The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories

Escape from the Mall

I have only known Roger for a couple of hours now, but when he comes over to me, he’s got a look on his face that tells me he’s got something on his mind.

He’s wrapping a strip of tattered cloth around the palm of his hand. It’s a serious venture, this wrapping of the cloth around the palm of his hand. As he walks over to me, he seems to be considering this process more than he’s considering me, more than he’s considering the act of walking, which is why, even though we are all huddled here — the seven of us — here in this janitor’s supply closet, which cannot be much larger than a decently sized public toilet, why it takes a good minute or two for him to reach me. Why it takes him long enough that for a moment I consider meeting him halfway, if only to quickly get over with whatever it is he is going to propose to me.

Instead, I try to think back over the past couple of hours to see if I can remember what he might have done to the palm of his hand, but I can’t remember anything in particular. Granted, there is a lot to remember. Granted, there is a lot I’d rather not remember.

The way Jennifer slipped on the wet tile in the middle of the food court just as the hordes rushed over her, for example. The way she screamed for our help. The way they slurped as they slurped her up. I could stand to forget that.

Not to mention the way that black guy, that black guy with the kid, the kid who’s now sulking, red-eyed and snotty and blotchy-faced in the corner, the way that guy turned around at the last minute, at the very last minute, right before Roger jimmied the closet door open, turned around and charged into the throng of them, wielding Roger’s Louisville Slugger and yelling over his shoulder, “I’ll always love you, Tyrone,” the way they kind of just parted for him, like the Red Sea for Moses, stepped aside and let him charge right into the heart of them before the mass of them swallowed him whole.

That.

I’m pretty certain I’m not the only one who’d rather forget that.

But as for Roger and his palm and what might have happened to his palm that might now require such deliberate attention, I can’t say as I remember.

He hasn’t stopped moving toward me even as he’s come close enough to me that he could probably whisper whatever it is he’s going to say and I’d still be able to hear it, and for a moment I think to myself, Maybe he’s going to kiss me. And then I think, That’d be unexpected.

But he doesn’t kiss me, which is fine, as I think it might hurt Mary’s feelings, Mary who’s been looking at him doe-eyed since he decapitated the one that was about to rip her skull off and eat her brains out.

He doesn’t kiss me, but he leans in close enough that I could bite his nose if I wanted to. I guess he could bite my nose if he wanted to, too.

Neither of us bites the other one’s nose.

“How you holding up?” he says, whispering hoarsely.

“Great,” I say. “What happened to your hand?” I ask.

He lifts it up and points it palm forward at my face and says, “This? Nothing. This ain’t nothing. I’m good, man. I’m good.”

I don’t get much of a look at it before he drops it quickly back down to his side, but the smell of it that lingers in the air where his hand was just a second ago smells rotten and earthy. But before I can force the issue, he tells me he has a plan.

“A plan?” I ask. “A plan to do what?”

“We’ve been sitting here almost an hour now,” he says. “We’re starting to get restless. We’re starting to panic.”

I shift my eyes to get a look around the room, and no one looks restless or panicked. Everyone looks tired and sad and sweaty. No one looks restless or panicked at all, except for Roger, I realize, once I shift my eyes back to him.

“Sure,” I say. “What’s your plan?”

This story has nothing to do with me. I know this, even as I am in the middle of it. This story has everything to do with Roger and Mary and Tyrone and the security guard. I don’t know the security guard’s name, but he’s got a look about him, a look that makes me think that this story is his story, too, more his story, anyway, than my own. He’s got that reformed-addict-turned-security-guard-waiting-to-make-the-ultimate-sacrifice-for-people-he-doesn’t-even-know-in-an-attempt-to-atone-for-the-misery-he-caused-in-his-youth kind of look. That, or maybe it’s just that he looks bigger than the rest of us. Bigger and unhurried, too, as if he has seen all this before, or as if just this sort of situation — a zombie attack, an alien invasion, a giant, ferocious lizard, mutated by the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima, rampaging through Houston — was what he had been planning for, what he had expected when he signed up for the job as a security guard for this mall in the suburbs. But when I mention this to Mary, who, every time I speak to her, looks surprised to see me there with the rest of them, she tells me he’s stoned.

