“After we got them buried, we stayed in the house, living off the things left in the pantry. My mom always made spaghetti on Sundays, just like my aunt, so she had about fifty jars of sauce in the garage. She bought them in bulk at Costco.”

“I loved Costco,” I said wistfully.

“Me too. What I wouldn’t give right now to just live in one. They even have mattresses there.” He sighed and cleared his throat, continuing in a stronger voice now. “Anyway, one day we decided to take a walk down to the convenience store that was near our house, just a few blocks away. We were joking around about getting a slushy, I remember, when we first saw them.”

“Them?” I asked, to fill the silence. Peter was lost in the memories somewhere, and I knew it wasn’t a good place to be. I scooted over and put my hand on his back. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“No, I do,” he said sternly. “Someone else besides me should know what they did to her. To Lily.” His voice broke at her name.

Buster tried to get up to come over to me, but I pushed him away, sending him back to Peter. He needed the dog more than I did right now.

“As soon as we saw the group of them, we knew they were trouble. They walked in a big group, right down the middle of the street, not caring who saw them. Some of them had baseball bats. One had a gun.”

“Was it the same guys we saw?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.” He looked at me, fear in his eyes. “I mean, what are the chances they would have taken the same route as me to get to my aunt’s house?”

“Not good,” I assured him. “Practically impossible.”

“Yeah. You’re right.” He stared straight ahead again. “It means there’s more than one gang of them out there, though. Not exactly good news.”

I shook my head in disgust. “They’re like packs of wild animals. Zombies.”

“I used to read zombie books and go to those movies, laughing at the gore.” He smiled bitterly.

“Me too.” I reached over to pet Buster with him. “So what happened then?”

“We took off running. It’s like all they needed to see - it got them all excited. They were hollering and cheering, like they were egging each other on. It was a sick game to them. I’ve never been so friggin scared in my entire life.”

Peter grabbed my hand that was petting Buster’s head. I just sat there and let him squeeze it, saying nothing, just listening.

Peter’s voice was wavering badly now. “Lily took my hand and I saw her face. She was super scared too. And then as we were cutting through one of our neighbor’s yards, she tripped on one of the roots that was sticking up out of the ground and landed on her knees. I tried to help her get up but she’d twisted her ankle. She couldn’t move.”

I put my other hand on top of his, squeezing now too. I could totally picture the scene, his poor little sister on the ground and the pack of wolves closing in.

“She yelled at me to keep going, but I didn’t want to leave her there.”

“There was nothing else you could do,” I said, firmly. “You had to save yourself.”

“I know,” he said, putting his head down. “But I couldn’t just leave her.”

“What’d you do?” I asked softly.

“I stood there over her, waiting for them to come. She kept grabbing my pant leg, pushing me, screaming at me to leave, but I couldn’t.” He started crying again. “I just couldn’t.”

“How did you live?” I asked. I knew those canners had no souls left. They wouldn’t have just let him go.

“They came and took her from me, dragging her away while she screamed my name over and over and over. One of them punched me in the face and knocked me down, saying I was too skinny to bother with.”

“That’s kind of rude,” I said, without thinking. “Sorry.”

“No. Don’t worry about it. Anyway, they took her away, and I tried to follow, but one of them came back with the baseball bat and swung it at me. So I dropped far behind, following them from a distance. I saw where they took her and then ran back to my house to get my gun.”

“You were going to kick some ass, weren’t you?”

“You’re damn straight I was,” he said bitterly. “I took a whole box of bullets in my pockets and went back to their house.”

He was crying again, more intensely now, small sobs bursting out between the words. “When I got there, though, it was too late. I went around to the back where I could hear their voices …”

I didn’t want to hear the rest of the story. I knew pretty much how it ended and I knew the details were only going to make the knowing worse. But Peter needed to tell someone, and Buster wasn’t exactly in a position to appreciate its awfulness enough to help Peter feel like he wasn’t alone.

“What did you see?”

“Oh, God. It was awful. My worst nightmare come to life. I saw my sister’s head. On the ground. They were … they were …” His shoulders were quaking now, tears and snot dripping off of his face. “They were cutting her up … and putting her body parts on a big grill! There was blood everywhere!”

I felt the vomit coming up again and swallowed three times in quick succession to keep it down. My salivary glands were working like mad, telling me to get moving, so I wouldn’t barf on my friend.

But I couldn’t leave him. I knew he didn’t want to be alone right now - couldn’t be alone right now. He’d seen pretty much the most horrific thing I could possibly imagine a person having to endure. And it had happened to his baby sister.

