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A bullet panged off the passenger-side door and the car rocked on its tires. The Volkswagen's windshield had a long silver crack running across its width but it hadn't broken yet. Gary assumed a fetal position in the leg well of the driver's seat and tried not to make a sound.

The demented girl scouts or whatever they were had spotted him and opened fire before he could say a word. He'd tried to run away but he was pinned between two hazards: the boat on the river with its sniper ready to shoot anything that moved, and these heavily-armed schoolgirls who had taken over half of the West Village. It was inevitable that he would be spotted and so he had. He'd barely had time to take cover in the abandoned car before they started spraying the neighborhood down with lead. He was pretty sure they didn't have a fix on him, though, that they were just firing blind. He was pretty sure they would eventually leave, if he could stay perfectly still and not give himself away. Which, considering his current state of health (undead), seemed entirely doable.Advertisement

If it wasn't for the damned fly.

His fellow passenger buzzed angrily every time the car moved. It would climb along the dashboard for a while then take to the air with a sudden leap and make a circuit of the enclosed space before settling down again on a headrest. Gary felt truly sorry for implicating it in his peril - clearly the fly had a good thing going here. The backseat of the car was full of rotten groceries. Much of the former food had long since turned to white fuzzy mold but maybe the fly ate that, too. Either way the fly looked plump and contented. Bursting with life, real life, not the sham kind that animated Gary. It was the first living thing (other than the gun-toting girls) that Gary had seen since his reanimation. It was beautiful - exquisite. Priceless in its immunity to death, in its continued breathing existence.

There was a deep-seated, urgent, and entirely unbearable need in Gary's soul to get this fly, somehow, into his mouth.

A bullet hit one of the VW's tires and the car sagged to one side with a popping noise that echoed off the brick facades of the surrounding townhouses. Gary, whose hand had been creeping toward the fly, pulled himself into an even tighter ball on the floor of the car and tried not to think about anything at all. It didn't work.

The fly landed on a seat belt latch and fanned its wings briefly in the sunlight. Its whole body seemed to glow with the light of its health. It rubbed its hands together like a cartoon character about to sit down to a satisfying hamburger - all it needed was a tiny little bib. How cute would that be? Oh god, Gary wanted so much to eat the fly. His fly, he had decided. It was his.

The fly leapt into the air again with a flourish of wings and Gary's hand shot out for it. The fly evaded him and he lunged upward, catching it between two cupped palms. In a moment he had shoveled it into his maw and he felt its wings brush frantically against the roof of his mouth. He bit down and felt its juices burst across his dry tongue. Energy surged through him even before he'd swallowed the morsel, an electric jolt of well-being that burned in him like a white flame that nourished him instead of consuming him. If the hamburger patties he'd eaten earlier had calmed his hunger the fly instead sated him fully, suffusing him with a euphoria the insect's tiny mass could not possibly account for. He felt good, he felt warm and dry and satisfied, he felt so good.

The feeling had barely begun to recede when he realized with a start that he was sitting up, perched on the front seats of the car and clearly visible through the windows. He heard gunshots and knew he'd been discovered. Desperate but feeling safe and potent now Gary pushed open the driver's side door and rolled out of the car. He got his feet on the asphalt and started loping away from the Volkswagen, certain he could reach safety if he just hurried up a little, if his legs would just move a little faster -

A bayonet blade slid through his back and right into his heart.

Good thing he wasn't using it.

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He tried to turn but found himself transfixed - literally - by the bayonet. He raised his hands in the air, the universal signal of surrender. "Don't shoot," he shouted, "I'm not one of them!"

"Kumaad tahay?"One of the girls came around into his field of vision and raised her rifle. She panted with exertion or fear perhaps, her weapon bobbing up and down. He could see the dark O of its muzzle waggling at him, the gap between a bullet and his brain. She yanked on a latch on the side of the weapon and flexed her trigger finger.

"Please!" Gary shouted. "Please! I'm not like them!"

"Joojin!" someone shouted. He heard booted footsteps running up behind him. "Joojin!" The rifle in front of him steadied in the girl's hands. Was she receiving the order to fire or to not fire? Gary's forehead began to feel hot, anticipating the bullet.

Another girl came up in front of him. She barked orders at the others and Gary felt the bayonet yank backwards out of his body. The girls argued amongst themselves - he kept hearing the word "xaaraan" - but clearly their orders were to stand down.

"You talks," the girl who'd given the orders said. She studied his face, obviously confused by the dead veins in his cheeks.

"I talk," Gary confirmed.

"You fekar?"

"I don't know what that means."

She nodded and threw a complicated hand gesture at her soldiers. Gary gathered by the gold epaulets on the shoulders of her navy jacket that she must be an officer of some kind, though that made no sense. What army in the world had officers who were teenage girls? Gary couldn't shake the idea that he had been captured by a school field trip gone horribly, horribly awry.

"We kills you, if you says any wrong thing," the officer suggested. She shook her rifle at him. "We kills you, if you dos any wrong thing. You do only right thing, maybe we kills you anyway because of the smell of you."

"Fair enough," Gary said, slowly lowering his hands. pqdm.com