"Levi threatened your job? Really said that to you?"

"I tell you Val, they're cutting costs across the board. Bring in those Z-crews on the cheap. I know they couldn't have been certified. They're setting themselves up for one big mess."

Val thumbed the mute button, sighed, and rubbed the inside of her wrist across her forehead. "Well, it's a hell of a day for us, I'll tell you that." She looked off in the distance as she always had when bringing up bad news. "I lost the Chavez Building account today. They came at me with a bid---well damn---so low I would've had to clean the whole place myself to make any money. It was my biggest account. I had to let Esmeralda go. She's got kids, too, you know---it was hard. Said I'd bring her back if business picked up, but there's not much out there."

"Cheap," Harold ran his finger around the bottle top, moisture rippling up in a tiny wave. "Were they---"

"Yep, some outfit out of Greely. I guess they can make 'em push a mop, empty trash cans. Can't think they'll do a decent job." She was silent for a moment and when she spoke again her voice quavered. "Those... things. Those goddamned fucking things." She tossed the remote on the coffee table. "You know, it seemed the world went to hell overnight and then we pulled it back up, but it's just sinking again, in a different way."

Harold glanced at the mantle, at the picture of Stephen in his cadet uniform, so bright and earnest, the world at his feet. He wished, not for the first time, Val had been the one to look through the peephole that night. Would she have only seen her son? Would she have turned a mother's blind eye to the twigs in his hair, the dirt rimmed lips and nostrils, the dried bloody tendrils snaking from his scalp and ears. Maybe it would have been better than all this, better if she had opened the door wide and let him lurch into the house, better to have had it all end then.

On the television two talking heads shared a screen, below them the words--- A Shifting Economy?---crawled. Harold turned up the volume. "This has the potential to skyrocket the GDP, vault us over Asia and Europe----"

The blow-dried head's adversary cut him off---"But isn't it just slavery under another name? Aunt Mildred kicks the bucket and her family gets a quick thousand to ship her off for processing, regulator implanted in her skull and the next day she's making widgets, free labor."

"Well certainly there will be some birth pains---they are all but taking over the unskilled job market. Ultimately it will bring us all a higher standard of living. People are going to have to become better educated, more skilled workers." He leaned back and chuckled. "I know no zombie could do my job, though I'm not so sure about Chet here."

Harold clicked the television off before Chet could reply.

He sat the empty bottle on the table. "You know it wouldn't be so bad if the controls were followed. They're supposed to be burning ninety percent of the bodies, strict protocol for the regulators, but---"

"But they're greedy," Val finished his sentence.

Harold nodded. It was an old topic for them "Trucking them up from the border. Who knows how cheap their circuits are. Business, it's greedy, and the government's turning a blind eye to it. I guess you can't blame them down south for selling the bodies off---even if they get five hundred dollars each, it's more than most of those folks see in a year."

Val let her hair loose, rubbing her neck.

Harold felt a small hitch in his chest when he realized her brown eyes were shiny with tears.

"I can blame them. Look what we've become," her mouth softened. "We're sinking into hell and all anyone cares about is 'can I make another dollar on this?'" She slumped, "There was a time when you would just work. You could go to work and care for your family. If you were willing to work hard, it was enough. You could raise your family and have a decent life."

"Well, we did that. We had a decent life before..." He lost steam, fumbling over the right words. "I'm sorry," Harold said and he hoped she knew what he meant.

"I just don't know" her voice hiccupped, "I just don't know how it can keep moving. The world. I don't know how we can keep moving."

"I don't see we have a choice. I know Stephen---"

Her voice rose, cutting him off, "Don't."

~

Later, in bed, he splayed a hand across the swell of her hip, her nightgown cool beneath his fingers. Her breath caught and he knew she wasn't asleep, but she kept her eyes closed and turned her back to him, burrowing her head into the pillow. Harold's hand dropped.

He knew better than to say their son's name in front of her. She would spiral down for days, breakfasts and dinners with a palpable wall of silence separating them. Her eyes glossy and staring past him, mouth, cheeks and forehead creased with hard shadows.

He was already gone, Harold thought. He knew it. The dried blood, the dirt and twigs, yet still that part of his mind which took such sadistic delight in waking him deep in the night, asked the question again and again. Was he? Was he really? How fast did you bring the shotgun up Harold? Didn't you see a glint, just a flash of awareness in his eyes?

He'd buried Stephen in the soft ground of the garden along the back fence. Zipped his near headless corpse into a day-glow orange mummy bag and shoveled dirt over him, blocking out Val's wailing from the house, letting her anguish blend with the braying sirens, the clattering Strykers and staccato bark of AR-15s filling those first days of the Epidemic.

No man should have to bury his son with his own hands.

Harold turned over. Outside a low warbling siren grew closer. Revolving red and blue light seeped through the cracks of the heavy plantation shutters bolted to their windows.

He rose and levered the shutters open, filling the room with muted moonlight and the oscillating flash of an emergency vehicle. A sheriff's SUV, blue and white, stopped at an angle across his street. The virus, the infection---whatever had caused the dead to walk was still in the air, weaker, but enough to keep the crematoriums busy.

About every third corpse now became infected and sometimes people died alone in their homes, no one to strap them down or phone their death into the CDC.

A Barney shambled along the street, an old man, eighty-five or ninety, sloped shoulders and sunken chest curled with wisps of white hair. His flaccid belly jiggled with his stiff-legged walk, toothless mouth gaping and his pee-soaked pajamas falling off his scrawny backside.

A second sheriff pulled up in front of the Barney. The competing headlights threw perpendicular shadows on the ground. The first SUV's door opened and an officer stepped out, shotgun at port arms. He circled around the Barney, who had stopped as the second set of lights washed over him, circled until the other officer was free from his line of fire. In what could have been a replay of Harold's movement earlier in the day the Sheriff took two quick steps, nestled the shotgun in the back of the old man's head, and pulled the trigger.

Before the echoes rolled off down the street and the Barney's frail body hit the pavement, Harold snapped the shutters down, not sure if he should get back in bed, knowing there'd be no more sleep tonight.

~

The next morning Harold slipped into his usual parking space at the plant. Val hadn't woken when he'd told her goodbye. Or if so, she'd done a good job of hiding it, keeping her breathing slow and regular. He'd snipped a rose from one of the bushes out front and left it in a tumbler of water on the kitchen table with a scrawled "I love you," on the back of an envelope.