ᶜᴼᴺᵀᴱᴺᵀ ᵂᴬᴿᴺᴵᴺᴳ — ᴿᴱᶜᴼᴹᴹᴱᴺᴰᴱᴰ ¹⁶⁺ ᵀʰⁱˢ ᶠⁱᶜᵗⁱᵒⁿᵃˡ ᵈⁱᵃʳʸ ᶜᵒⁿᵗᵃⁱⁿˢ ᵈᵃʳᵏ ʰᵘᵐᵒʳ, ʰᵒʳʳᵒʳ, ᵇᵒᵈʸ ʰᵒʳʳᵒʳ ᵃⁿᵈ ᵈⁱˢᵗᵘʳᵇⁱⁿᵍ ⁱᵐᵃᵍᵉʳʸ.

11/01/1980

Dear Diary,

The Millers were fucking insane. Thank God we killed them.

Dean and I were having a heated argument over whose turn it was to use the kitchen. But as far as I'm concerned, from 12 to 1 PM it's Jenny's and my space.
“You have the room from 2 to 3 PM.” He crossed his arms.
“That's ridiculous! Why the hell would we want to have lunch at 2?!”
“You're not even eating anymore,” he pointed out.
“Obviously, fuck! The smell of food makes us sick! We need human flesh!” I snapped.
Because, by the way, he keeps insisting that the rule about eating humans still stands. And I don't understand why he wants to wait until it doesn't, when Jenny ends up eating Calvin.
But that wasn't the only thing we argued about.
“Give me that rifle,” I kept insisting.
“You don't know how to use it.”
“I'll learn by making mistakes.”
“No.”
Anyway, legally it's mine now. I carved my name into it, along with the words “All is Well” It's clearly mine. And I need it to go hunting.
And obviously, he drove us to the breaking point. Well, mostly Jenny. She stormed out of the house screaming and disappeared for an entire day.
“See?! You're a fucking idiot!” I snapped at him in the hallway.
He shrugged. “Not my fault.”
“You made her run away! I don't even know where she is now!”
He was already walking away like the conversation was over. “You could've gone after her.”
“I was in the fucking bathtub!” I followed him. “And you decided to wait an hour after I got out to tell me!”
He gave me the middle finger. Like a child.
She came back that evening, after I'd spent hours trying to get the Millers' mare to cooperate so I could go look for her. I'd never been trampled by a horse before. It's not pleasant. If I'd been human, I wouldn't have survived.
All her curls were plastered to her face from the rain. Her sweater and skirt were covered in blood, just like her face and hands. When I ran over to her, she opened one hand. Two crushed eyeballs between her fingers.
“I saved them for you...” She was sobbing. “But I crushed them...” Her tears were washing the blood off her face.
My poor baby...

