Okay, so I was not “situationally aware” that morning. Sue me.

Considering what I had planned, you’d think I’d be all keyed up. But last night I’d been all alone in the house. The house that had been empty since my wife took our kids back to South Carolina, two weeks ago. My only companion had been a fifth of Jack and the week-old notice that I was being replaced at my job. It had arrived the same day as the third final notice from the pediatricians and the second final notice from the dentists.

“Dear Officer (fill in the blank) Despite your spotless record, seven years of service with no late days or absences and previous promises that you would be promoted to take charge of the Security Department at Malden College, we are throwing you out on your ass because we found a security company that was better than you at sucking up to us.”

Okay, I’m paraphrasing. You get the idea.

So I wasn’t attentive when I drove into the campus. I remember seeing the crashed police car near the gate, but it didn’t register at the time. My mind was somewhere else. Ditto for the several dozen students staggering around the campus and some general disorder. The crashed cars actually got my attention. It must have been a hell of a party. No ambulances though, so they must have gotten there already. Or so I thought. So I parked my rustbucket Crown Vic in my normal space and suddenly there’s a student throwing himself against the passenger door.

I got out. This kid was bloody. Slashed, on his face and arm. Reflex reminded me there was a first aid kit in the Security office, ten steps away in the Maintenance Building. “Hey! Student! What’s going on-”

I began walking towards him.

He snarled.

Suddenly, I noticed that half a dozen of the nearest students, the ones who’d been staggering around, were now staggering towards me.

“Flynn! Get down!” Tony Nudo, the old LT who bossed our department. An army vet, like me. Barking orders. Reflex cut in, I dropped.

Gunshot.

Another gunshot.

The bloody student dropped, half his skull missing. I looked at Nudo. His hand was bandaged. He was holding that .38 he thought none of us knew about, the one he kept under a false bottom of his desk.

“Ell-Tee, are nuts?”

“Get in here Flynn! Now!”

The other bloody students were staggering faster, coming towards me. Okay, something was off. Then the LT started firing, single, careful shots, dropping the students.

I had to stop this. I threw myself at him, tackling him as I shove him in through the door.

Somebody slammed and locked the door behind me. I heard hands pounding on the fire door.

Lt. Nudo didn’t seemed angry that I’d tackled him. The jowly old guy grinned and winked at me. “Good reflexes Danny. Not so hard next time though, okay? Help me up.”

Earl Helmuth, one of the University maintenance guys, had locked the door. He was holding an axe.

I got off the LT, moving so as not to do any more damage. The bandaged hand looked nasty enough. We were in the garage of the maintenance building. Around us were the University’s trucks, a backhoe, tractors, a lawn mower. The walls were hung with tools. The only windows were slightly above head level, for light, not sightseeing. I heard more banging at the door. “What the hell is going on? What happened to those students out there?”

“You’d know if your phone wasn’t off the hook, Flynn. Been trying to reach you since four this morning.” Groaning, the LT started up the stairs to the offices. “It started sometime last night. People acting crazy, biting each other. I got a call from Ericson, he said some of the students were acting crazy. When I got here, Ericson and Chang were gone, no idea where they went. I think those guys out there ate them.”

“Ate them?” For a moment, I thought, hoped, prayed it was a prank. For about two seconds. This was way beyond people’s ability to fake. We stepped into the security office. It looked bare. We’d been stripping out our personal stuff for the last week, ever since they told us we were all being fired. The incoming Security company had made it plain they had no intention of hiring any of us. I looked out the windows.

There were dozens of bloody people, standing around. One person running, chased by a staggering mob. More of them clustered around the dorms.

I could see Mount Hope hospital from the window. All eight stories were spewing smoke and fire. So much for ambulance service. “Any word on the guys who were replacing us?”

“Nary a one.”

Bainer, the youngest and newest of us, was watching the TV we kept in the office. “Yo, check this.They been repeating it for half an hour.”

The announcer, his perfect voice cracking, his perfect hair mussed. No tie. There were sweat stains in the armpits of his shirt. “The latest word from the Sheriff’s department is do not let anyone who has bite wounds or wounds of any kind touch you. It is some kind of disease, similar to rabies, causing individuals to attack and bite other human beings. The people who have been bitten then attack others, spreading the disease. We have unconfirmed reports – oh, come on! You can’t want me to – Okay, okay, I’ll read it. That these are the bodies of the dead. The recently dead. Somehow attacking the living. There’s another unconfirmed report that shooting them in the head is the only way to stop them.”

