"Jonathan, this isn't right! She never deserved this!"

"But did we deserve this?! This isn't some kind of game!"

"Just wait for Jack to come back. Please. Let him talk some sense into you."

"Wait for Jack? Sorry, but he's not coming back."

Kiana's eyes felt heavy as the voices flooded her head. Her brain throbbed with each word while her limbs were weighted with a sleep. Trying to blink away the confusion, she forced herself to stare into the painfully bright light, scents of sterilizer haunting her nose.

A mumble escaped her lips as the voices returned, faces shifting into her vision like angels from heaven.

"Oh great, you woke her up." Jonathan, she realized as his bitterness poisoned her ears. He was standing above her, the scar on his cheek open and bloody.

"I won't do this Jonatan!" Sweet Erica stood next to him, screaming as fear enveloped her. "This isn't just replacing one of your faulty organs or...or replenishing your blood! I was a nurse! Not a surgeon!"

"But you're the best we got!" He was furious as Erica threw her arms in the air, every horror she committed clawing at her sanity. "And you'll do what I tell you to do! It's not like you've got anywhere else to go!"

"This is murder!"

"This is survival!"

Kiana moaned as the light made her head throb. Each word sent a wave of confusion through her tired brain. It only muddled her thoughts, but she could hardly get up and walk away from it all. Something held her down, flat on her back as the two argued above her.

"I...can't." Breathless, Erica backed out of Kiana's view, horror radiating from her voice. "I'd rather die."

"Well wouldn't we all, but that's not an option for us, is it?" Scowling like a murderous dog, Jonathan's scar stretched with his grin. "Either kill the girl or get out. See how society treats you with all your blood and guts."

Erica's heavy breathing filled Kiana's ears, pulsing like a desperate siren as she stared death in the eyes. Then, with the slam of a door, Kiana was left alone with the monster.

"Jonathan?" Kiana mumbled as her thoughts swam through the light. His fragile form drifted like waves of a hallucination, warped and misshapen as he stood over her. "Where...are we?"

"The repair room." He grinned with tired energy, his entire body riveting with pain.

"You know, I thought it was hilarious when I stole your journal," Jonathan weaved his tale like a storyteller. "You talked about a world of zombies, how everyone was just a lifeless image of what they should be."

Pausing before a stainless steel fridge, he caught his breath and wrenched it open. "But then you talked about me." A cold wind bled from the open door and battered Kiana's hair as she listened, her head too foggy to feel the fear. "You described me as alive. So wonderful, that I seemed like the only person who had any clue what life was."

"Why..." Kiana took a deep breath as her head burned with muddled questions. As Jonatan fiddled with a bright red package of blood and held the needle like a shaking rag doll, she forced herself to speak through the pain. "Why are you telling me this?"

He grinned, the cold shivers spreading through her entire body. Hanging up the bag of blood, he collapsed into a chair, head tossed back in mad exhaustion.

"Don't you think it's strange that the only life you found was in a zombie?"

Kiana's lips froze as the word came in one ear and out the other. She couldn't process it as Jonatan unzipped his sweatshirt, revealing a haphazard entanglement of bandages. They were thrown around his torso in jumbled, cluttered strands, only held together by a sticky crimson growing from his centre. They wrapped over his chest and once around his neck where another red stain seeped, dripping and flowing across each until Jonathan was so deformed, he was more of a mummy than a zombie.

Grey skin was pulled tight over brittle bones that poked and jabbed like a cruel sculpture. Each muscle twitched as if only a memory, so small that they were hardly there at all.

It all began to fall into place. The wrong feeling that rattled Kiana to the bone when they first met, his odd behavior, and Hunter's mad explanations. Once in the neck, twice in the stomach and twice in the back...even after death, he can't help but make things disappear!