Prompt: I called the shotgun Infinity when I was twelve.

By eight I knew they weren't coming back.

They couldn't dupe me, the coppers spewing their pretty lies about paused searches and motives. They were gone, probably because they got eaten.

That's what happens when you're dumb enough to step outside.

Not that they were dumb - Dad was hella smart, but I'm hella smarter. I guess the marsh didn't suit them, but they're dead. Nothing suits them anymore.

Me, I can take it. Hunt for waterfowl and return home before the hands start emerging. Once I went too far and saw a fingertip on the return trip. Mom woulda tried to shake its hand.

Our house is on stilts like clowns in those faded kiddie picture books, partly to keep the marshy water out of the foundation, and now to keep them out.

Not Mom and Dad.

The other them. 

They sit in the water, under the water. Bet they watch me as I jump over their land, toes dipping into their territory. Wish I could kick 'em in their sunken faces, their staring, glaring eyes, but it still gives me the shakes just thinking about them.

Wish Mom and Dad had a boat, then I'd get the hell out of here, with the bodies and the marsh and the nightly invasions. I dunno what to call them. The drowned? Undead? Naw, that sounds cheesy. But whenever they open their mouths water spills out through their broken teeth. They're full of it - floating in their brains, pumping through their veins, since they don't need oxygen no more.

I can hear them clamor at night, splashing through the water and dragging their limbs. Least they have the decency to keep it down when I'm trying to sleep.

Except when they fall off the stilts. Then they scream.

By nine I hated the house. 

It's a nice house, and I keep it nice, since chores and books are about the only two things I can do to keep myself from dying of boredom. Making beds, dusting, washing plates, like a bona fide Cinderelly. Wish some prince would cart me out of this dump.

Stuck up on stilts with lunatic zombie armies. Drowned. I see their clothes hanging off them, soaked to the rotting sin. Once I saw letters - UCLA. 

Then I threw up.

The radio doesn't work, never did, but the phone still does. That's how I called 911 when Mom and Dad took a walk on the blue. The coppers came on cruisers, darting over the water, fingers, hands.

They hightailed it when it came near to sunset. I don't blame 'em. 

Before, I had Mom to hold my hand when the deaders screamed. Dad to fire off rounds with the shotgun. He taught me how to load and fire, but I hated the thing. Too loud, and it hurt my shoulder when it kicked. Now I've got no one but my damn self, and I'm pretty sure I can fight them off on my own.

Not yet, though. A few more months of blissful security, but how was I to know that? I was nine.

I wanted to live anywhere else. Kansas, nice 'n dry-like. Not California, soaked and dead, but not dead. Dead all day, but not at night.

I wiped the slime off the stilts when I slid down, red Jell-o, congealed and scarlet-red. Not gonna fool myself and say I don't know what it is.

If a kid could climb the stilts, why couldn't they? 

I hated the house. 

By ten the first one got to the porch.

I still remember the moment when I heard the body flailing against the front door, groaning and hissing with all the sounds of a demon unleashed. I don't know who shrieked louder; I slammed open the door into its broken body and emptied the shotgun into its head. That was the first coat of pretty red paint that stained the porch, the red of the drowned man's blood. 

He was tall and lanky, exceptionally so, and that was how he worked his way to the porch, bent fingers clutching the wooden steps, hollow chest heaving, gurgling, moaning.

The day after that, a woman. A child. Screaming as they fell from the stilts. I watched them from the porch, shotgun slung across my chest like some diminutive commando. No new paint, but I scrubbed at the old coat. Cement and tears. Stuck.

Just like me, nowhere to go.

Couldn't call the cops - everyone had deaders, it was only a matter of keeping them back. Either the house was sinking in the marsh, or they were getting stronger. Shinning up the stilts like a right spider monkey.

I read a lot when I was ten, pouring through the books like they were my ticket to a better life. I sweated in a steaming New York summer. I flew through the stars with ease, discovering strange new worlds. 

Where the drowned citizens of Los Angeles didn't revive at night and eat people.

I was alone. Who could I call? No relatives, no help. My hair grew long and my jaw tight, tougher and grittier. Deaders got a taste of me, they would spit me out quick.

But who's really alone with them, waiting for you at night?

By eleven I was the general of my own war, decorated heroically. 

The porch was crimson, bathed in the sanguine liquid I drew each night. It stuck to my soles at peeled at my shoes like Velcro.

Glass encrusted the steps. I shattered the plates and cups and glued them to the porch so they couldn't get it; they howled and howled all night long as the shards pierced their swollen hands. Ain't smart, they kept trying. 

I read through Dad's library and didn't understand any of it, going on about politics and religion too high 'n mighty for me. I prayed to God each night, kneeling by my bed and sticking my hands together and biting my lip, praying hard that the deaders wouldn't get in, that they'd just leave me alone. 

Torn-up hands painted the blue door scarlet. Like I had a choice. Bashing the windows with bloodied knuckles.

Knock, knock!

Who's there? 

Like the kiddie books I used to read. With happy families and houses not on stilts. They're not there, scarin' the kids when they sleep with their agonized screams. Naw, book kids are lucky. Fluffy little pastries, not beef-jerky tough like me. I put lead in their skulls. Sally picks flowers and Jimmy plays ball.

