It Figures by: Moongoddess After all the hard work to make herself into a sexy girl, all that anyone was interested in was her Braaaaiiiiinnnnssssss!

The polish on the fingernail was chipped; it was attached to a grimy finger that pressed the play button on the portable stereo. The Guitar line began and was joined by Drum and Bass…. The sound echoed down the alley…

She was never sure whether they could really hear or whether it was the vibrations from the driving bass line that drew them like flies to honey. ‘I wonder, if we ever get civilization back up and running, could I use all my observations as research toward a degree?’ she thought with a giggle.

‘Doctor Amanda Fischer, Zombioligist,’ sorta rolled off the tongue … damnit! Where were all the fucking shamblers tonight?! Now she was getting mad; last thing she wanted to do was leave the high ground and have to hunt them at street level. That meant gearing up and putting her ‘armor’ on. And it was a hot evening for early October. She sighed. Was it ironic that she was playing a cut from an album called ‘Raise the Dead’ to lure them to herself?

What was that… movement? She turned to her infrared camera… very little heat coming off the figure and the majority of it was in the primary motor cortex of the corpse. She made a note of the time and general condition of the zombie: relatively fresh, wasn’t particularly desiccated yet, probably a bite victim and not a reawakening. Tough looking guy, too. Amanda shook her head sadly.

She hit record on her cameras, settled herself behind the C14 Timberwolf and took careful aim… breathe in… hold…squeeze the trigger… The suppressor took some of the noise out of her shot, but it wasn’t the ‘phut’ noise you used to hear in movies and on TV. Yes! Clean shot… The body collapsed with the top half of its head missing. Pull the bolt back, push forward and reload. She sighed as she straightened up. She preferred the reawakened to the bite victims.

At least most of the reawakened resembled aliens or something, while the bite victims looked like pale people, neighbours, doctors, friends…family… Amanda turned away from that thought… it still haunted her. Nothing on her cameras; she relaxed and lit a cigarette. ‘Christ! This is the fucking world I inherited?’ she thought savagely. ‘This wasn’t in the life plan… find a nice guy, settle down, raise a family, grow old, die… and stay fucking dead!’ She took a deep drag. Nowhere was ‘survive zombie apocalypse, rebuild civilization’ in that plan.

There, to the right of her field of fire, several zeds… four or five REAs, fish in a barrel. Aim, pop, aim, pop... they went down like marionettes with their strings cut. Like playing Left 4 Dead as a boy. She sure didn’t look anything like that video game playing teen now. Amanda had realized around the age of fifteen that she wasn’t like any of the other guys she hung around with, and that she had never had anything in common with them… well, maybe the video games.

Her mom had accepted her pretty well right off. Her father had taken some time and he had mourned the loss of his son, but eventually welcomed his daughter. It was business as usual for the most part at home. She had talked to her doctor, who was trying as hard as she could to help Amanda, but she really had no knowledge of transgenderism, or gender dysphoria as it was listed in DSM IV. The doctor made calls and contacts at the University of Western Ontario, and soon Amanda had a psychiatrist helping her understand what she was going through.

Amanda started living as herself when she turned sixteen. She had told her friends and, as her psychiatrist had warned her, some abandoned her… that had hurt. The school board had been informed and she went back to school as Amanda. That was a difficult time, but she survived. Bullies tried to make her life miserable, but she could and did fight back; the slurs they tried rolled off her back... she wasn’t a fag, she was a girl. It was some of the other girls who tried hardest to hurt her, but Amanda knew who she was, inside and slowly, now outside as well. One of her best days had been when they were taunting her… the cheerleader types… near graduation and she stopped and pointed at each one in turn and said “your outer beauty is going to fade… your inner ugliness is forever.” And turned and walked away.

High school had not been all bad… she had made some friends, and her best friends stuck by her. Eventually people started to forget who she had been and focused on who she was. Amanda wasn’t stupid either; she got excellent grades and a lot of offers from a lot of Universities. She had options, and decided that U of T School of Medicine was where she wanted to go; she wanted to become a specialist in Gender and help others like herself. Something moved, distracting her from her thoughts. She looked through the scope to see some poor bastard running, trying to hold his intestines in. She could see the bite marks on his face and arms and took careful aim. He dropped, and the zeds that had pursued him converged to feed. She had a busy twenty minutes then, as the fresh kill drew more and more of them from the surrounding area.

A couple of the fresher shamblers took notice of her and started down toward her nest, so she grabbed the AR15 and took them out. Sometimes it seemed that they could think… just a little… when they were fresh; Amanda shuddered at the thought that there still might be a bit of the original people trapped in those decaying hulks. She shook herself. ‘They might have been people…human once, but now they’re just dangerous vermin.’ Amanda reminded herself.

U of T was great… no one knew her, just another face in the crowd. She worked hard through pre med and English, her major and minor, and took in all the campus had to offer. Staying active was fun and helped her look more like the young woman she was. Fencing, track, even target shooting with guns; knowing firearms made her feel safer in a big city. Small town girl, indeed. Her Psychiatrist referred her to a gender clinic in the city and she was on track to becoming fully herself. Her first four years had been heaven and she managed to keep an active social life too… she dated and went to parties and managed to keep her “secret” secret.

