The banging on the kitchen door had settled into a rhythm. Slow, steady, relentless. Like a metronome set to the tempo of Kevin's mounting dread.
*Thud. Thud. Thud.*
"Alright," Derek said, straightening his torn golf shirt with the dignity of a man who hadn't just watched a hundred and thirty-nine coworkers get eaten. "I think it's time we had a quick stand-up meeting to align on our go-forward strategy."
Kevin stared at him. "A stand-up meeting."
"Fifteen minutes, tops. We'll do a round-robin, everyone shares their status updates, blockers, and action items. I'll facilitate."
"Derek, the action item is 'don't get eaten by our former coworkers.' Meeting adjourned."
Rachel was already moving, the fire extinguisher tucked under one arm like a rugby ball. She crossed behind the main prep counter and started opening cabinets. "Kevin, get over here. This kitchen is massive."
She wasn't wrong. The Evergreen Mountain Lodge's kitchen was built to feed conference groups of two hundred. Stainless steel prep stations ran in parallel rows beneath industrial fluorescent lights that buzzed and flickered on emergency power. A walk-in freezer dominated the back wall, its compressor humming steadily. Next to it, a dry storage pantry the size of Kevin's apartment.
"We've got industrial ovens, a six-burner range, two deep fryers," Rachel catalogued, yanking open drawers. "And knives. Lots of knives."
Kevin joined her, pocketing a paring knife to go with his chef's knife. His hands were still shaking. He gripped the handle tighter to make them stop.
"Over here," Rachel called from the pantry. She'd found the motherlode: fifty-pound bags of rice and flour, canned goods stacked floor to ceiling, cases of bottled water, industrial-sized containers of cooking oil. Enough to feed a small army. Or eight terrified office workers for a very long time.
"Well," Kevin said, surveying the haul. "At least we won't starve."
"I'm cataloguing everything," Karen announced from behind them. She'd found a clipboard somewhere and was already scribbling with the focused intensity of someone filing quarterly reports. "We'll need a full inventory. Item counts, expiration dates, caloric values. I'll have a preliminary spreadsheet by morning."
"Karen, we don't have a computer."
"I'll do it by hand. I did accounting before Excel existed, Kevin. Don't test me."
He didn't test her.
The eight of them spread out through the kitchen, each processing the catastrophe in their own way. Carl had stopped crying long enough to sit on the floor with his back against the walk-in freezer, hugging his knees. Derek was pacing, rehearsing what sounded like a motivational speech to no one. The three other survivors Kevin didn't know well--a woman from marketing named Janet, a guy from facilities named Doug, and a quiet man from sales whose name Kevin had never learned--clustered near the back wall.
The quiet man from sales was holding his forearm. Kevin noticed it in the way you notice a crack in a dam: with the sudden, stomach-dropping certainty that something terrible was about to happen.
"Hey." Kevin approached him carefully. "What's your name?"
"Tom." The man's face was pale and sheened with sweat. "Tom Briggs. Sales."
"Tom, let me see your arm."
Tom hesitated, then slowly peeled back his sleeve.
The bite mark was ugly. Ragged, deep, already purpling at the edges. Kevin could see the individual tooth impressions pressed into the flesh like a grotesque dental mold. Blood had soaked through Tom's shirt and dried in dark, crackling patches.
"It happened in the hallway," Tom said, his voice steady in the way of someone who'd already accepted what he was saying. "One of them grabbed me. I pulled free, but..."
"But it bit you."
"Yeah."
The kitchen went silent. Even the banging on the door seemed to pause, as if the zombies outside were listening.
"What does that mean?" Janet asked. She was clutching a ladle like a sword. "In the movies, a bite means..."
"This isn't a movie," Derek said sharply. Then, softer: "Right? This can't be like the movies."
Kevin looked at Tom's wound. The edges were already changing color, darkening from purple to something that looked almost gray. The veins around the bite were becoming visible, spreading outward like ink through water.
"How long ago?" Kevin asked.
"Maybe... forty-five minutes? An hour?"
"How do you feel?"
Tom laughed. It was not a funny laugh. "Like I got bitten by a dead person, Kevin. How do you think I feel?"
Rachel appeared at Kevin's shoulder. She'd seen the bite. He could tell by the way her jaw tightened, the way her hand shifted on the fire extinguisher. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to.
"We should clean the wound," Carl said from the floor. Everyone turned to look at him. His eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but something had shifted behind them. "There's a first-aid kit on the wall by the loading dock entrance. If we clean it, bandage it, maybe..."
"Maybe what?" Tom said. "Maybe I won't turn into one of those things? We all saw what happened out there. We all saw Denise."
The name hung in the air like smoke. Denise from HR, with her clipboard and her forced enthusiasm, going down under a pile of jerking, grasping bodies. Kevin pushed the image away.
"We don't know how it works," he said. "Maybe it's not transmissible through bites. Maybe--"
"Kevin." Tom's voice was gentle. "Look at my arm."
Kevin looked. The gray discoloration had spread another inch in the time they'd been talking. The veins were darker now, almost black, creeping up toward his elbow.
"Oh God," Janet whispered.
"Okay." Kevin's mind was racing. "Okay, here's what we do. Tom, you stay over here. We'll get you the first-aid kit, water, whatever you need. But you stay... separated. Just as a precaution."
"You're quarantining me."
"I'm being careful."
Tom nodded slowly. "Fair enough. I'd do the same."
