I stared at the glowing blue text hovering above the dead body in my kitchen.

And then the dead body moved.

I was holding a frying pan in one hand and a dishcloth in the other. Until recently, the dishcloth had been clean. Just soapy. Now it was covered in blood, much like the edge of the frying pan. My eyes flicked from the dirty dishcloth to the blood-covered frying pan to the glowing blue text. Jumping around like a glitching TV signal.

Thankfully, my mind decided to focus on the dead body now pushing up to all fours on the cracked linoleum of my kitchen.

“Fuck,” I said, which pretty much summed up the situation succinctly. 

I squeezed the dishcloth unconsciously and watched as soapy blood splattered to the floor.

The dead body — a man whom I was fairly certain was very much dead, considering the caved-in side of his skull — shook himself and then looked at the soapy blood splotches beside his left hand.

“Are you okay?” I asked, and yep, that was a ridiculous thing to say to the dead man on all fours in my kitchen, considering I held the murder weapon in one hand, and the attempt to clean up the evidence of my crime in the other.

He did have it coming, but still…

A gurgling sound emitted from the back of his throat. I hadn’t hit his throat. I’d hit the side of his head. But maybe that was the side of the head that speech was centred in? I had no idea. I was a cybersecurity analyst, not a brain surgeon.

He lurched to his feet, swaying, eyes vacant and already going that milky colour you see in dead bodies on TV.

Yep, very much meant to be dead.

More garbled speech emitted from the back of his throat as if he was dragging the sounds up from the depths of his corrupted soul, and somewhere between hell and my kitchen, the words got mashed up.

“I don’t speak zombie,” I said.

He turned to stare at me out of those milky white eyes. I was pretty sure he couldn’t see me, but it felt like he could see right into me, and he was cataloguing all the juicy bits he’d eat first. His fingers curled, and that’s when I noticed the claws.

He hadn’t had claws before I killed him.

He’d had manicured fingernails on long, masculine-looking fingers, attached to slightly tanned hands larger than mine. I knew exactly how large those hands were because moments before I killed him, they’d been wrapped around my neck.

I reached up and touched my neck now, but I couldn’t feel the bruise that must have been there. In fact, it no longer hurt to breathe, and I’d even been speaking without any ill side effects.

Just another mystery to add to the vacant-eyed, claw-handed, pale-skinned zombie standing in my kitchen.

He gurgled again and then took a shuffling step toward me, raising his arms in the movie-approved and universally recognised motion of shambling zombies everywhere.

I had a choice to make here. I could run. I could certainly run faster than the dead man was walking. I could leave this all behind and call the cops from the safety of the street. I could abandon this shambling monstrosity in my apartment and hope it couldn’t unlock doors and escape to run amok through my innocent neighbours’ less secure doorways.

Or I could grow a pair and finish the job I started.

“You asked for this,” I told the dead man shuffling toward me.

I pulled the frying pan back like a baseball batter ready to hit a home run, and then swung with every ounce of strength I had in me.

Considering my five-foot-five height and spindly computer-nerd arms, the total sum of my strength was negligible. The pan bounced off the side of the zombie’s head, adding a new crater to the horror show that was his skull.

I could do damage, but not significant damage. Especially when the target was undead.

“Good to know,” I muttered, catching my breath.

The zombie had staggered with my hit, but caught himself on the centre island. His clawed hand gripped one of the stools and pulled it out from beneath the overhang. It didn’t scrape. It didn’t hit the bench top or island. He lifted it with more precision than he could take a step and hefted it one-armed above his caved-in head.

Now that was strength, I thought stupidly. Exactly what I needed and didn’t have.

I raised a hand — the hand still holding the bloody dishcloth — to ward off the blow that was inevitably coming, closed my eyes tightly and held my breath. Not exactly warrior woman standard, but it was the best I could do on short notice.

The blow didn’t come. The clatter of the stool on the lino broke my fright reflex and made me jump like a startled rabbit.

The dead man and I both looked at the stool now lying on its side on the floor at his feet. He had big feet. His business shoes were still shiny. Somehow, the soapy blood splotches had missed them.

“You dropped something,” I told him.

He gurgled back at me, equally as surprised.

Maybe he wasn’t as strong as I’d thought.

His lopsided head came up, and he snarled at me. In any language, that shit was translatable. I screamed. He gurgled. The frying pan swung through the air with so much effort that I could practically hear the air snapping and sizzling around it.

Frying pan + frightened and righteously angry woman = no more zombie head.

A pulverised mess spread across my once clean kitchen. Blood, brain matter, red soapy splotches; it all mixed to paint a Rorschach image straight from hell itself, depicting the devil, what could have been a butterfly, and that giant talking plant from the Little Shop of Horrors show pleading, “Feed me, Seymour!”

