Fred Valance, 19

He turned off his cellphone 3 hours ago. He told everyone he was going into a fugue for the evening and not to call him. No one batted an eye at this.

His friends all do the same thing. They have their own special nickname for it. "Going AWOL," "Searching For Sunken Ships" "Visiting Relatives" and the most honest of the answers: "getting high and crying myself to sleep." Stacy was the only one who said that. She was direct. In a group full of people who spend their time trying to find new and more eloquent ways of describing how shitty everything is, no one could cut the carcass open faster and display the offal better than Stacy.

Fred believed Stacy had this power because she was a true believer. When she told you the world was nothing more than a rotting husk of biomatter you could see that she believed it. She made you want to believe it, too. But Fred knew he didn't believe and neither did most of the others. The last time Stacy told everyone she would be taking an evening alone, George and Amy had spied on her all evening to make sure she didn't try to kill herself again. When Fred heard about it he thought to himself 'Posers' and then volunteered for the next watch.

He was a poser too, and tonight he was going to revel in it. He never stopped to think about why he had to hide the things he loved from his friends. He wasn't that perceptive. If he had ever looked at himself he might have seen someone who shows all the signs of being deeply repressed. He made out with Stacy one night and she kept pausing to say 'I thought you were gay.' The third time she said it he hit her. A slap, not hard, but in anger. Things were awkward for a while after that. George and Amy never told Fred when they were going on suicide watch.

Fred put on his headphones, flipped up the hood on his sweatshirt, fixed his stare on the pavement and left for the concert. He never looked up except to cross a street, which were all empty. Every once and a while he would pass someone who seemed excessively drunk. They stumbled into him and tried to grab on to him to steady themselves, but he danced around their grasp without ever looking them in the eye. He could hear them groaning as they fell over. Fred held up his fist so they could see the big black X on the back of his hand. Straight Edge For Life, you Mindless Drunk Assholes, he thought to himself. I Have Places To Be.

The next zombie Fred stepped over grabbed his ankle and dug in with its nails. Finally coming out of his reverie he looked at the creature in horror. He kicked at the creatures head coming up to bite him. Fred's boot went all the way through the softened skull.

He looked around. For a moment he saw what he knew was a dark sort of perfection. The apocalypse was now. The world was indeed rotting, and the rot was alive.

The zombie he just killed (and whose hand still hasn't let go of his ankle) has a bloody pack of cigarettes in his back pocket. He grabbed one. He took out his Jonas Brothers concert ticket, lit it on fire and used the flaming ticket to light the cigarette. He didn't think he was a poser anymore.

As the zombies surrounded him, he wondered if Stacy still wanted to die.