When Ellie wakes up, she finds herself standing near the foot of the bed her parents once shared, a bed that is now hers. The thought that has revived her is still ringing in her head, reminding her.

One day, there will be a cure.

She listens, her ears alert for signs of an intrusion. Her eyes strafe the curtains, trying to discern the time of day. The light bleeding in is timid and coming from the west. It is evening, maybe eight o’clock. She glances at the pile of furniture pressed against the locked bedroom door. It sits steady, undisturbed.

She is, as always, fully dressed. Pajamas are a luxury placed firmly in the past. A bundle of keys hangs on a chain from her belt. She collects it into the palm of her hand and stuffs it into her jeans pocket. Then she moves to the master bathroom.

Next to the sink is a thermos full of hot water. The pipes have long since gone dry, so she survives by collecting rainwater that she boils in the fireplace downstairs. Some of the water she keeps hot for washing up. The rest is for drinking. There is bottled water, but it’s in the basement. And she can’t go in there. Not yet.

The hole in the wall above the bathtub is large enough for her thirteen-year-old frame, but no larger. She doesn’t worry too much about Carl trying to get to her – it’s her parents he wants – but she doesn’t completely discount the possibility. So the hole is large enough for her, too small for Carl.

Climbing through the hole, she emerges into the bedroom that was once hers. Its window also faces the front. She makes a narrow gap in the curtains and looks outside.

The dead-end street is unchanged from the day before, and still as quiet. The only person in sight is Mrs. Bennett, sprawled out on the pavement where she’s been since the day Carl shot her. In life thick and fleshy, the elements have rendered her slack and ghoulish. The fabric of her floral nightgown – once pink and yellow, now dried-blood brown – flaps gently against her bony frame.

Ellie moves away from the window and across the bedroom. For a moment, she stands at the door, again listening, alert. Hearing nothing, she turns the lock and quickly pulls the door open. The second-floor landing is empty, the barricade she assembled at the top of the stairs still in place. Nevertheless, as she exits the bedroom she moves slowly, cautiously, her eyes wide.

She scrutinizes the doors to the bathroom and the other bedrooms, all of which she has locked from the outside. She tries their handles and inspects the tape she applied between each door and its frame. If Carl had managed to pick one of the simple locks and conceal himself inside, he wouldn’t have been able to replace the tape on the outside of the door. She would see the tape hanging and know that he was in there. But in each case she finds that the tape has not been disturbed.

She shifts her focus to the barricade, a precarious assemblage designed not to keep invaders out but to collapse at the slightest touch. She wouldn’t be able to sleep without knowing that it was there to awaken her in the event that someone – or something – was trying to reach the second floor.

She gives it a nudge with her foot and sends it tumbling down the carpeted stairs.

And that’s when she hears it. The sound of metal hitting tile, the swallowed breath, the scampering. Not sounds made by some lumbering, mindless zombie, but by a human startled in the middle of some covert act. She knows who it must be, but she can hardly believe it. And as she runs down the stairs, dodging chairs and end tables and lamps, she is already trying to figure it out. How did he get in? How? How? How?

When she enters the kitchen, she finds Carl standing at the basement door, sweat pouring down his face, a screwdriver clutched in his greasy palms. He is trying to take apart the heavy-duty latch she installed, not to keep her parents in – the lack of stairs make the door impossible to reach from the inside – but to keep Carl out.

Carl is sixty at least, maybe older, and he wears his white hair scooped up over his balding, freckled pate. The combover confuses Ellie. They are the only ones left, him and her, and she already knows that he’s old and bald. So who is he trying to fool? The zombies?

“Ellie,” he says. “Ellie, they have to die.”

She can hear him struggling to sound strong, but it’s clear that he’s afraid. He might even be crazy. He’s certainly not the man he was before, the jolly retired widower at the end of the street, the man she always called Mr. Hewitt. Now he’s Carl, the man who wants to kill her parents.

“Put the screwdriver down and get out,” Ellie says.

With her eyes locked on her adversary, her brain does a quick inventory of the kitchen. She is at least a hundred pounds lighter than Carl, so if it comes down to it, she will need a weapon.

“They’re the only ones left,” he says. “We’re not safe.”

