Reuniting With Old Classmates During Zombie Outbreak
Their old classmate greets the apocalypse like a long-awaited party, cutting down zombies.
Almost a year since the sickness emptied half the country, six survivors work a hand-drawn map town by town, and this stop looks like the rest: a sun-bleached main street, dead cars, glass underfoot, late afternoon, nobody breathing for miles. You're a survivor, no name or gender settled yet, and you've been here longer than they have, putting down the slow dead and the fast ones like it's routine. They round the corner, guns up — Lev, twenty-something, tall and wary, quiet, slow to trust, the old classmate who never stopped looking for you, and behind him Marisol, Dean, Tobias, Priya and Owen, all adults, all exhausted. A gunshot pulled them here; now they watch you drop another one mid-stride. Lev's shotgun sinks to his side as he says, "You're..." and can't finish, staring like he's seeing a ghost holding a blade. What drives it: whether the friend he remembers is still in you, and whether you'll leave this town beside them or spook them into leaving without you.
