Part 4: The Only Zombie in an Outbreak
Chapter 1
The world broke.
But I had already crumbled.
COVID came like a thief with a halo—and everyone suddenly knew fear.
Suddenly knew what it meant to be isolated.
To be uncertain.
To be trapped in their own minds and homes.
They hoarded. They hid.
They screamed at invisible air.
And I watched them from behind a mask, wondering what took them so long.
The irony wasn’t lost on me:
They were running from death,
and I had been sleeping with it.
Flirting with it.
Waking up beside it for months—maybe years.
The sirens outside didn’t scare me.
The headlines didn’t shock me.
I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t mourning.
I was numb. Detached.
Already infected by something far older than any virus.
Chapter 2
I worked on the frontlines.
Not to save lives, but to dare fate to end mine.
Mask on. Gloves tight.
I took vitals like I was clocking in at Purgatory.
Caring for the sick while dying quietly myself—
of an unnamed disease no hospital could treat.
Hope started to rise.
Deacon had even agreed and planned to visit – to come back.
BUT, just when he was supposed to return home to me—
the world shut down.
Borders closed.
Flights stopped.
And fate whispered “No.”
CHAPTER 3
It was as if Hell itself had petitioned to keep us apart.
As if I hadn’t suffered enough,
it threw in a global catastrophe just to twist the knife.
From that point on—
I went home every night to a mattress,
a bottle,
a ritual.
Substances became communion.
My body, a cathedral for chemicals.
I studied the science of escape like it was salvation.
By day, I played healer.
By night, I unraveled.
And when sleep took me—when it finally came—he came too.
Deacon.
Not as the man I loved.
But as the ghost I couldn’t stop summoning.
He appeared in my dreams—
beautiful and unreachable,
like Heaven through a keyhole.
I didn’t fear the virus.
I envied it.
At least it made people feel something.
I was the only zombie in an outbreak of the living—
rotting before the panic ever began.