[ WP ] You were the last human on earth after the zombie apocalypse destroyed civilization . One day , you finally get infected by a zombie , but after turning , you realize what you 've been missing out on .

For a day we ran. 
 
 For a week we hid. 
 
 For a month I survived. 
 
 For a year I wandered. 
 
 The plague struck everywhere at once, and panic rang through the nation, a shout that shattered society like a pane of candy glass, into delicious and harmless pieces. For a while we survivors turned to or on each other. Jacquie, my wife, was raped and murdered by someone I never saw, while I was out hunting. I came back to our improvised home to find the universe and her belly torn open, and nobody to blame but myself. She rose again and I had to crush her skull. 
 
 After that there was no `` us'', just me and an ever smaller number of strangers walking the planet among the restless dead. I had the good fortune to shoot dead five men of the bad kind, who meant me harm, and I can only hope that Jacquie's rapist was among them. 
 
 I slept one night in an abandoned caravan with a woman from Florida. She had been a pharmacist. She had had a husband. There was no love between us. When night fell she lay down close to me, then closer, and we did what our bodies asked of us. In the morning she was gone. I was sad for a moment, and then relieved, and I realised that I would not have been able to look her in the eye. We could not have replaced each other's dead, only dragged each other further from them. Instead we gave in to our needs furtively, and let our minds drift on. 
 
 I had not seen another living soul for 288 days when it happened. Was I the last? A sadly unrecognised honour, if I was. The world's highest score in a game that everyone else had played and lost, and nobody there to see. 
 
 Except they did see. I know that now. 
 
 Thinking back, she must have climbed into the overhead bin before she turned. I ca n't explain how else she came to be there, on board that crashed airliner in the forest. I mean what were the chances? It was n't even a contest. The way she flopped out when I opened the lid, gravity alone practically drove her teeth into my arm. 
 
 Tooth. One tooth. One upper canine. Game over. 
 
 At first I just felt nervous, almost exhilarated, like I'd just booked a holiday to a dangerous country. After two days my fingers and toes started to feel numb. On the third day I woke with the prodrome of a fever, and by that night I was rigid and shivering. For hours I was in its grip. At 3am I slipped away, and I felt blessed. My last thought was of Jacquie, hoping that somehow she was a part of whatever came next. 
 
 When I woke up I was shambling down a forest trail. I could see, and I could feel, and I could think, but I could n't do. My verbs were intact but my actions were all gone. If you've ever sat very still and let your arm hang very still for a few minutes, until it no longer felt like a part of your body ( not numb, just not belonging ) then you may understand how my whole body felt. We were having a trial separation but I had nowhere else to go, and nothing but time to think. 
 
 My eyes are dry. My body never blinks ( nor makes tears in fact ). It itches but it does n't scratch itself. It hungers but it does n't ask me to help it hunt for food, just staggers on. If I saw a piece of paper on the ground it would trample it. If I saw a pen it would ignore it. If I saw wet sand I could scribble in it would trip face first into it and crawl on, teeth clacking. 
 
 Writing this story in my head, and rehearsing it over and again, until I have it word perfect, has consumed the best part of two days, as my body stumbles through the world. There's a thought I do n't like, and when I'm rehearsing this story I only have to think it once every two minutes and forty-five seconds: 
 
 A stranger killed Jacquie, and a virus took her body. But I snuffed her out. 
 
 I can think that without crying now.