I’ve got a story for Mary, too.

Recently divorced, mother of two.

Not the prom queen from high school, maybe a late bloomer, but when she bloomed, pretty enough that she married that prom-king type.

Maybe an actual prom king from the rival high school, or not a prom king at all, but a quarterback, or point guard.

All in all, a miserable affair: You’re married to an unappreciative man mired in the glory of his past, supportive of him but lonely, too, until one day, you come home to hear him tell you that he doesn’t love you anymore, that instead he loves Missy, a saleswoman at the Toyota dealership where he works, not as a salesman himself, or even as a mechanic, but as the guy who cheats car buyers into buying extra care insurance packages for things that will never break. Now she’s juggling kids, two part-time jobs, attorney fees to wrest alimony and child support from her ex-husband, inappropriate advances from her much older bosses at both of her jobs, and today. Her day off of all days, the day she has set aside for herself, not even the whole day, but the few measly hours her mother agreed to watch the kids, a couple of hell-raisers made only worse by the divorce, the one day she picked to come to the mall, not even to buy anything, not that she even had the money to buy anything, but just to look around, just to have a few moments to herself, just to revisit the world she thought was going to be her world, today is the day the mall is overrun by the evil undead.

Of course it is.

She is surprised not in the least by this.

And maybe she didn’t trip in the sporting goods store by the exercise equipment. Maybe she didn’t trip at all, but gave herself up, handed herself over, because could it be worse, really, than how she felt now?

All of this, though, all of this speculation I keep to myself. And I’ve decided to speak to Mary as little as possible in case she makes any more stray comments that might unhinge the fragile framework of my coping mechanism, as she’s already done with the security guard.

Roger’s plan might just be the dumbest plan I have ever heard ever, but I go along with it anyway. Why not, right? What have I got to lose, right?

Or, rather, other than my life, what have I got to lose?

I go along with it because I know the others will go along with it, too. They’ve followed Roger’s lead since the moment the screaming began, way on the other side of the mall, somewhere near the food court, the screaming loud enough that we could hear it from so far away. They followed his lead into that fray even when, in the opposite direction and only a hundred yards away, there were doors leading outside, leading to our escape. Even then, they followed him.

By they, of course, I mean, we.

We followed him into the fray.

We watched him save first Tyrone and then his father, and then, at the end, right before we shuffled into this janitor’s closet, Mary in the sporting goods store.

And then into this broom closet: We followed him here, too.

Now he wants us to go up into the ceiling.

“The ceiling,” he tells me, whispering still. “That’s our ticket out of here.”

I look up. He slaps me quickly and lightly on the face. “Don’t look up,” he says. “You’ll give it away.”

I shift my eyes around the room a) to see if anyone just saw Roger slap me and b) to see whom I might give this precious and vital information away to.

“To whom?” I ask.

Roger leans in closer and I wish he wouldn’t. There’s a smell to him that’s ripe and uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the adrenaline in his blood, or maybe he lets off a funky kind of sweat when fighting the evil undead. Whatever it is, I’m doing my best to breathe it in through my mouth.

“Don’t say anything,” he says. “Don’t react to what I’m about to say.”

“Okay.”

“We don’t want to freak anyone out.”

“Sure. No. No problem.”

Now his voice drops to an actual whisper, and I can’t hear him, and for a moment, I wonder if he’s saying something and I just can’t hear him or if he’s decided now is the time to pull that trick where you move your mouth like you’re talking when really you’re not saying anything at all.

“I can’t, I can’t hear you,” I tell him.

He doesn’t like to repeat things, I can tell by the look on his face, but before I can apologize for something that wasn’t my fault, he says, again, “One among us has been infected.”

This news takes me by surprise, but only slightly, and only in that it was Roger who figured this out and not me.

I figured that if anyone were to discover that one of us was infected, it would be me or one of the other unnamed peripheral characters, and only moments too late.