Not a knife. She couldn’t get that close to him. So what would provide her with some distance? She curses herself for running downstairs without the baseball bat that she keeps in her old bedroom.

“You can’t just come in here,” Ellie says. “This is my house.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, his tone dropping a notch. “But there’s nothing you can do.”

He turns slightly so that she can see the holster on his hip, the gun tucked into it. She has seen it only once before, the day Mrs. Bennett died. She can’t believe he brought it into her house.

“It’s over now,” he says.

Would he shoot a human? Ellie wonders. And that’s when she remembers the fire extinguisher under the kitchen sink.

“It’s over,” Carl says, and before he knows what’s happening, the cupboard door is open and the extinguisher is in Ellie’s hands.

She yanks out the safety pin and storms Carl, pointing the nozzle at his face. She grips the handle and blasts him with sodium bicarbonate. Frantic, the old man lets the screwdriver drop to the tile floor and shields his eyes with his hands, stumbling backward.

She advances, driving him through the family room, easing up when he catches his leg on the low table in front of the couch. She doesn’t want him to fall. She isn’t trying to capture him. She wants him to lead her to his point of entry. She has to know how he got it.

Recovering, Carl spins around and runs as fast as his skinny legs can carry his pot-bellied frame to the laundry room, an unfinished and uninsulated space between the main house and the garage. He enters and moves past the door to the garage to a stack of crates at the far end of the room. Then he stops and turns to face Ellie.

She moves toward him slowly, the extinguisher pointed at his pleading face.

“Ellie, please,” he says, beads of sweat tracing paths through the powder on his puffy cheeks. “I’m trying to help you. You’re not safe here.”

She squeezes the handle and Carl vanishes into another cloud. When it settles, he’s on his way into the rafters, pulling himself up awkwardly, his feet flapping in the air. He looks so ridiculous, Ellie almost feels guilty. Nevertheless, she shoots him again.

When he reaches the crawl space above the garage, he moves slumped forward to a rectangular hole high on the outer wall. Once there had been a vent there, its purpose unknown to Ellie. When she and her father had secured the house, somehow they’d missed it. But Carl hadn’t.

As she watches Carl squeeze himself through the opening and out of her house, she curses herself for the oversight. Once he’s gone, she drops the extinguisher and goes to collect a hammer and nails and some wood.

***

After securing the vent, Ellie retrieves her baseball bat and exits the house through the front door, stepping out into the purple-pink twilight. Locking the door behind her, she moves slowly around the house, examining the steel bars that cover each basement window, ensuring that everything is intact.

They’d never kept anything of value in the basement. But long before the zombies arrived, back when things were normal, Ellie’s father had decided that it was an easy entry point, a way to get into the house and ultimately to them.

Compared to other parts of the city, their middle-class neighborhood was a peaceful and prosperous haven. And this, in her father’s eyes, made it a target. So he’d paid some men a ridiculous amount of money to crook-proof the basement.

At the back of the house, she stands in front of the basement door. Like the window bars, it’s also steel, and – as her father once assured her – impenetrable. The frame has been reinforced, the old lock replaced with a deadbolt, and inside there is a horizontal security bar secured with a padlock.

She knows that no one can get in or out. Yet she still tugs at the handle and gives the door a shove. It feels like shoving a wall. Satisfied, she goes back inside.

***

She has only been asleep for an hour or so when a shot awakens her.

For a time, gunfire was a regular occurrence. But now, after weeks of an almost deafening silence, the sound has again become shocking. The way it would’ve been before the zombies and their sickness arrived. When this was just an ordinary middle-class suburban neighborhood. When the greatest threats to one’s existence were heart attacks and car accidents.

Ellie is on her feet before she can think, rushing to the bathroom, squeezing through the hole into her old bedroom. Once again forgetting the bat, she flings open the bedroom door and runs out onto the landing, crashing through the barricade at the top of the stairs.

When a second shot sounds, followed by a third, some part of her has already realized that the gunfire is coming from outside. Yet she is driven by the fear that Carl has once again gotten inside and is at that moment killing her parents. Only when she arrives in the kitchen to find the basement door locked and Carl nowhere in sight do her instincts give way to rational thought.

She waits, and listens. For several long moments, all she can hear is the sound of her own heavy breathing. Then a fourth shot sounds and she moves swiftly back upstairs to her old bedroom. Standing at the window, she waits for another shot. When one doesn’t come, she makes a crack in the curtains and peers outside.