Wish I could play ball. I wonder why Mom and Dad took a walk that night? The deaders were just coming, and they up 'n left. 

Maybe I'm grateful.

Nobody's going to make a pastry out of me, not even a deader.

By twelve I called Dad's shotgun Infinity, because that's how many I guessed I killed.

Nowhere in his books did it say how many people lived in Los Angeles. I don't even want to guess. A million? A billion? And they all crawl out of their filthy holes in the water and come for me.

Wonder what they want. Deaders trying to get in the house each night, a-moaning away. Sounding like wild wolves. Sometimes I imagine them like that, rabid and ready to pounce, jaws foaming with bloody spittle. Crazed eyes rolling in their sockets. 

Moaning and climbing, climbing and moaning.

The shotgun and I have gotten pretty close. Infinity, I name it, for each bullet strung up in the body of those buggin' things crawling out of the lapping waves. We're the closest things to friends around these parts, unless you call the pack of them underwater folk 'friends,' in which case you'd be sorely mistaken. They ain't friends, no more than I would kiss one of them full on the lips.

I don't need fortifications for the house, they're insistent on getting up through the porch. Some warped kind of courtesy still stuck in their twisted brains? The part that's now washed out with the churning water they return to every night, bony knuckles clamping the stilts as they scramble down. More like crabs than people.

Never really see them as people anymore, that's the thing. To me they're like the drones in a book I read on bees, just doin' their job, all respectful and obedient. Rankles me quite a bit, it does, since I'm no collection of respect or obedience, twelve-year-old kid with a shotgun named Infinity and a serious case of deaders. Gunning them down ain't a pleasure, but it's near enough to. Maybe they're rats, and I'm exterminating them. Funny how stuff like this works out.

They're going to get me soon, and I'm no stupid fool to ignore it. They bang at the doors and I have to shoot them down, shuffling their bodies off of the porch when morning comes. Sometimes they get caught on the glass and take a little longer to tumble down, leaving bits of them behind. At first my own vomit joined the drying blood. Now I hardly blink.

If I were a pastry kid I would cry about it, sayin' life isn't fair, bawl that I miss my Mom and Dad, want them to come back from the water. The way I see it, the only was Mom or Dad is coming back to this house is as a deader. No use wasting my breath lying to myself. Brutally honest or just brutal, can't say. 

As bad as the porch looks, the house is spick 'n span on the inside. I keep making Mom and Dad's bed each week, even though no one has slept in it since they wandered off on their own foolhardy lonesome as deader fodder. I keep making breakfast as usual, storing the waterbird eggs in the fridge and staring at the phone, wondering if it will ring. Peruse my favorite books, wonder what all the fancy words mean. Sometimes I make up meanings for them, even though I know they're wrong. 

Capacious - It's that feeling you get when they get so close to the door and your heart jumps out of your chest and rolls around the floor and they kick it between their feet like when Jimmy plays ball.

Taciturn - No-nonsense, like me. Get it done, don't bat a lash about it. Life's as rough as you make it until you make it easier, so get a move on. 

Uxorious - The look on the copper's face when he left. Mix of sad, not caring, lonesome, grief, and a few other things flashing in his eyes. I like eyes, they tell you a lot about someone. My eyes are muddy brown and about as pretty as said mud, but they're tight and focused, ready for you to make your move. The copper wanted to help, I guess, but there was nothing he could do. He knew they were dead. He knew they were deaders.

Their eyes are nothing, and I care more to blow their eyes out, not look at them. Bulging and mad, with bloodshot strands running thick like highways over the white. 

Infinity has got his own personality, too, and yeah, it's a he. He's big and loud, talks too much, lots of blustering and roaring, and while his words can seem injurious, he's a real pal. Nice and dependable, especially when you need him.

Dunno if Dad was running some kind of bullet/ammunition operation, but I'm not even close to running out of bullets. I figure if I did the math right, I'll be able to last until I'm twenty-nine. They say you can't learn anything out of school, but I've learned more with Mom and Dad gone than I ever did back at school. School on stilts, I remember. We never stayed long enough for the deaders to come out. But that was a long time ago.

I'm sitting out with Infinity. He's lying across my lap, but not flirtatious-like, we're just buddies. Ready for action, I can feel it as I clutch the barrel in one hand. The last rays of light slipping down over the horizon. Would be beautiful if I couldn't see the fingertips piercing the surface of the water. Kinda ruins the image. 

No deader has stuck around long enough for me to recognize it twice, but this time something's different. I glance at an arm bloated by water, and I recognize the clothes. Some outfit from a while ago? It's not that old copper, is it? 

Stringy brown hair, half torn out. 

That blouse, ripped and bloodied.

Those hands. The ones that used to caress me when I went to sleep, not slashed mercilessly by the plates and cups she used to wash.

She. The only deader that ain't an it. I know this woman.

Recognition hits me like a cruiser boat and I drop Infinity to the porch. He gives a shout of indigence as he clatters against the bloody boards, but I ignore his echoing voice. Searching for that face in the crowd.

There - barely recognizable, horribly disfigured, and very dead. But, like all the deaders, not quite dead. 

Muddy brown eyes like mine, but mine are all weepy and pastry-like now. No more beef-jerky tough.

"Mom?"