At the beginning of the week, I'd carved some of the least rotten pumpkins from the field. I'd put them outside the door and, that evening, lit them with candles.
I'd left Jenny in the bathroom to wash the blood off when I heard a bunch of noise.
Dean was kicking my lit pumpkins.
“Have you completely lost your mind?! What are you doing?!” I tried to shove him. Obviously, he didn't move an inch.
“Smashing this shit.” He kept kicking them, knocking them down one by one.
I grabbed one of the few he hadn't used as a soccer ball yet. “Stop it!”
“Sure, Rose, let's attract attention with a bunch of fucking lights outside the door, right?” He snatched the pumpkin out of my hands. “Why do you think most of the windows are barricaded?”
I reached for the lantern. “They're supposed to keep evil spirits away on Halloween night!” I insisted.
He raised it with one hand, keeping it out of my reach. “No, they attract anyone who might've followed your cannibal friend back here.”
I nodded. “Because of you.”
“It's exactly the opposite.” He smiled.
No, you get it? He smiled at me, like an asshole, while threatening to smash the only surviving lantern on the ground.
“You didn't let her eat!”
He shook his head.
“I'm going to slap you,” I growled.
He didn't even try to hold back his laugh. “No.”
“Yes. I've already slapped you once. I'll slap you again.”
He let the pumpkin fall to the ground, where it smashed against the steps. “Bye, Rose,” he muttered as he walked back inside.
“My name is Tiffany!” I was going after him, but Calvin's yell interrupted us.
“Dean! Fuck!” He was staring at the backyard. Figures were approaching the house.
Dean turned to look at me. “I fucking told you!”
“If they're coming from the backyard, they didn't follow my fucking pumpkins!”
When Dean hurried away, I clearly saw him falter on the leg with the bullet wound. I enjoyed every second of it as he straightened up again with that serious look on his face.
“Give me my rifle,” I said when he came back downstairs with some weapons.
“No.” The two of them were loading their revolvers. Maybe no is his favorite word.
But I'm bulletproof anyway, so what do I need a rifle for? Maybe to find out if everyone else is too?
I followed them out the back door while yelling upstairs for Jenny to get out of the bathtub.
And when we threw the door open, both guys swore. I squinted at those people, trying to bring them into focus. They were still too far away for me to see properly. But they were all walking crooked. Then something moved in the ground closer to us. Fingers poked through the dirt.
“Those aren't...?” Calvin asked Dean.
He clenched his jaw. “Fucking walking corpses,” he confirmed.
I left them there. I went back inside because... what exactly did they think they were going to do with six bullets each against people who were already dead?
I started hearing gunshots from inside the house, and I ran into Jenny on the stairs, still barefoot.
“Jenny! Zombies!” I grabbed her wrist.
“Zombies?!”
“Walking corpses. Yes.” I was heading toward the basement door.
“Like in Dawn of the Dead?!” She grabbed my hands. I knew exactly what answer she was hoping for.
“Yes!” I almost started laughing because... I already knew.
She started bouncing up and down. “I can finally be the Francine I've always dreamed of being!” Then she pulled me back before I could cross the doorway. “You're not planning to hide, are you?” She was on the verge of complete disappointment.
I shook my head. “No, we have to save those two idiots with the revolvers.” I pulled her along with me. “There are some old axes downstairs.”
We might be terrible with guns. But how hard could it be to use an axe?
Dean and Calvin were still in the doorway, reloading their guns.
“These things won't die!” Calvin yelled.
“Move, idiots!” Jenny shoved Calvin out of the way. “This is my moment!”
I really shouldn't be surprised that men don't have the same intuition we women do, because it only took a few words between Jenny and me to figure out what was happening.
We went for their necks. The bodies dropped like puppets. And while the tendons around their carotid arteries started regenerating, we went straight for their skulls, which by then were completely filled with radiation.
Fucking disgusting.
“They stink!” I yelled, trying to wipe the rotten remains of those things off my face. Dean had started using my rifle as a club. Calvin, meanwhile, had found an actual baseball bat, the same one he'd threatened us with when we first met.
The backyard had turned into a field of corpses that had died twice.
I stared at what used to be a head. “Maybe this is the only way to kill us too,” I thought out loud. Jenny, meanwhile, was complaining that there hadn't been enough of them.
Dean counted seventeen.
Seventeen bodies buried in the Millers' backyard. That's why I told you they were insane. Fucking psychopathic murderers.
The four of us ended up sitting around the kitchen table with a glass of water each. We stared blankly into space in silence, with something rotten in our hair and on our clothes.
I held the pendant I'd found in the yard between my fingers.
“I'd say we found the owner of this.” I left it on the table.
Dean stifled a laugh. “I'd say you don't have much of a problem stealing things from dead people anyway.”
I pulled my legs back, my cowboy boots still on my feet. “Mind your own business.”
“Do you think there'll be more? They were slow and stupid anyway. It's doable.” Jenny cut in between sips of water.
“Are you kidding me?!” Calvin looked about ready to leave us here.
Jenny frowned. “It was fun.”
“I'd kill for a beer.” Dean put a cigarette between his lips.
We burned the bodies and our filthy clothes. They were beyond saving, and the skirt I'd made for Jenny lasted a little over a week. The Asshole has started noticing shortages in the things that actually matter to him: cigarettes and alcohol. Calvin, meanwhile, seems particularly irritable if he doesn't get his beloved The Pastel Apocalypse Cereals for breakfast. Yes, those disgusting things.
And I'm seriously starting to need to eat someone's arm.
Especially after all the energy we wasted killing people who were already dead.
I've got a trip ahead of me. I'll bring Jenny some eyes.
XOXOXO
Taffy