It is broad daylight, probably midday. Nothing has changed. The street is still empty, save for Mrs. Bennett’s disintegrating corpse.

Ellie’s house is situated about two-thirds of the way down the street, with just one house between it and the cul-de-sac. She looks up the street toward where it meets 146th but sees nothing new: no people, no zombies, nothing where it wasn’t the last time she looked.

Then she turns the other way, toward Carl’s house. It sits on a small rise at the back of the cul-de-sac, its sloped front yard surrounded by a low, chain-link fence. Everything there seems normal too, unchanged. Then she spots the open second-floor window, and every muscle in her body tightens.

Someone has broken into Carl’s house. Not some zombie but a human, a scavenger. Ellie long ago stopped worrying about the zombies – the only ones she’s seen in weeks are her parents – but scavengers continue to be a problem. And now it looks like one has gotten to Carl.

Carl’s front door opens, and Ellie brings the curtains together until just the tiniest gap remains – enough, she hopes, to see without being seen. When Carl appears in the doorway, she lets out a sigh of relief. Then she notices that his right leg is covered in blood, and that the blood is clearly his own.

For a moment Carl stands on his front porch, surveying the neighborhood. Then he turns and moves back into his house. When he reappears, he is dragging a body, a young man dressed in black jeans and a black jacket.

Limping, Carl pulls the body down off the porch, and from the way it bounces on the concrete steps, Ellie is sure the young man is dead. Carl has successfully defended his home, but not without paying a price. His leg wound looks severe.

In the center of his front yard, its scraggly lawn gone brown from lack of water, Carl stops. Then he removes the gun from the holster on his hip and aims it at the young man’s head. Without a bullet to the brain, the young man will come back.

The gun jerks and a moment later Ellie hears a shot. The body on the ground doesn’t so much as twitch. Carl repeats the action twice, just to be sure.

Carl has just committed a crime, but the days when Ellie could call the police are long gone. And although she believes that one day there will be a cure, her moral outrage doesn’t extend beyond her parents. Emotionally she can’t afford to care about them all.

Carl takes a heavy breath and reholsters his weapon.

Then he turns back toward his house, and collapses.

“Shit,” Ellie hears herself whisper.

***

Ellie hops the low chain-link fence and moves quickly up the yard to the two motionless forms on the lawn.

The young man is someone she knows, or at least she knows his face. He was a checker at the grocery store where her parents used to shop, a thin, sullen young man who would barely glance up at them as he rang up their purchases. He never gave them a receipt unless they asked, and afterward Ellie’s mother would always make lighthearted jokes about his lack of customer service skills. Yet she would never go to a different checker. She enjoyed the familiarity of the joke.

Ellie wonders how she will share this moment with her mother after she is cured. Telling her how her daughter stood on Carl Hewitt’s lawn, looking down at the checker’s corpse, examining the holes in his head.

The holes are close together, one in the bridge of his nose, the other two just above it, side by side. Ellie is sure he won’t come back.

She turns to Carl. He is flat on his face, and still breathing. Still alive.

She stands over him and looks for the wound on his leg, eventually spotting a hole in his khaki pants in the middle of his right thigh. He has lost a tremendous amount of blood, and Ellie wonders if it’s too late to save him. Wonders if she’ll have to put three bullets in his face to prevent him from coming back.

She certainly won’t be dragging his corpse to her basement. She won’t set him aside for curing later.

“Ellie,” he says weakly.

She realizes for the first time that his eyes are slightly open. He has been watching her. She hunkers down in front of him.

“Oh, thank God,” he says.

She can see a drift in his focus. The way he sees her one moment, then not the next.

“I need your help,” he says.

Her expression shifts, from cold scrutiny to skepticism.

“Help me,” he says.

***

She ties off the wound and then enters his house to find something for him to eat.

When she opens his kitchen pantry, she is startled by the amount of food she finds there. Canned food mostly, but also countless bottles of water. Did he know this was coming? Or was this what every old widower’s pantry looked like?

She grabs a can of beef stew and opens it in the kitchen. She brings it to the front yard and sets it down in front of Carl, along with a bottle of Poland Spring. Then goes to retrieve her parents’ car.

