After what felt like two weeks, and was actually ten minutes, I got the aspirin, dry swallowed six, went to the kitchen and made coffee. I dropped five ice cubes into the pot, poured a cup, and swallowed it in a gulp. Then I had the courage to storm the TV and turn it down.

Three cups of stimulant mud later, I noticed two fingers of bourbon left in the bottle. A little hair of the horse that kicked me, perfect. Thus fortified, I began to take stock of the gossip-wankers on the screen. Boston was in trouble, Portland, Maine was hopeful (lots of armed rednecks in Maine) and Manchester, New Hampshire was giving a pretty good fight. Though why anyone would fight for ManchVegas, I couldn’t say.

There was no news about the Portsmouth area, however. There had been no ships at the Navy Yard for months, and the few Marines there had mainly been recruiters. The Reserve and National Guard armories in Portsmouth were probably already overrun, because no one mentioned them at all. Still, I figured that if a fuck-up like me was doing this well, then someone else must be.

I remembered the barricaded stairs, turned off the TV, and listened. There were a few shufflers down there, probably the landlords’ family. They didn’t seem to be a danger to my makeshift wall.

I went to the fire escape window and looked out. There were about twenty corpses standing in the driveway, shuffling around, looking at their shoes, and hissing at each other when they collided. It looked like the last Goth Show I’d been to at Axis, in Boston. I thought it hilarious, all those kids standing around in black, their body language screaming “I’m Deader Than You Are!” I started laughing. The corpses heard it, and started moving toward the sound. They got to the wall of the house and started walking into it, looking up. They just kept bouncing off the wall, and making sounds like I had at the toilet earlier. This was even funnier. I laughed more. They got even more restless. A few more even started appearing from around the corner. None of them seemed to have fresh blood on them, so apparently no one had eaten recently.

Then one of them found the ladder. At first he just tried walking up, not using his hands. After three falls, he discovered his hands, and made about four rungs before slipping on the goo of his own fall-shredded palms, and wedging himself into the rungs of the ladder in such away that he couldn’t get out. None of the others could get past him to climb up, either.

I realized how lucky I had been all night, and began to think how to make a barricade for the window, without making it useless as a way in or out for the living.