The Last Green Thing

Marcus stood in his kitchen, staring at the bag of spinach like it was an artifact from another civilization. Three years since the outbreak, and he hadn't seen anything green that wasn't trying to eat him first.

"You going to eat that, or just admire it?" Sarah asked from the doorway. Her voice carried that familiar edge—the one that said she was tired, they were both tired, but someone had to keep pretending life was normal.

"It's expired," Marcus said, though expiration dates seemed almost comical now. "But yeah. I'm going to eat it."

Sarah laughed, short and sharp. "God, remember when we worried about E. coli?" She crossed the room, wrapped her arms around his waist from behind. "Now we're just grateful if it doesn't try to bite back."

This was their routine: gallows humor, small comforts, the endless project of maintaining humanity in an abandoned world. They'd found the spinach in a sealed bunker last week—part of some doomsday prepper's fantasy, now their miracle.

Outside, somewhere in the distance, a zombie moaned. The sound had become background noise, like wind or rain. Marcus used to flinch. Now he just kept chopping.

"You think he suffered?" Sarah asked quietly.

Marcus paused. David—his friend, his best friend since seventh grade—had turned three days ago. They'd locked him in the basement with a bucket of water and a promise to come back with a cure. There was no cure. There was just waiting and listening as the sounds coming from the basement changed from human pleas to something guttural and wrong.

"I think he's gone," Marcus said finally. "What's down there isn't David anymore."

Sarah tightened her grip. "We have to do it tonight. Before he gets out."

"I know."

He finished the spinach salad, divided it between two chipped plates. They sat at the table, holding hands across the scratched wood, eating in silence while something that used to be David scratched at the basement door.

The spinach tasted like metal and tears and memory. Like everything good they'd lost. But for a moment, in the quiet between the moans and the forthcoming violence, it almost felt like dinner. Like friendship. Like the world hadn't ended at all.