“Unconfirmed my ass.” The Lt. sat down in his chair, suddenly looking tired. He flipped open his pistol, replaced the expended rounds one handed as he waved his bandaged hand. “I put three slugs into the little girl who did this. Damn near took off my hand before I shot her between the eyes. Then she dropped. Just our luck the college always wanted their security to be unarmed, huh?”

Bainer swore. “Damn. Two tours in Iraq and I come home to this? I knew I never should have gone to work as unarmed security. What do we do now?”

“I got my twelve gauge out in my truck, if we can get to it.” Earl spoke up. His axe already had blood on the blade. It didn’t seem to make him any more confident. “Kinda makes me think of when I used to play dungeons and dragons. We’d have called them things zombies.”

Things began sliding into place in my head. I looked out the window. Dozens of those things. Zombies. Clustered around the dorms. Trying to bite people. If they were trying to bite people, those dorms must seem like a buffet to them.

My hangover had gone away. I got up and walked to my locker. “Y’know, I’ve never been the right man in the right place at the right time before. It feels pretty good.”

I opened my locker and pulled out the AKM inside it. The bag of six 30-round magazines for it as well. I tossed that to Bainer. “You did two tours in Iraq, you should know how to use that thing.”

Bainers’ eyes went wide. Then he crammed a magazine into the weapons and jacked the bolt, chambering a round.

I pulled the two TEC-9′s out of their back, shoved in the mags. Each had two 30 round magazines, jungle-clipped. The TEC-9 is a cheap piece of junk but it had been all I could afford and right now, it was 60 bullets I could fire off without reloading.

Lt. Nudo and Helmuth looked at me in shock. Bainer looked even paler than he had looked before. “What the hell were those doing in your locker?”

“I was a boy scout, El-tee. Be prepared, right?” Last, I pulled out the old Mauser rifle. I only had a hundred rounds for the ancient cannon, but what can you do? I handed it to Helmuth. “You can shoot this, right?”

Helmuth didn’t bother arguing. He loaded the rifle.

“Okay, Helmuth, you go up on the roof and start popping zombies with the Mauser. Us three, we’ll go out the side door. I don’t think there are any zombies there. We’ll clear the street.”

Bainer spoke up. “With this rifle, I can nail them with head shots from the roof too. AK’s aren’t’ accurate, but within a hundred yards, I can hit what I aim at.”

“Okay, you two go up on the roof and start clearing us some space. El-tee, you feel up to clearing the streets with me?”

He was looking pretty rough. But he got up. “You have the firepower, Flynn. Unless you’re willing to give me one of those TEC-9′s?”

I could actually grin. “No way in hell. Just watch my back.”

That was how we went out the side door. It was like clockwork. I’d been practicing with the TEC-9′s and in my hands, sixty bullets meant sixty dead zombies. Well, fifty, maybe. Forty definitely. A solid forty kills and change. I learned to concentrate on firing one at a time. Occasionally, I’d hear the LT pop one that was coming at us from the side. The guys on the roof were doing their job as well. We rolled up one side of the nearest dorm and down another. I barely had time for a clip change, as they came from all directions, looking for whoever was shooting. That made it easier. After a hot 15 minutes, most of the campus seemed clear. Except for bloody corpses, the non-moving kind.

One of the students from the dorm came running at me. I almost shot her before I recognized Annie Traxler, the Dorm manager for one of the girl’s dorms. She was carrying a baseball bat and wearing a hockey mask and work gloves. It looked kind of odd with the “Hello Kitty” T-shirt she had on, but who was I to judge? Besides, I liked her. She brought us cookies last Christmas. “Mr Flynn! Thank heavens you’re here. We’ve got those crazy people all around the outside of the dorm. They’ve tried to break in and bite us! They pulled- they pulled my best friends out and she screamed and-”

I was about to grab her by the shoulders when she steadied herself. “What do we do?”