For instance, say one of us would be crying in the corner, hunched over and sobbing and rocking, and another one of us would see this person in pain, and we would sigh in disgust at Roger and Mary and the security guard and Tyrone, all too caught up in their own drama to notice the rest of us, and we would walk over, gently place our hand on his shoulder, sit down softly next to him, and say something like, “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay, we’re going to make it out of this, I swear, I promise, we will,” and we would place our other hand on his knee, a sign of friendship, a sign of “You are not alone,” and he would place his own hand over ours, and we would say, “That’s right, it’s going to be just fine, don’t you worry,” but it would come out a little hesitantly, or distractedly, as we would be distracted by the queer texture of the hand on top of our hand, cold and wet and a little sticky, but we wouldn’t look down, not yet. We wouldn’t look down because we would feel guilty for thinking poorly of our comrade in arms, our newfound friend, desperately sad and in need of comfort.

“Do you have a family?” we might ask. “Do you have someone waiting for you?”

And he would nod, a gentle but increasingly vigorous nod.

“Oh yeah?” we might say. “Where? Where are they? Tell me, just tell me about them,” we would say, knowing that sometimes talking about something else, anything else, might distract us, if only temporarily, from the fear and the pain and the sorrow.

Then would come that too-late moment when we look down at the hand covering ours and discover it to be a rotting mass of flesh, at which point we freak out and the creature whips its head around and bites our face off, or when, pivoting off our question about his family, he whips his head quickly around and says something to the effect of “My family? They’re waiting just outside that door” before biting our face off.

Though, truth be told, zombie-like creatures aren’t known for their ability to speak.

Nor for their understanding of ironic timing.

Or even their understanding of delayed gratification.

So, really the surprising thing about Roger coming to me with information about one of us being infected is that there is one of us infected and we are not yet all dead.

Still, it’s a little disappointing to find this out from Roger, who has discovered it all on his own and in enough time to try to think of what to do about it.

“Really?” I say. “Who?”

“Not yet,” he says. “We screw this up, we’re cooked,” he says.

Then he nods seriously and gravely. Then he puts his hand heavily on my shoulder and nods again, and so I smile back at him, which I guess is all he needed from me, because then he moves on to the next person he’s going to tell about his plan.

For my money, I peg Tyrone as the one among us who is infected. Not that I’ve got anything against the kid. He seems like a nice enough kid, or did before he was turned into a mindless and brutal killing machine. He seems nice enough, but he’s also the one we might all least suspect, which is why I suspect him most.

There’s a small, bloody mass on the side of his head, which I originally figured for random brain matter or organ matter splattered there during the run through the maze of maternity clothes after we ducked into the department store. Now I am beginning to wonder if it’s not his actual brain I’m looking at. If that’s maybe where they got him, in his actual brain, not enough to kill him, not enough to really slow him down. But to make him one of their own, how much brain would a zombie need to eat?

Not much, by my reckoning.

The longer I stare at that piece of Tyrone’s brain sticking out of his skull, the more I wonder why no one else but Roger has noticed it, and then what I might be able to do to preemptively disable the thing that once was Tyrone. I scan the room for a piece of equipment that might quietly and quickly be transformed into some kind of specialized weapon, but the most threatening thing I see is the mop and mop handle, or the broom, or the disinfectant spray, none of which seem all that promising. As I’m trying to figure out if there’s some way I can take a roll or two of toilet paper, light them on fire, and turn them into some kind of something, though, Mary crosses over to Tyrone and pulls his head to her chest, to comfort him, maybe, or to comfort herself, or maybe both, and he hiccups one time and then sobs heavily into her, and I see the piece of brain matter slip off his head and fall into her lap.

When I first heard the screams, I was walking into the mall, and Roger, who had just passed me going the other way, was walking out of the mall. Then the screams happened and then we both turned around, and maybe he gave me the benefit of the doubt, maybe he saw in me what we all hope to see in ourselves — selflessness, bravery, willingness — because when he saw me turn around so I could walk back out of the mall, having decided that the new pair of shoes I hoped to buy wasn’t worth dealing with the kind of hysterical, pained, violence-ridden screaming coming from the far part of the mall, he grabbed me by the shoulder, a strange glint in his eye, and said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Perhaps it was the tone of his voice, the surety of it, the assumption that I was like him, that everyone was like him, and how little room for argument there was in what he said and how he looked at me. Whatever it was, like an idiot, I followed after him.