She yanks the garage door open and dives in behind the wheel of her parents’ four-wheel-drive Volvo wagon. She starts it quickly and flips it into reverse, backing out into the street. Twisting the car around until it’s pointed at Carl’s house, she feels its rear wheels tumble over an obstruction. Without emotion, she realizes that she has crushed what is left of Mrs. Bennett.

She shifts and steps on the gas, speeding into the cul-de-sac and crashing through Carl’s fence. She turns the car to the left and hits the brake, stopping on the lawn so that Carl is right outside the rear passenger door.

Emerging quickly from behind the wheel, Ellie steps around the front of the car, past the dead checker, and over to Carl. He is up on his elbow, the empty can of stew on the ground in front of him, the bottle of water pressed to his lips.

She reaches down and removes the gun from his holster.

“You won’t be needing this in my house,” she says, putting the weapon down the back of her jeans. “Can you get up on your good leg?”

“I think so,” Carl says.

“Because I can’t carry you.”

Ellie looks out across the hood of the Volvo, scanning the neighborhood. Her garage door has been open for at least a minute. She is standing fully exposed in Carl’s front yard. She sees no one, but she has learned how quickly nothing can become something. Like today, when she was awoken by gunfire, and now she’s out in broad daylight, her house wide open.

“I think so,” Carl says again.

She pulls the car’s back door open, holding it, waiting, still watching the street. She is certain the checker had friends. Surely he couldn’t have survived this long on his own. So where are they? Did they see what happened? Are they watching now? Will they attack her house next? Why is she doing this?

Carl has made it inside the car. He is sprawled across the back seat, his wounded leg up.

“Is there anything that I should get?” she asks.

“Not now,” Carl says. “I’ll come back for it.”

“You might not be able to get it later.”

In this new world, anything you leave behind probably won’t be there when you come back. Thinking this, she is aware again of what she has become after just a few weeks. The world changed, and she changed with it. Just thirteen, and so easily in a post-apocalyptic frame of mind.

“Then let it go,” Carl says.

Ellie slams the car door shut.

***

Outside it is still daylight, but thanks to the wooden planks across the windows, the light is dim in Ellie’s living room.

Carl is laid out on the sofa, the blood on his wounded leg now dark and thickening. His other leg is on the floor, his head is against the armrest. Ellie is in an easy chair opposite him, struggling to keep her eyes open. Carl’s gun is in her lap.

“Ellie,” Carl groans.

She opens her eyes wide and sits up, her fingertips finding the gun’s cold steel. She doesn’t know if it’s loaded anymore. She hasn’t checked. She isn’t even sure how to check.

“I never asked,” Carl says, “but Ellie, what’s that short for? Eleanor?”

“Yeah, but not like Eleanor Roosevelt,” she says. This isn’t the first time she’s had to answer this question. “Like Elinor in Sense & Sensibility.”

“Ah,” Carl nods. “She was sense.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, lucky me.” Carl forces a laugh, barely able to keep his eyes open. “I got sense.”

It was her father who had helped her board up the windows, before he got stupid and went outside, when they were still in the thick of it.

“You saved me,” Carl says. “How ’bout that.”

Mom was already in the basement then, infected, the stairs removed by her father. When he’d come home bitten, he’d asked Ellie to put him down there too. But only at the right moment, after he’d turned. He didn’t want to be eaten by his wife.

“I’ve been your worst enemy,” Carl continues, “I’ve kept you up, I know that. And now you’ve saved me.”

Ellie rises to her feet, alert. The gun is in her hand, pointed at the floor. She is always alert, but especially when she thinks she might’ve fallen asleep for a moment, not knowing how the world outside might have shifted. And now she has the checker and his scavenger friends to wonder about.

“Elinor,” Carl says.

She stops, so used to being in this house alone. And now someone is here calling her Elinor.

“Do you know how long I’ve lived here?” he asks.

Ellie moves to the front window, peers outside between the planks. This was her father’s design. The wood made the windows secure, but with small gaps between the planks they could still see out. They were safe, but not blind.

She is certain that the dead checker’s friends are watching the house. She wants to go upstairs for a better view. But she doesn’t trust Carl, doesn’t want to leave him alone.

