblers he encountered were adults, but at one point he was thrilled to come across a pair of teenage boys, jocks by the look of their soiled letterman jackets. In his excitement he got a little sloppy, and one of them – the mean looking one with the big nose and crew cut – nearly took a bite out of his leg and caused him to drop the poker. Thankfully Andy was quick with the kitchen knife, and sunk it deep into the top of the jock’s wire-brush scalp. It gave him enough time to retrieve his fire poker, and decapitate the other one with a hard blow to the neck. The whole thing left him winded but satisfied, and as the sun came down he headed for the safety of home.

There, back at the house, a sadness crept in. Mother’s corpse had really started to reek, so he brought her up to the attic and set her down in an old rocking chair. He sat with her a while in the hot and dusty room, wishing he could share with her the excitement of the day’s events. He wanted to tell her that he had found his true calling, the thing in this life he felt he was meant to do. But mother just sat there, flies buzzing around her split-open skull, eyes grey and staring at him with their usual disapproval. No matter what he did, no matter how many he killed, he could not seem to make her proud of him. It made him so angry that he pulled a moldy tablecloth off of a shelf and threw it over her, then left her there to rot on her own.

The following morning he started off with renewed purpose, but by noon he had started to feel the sadness creeping back in. Slaughtering shamblers, as fun as it was, had already begun to feel rote. He tried to spice things up by mutilating them after the kill, or mangling them before hand and playing with them a bit. A few of them he even allowed to get close, trying to drive a thrill into it by putting himself deeper in danger. But in the end, it was the same thing again and again; a whack to the head and down they went. It was all so repetitive and automatic that he began to feel like a machine, a robot programmed to carry out this strange, singular purpose. And the dead didn’t provide much variety on their end; just groaning and grasping and snapping their jaws. There was some crucial piece missing from the sad little routine, and by late afternoon Andy knew what it was.

Life. Life was what was missing. He needed to hear screams, feel fear – see the panic in their eyes. Even animals – which he never would harm – reacted with fear, but these shamblers just stood there and took it, no reaction of any kind. In some ways Andy felt he was doing them a favor, and he was not in the business of granting favors. No, he needed to fight, to feel the blood rush in his veins, and the only way to achieve that was to kill a live person, as he had done with mother the first time. If only there was a live person left in this whole stinking town.

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