• The two still lived in San Diego, and Dran was now eighteen years old, Kait being sixteen. “Kay,” Dran said, concerned, “you’re sure you didn’t get bitten? If you died on me, I don’t know what I’d do with myself.”
    “I’m fine, Dran. Okay? Quit your worrying, that’s my job; to worry about you.”
    Sighing, Dran knew he could never win an argument with her, so he gave in. “Okay. It’s going to be dark out soon, though. We need to find somewhere safe, somewhere inside, with locks and food. Dumb as they are, zombies can still open a door on accident.” Looking in the distance, he saw a house, and chuckled a bit to himself. “Guess we don’t have to search. There’s a house right there, looks empty from here.” Grabbing his little sister and picking her up, Dran ran into the house with Kait in his arms, and set her down after he closed the door. “You stay here, I’m going to look in this general area for more survivors.”
    “But I want to help.” Kait stood up, looking into Dran’s yellow eyes with her green ones, saying “You can’t leave me here alone, what if zombies show up?” She was about to continue, when Dran put a hand on her mouth, a way of silencing her.
    “I won’t risk you. Just go upstairs, and get some sleep. If you sleep, I hope you don’t have a nightmare again.”
    Pouting, Kait gave up, saying “Okay, brother. Come back soon, you’re all I’ve got left, okay?” Kait went upstairs, into an empty bedroom, and rolled out her red and white sleeping bag, putting herself in it.
    Stepping outside, Dran saw a girl. She had long hair, that was dyed pink. She was a few inches shorter than Dran, and seemed to be blindfolded. Stepping up to her, he asked “You okay by yourself? It’s a bad idea to wander out here alone, you know.”
    The girl said “I guess so, I’m pretty much blind.”
    “Come with me. My little sister and I found a house, there’s nobody else, we could get to know each other. My name’s Dran, what’s yours?”
    “Chiba Otaki Taylor.”
    “Okay, Otaki. Come on.” Since she was blindfolded, he picked her up, and went in the house, again closing the door, now locking it up. Setting her down, he said “All right, so now I know there’s at least three survivors. Myself, you, and Kait’s upstairs.”
    Just as he finished, Kait came down the stairs, still wearing her pajamas. “I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to see who you were talking to.”
    “This is Otaki. Otaki, meet Kait. She’s everything to me, so if you hurt my sister, I don’t care if you’re a zombie or not, I’ll cut your heart out faster than it can beat. Aside from that, let’s do our best to get along.”

    The three of them talked for a while, but outside, behind a rock, a girl was hiding from zombies. She had red hair, and bright blue eyes. “Why did I forget to bring water,” she said to herself, “I’m such an idiot!” Running to the door, the red-haired girl banged on it, yelling “Please let me in!”
    Dran didn’t flinch at the banging, but Kait jumped quite a bit back at the sound. Opening the door, Dran said “Come on in, it seems to just be raining babes today. Figured I’d need an umbrella.” Laughing a bit at his own joke, he stepped out of the way for the girl to come in.
    The red-haired girl stepped in, smiling. Looking at Kait, she said “Hi there. My name’s Megan.” She felt good about Kait in particular.
    Waving, she said “Kait. That’s my brother, Dran, and this is Otaki.”
    Sitting down, Megan felt good about Kait, and asked “Would you like to be friends?”
    Kait sat down next to Megan, and said “Well, it’s been just me and Dran for the last six years, so YES!” It was thrilling to her, to have a friend that was her own instead of a friend of Dran’s. “So, what do you want to talk about?”
    “I dunno. What do friends usually talk about?”
    “Well, I guess we should get to know each other first. Maybe our lives? You first, Meg.”
    “Well, I used to live with my parents and twin sister. But, she started to do bad things and blame me. At first it was little things, drawing on the wall or eating from the cookie jar. But as time went on, she did worse things. Breaking dishes, things like that. When we were seven, my sister crossed the line. Our little cousin was over, and he was five. She pushed him down the stairs and blamed me. That’s when my parents took me to an orphanage and put me up for adoption. I never got adopted, and I ran when the zombies started walking around.”
    Patting her back, Kait said “It’s okay. You’re alive, that’s what counts, isn’t it?” Straightening herself up, she said “Unless you want to hear a real tragedy, I wouldn’t want to share mine.”
    “Come on, Kay,” Dran said, “you’re friends. What they don’t know might hurt them later when they find out.”
    “Fine.” Kait sighed, and started. “Dran’s my older brother by just over a year. The first ten years of life were perfectly normal, made friends, lost them, neighbors moved, got new ones, all that normal-life stuff. But, then…” Tears welled up in her eyes, as the memories of seeing all the bodies flowed back into her mind. “…something went wrong. We went to a, a family reunion. It was just after I turned ten, while Dran was still eleven. Dran, he…the whole family, they all got…” The tears streamed down her face, as she tried to speak. “…the family…Dran had to, for me, he…” Giving up, she ran up the stairs, and the sound of a door closing and being locked could be heard.
    “At the family reunion,” Dran said, finishing for Kait, “the entire family got infected, except me and Kait. She was only ten years old, and was, and still is, my whole world. To keep her safe, I had to keep her by my side as I killed everybody in our whole family.” Taking a deep breath to cope with the rush of memories, he continued. “I told her to close her eyes, to cover her ears, just to not look, but she saw the first slice go from my glove into Grandpa Mack’s chest, and she couldn’t stop watching. She still has nightmares about it, they usually keep her up at night.” Sitting down on the bottom step of the staircase, he said “Go after Kait if you want, but she usually likes to be left alone at times like these.”
    Nodding, Megan ran up the stairs, after Kait. “Kait, wait!” She followed the sound of Kait crying to a door, and knocked lightly. “Kait?”
    The door unlocked, and Kait opened the door, running up to Megan. She wrapped her arms tightly around this new friend of hers, and continued crying. “You saw the glove on his hand? That’s the weapon. I made it for him for his tenth birthday, I made the thing that killed my family.” Pulling Megan into the room, she closed the door again, once more locking it. Megan wrapped her own arms around Kait, who once again hugged tightly to Megan. “Just stay for a bit, please? I’ve never really had my own friend before.”
    “Okay.” The two of them continued to talk, often changing the topic to not let Kait remember that day.

