Dead Channels

The dog had stopped barking three days ago. That was the first sign, though Maya hadn't registered it until she found him curled beneath the sink, breathing shallow, his fur matted with something that looked like dried spinach. He lifted his head at her approach, eyes milky and unfocused, and she understood then that whatever had come for them had already taken the best thing in this apartment.

She found Rick in front of the television, though the cable had been dead since the transmission towers went dark. He sat motionless in the blue-gray light of the static, clicking the remote every thirty seconds—channel up, channel down, though nothing changed.

"We're out of everything," she said, setting a can of peaches on the table. "Just this. And there's an orange in the fruit bowl. Starting to go soft."

Rick didn't turn. His skin had taken on a waxy sheen, the veins standing blue beneath his jaw. He'd always been pale, but this was different. This was the paleness of things that had forgotten how to circulate.

"Rick."

"The signal's coming back," he murmured. "I can almost hear it."

Maya opened the orange. Its flesh was dry, pulling away from the rind in desperate threads. The scent was sharp and nostalgic—another life, another woman who'd bought groceries on Tuesdays and worried about cholesterol and whether they were saving enough for retirement. That woman was dead now. Maya wasn't sure what had taken her place.

She'd seen it happen to the neighbors first. The lethargy. The slackening of the face. Then the hunger—not for food, but for warmth, for movement, for anything that still remembered how to be alive. They called them zombies on the shortwave, but that wasn't right. Zombies were monsters. These were just people who'd forgotten how to die properly.

Rick shifted, and she saw it then—the tiny bite mark at his hairline, already scabbed over. He must have gone outside while she slept. Must have found one of them and let it get too close, or maybe he'd simply stopped caring enough to step away.

"The signal," he said again, his voice flat and distant. "It's saying your name, Maya."

She finished the orange, fingers sticky with juice, and watched the man she'd loved for seven years dissolve into something that wore his face but didn't know his name. The dog whined once, a thin sound like wire snapping, and then silence filled the apartment, thick and complete as earth.