Page 25 of Doomsdate

But then I did. Standing there pinned against her doorway, I wanted Maisie so much I ached from it, like the rush of painful sensation that floods your limbs when you come inside after spending too long in the cold. And now she’s sitting here, reliving the rejection I put her through last night when I learned that she was a prepper, which, coincidentally, is the reason I’m sitting here still alive.

It’s not fair, and I feel terrible about it.

“Look, Maisie, I’m sorry for how I—”

“It’s fine,” she cuts me off.

I press my eyes closed and sigh. “It’s not fine, and you don’t have to pretend that it was. It’s just—that was the first date I’ve been on since my—in a long time. I was really nervous, and your…” I swallow, not wanting to add any further insult, but also not quite sure how to describe what I saw. “Armory? Threw me for a loop. And the zip ties.”

Maisie sniffs. “I told you I prepare.”

“I thought you meant, like, meal planning or go bags. I wasn’t expecting a full-blown doomsday prepper.”

She mutters “go bags” under her breath.

“Anyway, I’m sorry. It was horribly rude and unkind, and can we blame the zombies? I’d like to blame the zombies.”

Maisie deftly dodges an upturned truck on fire, then her mouth twitches once. Twice. “You wanna play the zombie card?”

“I mean…” I gesture out the windshield at the clumps of undead lurching stiffly down the road. “Now’s the time.”

Her breath escapes in an amused huff. “Fine.”

“Zombies.” I shake my head in wonder as we pass a whole flock of them. “They always struck me as the least likely monster, too.”

“I know. I can’t believe all the craziest preppers were right. Climate disaster, nuclear war, massive asteroids—those all seemed like way more realistic apocalypse scenarios than zombies. How do you prepare for zombies?”

It’s meant to be a rhetorical question, but this one I can actually answer. “First, you figure out how they work, when they’re most dangerous, what their weaknesses are, and the most effective ways to kill them. Then you can devise the best kind of shelter in order to rest safely from them. Everything else is just normal survival problems. Power. Food. Other humans.”

Maisie glances at me, then blinks. “Are you a prepper?”

“No, but I’ve seen hundreds of zombie movies, and they all boil down to interesting survival scenarios against relentless, though flawed, enemies.” I struggle to smile. Maybe my film degree isn’t so useless after all, Mom.

“But those are just stories. They’re not real.”

“In all the countless zombie stories out there, humans are bound to have predicted some of it right.” I shrug. “Take your rescue back there. In every zombie story I can think of, destroying its brain is a surefire way to take a zombie out, and it worked for you, too.”

“So? Destroying the brain kills everything.”

“And people got that right in zombie lore. Maybe some of the other things that show up in zombie stories will be true for our apocalypse.”

Maisie looks deeply unimpressed, but the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced I’m right. Maybe I just want to believe I’m not totally useless, but my mind is starting to buzz with connections made between our reality and my deep bench of movie knowledge. Glowing eyes? Army of the Dead, though I’m pretty sure the zombies eating out of that dumpster we just passed aren’t secretly robots. Slow in the daytime, but feral at night? Day of the Dead. Zombie virus? Here Alone, 28 Days Later, and a jillion others.

“Okay, if movies are so helpful, what are the main takeaways for survival?” Maisie’s voice contains a challenge, one that zips inside my chest and makes me sit up a little straighter.

I like it.

“Oh, I could prepare an entire presentation on this, but if I had to narrow it down…I’d say they’re most dangerous when they swarm, they tend to have poor gross motor skills, so seeking shelter higher up is probably wise, and always assume there’s a zombie waiting to surprise you.”

Maisie hmms noncommittally. “Do they ever get better? You know, turn back into normal humans?”

“In the movies?” I blow out a breath that warms my face mask. “Almost never.”

We don’t talk after that, but the silence that follows feels easier, at least. When she pulls into my driveway, everything looks just as I left it yesterday. The garbage cans are still at the curb, waiting to be rolled back to the side, the garden’s wild and untended, and the front door’s cracked open.

Wait.

Maisie clocks it before I do, then glances at me warily. “Is someone else home?”