Regardless, Roger is a guy I can’t make up my mind on. A guy I can’t get a good read on.

He’s a mystery, and that makes me nervous.

Take, for instance, that action he played with the Louisville Slugger. I didn’t see where he got it from, but I saw him wielding it with a fierce determination, watched him knock the head off one about to eat Mary’s brains out, saw him pose after the swing, as if for Sports Illustrated, as if he’d hit a home run, heard him, as he helped Mary to her feet, say, “That’s a stand-up double if I ever saw one,” and I’ll admit, since I saw him perform that nifty little trick, I’ve wanted to give it a go myself, except that, thanks to Tyrone’s dad, the bat’s gone.

Which was cool and all, what Roger did with the baseball bat, but then he’s earnest to the point of embarrassment. Like after Tyrone’s dad lost that bat, and we were all quiet and uncertain as to what to say to Tyrone, except for maybe “That was some kind of stupid, what your dad just did,” all of us quiet, that is, until Roger sat on his haunches and held Tyrone by the shoulders and looked deep into his eyes and told him, “That makes you the man of the house, now, Tyrone.”

Told him, “Do you think you’re ready for that?”

And then when Tyrone shook his head no, and while the rest of us, I’m sure, were thinking, Roger, give it a rest, leave the kid alone, Roger gave him a bit of a shake and told him, “I think you are.

“I think you’re stronger than you think.

“I think you’re stronger than all of us.

“But that doesn’t mean you can’t cry, that doesn’t mean you can’t be sad.

“Only really strong guys like you and me know it’s okay to be sad and it’s okay to cry, but that we still have to be strong, right?”

And Tyrone started to snuffle and started to nod, and Roger said, “Right?”

And Tyrone’s lips moved, but maybe it was a quiver and maybe it was him saying, “Right.”

And Roger said, softly now, “Right?” and then pulled Tyrone into a bear hug, which set Tyrone into a sloppy hiccuping mess of sobs and snot, at which point I looked around with a do-we-have-time-for-this-sort-of-thing? look on my face, only to find everyone else mooning over the scene, Mary with her hand pressed up against her chest and the security guard wiping his eyes in that way men sometimes do when they find themselves crying unexpectedly at the end of a movie.

I want to hate him, in other words, maybe because he’s everything that I’m not, or maybe because he’s the type of person who wants me to believe that he’s everything I’m not, but then there’s some strong and growing part of me that wants to admire him, too, can’t help but admire him, and that just makes me want to hate him even more.

The news has spread that we’re making our way out through the ceiling. I wonder what this means for the one among us who is infected.

Because he’s the biggest of us, the security guard is hoisted up first. Roger and me and two other guys, whose names I don’t know or don’t remember, heave him up there, and I watch him scramble and pull himself the rest of the way up, wondering why it is that I can’t remember or don’t know his name, either.

Then Roger turns to me and says, “Okay, Cowboy, you next.”

I’m not sure why he has decided all of a sudden to call me Cowboy, but, against my better judgment, I decide I kind of like it.

The plan is for the security guard, who is also the strongest (or so we’ve all assumed) to lower himself down enough to help lift up the rest of us. He tries it first with me, but the two of us together are too much weight for the flimsy ceiling tiles and supports. The whole thing starts to crack and collapse before he simply lets go of me and I crash down on top of Roger.

“That won’t work,” the security guard says, and it’s hard for me to believe, but I think that’s the first time I’ve heard him speak, and the sound of his voice, nasal and off-pitched, makes me for a moment reconsider his story. No longer a tough guy or a former addict trying to atone, he now strikes me as that kid, pale and a role-player, weak and trembling through high school, who discovered that the kind of devotion he heaped onto twenty-sided dice and gamemasters could be more beneficially applied to a gym membership. And while he might now be a much bigger geeky, trembly, insecure nerd, he’s still a nerd all the same, and I wonder why he hasn’t died yet.

“Good call,” Roger says, as he picks himself up. “Gonna have to figure something else out.”