“Barricade the ground floors and get everyone on the second and third floors of the dorms. Then find anything heavy, anything that might crack a skull and drop it on them from the third floor. See if you can find some kind of protective gear, anything to keep them from biting you. Gloves, leather jackets, football padding, whatever. And if they get in the building, you need some of your girls with clubs. Axes. Anything they can grab to bust these things in the head. You got that??

Just then, half a dozen of them came shambling towards us. Annie screamed. I popped them, then realized I had to be low on ammo. I had a couple of boxes of loose 9mm back at the locker to reload. I turned to Lt. Nudo. “Ell-tee, you got anything to..”

Nudo looked awful. Almost ready to faint. He was still trying to load his pistol. Annie grabbed him before he fell. “We need a doctor.”

“It’s way beyond that, Annie. Get back to the dorms and get your girls organized. If the cell phones are still working, can you call the kids in the other dorms, tell them what I told you?”

“I want to go with you. We don’t have any guns back at the dorms.”

“Annie, your people need you. You have to get them organized or they’ll all die.”

She sniffed and nodded, getting steadier. Then she kissed me on the cheek and ran back to her dorm.away.

Heh. Go figure. My last day of this job wasn’t what I’d expected.

I got Nudo back to the office, taking him up the stairs in a fireman’s’ carry. Every step reminded me of how out of shape I’d become the last ten years. Up on the roof, I could hear Helmuth and Bainer firing, slowly now. Good. Conserving ammo. I put the LT in a chair, looked at his bite mark. Dark red and black streaks were running up his arm. He was perspiring, panting for breath, fevered.

On the TV, I couldn’t help but hear one of the network doctors speaking frantically in a sing-song Indian accent. “This conforms to no known plague of any kind. There are over two hundred reported infection sites, scattered all over the world. There could be hundreds more not reported. This could be everywhere.”

“But what is the cure?” The network anchor, speaking in a desperate tone that I’m sure they don’t teach in broadcasting school.

“There is no cure. No antibiotics or anti-virals have even slowed the infection, let alone reversed it. Every bite victim, even those bitten in the most minor ways, all of them have died and then reanimated. There have been no exceptions.”

I looked at the Lt. He looked bad. Eyes red-rimmed, face pale. He handed me his .38. I took it, made him as comfortable as I could on the couch in the office, the ragged couch we put against the wall when they pulled out half of our lockers. “I don’t want to be one of those things, Flynn. You’ll take care of that, won’t you?”

“Gotcha covered, El-tee. Y’know, I was pretty mad at you this morning, but, well, hell, you been a good guy to work for.”

“And you were always a whiny pain in the ass, Flynn. But I could always count on you.”

He gave his last chuckle then. It turned into a death rattle. A real death rattle, honest. He spasmed and died.

I took the ball peen hammer we keep in the toolbox. Gotta save ammo. Crush his skull. But I couldn’t. Not him.

I laid him on the floor and cuffed his hands and ankles together instead.

Helmuth called down on our walkie talkies. “Y’all gotta see this! Up on the roof!”

I went up to the roof.

It was quite a sight.

Columns of smoke were rising in all directions from burning buildings. The neighborhood to our south was a poor, older neighborhood. It had been nicer when the university was founded, back when there were actually factories with decent jobs to be had in this town. As it had gone downhill, the University had erected a six-foot high brick wall, very attractive. It had one gate.

Apparently, people had been dying in that neighborhood last night. A lot of people.

And they were all coming through the gate.

Earl whistled. “Must be a couple-thousand of ‘em.”

Dead winos, not looking much more bedraggled than they had in life. Dead old grannies. Dead students, killed at their off-campus rentals. Dead EMT’s, cops, firemen who’d been called in to help and died not knowing what killed them. Worst of all, the children. How many had died in their beds? Hiding, running from adults who were suddenly monsters worse than any of their nightmares?

That was when it really hit me. What justified this? How could they have possibly deserved to die? What right did anyone have to kill them? But I’d been ready to-

I shook my head. I was getting off track. Deal with it later. Tactical problem now. Large number of hostiles, moving slowly. “Bainer, how are you for ammo?”

“Sorry dude, down to your last magazine. You got any more ammo?”

“If we survive this, there’s a gun shop three blocks to the north of here. We’ll hit that and load up. But we have to stop that bunch or they’ll swarm the campus.”

“Good luck at that.”

