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"Yeah right, asshole, get to the fuckin' zombies," Eric quipped impatiently.

Osment continued.

Here a dramatic Da-dummmm echoed in the background, and a frightening fanfare swelled in background.

You are warned: board up those windows, lock those doors, sit back, and prepare for—When Zombies Attack, 4!

After these commercial messages.

"Awwh, dammit! We gotta sit through another five minutes o' commercials now before dey get to the good stuff! I'm going to piss, April. Get me a beer, 'kay?"

April was incredulous—he hadn't even finished his first beer and already he was ordering her around for another one, the drunken bastard. She darted a weird look over to him, and he couldn't understand why. "Geez, hon, it ain't like you can't get none for yerself, too! God!" Eric thrust his hand down the front of his boxers, scratched himself, let out a satisfied grunt and proceeded upstairs to the bathroom.

April quickly darted around, wide-eyed, upon hearing what seemed like one of the unwelcome visitors her oaf-of-a-husband was content to watch on the TV. Just last month one such visitor happened to claw through the storm door in the back, and there went the cat! April constantly mocked Eric's reaction to herself after that incident: "Hon, where's the goddamn cat? Is he trapped in the cellar again?" He even saw the cat getting eaten! Could the man be that stupid? Perhaps the better question was whether or not the man could be that drunk that much.

Fortunately the moan was coming from the TV. This "reality TV" stuff was really getting out of control, like it had once long, long ago before corpses actually did go up and walking around. Sure the dead had been brought under control years ago. April even remembered her grandma telling stories of her childhood constantly evading the dead whichever way she could. How did that go again? Eh, who knows? Who cares? What stuck in April's mind the most was her crazy grandma jabbering over and over again with the slightest provocation…

Girl, youze take it for granted just how dangerous 'em things are. Complainin' about dem curfews they have now, just so youngsters like you all don't get caught outside alone at night. Why in my day, we had to hide for days without eatin' or pissin', while 'em zombies walked aroun' tearin' up everything and everyone in sight. And we didn't like it, but we dealt with it anyway. So stop yer whinin'!

April sure enjoyed putting that bullet in Grandma's head after she died. Just to keep her from "turning", and apparently from talking, too.

April had a lot to be bitter about. Five years in a loveless marriage to a "corpse collector"—a trash man but with a more glamorous, slightly more dangerous job. He did the 40-hour work week but still most people in the city didn't see him more than once or twice a month. Not even their own neighborhood, which wasn't a "high priority" area. The downtown, still quite close by, for some reason had many more of the dead wandering around—Eric and his co-workers might see as many as fifteen or twenty of them there in one day, a large number these days. More frequent were the completely dead bodies. The mayor insisted that her downtown stay as clean as possible, like back at the turn of the century when the Inner Harbor and the beautiful red brick baseball stadium were the city's jewels and its main tourist attractions. We couldn't have rotting corpses laying around Camden Yards or the National Aquarium, now could we? So Eric and his work buddies found themselves cleaning up the downtown area almost every other day.

April couldn't help but resent the fact that her own husband couldn't come around to clean up their own neighborhood more than every few weeks. Granted, they didn't have too many of those things wandering around—seven or eight in one week was not unusual. Maybe, she thought, it tied into the fact that when Eric came home from work he just sat his ass in front of the boob tube and drank himself into a stupor. The man had annoyed her for years, and had wondered why she hadn't just left his sorry ass before that. Maybe she could just leave for the mountains, live like the people there who grew their own food, hunted for stuff and just seemed to have a more pleasant existence. Hey, she had a cousin in Western Maryland, just on the West Virginia border. Why didn't she live with her? She sighed, knowing she probably would never get out there. She was a city girl anyway.

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