Then he looks at me, and I don’t know what he’s about to propose, but I know I don’t much like the look in his eyes or the attention he’s giving me.

“All right, Cowboy, time for you to shine,” he says to me, and now I realize how stupid the name he’s given me really sounds. “This is taking way too long. I’m going to need you to scout ahead for us, find us the way out, so that once we get everyone up there, we’re not just a bunch of ants scrambling around in our ant pile.” Then he slaps me hard on the shoulder with his good hand, and then he looks up and calls out, “Okay, Francis, scooch on back, and we’re going to help Cowboy here the way we did you.”

Is Francis the security guard’s name? I wonder. Or is Francis a nickname?

And then, before I can think about it too long, I’m lifted and heaved and shoved upward, and I panic for a moment because there’s nothing for me to grab hold of or on to that hasn’t been bent or cracked or crumbled by Francis, the security guard. Then I see a rail within reach and lunge for it, or try to lunge for it, unleveraged as I am, and I hear one of the guys below squeal as I accidentally kick him in the face while lunging. I grab hold and pull myself into the ceiling, and I wonder what the hell I’m supposed to do next.

I also wonder why Francis couldn’t have gone in search of a way out.

“Maybe that way?” he whispers, though I don’t know that, if we spoke in our normal voices, the creatures in the mall could hear us or do anything about us either way. “I think, depending on which supply closet we ran into, your best bet is either going to be that way, or back over there,” he says, pointing to my right and then over my shoulder. It’s not a lot to go on, but I go right, anyway, because I hate going backward.

About ten minutes and twenty yards into my search for a way out, I begin to wonder if it all isn’t some elaborate ruse. If sending me on this search for a way out wasn’t part of Roger’s plan to begin with; if, in fact, I’m the one they all suspect of being the one among us who is infected. And then I wonder, Am I?

But, no, I’m not.

But am I, maybe?

No.

But, maybe?

Then, to put the argument to rest, which is a dumb argument to have with myself in the first place, I perform a quick body check — head, hands, legs, arms, feet — and find myself completely free of scratches, bites, or wounds of any kind, and finally I move on.

At one point, my foot punches through a ceiling tile and I hear a commotion below, a sound of moaning and scrambling and yelping. I don’t know what to expect when I look through the hole left by my foot. An undulating mass of undead bodies, I guess, but even imagining that, the picture doesn’t linger for long before being replaced by the kind of shot you’d see in a movie, a medium-long shot that pulls you out of the mall and into the parking lot, which you can see is surrounded by them, and then farther still, to a long and wide shot of the city — cars abandoned, streets overrun — and then maybe a series of close-up shots in quick succession:

— A woman, screaming, clutching her baby as she runs from a gang of them, so racked with fear she doesn’t realize her baby is already dead, and, worse still, changed or changing into one of them;

— A man on a rooftop, cornered and with no other choice but to jump, to kill himself rather than be eaten and transformed, only to be caught and saved by the very thing he feared;

— At least one hopeful image of a little kid or a couple of little kids with bats or sticks or some strange build-a-better-mousetrap contraption taking out at least one of these monsters;

— And then back to me, gazing in astonished horror at the sight below.

That’s how I imagine it will be.

How it is, looking at the undulating mass of undead bodies below me without the benefit of edits and quick cuts and pans and long shots and fades, is a different kind of unsettling thing altogether.

For one thing, they’re looking right up at me.

For another, they are, each one of them, smiling.

It’s not a pretty sight, the sight of them smiling up at me. Their teeth have a wormy, gray quality to them. A rotted and soft yet somehow still dangerous quality to them.

There is something, let’s say liquid, there is something liquid about their smiles or their teeth or the pulse of them watching me. Something liquid and alive and mesmerizing, and I begin to feel myself pitch forward. And only at the last moment, I grab hold again of the ceiling braces, and everything comes back into focus, and for a second, it looks to me as if they are laughing at me.

I move away from the hole, and I push on, and I shove my foot or sometimes my hand through the ceiling tiles a few more times, and then I come to a wall, a dead end, and I stop.

I wait.

I breathe and listen and breathe some more.