    Dran had nothing to do, so decided to play the “guy game” as he called it. “Hey, Otaki. I’m going up to the roof for a bit to think, tag along if you want. Actually…there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.” Putting on his jacket, he knew it was cold outside, and being on the roof probably wouldn’t help that much.
    “Sure.” Following Dran, she climbed out a window, onto the roof, and sat down next to Dran. “What did you want to talk about?”
    “For starters, it’s freezing out here.” Taking off his jacket, he wrapped it around Otaki, saying “You need it more than me.”
    “Thanks.”
    “It’s Kait. She has nightmares, really bad ones. More often then not, I hear her screaming in the middle of the night, in her sleep. I was just wondering, since you know so much, if you might have anything to help her with them.”
    Handing him a bottle of small pills, Otaki said “These will help her with her nightmares. They don’t have any taste, so you can put them in her dinner or dissolve them in her drink.”

    Kait was asleep, having gotten tired from so much happening in that one day. As usual, she was tossing and turning fiercely, trapped in another horrible nightmare. It had started as a sunny day from before zombies were part of everyday life. She walked in the door to her house to find a trail of blood, and as she followed it, it led to her father, laying in a pool of blood. Above him stood a man wearing a black cloak, holding a scythe. Turning around, yellow eyes stared right into Kait’s, a scar over the right eye. It was her brother, holding a scythe dripping blood. She ran, she ran as fast as her legs would take her, but he was there at every corner.
    The world around her went black, and Kait woke up, screaming. Yanked up like a puppet, she was sweating, and her hair was a mess.
    On hearing the scream, Dran said “That’s gotta be Kait! Sorry, Otaki, I’ll be right back.” Jumping in the window and running down the hall, he opened the door to sit next to his sister. “Kay, you alright?”
    Shaking, Kait nodded, and quietly said “I’m fine. It was just another bad dream. You can go, I’m going back to sleep.”
    Kissing her forehead, Dran said “All right. Remember, I swore to protect you from everything, and I never lie to girls.” Running back, Dran climbed back onto his spot next to Otaki on the roof. “Sorry about that. She was just having another bad nightmare. Sometimes, she tells me that if there was a God, he wouldn’t torture people as bad as he would with her nightmares. I have to say, with the U.S. being a death-pit, I have to agree with her. Where is God, what’s he done for us? Whether or not there is a God, I may have met a pink-haired goddess today.”
    Nodding, Otaki said “There is a God. He’s always watching and protecting us.”
    “I guess whatever keeps a person happy works, doesn’t it?”

    Just down the road, a boy was going down the street. Pulling out a picture from his pocket, there was a boy and a blonde girl. They were in love, as the boy shot down many zombies in his path without any effort. Finding a house, he saw two survivors on the roof. “You guys alive?”
    Waving, Dran said “As much as anybody, yeah! Come on in, any survivor’s a friend of mine. My name’s Dran, and this pink-haired beauty to my side is Otaki.”
    Jumping from one roof to another, and getting to theirs, he said “Sistalain. Jason Sistalain. Just call me Jase, it‘s shorter.”
    “Good to meet ya, Jase. Hey, can you do me a small favor, though? In a room just down the hall, there’s a girl. She’s got gray hair, and is asleep in a red and white sleeping bag. She’s my sister, and I just need to know if she’s okay, and her worst nightmares are usually about me, so I don’t want to scare her.”
    Nodding, he said “Sure,” and followed Dran’s basic directions.

    However, Kait was not asleep, or in her sleeping bag. She couldn’t sleep, she was too scared from her nightmare. Knowing she’d need more weapons, she had gone to the basement to see what she could make. Kait was always good at making weapons from off-hand materials. Looking around in the garage, she saw a water gun, two propane tanks, a chainsaw, rope, a trigger-operated lighter, a car battery, and a large plank of wood. “Perfect,” she said to herself. Grabbing a nearby drawing pad and pencil, she began to draw schematics to a large weapon to use against zombies. On the top of the paper were written the words “Chainsaw-Revving Annihilator of Zombies: Yataghan.” Nodding, she started work.
    Megan entered the garage, and saw Kait. “Hi there.” Looking at the drawing pad, she asked “What are you drawing there?”
    “Schematics. It’s an old hobby for me to draw schematics for weapons, but the things around us are enough to make this. My Chainsaw-Revving Annihilator of Zombies, which I call Yataghan. Of course, you could just call it C.R.A.Z.Y. for short.”
    “Mind if I stick around?”
    “Sure. I was hoping you would actually. I never know when I need more help, and it gets lonely in a garage all by yourself.”
    “Hey, do you think we could make some training dummies when you’re done? You know, for target practice,” asked Megan, pretending to swing a sword.
    “Yeah, sure. We have to go to a Wal-Mart or something, though. There’s one down the road, about a mile.”

    Jason entered the room, to see no girl, only an empty sleeping bag. Deciding she must have gone somewhere else, he started to look around. When he reached the garage, he saw two girls talking. “Excuse me.”