Between Amanda’s scholarships, various grants and bursaries, her education was almost free, which had been a blessing because only her reassignment surgery was covered under the province's health plan. She had that surgery as soon as she was approved and went to a clinic outside Montreal. As she healed from the complex surgery, she began to save for her cosmetic procedures. Amanda graduated at age 21, female down to her new birth certificate.

During her med school years, Amanda had a labiaplasty, a tracheal shave and a “boob job”. Not stupid big, just an average size for her height and weight, a largish b cup. She was happy with her girls and her body and, according to her psych classes; she was one of the few women who were. ‘Guess I had to work harder for it,’ she thought after class that day. ‘I had to fight to get what was handed to them.’ Amanda also started dating more frequently at med school, but didn’t ever have a serious relationship with any one partner. One of her partners had been a bit of a survivalist and took her to his cottage / bunker. John was certain that civilization would collapse in 2012; he was the one who taught her everything she knew about automatic assault weapons, sniper weapons and explosives. ‘And when you think about it, he was only off on the date by about 24 months’ she mused wryly.

Amanda was twenty five and a newly minted intern psychologist when things started to get weird. Scattered reports began coming in from all over of some kind of psychosis causing virus that was transferrable through bodily fluid transference. The U.S. Center for Disease Control was discounting the story, and the World Health Organization had not even taken official notice. They could have nipped this apocalypse in the bud if they had investigated, but it was epidemic before they even started to move their bureaucratic asses. It was a global pandemic by Z day… the tipping point had been reached. The zeds outnumbered the living and no one knew where the initial infection came from. There were theories, of course, all put forward by survivors who heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend… germ warfare, lab accident, mutated superbug and so on right up to aliens, magic, bad hamburgers, divine wrath, Gaia deciding to purge its parasitic human infestation...

Amanda saw her first shambler in an autopsy suite. It kind of looked like one of the cadavers from med school, except this time the corpse was strapped down and fighting to get off the table. It was horrifying, and kept trying to bite the personnel until its head was secured and then made this low continuous groaning noise. It became quiet when a section of its skull was removed and a tissue sample was taken. It was still fighting to get out of its bonds when a full autopsy was completed. The room was cleared and a single gunshot was fired. All the tests showed a kind of bacterial mass that spread through the corpse but reacted only with necrotic tissue. It ate living tissue in Petri dishes, but stopped when the cells died. The cells then reanimated in a grotesque parody of life functions, the highest concentration of the bacteria would settle in the brain tissue, somehow controlling the corpse.

‘That was about all we learned before things went to hell,’ Amanda thought bitterly. ‘Fat load of good I was doing at the hospital anyways. Last thing they needed was a shrink. Bio anatomy came in handy though, figuring out the best spot to shoot them to maximize brain splatter.’ She smiled and lit another smoke. She and John had sped out of Toronto in his humvee to his survival bunker. Amanda learned a lot about both the organism and fighting the shambling dead in that two week period. John lasted a only a week before he got bitten… some macho bullshit about hunting them. First, any bite, no matter how small, was a death sentence. Twenty hours after you were bitten, you died… three hours later, you were a genuine George A. Romero zombie.

Second thing Amanda learned quickly was it was no picnic for the infected… it was gruesome and painful and mercy killing was a kindness. Third, there wasn’t an established lifespan for the organism, but the corpses would dry up and become less mobile and more flammable. Those were the easiest to take down. Other lessons? Guns jammed, swords didn’t need to be reloaded but required you be elbows deep in the action so you have to watch being swarmed, and flame throwers weren’t hard to make but shouldn't be used near a safehouse (oops). Amanda popped three more REAs and a fresh kill. Killing John’s corpse had been emotional, but she hadn’t hesitated, nor had Amanda hesitated to clear as much of the bunker out and load it into the humvee.

“I never should have tried to go home,” she sighed and said out loud. “Should have known that no one would survive.” Home had been horrifying… having to ‘kill’ all the people she had known growing up… but she learned so much about fighting the things, and that taught her to be cautious and quiet, to take the high ground and pop the skulls. Anything else just slowed them down a little. Amanda looked down at her kill zone… it was getting dark, and even up in her blind she wouldn’t be safe. She closed the sheet metal covered shutters and secured them tightly and shut everything down. Amanda took a final look around and shut the door behind her for the night, locking up the guard tower at what had once been Kingston’s prison for women.

The place had been a mess when she arrived and was terrifying. She had avoided major population centers for the most part, and most small town held few survivors, but she needed ammunition and supplies, and a town with seven penal facilities and two others nearby should have a couple of armories to raid. Amanda stumbled across P4W quite by accident. It was the only prison that wasn’t left open and abandoned, and that was simply because it had been closed for ten years before Z day occurred. Getting in had not been easy and that pleased her. If it was hard for her, it would be nearly impossible for a shambler. It took the better part of two months, but summer was harder on shamblers than on her.

Amanda had a safe haven from the Zeds. She waited for others to come and find haven with her.

Amanda had power and food and water, Amanda had weapons and ammunition and explosives. She waited, six months she waited.

Amanda was alive, Amanda was a survivor. Today was the same as all the others: no one came, no one but the walking dead.

After everything she had achieved in her life, becoming the woman she was, Amanda was utterly alone.

“It figures…” She started to weep.