Stephen Mallard stood stunned. He had hardly realized the events that had just taken place. But then he looked at the severed limbs and mangled torso scattered across his vegetable garden and the bloody shovel that he was still holding. Then, he wasnt able to stop the vivid memories from flooding back into his mind.

At first all Stephen could think of was the thrashing violence of the shovel, and how every swing of it would send large red arcs through the air and release an inhuman shriek from it. It. His memory retraced, and remembered the unmistakably chaotically and horribly putrid form of a walking corpse. He felt a lifeless despair, looking into its hungry eyes. They were voids, carrying all of mankinds lost dreams and forgotten lives.

But there hadnt much time to think about how the abomination could exist or what that would mean. It had all happened so quickly, in one of those faith-filled furies, where one risks everything in a matter of instants. But now it was done, the zombie was dead, and that would be the end of it. Yet Stephen knew that wasnt true, that those events would never leave him. His only comfort was that somehow their magnitude seemed to outlive their nature.

As a result of either he felt his heart still racing. It was the pulsing rhythm that reminded him that he was still alive. How precious it was to him now, now when it is more likely than ever to fail him. In the same way, his breaths were heavy and ravenous for air. It seemed possible that he had been suffocating his entire life, and only now had he surfaced.

Stephen felt awakened. He felt enlightened, somehow. He had been forced to do something he had never planned on doing and now it was everything. For once in his miserable life, he had a purpose. He had a goal, not because some told him to do it, or because it was what he was supposed to want, but because it needed to be done. Stephen, who had never been good at anything, was going to kill zombies, until he was nothing.

He scanned the horizon, an orange sky and crimson clouds, with the silhouetted shapes of staggering zombies. His stiff muscles straightened and he dashed towards them, shovel swinging. And at that moment, 6:17:39 AM, Stephan Mallard was the happiest man alive.