I put my arm across this back and pulled him in tight to me. “Shhhh, I know it’s awful. I know it’s terrible. Evil stuff. Evil. They’re going to pay.” I had no idea how that was going to happen, but prayed karma might take care of some of it.

“Oh, they did. Believe me.”

I stopped squeezing him for a minute. “What’d you do?”

“I shot four of them. One right in the face.”

I hugged him again. “Good for you, Peter. I don’t know how you did that without knocking yourself out, but I wish you’d shot all of them in the face. In the nuts too.”

Peter agreed angrily. “Me too. I think I got lucky with not hitting myself. The gun kicked more up instead of back for some reason. I think Lily’s spirit was there helping me.”

“I’ll bet she was too. How’d you get away?”

“I ran like hell while they all ran around screaming … got back to my house, threw my stuff in a bag and took off on my bike.”

“And ended up in my back yard.”

“Yeah. I ended up in your back yard.”

“In your Aunt-who-wasn’t-really-an-aunt’s house.”

He smiled, now a little less angrily. “Yes. In my aunt’s house.”

“The one with the bright red pumps.”

He giggled and sniffed hard, shoving me off of him. “Yes, the one with the pumps.”

I stood up and brushed myself off. “Well, I wish I could say something to make it better for you, Peter, but I just can’t think of anything. If I could, I’d go kill them all for you.”

“I know you would. And for some strange reason, that makes me feel just a tiny bit better.” He looked up at me, his eyes all red and puffy but no longer leaking.

I continued. “All I know is, they’d better never show their ugly canner faces in my Everglades, or they’re going to go down … and it won’t be pretty.”

“Yeah,” said Peter. “Damn straight.”

“Gator bait.”

“I like it,” he said.

“Snakebite victims.”

“Another good idea,” encouraged Peter.

“I’m out of good ideas now, though,” I said, smiling at Peter’s slightly uplifted mood.

“That’s okay, I’m good with those.” He stood up. “I’m gonna go pee.”

“Okay. Stay out of sight.”

“Who’s going to see us out here in the middle of nowhere?” he asked.

I shook my head slowly. “Do we really want to know the answer to that question?”

“No,” he agreed, sad once again. “Probably not.”

I felt bad about reminding him of our precarious position, but it wouldn’t do to go around with a false sense of security, just because we had a couple of guns and a fuzzy pink watchdog.

Buster followed along next to Peter, both of them stopping just at the edge of our ramp to pee out into the bushes. It was comical watching them do it together - Buster with his tiny leg lifted and Peter with his cammo shirt on backwards. I could read the bright white words on it from here: Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

***

We passed the rest of the day talking about our schools, our friends, and the things we had liked to do before the world started falling apart. It turned out Peter didn’t have a whole lot of friends, nor did he do much outside of school, other than sing and play video games. We had a lot in common - more than we had thought we would.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t have any friends. That’s just ridiculous,” I said, now angry at the unfairness of a world that was supposed to have been functioning just fine, before it all went to hell in a hand basket.

“I’ve been bullied pretty much since kindergarten. No one likes to be friends with a victim.”

“Why didn’t your parents do something about it?”

“They didn’t know. I lied about a lot of things.”

“Why’d you do that? Why not let them stick up for you?”

“Because I didn’t want them to find out,” he said, his wispy voice going even softer than normal.

“Find out what? That you’re a serial killer?”

“No, jerk. That I’m gay.”

“Why not? Being gay’s not a death sentence anymore. The world has changed.”

“Easy for you to say.”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“I had a theory that most of the guys who picked on me did it because they were attracted to me and hated themselves for it.” He smiled briefly, almost sadly.

“Interesting. Sick and a little twisted, but interesting.”

“Seriously. I mean, don’t we usually hate things that we recognize in ourselves?”

“I think you’ve wasted a lot of time reading self-help books.”

“Yeah, I probably did. But sometimes thinking that made it easier for me.”

“Didn’t teachers or other students notice?”

“Probably.”

“Why didn’t they do anything about it?”

“I don’t know. I guess they were too busy with their own lives.”

“Pfft. No wonder the world came to an end. Everyone living in it was a bunch of assholes.”

Peter laughed. “I’ve thought that more than once. Like this disease or virus was a giant cleansing of the planet.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t a very efficient method. It got rid of the good guys, too. My dad was a good guy.”

“I can tell … by the way you talk about him. You really loved him.”

“I still do. He’s still alive in my head. I hear his voice all the time, telling me to be smart and to practice my martial arts.”

Peter smiled. “I wouldn’t tell too many people that, if I were you.”

“Why,” I scoffed. “What are they going to do? Lock me away? I can do whatever I want without consequences now. I’m totally free.” I gave him a cocky look which I immediately lost at his next statement.