I continued walking, the echo of Erin's shout ringing in my ears. I could hear her soft treading a few yards behind me, but I kept my pace steady, refusing to look back. I wanted to appear unbothered, not as though my teeth clenched and my muscles tightened at her comment.

For the next few minutes, we kept this up: heavy silence, both of us left to only our racing thoughts to distract us from our wounded pride. The street we walked down was completely deserted. On our left, dusty storefronts with boarded-up windows and shadows of years-old graffiti baked faint by the sun. On our right, a collection of modest apartment buildings, bedsheets hanging from balconies with HELP and NO MORE FOOD painted across cream-colored threads.

The silence was suffocating. My ears felt stuffed and painful, as though I had just disembarked an airplane.

I ruminated on Erin's comment, the distant look in her eyes as she walked me through the simple questions of her life for which she was missing answers: her mom's name, her dog's breed, the backstory of a lip piercing. And I tried desperately to push down the sense of panic rising in my chest.

Alright, this is controllable, I asserted to myself. This is controllable because I'm the special zombie, right? I'm the "there's still hope" one. I closed my eyes. Mom, Dad, Diana. An image of my little sister flashed in my mind. Black hair, black eyes, pale skin, narrow nose, lips always grinning mischievously. I zoomed out. House with a red door. Dog… no, no dog. A bird fountain in the front yard. Dad's bright blue two-door car. My heart lurched when I tried to muster an image of his face and failed. Later, we can come back to that later. I stumbled on something as I walked, I was so engrossed in thought. School… crowded hallways, the sound of bells, heavy backpack that cut into my shoulders because I could never remember which books to take home for the day.

I heard Erin speed up behind me, trotting up to walk side-by-side. I glanced over at her.

"Any luck?" I took a gamble that she was spiraling on the same memory lane I was.

She exhaled sharply and wiped at her nose.

"Nope."

"Yeah," I read a passing sign: NEXT PROVISIONS STOP: BEAUMONT. "I'm trying, but it's… just the highlights, really."

"I get that," Erin stared ahead. Her face was less frustrated than before, more relaxed.

We walked for a minute in silence again.

"You ever think about doing it?" She looked over at me.

"Doing, uh, what?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Letting them get you. Just one quick—" She motioned at her temple, fingers pulled into a gun-shape. "—bap to the brains, you know? Be done with all this wasteland, like, crap."

I felt a pang of familiarity. Back at that facility, the idea flitted past as a brief thought. I laughed—uncomfortably, barely, passably.

"I don't, I… Not yet, no," I replied, not quite sure why I was lying. "I mean, I still need to find Diana, and after what that asshole back there said, I have no reason to think she's—"

Erin picked up on my sudden stop.

"Yeah, of course, that makes sense," she said, not missing a beat. "I'm not there yet either, it's just a thing I think about sometimes." She chuckled, and I smiled, grateful that there was one other person in this sorry dump of a reality that could keep me company.

"Sorry about, um," I looked at her, hoping she could see my sincerity.

"That's, you know, don't worry about it," she said. Her voice got softer. "Didn't really know him as him, did I? He was just another living thing that seemed to recognize me from time to time. Comforting, you know? He was an ugly motherfucker, but he was comforting."

We laughed.

Far ahead, a reflection's glint caught my eye. It looked like a complex of buildings, industrial or medical.

"That's it, I think," she said. "Way back in the early days, I kept my distance from there—too many soldiers, lots of eyes on the ground."

I glanced down at my hand, still clawed and gnarled as ever. I looked at Erin, raising my eyebrows.

"Have you ever had to go inside?"

"Uh, no." Erin tilted her head from side to side. "No real reason to, I guess. Never needed anything from them, and they never seemed keen on going any further out than the guard posts." She smirked. "We still have some kind of upper hand, by virtue of being absolutely horrific."

"Oh, well, that's something," I said. "They have guns, and we have—" I hissed and wiggled my fingers in the air.

Erin laughed. It was nice to be with someone who still looked so normal. Save the red eyes, she could have passed as just a really, really sickly woman who needed a good night's sleep. On our walk, I didn't even bother glancing in passing building windows. It was still too unsettling to fill a body that was unrecognizable.

Erin turned a corner and I followed. She ducked into a doorway leading to what looked like an old restaurant's kitchen.

"I don't think it'll do us any damn good to storm the castle in broad daylight, so might as well hang here until dusk." She hopped across a counter and absentmindedly opened and closed a metal fridge door. "We can game-plan then, yeah?"

I lifted myself onto a counter and leaned back. "Works for me."

Next to my head hung a dusty notepad, a small golf pencil stuck into its spirals. I lifted it off its hook and twisted the pencil out. Across a fresh page, I scrawled the first word I had written in months.

Diana.