"Goddamnit Harold, you shot her? Protocol is to wait on the rustlers. We just got her last week. Five thousand dollars! She had a good six months in her. Jesus Christ!"

Harold bit back his first reply. Still cradling the Mossberg he tipped its barrel toward Barney 109's ragged head. "Her regulator failed all the way, Levi. Look at that one. She'd taken him down, the whole bunch might've tripped over." He cocked his head toward the rest of the Z-crew, now complacently shifting from foot to foot, staring at the denuded chickens. "They could have all tripped over, you know? Every one. You want that happening?" Harold felt a thick muscle swell in his neck, veins bulging out along his temples---Christ, he'd been working the evisceration room for a dozen years before this ass-wipe was hired and now here he stood riding him on protocol. "They trip over and you got two dozen rampaging around the plant, who knows what happens. I'd be dead, the rustlers you send down dead, who else? A hell of lot more than five thousand dollars I can tell you that, hell of a lot more."

Levi opened his mouth, red flush creeping into his ears, and then seemed to think better of it. He pulled the radio from his belt. "I need status check on the regulator for F-248. Variances for the last twenty-four hours."

While Levi waited for answer the rustlers moved closer to Harold. One held his lollystick in a two handed grip.

"Any contact?" the second asked peering at Harold's bare arms, his neck.

"Contact? Christ no. Only contact was with the Barney there." They continued examining him, made him open his hands, show them his knuckles. Harold felt the post-adrenal surge working from his body. He needed to sit down. Even one scratch, Harold knew, and the loop would be over his head, dragging him into a quarantine room, waiting for the infection to surface.

Levi's radio crackled and he held it to his ear, nodded as if the speaker could see him "A bad regulator, dipped 15 minutes ago and went off-line."

Harold had been in the control room before. A technician monitoring all five hundred Z-crew in the plant, watching the output from the regulators, making sure the urge, the overriding urge that moved them, stayed dampened, the creatures docile.

Harold spit between his feet, prodded at Betty 248's flaccid corpse. "Tell you what, Levi. This'll happen again, the company going on the cheap like this. An approved regulator won't drop completely in 15 minutes with no stimuli. Half this crew's up from Nogales, ain't it? Undocumented. What's the cost now to slip in under the CDC?"

Levi's tongue probed at his back teeth, lips parted. His ears stayed red. "You want to watch what you're asking there, Harold. Two, three years to pick up your pension? Wouldn't be right for man your age to be turned out this late in the game."

When Harold didn't reply Levi allowed himself a small, self-satisfied smirk and clipped the radio to his belt. He beckoned the rustlers "Move this crew out and get the room sanitized. Get this mess cleaned up." He prodded Betty 248's corpse. "And the chickens, shit, those four are gone. Run the rest back through the baths." Barking orders now, the flush left his face. A rich pall of cordite and the yeasty smell of the Betty's brains hung in the air, fighting through the ever-present chlorine, through the chicken offal's briny scent.

"Harold, head up to H.R. Fill out your incident report and clock out. Take the afternoon off."

~

Traffic on the drive home was light early in the afternoon, giving Harold time to ponder. At Federal and 12 ^thpanhandlers stood four abreast, some made eye contact, others kept their heads lowered, shuffling alongside the cars trapped at the stoplight. WILL WORK FOR FOOD---HARDWORKING DISABLED VETERAN---ANYTHING HELPS---and the last---ZOMBIES TOOK MY JOB.

Harold did his best to ignore them and fight the guilt at the same time... there but for the grace of God and such. He caught the left turn signal at 17 ^thas it flipped to amber. These blocks had taken it hard during the Epidemic, lot after vacant lot, the burned foundations poking through the weeds. There'd been talk of rebuilding, townhouses or something, but there were too many empty houses now. Why build more?

Though fifteen years had passed since the Epidemic began, since the first corpses clawed their way from their black rubberized body bags in Houston, Harold still marveled at the way society slipped back into normalcy.

The first dark days were right there if he closed his eyes----the world in chaos, round-the clock coverage on all channels, the cities burning with soldiers rattling through the streets in their Humvees. He and Val had worked hard and furious when the reports first started, screwing plywood over the windows, double nailing closet doors horizontally over the front and back entrances, listening to the relentless thump, thumpagainst the wood.

The tanks and APC's at last roaring into the city to restore some semblance of order, of safety.

And then Stephen had come home.

Harold rubbed at his dry eyes, willing the memory away. He knew the Z's must have some vestigial intelligence down there under their all-consuming hunger. Maybe that's what had brought Stephen north from Colorado Springs, to their doorstep.

All the blood and terror of those first days boiled down to mere seconds on his front porch.

"And look now," he muttered as he made the wide arc around Custer Park. A Z-crew shambled about the grounds, running push mowers back and forth, their overalls spattered green to the knees. Two city foremen and three Rustlers watched them. Another bent over his transponder board, eyeing the regulators' discharge.

One foreman turned his head as Harold's truck rattled by, a shotgun propped on his hip and the sunlight winking from mirrored sunglasses. The city crew looked in bad shape, skin sloughing and lips pulled back in rictus grins. At the plant, after the second shift, all the zombies were herded downstairs and into the safe room, where the day's offal bins were rolled. They were locked up and the control boards shut down, letting them come alive, plunge into the viscera, gobbling it down. Harold had watched a time or two on the security monitors. The technicians waited until the offal was gone, until the first Barney tried to take a bite from his neighbor, and then flipped the regulators back on, leaving them all shuffling aimlessly, stupid, staring at the cement walls.

Such quick and loose use of the regulators was prohibited if a company was using Z-workers. The CDC would shut them down in a blink if they caught wind of it, but Levi and the management thought it worth the risk. The workers lasted longer if they could feed. Still, maybe flipping the regulators on and off weakened them, the way taking too many pain pills eventually stopped helping with the arthritic grinding in his knee.

~

"You're early today."

Harold twisted the bolts on both locks and dropped the counterweighted bar, snugging it against the steel sheathed front door. Val sprawled on the couch, one hand working the remote and other rubbing her bare foot. In the back room the swamp cooler thrummed, pushing damp air through their little rambler. She had unzipped the front of her polyester cleaning blouse, and few strands of hair hung loose at her temples. Sweat beaded on her neck and the bags under her eyes were so dark they seemed purple.

"Had one the Betties flip over today," he rummaged a beer from the refrigerator. Recounting the afternoon's events between swallows, he tried to sound casual, not mentioning how the flesh crept along his scalp as he slid under the carousel, how his guts sloshed as he thought the others were going to flip over, or the dry crumbling of the Betty's brains spraying across the chickens.