My friend Karl was shooting zombies. Karl Kaiser’s mother got eaten by zombies, so nobody denies he’s got the right.

The four of us were sitting around his heated tree-house drinking hot chocolate. The grey light of another post-apocalyptic day filtered in through the tree-stand door. There were Karl and I and his current girlfriend,  Joyce, and my wife, Paula.  We lived in New Hampshire then, but we were all from somewhere else.

There was a space heater in the middle, with a hot plate and a kettle. The hot chocolate packets kept getting passed around, and we got, unsurprisingly, on the subject of zombies.  Karl thought zombies were some sort of walking metaphor for spiritual emptiness come home to roost. Karl spent five years working as a corporate lawyer before he quit and joined the Marine Corps, and he said he saw the same look in the eyes of the senior partners that we all saw in the eyes of zombies now.

We were all pretty glad he had joined the Marines now, as he put another .50 caliber sniper rifle round between a zombie’s eyes a half-mile down the road.  I watched its head explode through the spotter scope as I sipped my Swiss Miss.