“I’m sixty-seven,” Carl says. “Maybe you don’t know. I moved here when I was twenty-nine. So forty years I guess–”

“Thirty-eight,” Ellie cuts in, passing Carl as she moves from the front window to the dining room at the back of the house.

“Yes,” Carl says, “you’re probably right.”

Ellie looks out between the planks nailed across the dining room window. No one in the back yard, and everything seems normal.

“I had a wife,” Carl says, “and two kids. When I bought that house, everything behind it was still forest. Then they put a neighborhood in back there, cut down all the trees. Used to have a great view out the back. Then suddenly I was looking at some guy’s house.”

Still in the dining room, Ellie watches the back of his head. He is facing away from her, talking to the front window.

“Anyway,” he says, “eventually the kids grew up and moved off, and my wife died.”

“I never met your wife,” Ellie says.

Carl nods.

“She died before you were born. Breast cancer.”

Ellie moves back to the easy chair, sits down perched on the front edge, the gun between her knees.

“After my wife died,” Carl says, “I lived alone in that house for years. And then I fell in love with Maggie.”

“Maggie?”

“Yeah. I guess you called her Mrs. Bennett.”

Ellie can still feel the rumble of her parents’ car as it backed over Mrs. Bennett, hear the crackle of her bones.

“We were in love, Maggie and me,” Carl goes on. “There was no sense to it. We’d had our families, we were old, almost finished.”

Mrs. Bennett had been the last of them, Ellie remembers. Carl had let her wander the street for days before putting three bullets in her head. Ellie had watched from her bedroom window, had barely flinched. After that, Ellie’s parents had become Carl’s focus.

“I need to tell you something,” Carl says. “I’m not going to make it, and you need to know.”

But Ellie already knows.

“I was never afraid of your parents…” Carl says.

It wasn’t that he didn’t believe there would be a cure. It was that he couldn’t.

“I was afraid of being wrong.”

Because if he was wrong, then he had killed Maggie for no reason.

“No one will judge you, Mr. Hewitt,” Ellie says.

“Mr. Hewitt.” Carl laughs. She can see him fighting to stay conscious. “Now we’re so formal.”

“If you wanna keep calling me Elinor…” she says.

“Alright, alright.” Carl has both hands on his wounded leg, as if their presence might mitigate his pain. “Ellie, then.”

“Thanks.”

“Ellie?”

“Yeah?”

“If I slip away,” Carl says, “I want you to shoot me. Don’t let me come back.”

Ellie nods noncommittally. Part of her is still wondering if this is just an elaborate trick to get to her parents, while another part is focused on the scavengers she is sure are outside.

“What does that mean?” Carl asks, closing his eyes. “That nod?”

“I have other things to worry about.”

***

When Ellie wakes up, all is silent.

Then a second later they are banging on the front door.

It’s night outside, and so inside it’s pitch dark. She is still sitting in the easy chair, but the gun is no longer in her hands. She tries forcing her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but it’s no use. She puts her hands on the carpeted floor, but she can’t find the gun.

“Carl?” she asks the darkness, but the only response is more banging on the front door.

It’s the scavengers, she is sure, using something heavy to try and knock the door in. Now that night has fallen, they’ve given up on being sneaky. And they want the man who killed their friend.

“Carl?” she asks again, and again he doesn’t respond.

Ellie stands and moves to the dining room table, in the center of which is an oil lamp and a pack of wooden matches. She lights the lamp and moves to the sofa. Carl is there, still clutching his leg with both hands. His eyes are closed. Turning away, she finds the gun on the floor just a foot or two from where she’d been sitting.

The banging continues. She looks up at the door. It seems to be holding but it’s just a matter of time. To fortify the house against zombies was one thing. To fortify it against Carl, something else. But there is nothing that motivated young men can’t find a way to tear down.

“Give me the gun and let them in.”

The voice is a wheeze. She almost doesn’t hear it. When she turns, she finds Carl reaching out to her, beckoning.

“What?” Ellie asks. “No.”

“Give me the gun,” Carl says again, “and let them in.”

She approaches him now. His skin is pale. The whites of his eyes are blood red.

“You don’t know how to shoot it anyhow,” Carl says, forcing a grin.

“You want me to let them in,” Ellie says.