I stared at it. I stared at the decapitated body of the man I killed twice. And then I stared at the glowing blue text that appeared above the entire scene, replacing the earlier glowing blue text that I hadn’t even noticed had disappeared because I’d been committing double homicide on the same man all in the space of half an hour.

“What?” 

More glowing blue text replaced the last.

“What the…”

More glowing blue text replaced the last.

“What the fuck?”

I blinked, and the glowing text disappeared. So there was that. 

I blinked again, but nothing replaced the missing text. 

I stood in my kitchen, surrounded by blood and viscera and the headless body of a dead man that had looked pretty much like a zombie and wondered if I was in fact dead myself, or maybe in a coma and hallucinating, and any moment now a bright white light would appear or — more likely, considering my recent escapades — the fiery flames of hell flickering up a set of ancient stone steps in a not so welcome invitation to the afterlife.

Carefully stepping over the mess I’d created, I made my way numbly to my couch. My apartment was small but centrally located. The ceiling was high, the detail work gorgeous, the building listed, but the footprint tiny. I lived above a tattoo shop, hair salon, and jewellery store. Karangahape Road was an eclectic mix of bohemian creativity and gritty central Auckland soul.

And any moment now, the sirens I could hear in the distance would get closer. There was no way my neighbours hadn’t heard the screaming and skull bashing and zombie gurgling. I was in so much trouble.

I started rocking back and forth on the settee in a way I had never done before. I worked in a male-dominated industry. I could hold my own with the knuckleheads who ran security firms and then flip a switch and debate data-breaching malware, cloud security threat assessments, and zero-day exploits with the best geeks and hackers in the universe. I was at the top of my game. A lioness amongst the lions.

And yet, all I could do in that moment was rock back and forth like a damsel in distress and wonder where my day had gone wrong and how the ever-loving hell I was going to get out of this mess, and can we come back tomorrow and pretend none of this happened?

I could smell the blood. It wasn’t attractive. I looked down at myself and noted I was covered in it. Not horror movie covered, just the odd bit of brain and blood and soapy bits. Enough to make me feel icky. 

I gagged and forced myself up off the couch. I should call the cops. The sirens didn’t seem to be getting any closer. But now that I concentrated, I realised there were a lot more of them than usual. I wondered if anyone else was having as shitty a day as I was.

As I was already in so much trouble, I decided I might as well add interfering with a crime scene to the charges. I headed towards my bedroom, stripping off my soiled clothes and folding them nicely for the detectives, placing them on a chair I kept in the corner of my room. 

Showered and dressed in leggings and an oversized spirit jersey, I picked my cell phone up off the dresser and swiped the screen.

The phone was dead, which wasn’t unusual. I always seemed to drain my batteries faster than factory specs suggested. Shrugging, I plugged it in and left it to charge, returning to the scene of my crimes.

Yep, just as dead. Dead without a head.

I was losing it. I had to get out of here.

The right thing to do was to borrow a neighbour’s cell phone, call the police, and get this show on the road, finally. But something stayed my hand.

Or several somethings.

The dead man not being completely dead, despite the evidence of his mortality.

The dead man becoming what I could only assume was a zombie.

And the glowing blue text.

“What the hell was that text all about?” I muttered. “Some sort of gaming HUD?” 

It had looked very much like a game mechanic, where the player can read their character’s stats on a heads-up display. Glowing lettering on a semi-transparent background, so you could see what was happening around your avatar as you read through the system’s message.

Of course, that was ridiculous.

As were real-life actual zombies. I glanced at said zombie, who very much looked like a zombie still and not simply a dead man. Okay, then.

“Ah, HUD?” I said aloud, but nothing happened. “Activate?” I tried. “Abracadabra!” Yeah, right. “System?”

I stared at the glowing text, noting two things. One: it was a gaming system. And two: I was going mad.

“System,” I said very carefully, “what is happening?”

I had absolutely nothing to say to that.

I stared at the zombie again and then finally noticed all the yelling and screaming outside the building. The sirens were still kicking off, too, but they seemed to be all over the place and not on the footpath outside my building’s foyer. K’ Road could be chaotic at the best of times. It was getting late in the day, too, so it would really start pumping soon. But the sun hadn’t quite set, so this level of action was unusual. And anything unusual right now had to be part of the zombie apocalypse, right?

I crossed to the floor-to-ceiling windows in my lounge and tried to see what was happening past the awning covering the footpath directly below. I could see across the street easily enough, and what I saw there had my brow arching and my eyes widening. 

Two dead bodies. Pale skin, clawed hands, milky white eyes.

Zombies.

“So, System,” I said. “Zombies exist, then?”

Ookay.

“And you’re what? A gaming system? This is a game?”

“And what clearance level do I have?”

A pause and then more glowing blue text, this time inside a glowing blue box.

Well, that explained everything.

Not.