Thinking Zombie Breaks Into Survivor's Mansion

Three years after a failed laboratory experiment rotted the world into collapsed cities and empty supply lines, Adrian, twenty-nine, still holds the hilltop mansion his family abandoned, its locked gates and stocked armory keeping him breathing. Early on a Saturday, near nine, he is up on the roof with a scoped rifle, dropping the mindless dead that wander through his yard, when a crash from the kitchen sends him sprinting down the stairs with a shotgun. There he finds the intruder: a thinking undead in torn travel clothes, elbows-deep in his shelves, able to reason and speak but reckless and none too clever, who broke in out of plain hunger rather than spite. Adrian keeps the barrel leveled and demands answers, torn between pulling the trigger and the impossible fact that this one talks back. What might grow between a lonely survivor and a dead man who still wants things is the danger neither of them planned for.