There is a crash behind her, a powerful blow that sends splinters skittering across the tiled entryway floor. The door is about to give way.

“Put the lamp down so they can see me,” he says, “and then let them in.”

She stares at him, thinking about how strange her choices have become. Hand someone a gun, then let him have a shot at the men who want to kill him.

“Ellie,” Carl says, “there’s no point in letting them wreck your door.”

Ellie nods. Now she is convinced. She needs the door intact.

She sets the lamp down on the coffee table, the gun down next to it. Then she turns and walks toward the entryway.

“But what if I come back?” Carl asks loudly, stopping Ellie in her tracks.

She turns and looks at him. She should be afraid, but life has changed. You make a decision, and then you act. There is no room for fear.

“We’ll see,” she says.

“We’ll see?”

“Yeah. We’ll see. I’ve stopped making plans.”

***

She slips the key into the deadbolt and waits, and when the next strike comes she turns the lock and opens the front door.

She’s hoping they’ll think they’ve knocked the door open themselves, and sure enough when they spill in – just two of them, young men, like the checker – they move quickly away from her toward the light of the oil lamp, howling triumphantly.

Ellie steps back, concealing herself behind the open door, so that when Carl opens fire, she doesn’t see the men drop to the floor. She just hears the shots and the screams, imagines what it must look like when Carl kills his second and third uninfected humans of the day.

The moment the house goes silent, Ellie pushes the door closed and locks it. Then she moves into the living room. The young men are sprawled out on the floor in front of her, motionless, blood oozing from holes in their black jackets. She isn’t sure how much time they have before the men turn. It’s never the same.

She looks at Carl. He sees the question in her eyes and shakes his head.

“I can’t.” He holds up the gun. “It’s empty.”

“So what do we do?” she asks.

But she already knows the answer.

***

Ellie opens the basement door and leans in with the oil lamp out in front of her.

Her mother is there at the bottom of what had been the stairs, where she’s been every time Ellie has been brave enough to look inside. Her eyes are grey; her skin, green.

She has seen zombies eat dead meat, and she has also seen them avoid it. She doesn’t know how it will be with the scavengers, but she’s not about to leave them upstairs until they rejuvenate. As long as her parents don’t eat their brains, they’ll come back. And then one day they too will benefit from the cure.

“Mom,” Ellie says, loudly, to see if the woman there will react. “Mom.”

But there is nothing. She lowers the young men into the basement and closes the door.

Back in the living room, Ellie carries the lamp to the end table next to the easy chair. On the sofa, Carl is starkly lit. Pale skin, blood-red eyes. Still alive, but only barely.

“That went alright,” Carl croaks. “For a double homicide.”

He is trying to make the moment light, and so Ellie forces a smile. He’s dying after all.

Once she would’ve been painfully aware of the pimples riddling her skin, the cracked dryness of her lips, the greasiness of her hair. But she is long past caring what she looks like. Her smile is unselfconscious.

“We’ve got a deal, right?” Carl asks.

“What deal?”

“You’re not going to let me come back,” Carl says.

Ellie shakes her head.

“No, of course not.”

“But you’ve got no bullets left.”

Ellie shrugs.

“I didn’t know how to shoot that gun anyhow,” she says.

“Hmm.”

Carl’s eyes are closed now.

“So how will you do it?” he asks.

“I’ve got a bat.”

“A bat?”

“A baseball bat,” Ellie clarifies.

“Hmm.”

There is silence.

“Ellie?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m really surprised,” Carl says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I never thought it would end this way.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“How did you think it would end?”

***

She opens the basement door for the second time that night and finds the two scavengers on their feet, staring up at her through eyes clouded grey. Her mother is standing behind them.

She tries to remember when she last saw her father, then stops trying and goes to collect Carl.

When Carl’s eyes open, he is where Ellie has placed him, flat on his back in front of the open basement door.

She is sitting crossed-legged on the kitchen floor just a few feet away, eating pineapple slices out of a can.

He sits up and looks at her. His skin has turned an icy green, and there is nothing like recognition in his dull grey eyes. There is only hunger.

Ellie sets down the can of pineapple. Then she uncrosses her legs and puts her feet against Carl’s chest. She pushes, and he tumbles backward into the basement.

One day, there will be a cure.

Now she’s got five to look after.