They gave Tom a corner near the back of the kitchen, behind the prep stations. Carl brought the first-aid kit and cleaned the wound with shaking hands, wrapping it in gauze that turned pink almost immediately. Janet brought water. Doug stood nearby, his face gray with secondhand terror.
Kevin pulled Rachel aside, near the walk-in freezer where the compressor's hum covered their whispered conversation.
"He's going to turn," Rachel said. Not a question.
"We don't know that."
"Kevin. We watched those things come through the windows. They were people. Coworkers. Something turns people into those things, and he was bitten by one of those things. This isn't complicated math."
She was right. He hated that she was right.
"So what do we do? Kill him? He's still a person, Rachel. He's sitting right there, conscious, talking to us."
"I'm not saying we kill him. I'm saying we need a plan for when he stops being him."
Kevin looked across the kitchen at Tom, who was leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. His skin was grayer now. Visibly, measurably grayer, like someone was draining the color from him in real time.
"We watch him," Kevin said. "And if... when... it happens, we deal with it fast."
"Deal with it how?"
Kevin looked down at the chef's knife in his hand. Rachel followed his gaze. Neither of them said anything.
---
The next hour was the longest of Kevin's life.
Tom's deterioration was steady and merciless. The gray spread up his arm, across his shoulder, down his torso. His eyes, brown and sharp when they'd first spoken, went cloudy and distant. He stopped talking after the first thirty minutes. Stopped responding to his name after forty-five.
But he was still breathing. Still blinking. Still recognizably Tom from sales, a man Kevin had never spoken to at a single company event, a stranger he was now watching die in slow motion under fluorescent lights.
"This is inhumane," Karen said, her clipboard abandoned for once. "We should do something."
"Like what?" Derek asked. He'd stopped pacing. He was standing as far from Tom as physically possible, pressed against the opposite wall. "What exactly do you suggest we do, Karen?"
"I don't know! Something! We can't just sit here and watch him--"
Tom groaned.
It wasn't a human sound. It started human, somewhere in Tom's chest, but by the time it left his mouth it had become something else. Something wet and wrong and hungry. His eyes, which had been cloudy, went flat. Dead. The irises disappeared behind a milky white film.
"Oh no," Carl whispered.
Tom's body jerked. Once, twice, like someone had run current through him. His head snapped to the side, then forward, and when his mouth opened, the sound that came out was the moan Kevin had heard through the windows. The sound of every zombie in the building. The sound of something that used to be alive but wasn't anymore and didn't know the difference.
"Everyone back!" Kevin was moving before he finished shouting. He grabbed the chef's knife and positioned himself between Tom and the rest of the group.
Tom--the thing that had been Tom--rose to its feet in that horrible, jerky way. Shoulders first, then the rest of the body following. It looked at Kevin with those dead white eyes, and Kevin could swear it smiled.
Then it lunged.
Kevin had never been in a fight. Not a real one. He'd done some embarrassing karate in middle school and once shoved a guy at a bar, but nothing that prepared him for a dead coworker launching itself at his throat with its mouth open and its fingers clawing.
He swung the knife.
It connected. The blade bit into Tom's shoulder, slicing through the gray flesh with a sound like tearing wet cardboard. Tom-thing didn't react. Didn't flinch, didn't slow down. It kept coming, grabbing at Kevin's shirt, its teeth snapping inches from his face. Kevin could smell it: rot and copper and something sweet underneath, like fruit left in the sun too long.
"MOVE!" Rachel's voice cut through the panic. Kevin threw himself sideways as the fire extinguisher smashed into the side of Tom-thing's head with a hollow, metallic boom. It staggered but didn't fall.
Kevin got his feet under him. The thing was turning toward Rachel now, drawn by the sound. She held the extinguisher ready, her arms steady, her face locked in concentration.
Kevin didn't think. He stepped forward and drove the chef's knife into the base of Tom-thing's skull, angling upward. The blade met resistance, then punched through. Tom-thing stopped moving. Its body went rigid, then slack, collapsing to the floor all at once.
Silence. The compressor hummed. The fluorescent lights buzzed. Someone was breathing in short, ragged gasps, and Kevin realized it was him.
He looked down at his hands. They were covered in blood that was too dark, almost black, and thick like old motor oil. The chef's knife was still embedded in Tom's skull, the handle sticking up at an angle that seemed almost jaunty.
"Oh my God," Janet said from behind the prep counter, where she'd taken cover. "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my--"
"Is it dead?" Doug asked. "Is he dead? Was he already dead? What--"
"He's dead," Kevin said. His voice sounded far away. "He's... yeah."
Rachel was beside him. She didn't touch him, but she was close enough that he could feel her warmth, and right now that was the only thing keeping him tethered to something that felt like sanity.
"You did what you had to," she said quietly.
"Did I?"
"He would have killed us all."
Kevin looked around the kitchen. At Carl, who was crying again. At Karen, who had her hand over her mouth. At Derek, who had gone the color of old paste. At Janet and Doug, holding each other by the prep counter.
Six survivors now. Not eight.
Tom from sales lay on the floor, and Kevin Park stood over him with blood on his hands, and the fluorescent lights buzzed their indifferent fluorescent buzz, and the zombies outside kept banging on the door.
*Thud. Thud. Thud.*
Kevin retrieved his knife. Wiped it on his pants. Looked at the people depending on him.
"This is real," he said. "This is real, and this is permanent, and nobody is coming to save us. So we need to start acting like it."
Nobody argued. For the first time since the windows shattered, nobody had a single word to say.
The banging on the door continued. Steady. Patient.