Hearing nothing but the sound of me, I remove a tile and lower my head down through the ceiling, and I want to close my eyes, just in case, but I don’t, and I see the exit, and I see the coast is clear, and I let out my breath.

On my way back, I find Mary.

I hear her before I see her. Or rather, what I hear is the sound of a tile break in half followed by a sharp gasp.

When I find her, her left leg has gone completely through, and she’s sobbing, and I think, She’s a goner, for sure, she’s a goner. But I get to her and cover my hand over her mouth before she can really start to wail, which would lead them right to us, no doubt, and then that much closer to our way out. But she feels my hand on her mouth before she sees it’s me and that makes her bite my hand — though, give her credit, as I don’t know that I’d be desperate enough to bite one of these things if it snuck up on me — and that makes me want to hit her hard in the back of the head, but I don’t. “It’s just me,” I say through gritted teeth, my hand still over her mouth, or in her mouth, however you want to look at it. “It’s me, it’s me, I’ve found the way out,” I say.

It is a way out, I know that for sure. It’s a run, twenty, thirty, forty yards, but straight and with a little coverage, too, so that if you run a little hunched, no one can see you.

What surprises me most about this isn’t that I found a way out, though that is a bit of a shock, but that I found it and tried it, dropping down from the ceiling, landing loudly but safely and without drawing attention to myself, and then, hunching, ran to the glass doors, and pushed them open and then stepped outside into the bright midday sun. The parking lot was full of cars, though I don’t know why I expected it to be empty. I didn’t see anyone — neither people nor monsters — and I shaded my eyes and looked at the long expanse of cars and then over the concrete just past the cars and then down that road farther still, and I thought to myself, Now’s my chance. I could start running and not look back and no one will know, and I’ll be free, or I’ll have a better shot at being free and alive than if I go back inside, than if I go back for those fools still stumbling around the ceiling. But I didn’t run. I could have left, but I didn’t, and here I am, struggling to lift Mary, who doesn’t even know my name, back into the ceiling so I can help her escape, but not just her. Her and Tyrone and Roger and the security guard and those two other guys, or at least one of those two other guys because I’ve decided that the other one has got to be the one among us who is infected, and in the end, that is what surprises me most. I found my way out and didn’t take it.

What happens next seems almost too easy. I point Mary in the right direction and then immediately stumble across those two other guys, and then point them in the right direction. And then I’m back where I started, and it’s unreal that I found my way back at all, let alone this quickly, and I wonder, Is this how your life starts to change? I wonder, Is this how Roger feels about every day? About every decision?

“Francis,” I say.

He turns, startled, and then smiles. “Cowboy,” he says.

“I found the way out. You ready to go home?”

“Hell yeah,” he says. “Just waiting on Roger and the kid.”

And I surprise myself again when I tell him, “Go on. I can handle Tyrone.”

He hesitates, but then I give him a look. It’s a look I’ve never given anyone before. It’s a look that says I got this. Says I’m in charge of some things, and I got this, so go take care of the rest of them, okay? Or says something like that, anyway.

Whatever the look says, Francis buys it and starts off, and then Roger, straining with the weight of Tyrone, calls out, “What’s the holdup?”

I lean down and grab for Tyrone, and he’s not as heavy as I expected him to be, and I lift him up, and the ceiling doesn’t collapse, and his arms don’t slip through my grasp, and I don’t pitch forward under the weight of him, and nothing bad happens, and I let the thought that maybe this is how things will be from now on filter softly into my head. When he’s finally up, I smile at him and pat him gently on the head and tell him something about how brave he’s been, how we’re proud of him, how I’m proud of him, and he smiles back and gives me a “Yeah, me, too,” or a “Thanks, Cowboy,” before I send him on his way.

And right about then is when I realize that something funny just happened.

I lean my head over the opening in the ceiling after Tyrone scrambles past me, and I look down at Roger, who’s looking up at me. I’m about to ask Roger why the hell he sent them all up and who the hell is the one who’s infected, but before I can say anything, two things happen.

The first thing that happens is this: The door bursts open and a roiling mass of them fills the closet, a clawing, moaning, death-gray crowd of arms and legs and bloodied heads, and I think, Oh my God, they’ve got Roger.

