Just Another Day at the Office: A Walking Dead Short

“Would you stop?”


“Why, though?” Megan’s grin turns to a smirk. “Why have you not climbed on top of that? What are you waiting for? That body…those guns he’s got—”

“Stop it!” Lilly’s anger flares, a sharp splitting pain behind the bridge of her nose. Her emotions close to the surface, her trembling returning, she surprises even herself with the volume of her voice. “I’m not like you…okay. I’m not a social butterfly. Jesus, Meg. I’ve lost track. Which one of these guys are you with now?”

Megan stares at her for a second, coughs, then loads up another one-hit. “You know what?” Megan offers the pipe. “Why don’t you take it down a little bit? Chill?”

“No, thanks.”

“It’s good for what ails ya. It’ll kill that bug you got up your ass.”

Lilly rubs her eyes, shakes her head. “You are a piece of work, Meg.”

Megan gulps another hit, blows it out. “I’d rather be a piece of work than a piece of shit.”

Lilly says nothing, just keeps shaking her head. The sad truth is, Lilly sometimes wonders if Megan Lafferty is not exactly that—a piece of shit. The two girls have known each other since senior year at Sprayberry High School back in Marietta. They were inseparable back then, sharing everything from homework to drugs to boyfriends. But then Lilly got designs on a career, and spent two years of purgatory at Massey College of Business in Atlanta, and then on to Georgia Tech for an MBA she would never get. She wanted to be a fashionista, maybe run a clothing design business, but she got as far as the reception area of her first interview—a highly coveted internship with Mychael Knight Fashions—before chickening out. Her old companion, fear, put the kibosh on all her plans.

Fear made her flee that lavish lobby and give up and go home to Marietta and resume her slacker lifestyle with Megan, getting high, sitting on couches, and watching reruns of Project Runway.

Something had changed between the two women in recent years, however, something fundamentally chemical—Lilly felt it as strong as a language barrier. Megan had no ambition, no direction, no focus, and was okay with that. But Lilly still harbored dreams—stillborn dreams, perhaps, but dreams nonetheless. She secretly longed to go to New York or start a Web site or go back to that receptionist at Mychael Knight and say, “Oops, sorry, just had to step out for a year and a half…”

Lilly’s dad—a retired math teacher and widower named Everett Ray Caul—always encouraged his daughter. Everett was a kind, deferential man who took it upon himself, after his wife’s slow death from breast cancer back in the midnineties, to raise his only daughter with a tender touch. He knew she wanted more out of life, but he also knew she needed unconditional love, she needed a family, she needed a home. And Everett was all she had. All of which made the events of the last couple of months so hellish for Lilly.

The first outbreak of walkers hit the north side of Cobb County hard. They came from blue-collar areas, the industrial parks north of Kennesaw woods, creeping into the population like malignant cells. Everett decided to pack Lilly up and flee in their beat-up VW wagon, and they got as far as U.S. 41, before the wreckage slowed them down. They found a rogue city bus a mile south of there—careening up and down the back streets, picking survivors up—and they almost made it onboard. To this day, the image of her father pushing her through the bus’s folding door as zombies closed in haunts Lilly’s dreams.