“Oh, I have an idea. You have the keys to the snowplow, right?”

“Nope. Simonides took the keys and locked himself in his office.”

Oh great. Steve Simonides, head of the University Support Services. The guy who’d made the decision to replace us. Gads, I hated that little weasel. We went down to his office.

I banged on the door. “Simonides, open up!”

“Flynn, you will use a civil tone when you speak to me!” The mans’ quavery voice was hard enough to hear through the door. “You have a job to do! Go do it!”

“Steve, we need the snow plow keys.”

“That is not security equipment! And there’s no snow!”

That was it. It took me three tries to kick in the door. Simonides was screaming for the police by the second kick. I came through the door, a reloaded TEC-9 in either hand. He handed the keys to me, silently. I could smell urine in the room as we left. So he wet himself. It was better than what I’d been planning to do to him.

Okay, it made me smile a little.

I tossed the plow keys to Earl. Bainer was there too. The snowplow was a medium sized dump truck with a massive plow blade on the front. I’ve seen it crack through two inches of ice. “Earl, start it up and lock the door. Bainer, get in the back, keep those things from getting in. I want you to plow clean through that bunch coming onto campus in the slow plow, then turn around and come right back through. I’ll be right behind you, in my Crown Victoria.”

“Shouldn’t you be in the back of the truck too?”

“Nah. I got a little surprise. But when I honk my horn, stop the damn truck. Got it?”

“Okay, Flynn, it’s your funeral. Good luck!”

I made my preparations in the car. Had my button ready to press.

For his part, Earl drove like a champ. He hit the zombie tide at forty, the big diesel engine roaring. Bodies flew everywhere. I followed, bumping furiously on the crushed bodies on the road. Amid the horror, I suddenly got a new dread. What if I messed up my suspension on the corpses?

But we made it through into a spot where the zombies were thin. We turned, banging the occasional zombie even now, sending them flying. Then Earl was plowing through again, bodies flying until I leaned on my horn. The truck jolted to a stop. I stopped as fast as I could, hit the button, went out through the sun roof. Bainer was using up his last few rounds to give me cover as I leaped into the back of the truck. “Go, go, go!”

I felt cold bloody hands grabbing at my ankles. I slipped back as the truck jolted, rolling forward, me holding onto the smooth metal of the truck. Dead hands began to squeeze.

Bainer grabbed me, gripping one of the safety grips and pulling.

I felt myself being torn in half.

Undead muscle gave way, damp body fluids cool on my leg while Bainer pulled me up into the truck.

I had a few seconds to realize I was going to live.

Then my car exploded.

Well, the two hundred pounds of high-nitrate fertilizer and diesel oil in my back seat exploded.

The Crown Vic, all American heavy metal that it was, disintegrated.

A wave of shrapnel tore through the zombies, dropping most of those it didn’t vaporize.

We got cheers as we rolled back into campus. The football team had decided to make themselves useful. They had on all their protective gear, including what looked like arm guards and padding borrowed from the hockey team. Their weapons were an interesting mix of bats, axes and shovels. The mascot was leading them, in his outfit. I guess it’s good to have a team called the Crusaders if it gives you a mascot wearing full plate armor and waving a broadsword.

I went up to the office as they congratulated themselves. A couple of the halfbacks took the opportunity to bust open a soda machine and pass around free drinks. Me, I steadied myself for what I knew I’d find.

The El-tee’s body was there. He was gone. A snarling, milky-eyed horror was in his place, thrashing in the cuffs. Wrists and ankles already bloody. I took the ball peen hammer, got ready to do my job.

“Why did you have those guns?” Simonides, behind me. He had recovered a little nerve. “What was that explosion? Why did your car-”

He went silent as I glared at him. Then I cracked the skull of the zombie with a hammer. It stopped moving.

I got up, wiped my hand. “Hey director, what can I say/ It was going to be my last day at work.”

The look of horror in his eyes was truly sweet.

I laughed.

“Oh chill out. I’m all better now. I just needed to be shown what’s really important. We need to establish a perimeter. Organize the students to defend themselves. Get some real weapons. If this plague is worldwide, it could get really bad.”

“You will do no such thing! As soon as I can get my call through to the police- I’m on hold for the Chief now, he and I-”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “You do that. I guess this isn’t my last day at work after all.”