The second thing that happens is that Roger, still looking up at me, bares his rotted, wormy teeth at me.

And then he leaps.

I pull my head back in time, but only just. I see Roger’s dead hands grab blindly through the opening in the ceiling at whatever part of me he can catch hold of. Then he jumps again, and then again, and then I hear the crash of shelves and boxes on the floor, and while I’m not sure if zombie-like creatures can construct things like stacks of boxes to climb up on so they can follow after us, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to find out, so I leave.

From that point forward, things go from bad to worse.

I stumble across a hole in the ceiling and look down only long enough to catch sight of one of the men whose name I do not know, or parts of him, anyway, as they seem to have rendered him into his smallest components, such that I don’t know for sure which one he is, or was.

For a moment, I wonder by what criteria they determine who is all-consumed and who is infected, but I don’t have much time to dwell on this, as I see Francis the security guard ahead of me, struggling to pull himself back into the ceiling. Suddenly we seem to be surrounded by weak or weakened ceiling tiles. I think I should help Francis, my security guard friend, but I have no desire to go down with that big ship. I slip past him. I feel bad for it, but that’s what I do. I slip by and then I hear and then come up on Tyrone.

He’s looking down at his feet and then back up to his hands, which barely grip the thin metal support. He doesn’t see me. His eyes are crazed with fear, or blank with it, or blinded by it, I don’t know. A huddle of them are jumping at him, grazing the tips of his sneakers. Any concerted effort on their part gets them their prize.

But he’s not so heavy. And he’s a kid.

I grab his arm and he squeals at my touch, jerks and tries to break free, and I almost let him drop. I shake him instead and repeat his name again and again and again, but I never find out if I get through to him. The ceiling drops out from under me, and I fall.

I take them by surprise and knock two, maybe three to the floor by landing on them. I see Tyrone’s white shoe slip back into the blackness above us and take some pride in the fact that, while cooked myself, I pulled Tyrone out of the fire.

Then they’re on me, grabbing at whatever’s in reach, and I choke on their smell, and I gag on the strips of their now rotted clothing flung into my mouth and nose and eyes. But there are too many of them and they are too eager to have at me, and for a moment I find myself in a kind of cocoon. A pocket made up of flailing arms and teeth and feet. Then one of them swipes at my face, so close I hear the soft whisht of air and feel its knuckle graze my nose, and that swipe lands in some hidden recess of their bodies and dislodges a packet of cigarettes from some torn pocket, and after the cigarettes falls a lighter.

The ones nearest the one I light go up like dry kindling.

And then I’m running, exhilarated by what I have just done, by what this might mean for me — not just escape from the mall, but a kind of escape from life, from my old life, from that tired old existence.

I think to myself, This was for the best. All of this.

And maybe I should feel worse for Roger and the security guard and the rest of the human race, but I can’t help but wonder that maybe we need these kinds of moments. Not moments of quiet, but moments when our lives are upended by violent tragedy, monsters, zombies, because without them, how would we meet the men and women of our dreams, how would we make up for the sins of our pasts, how would we show our true natures — brave, caring, strong, intelligent?

I wonder, How would we?

And then it happens: I slip. I’m looking one way and moving the other, and maybe there’s a wet spot, or a blood spot, or a stray piece of gray matter, some viscous thing that grabs just enough of a hold over the toe of my boot, and I fall forward. Falling like this, so unprepared, so forcefully, hurts more than I could have imagined it would, and the wind is knocked out of me.

As I land, out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of them coming for me. But I’m not done yet. I can pull myself up. I can pull myself to my feet and run and run harder and faster than I’ve ever run before. I can make it to those doors and burst through them and into the parking lot and find my car. I can outrun those bastards and start this all over. I will watch less television. I will spend more time outside. I will foster stray animals and donate to charity walk-a-thons and look both ways at intersections. I will call my sister and apologize for what I said to her on her wedding day. I will let love into my heart. I can survive this. I can run and my life will be different and I will not look back. I will gun the engine and peel out of the parking lot and merge onto the traffic-less freeway and speed down newly empty streets, and not look back, not once look back.