Everything was perfect.

So I really wasn't expecting it to happen again right then, at the worst moment it could have possibly chosen. Julie's front pressed against the wall, her slender back warm and soft sliding against my torso. I press my face into her neck and inhale her scent deeply, laying soft kisses along her shoulder and up her neck, noises of enjoyment escaping her mouth so quietly I barely hear them. But I can hear, much better than I had when I was Dead, sharper and smoother, like someone has opened the glass window they'd been speaking behind for years, and it's helping speed things along very well. I can feel it nearing, that pressure building up in my groin... In my stomach... Now it's...in my chest, and I burp a little on accident. Ugh, gross, I hope she was too distracted to hear me. I shake my head a little and grab her waist, moving it quicker in unison with my hips, her little noises becoming louder as we increase in speed. I feel the pressure low again and go faster yet, leaning my head backwards, closing my eyes as I look toward the ceiling. She grips one of my hands with hers, digging with her nails into my flesh... and I feel it in my stomach again. A horrible, cramping sensation this time, like my stomach is collapsing in on itself. It catches me off guard and I falter in my movement but continue, slower. 'Don't stop...' she whispers, so I don't. I keep going, ignoring the sensation in my belly. I almost think it's gone away when it finally happens – I vomit.

Horrible, black globs of death come shooting uncontrollably from me. I manage to miss most of her body but splatter all over her yellow wall, ruining paintings and staining frames. Awful, dark red and partially clotted, I manage to extract my body from hers and push her to the side as I fall on my arms, bare naked, into the pile of crimson liquid. I think Julie is screaming but I can't be sure, my ears are clogged like I'm underwater, my brain only able to concentrate on my esophagus contracting and expanding, emptying the liquid out of wherever in me it had been stored. It's such a painful feeling, unlike anything I remember of being sick before, like instead of fighting a virus in me my body decided to push it out in one fell swoop, taking some of my blood and parts of my organs along with it. Tears drip down my face into the pile, and I open my eyes when I think it's finally over. I cough, and more still comes out of my lungs this time. I take a deep wheezing breath before I notice Julie is talking to me. I look over at her and she's kneeling with me, in the bloody mess, eyes wide with her hand in my hair. I open my jaw and pop my ears, sound finding its way into my brain again at an alarming volume. She is still yelling, out of panic I think, asking over and over what was wrong, if I was okay, what the fuck was happening.

"S...Sorry, Julie," I reply, shakily sitting up onto my knees.

She shakes her head fast and hard, "What do you mean sorry? What's happening, why is there blood in your stomach, R?" God, she doesn't think I ate someone, does she? Thinks I had some late night flash back to my former self, decided to have one last bite while I was out?

"Don't know," I reply, hoping my honesty is apparent. I stand and she follows, grabbing my face on both sides and uses a thumb to wipe my mouth clean. I must look like I did way back then, on that first day we met, chin dripping with Perry's blood, brain matter splattered all over myself. She looks worse than shell-shocked, standing there stroking my face and staring blankly down at my bloody torso.

"...Julie?" She snaps her head up and pulls me by my wrist into the bathroom, starting the shower, pushing me in it while it's still cold. I cringe, but don't resist, running the water into my mouth, rinsing and spitting repeatedly, trying to get the taste out. I hear her shuffling around in the kitchen and catch a glimpse of her in the hallway carrying dirty towels and a bucket. I see Nora follow her in, apparently awake now, and hear her scream, too. I can't make out what words are said but I see Nora run back down the hallway and hear the front door open and shut. She bailed, probably too sickened by the site to help Julie. It's five in the morning on her birthday night and she's cleaning up my mess. Guilt hits me in the chest and I try to hurry and finish so I can help her but I find myself in a coughing fit, blood splattering all over the while tile walls. Panic starts to well in my chest and breathing becomes harder, my head light and suddenly woozy. The water has finally begun to warm and it makes me unbearably tired, forcing me to sit down, hitting my head on the wall when I move too quickly.

"R!" I jolt up suddenly, confused and groggy, laying on the edge of the tub, wondering when I had fallen asleep,.

"I'm okay," I say in the most reassuring voice I could muster, but it comes out of me like a sick puppy. She gets in the shower with me and squirts a large glob of bath gel in her hand, cleaning first herself with it before kneeling down and covering my body in the floral scented goo. I can't seem to force my head up, so I just rest my head in my arms as she cleans my slumped body, using a cup to pour hot water over me.

"Are you feeling any better," she asks as she rinses my hair. I shake my head. She is straddling me, but I can't manage to feel anything but nauseous. She pushes my head up, pulling my eyes open with her thumbs and looks into them with scrutiny, brows furrowed together hard. I manage to force a weak smile and touch her face. I'm going for sweet but she ignores my gesture and shuts the water off.

"C'mon, were bringing you to the hospital, and Nora's meeting us there," she says as she towels herself off. I jerk my head back up at this.

"No, Julie, please? They'll just send me down to the lab and start doing all kinds of test on me and it's your birthday and..." I stop when I notice she's left the room. It takes every once of energy I have but I manage to stand, on shaky limbs, and get out of the shower. I find her in her room already half dressed. She bends down to grab her pants and I grab her arms, pushing her gently to the wall and pinning her there, forcing her to look at me.

"I don't want to go there, Julie, please. Not tonight." my eyes plead with her and she rolls her eyes in return, pushing me off her.

It's another twenty minutes or so of arguing and pleading and I'm sitting in the lobby of the Stadium hospital staring at the floor. Even at this time of night the room is full of people, but it's dead silent. Every single person is staring at me, some with the same frightened looks that I was given when I was dead, others with fascination, curiosity, and the rest pretending that they're not. I seem to have become something of a legend around town, so in return I tend to keep myself hidden. It is hard, though, to remain invisible in a crowded room. Julie is filling out paperwork next to me, ignoring everyone with pursed lips, only speaking to ask me a question or see how I'm feeling. I insist that I'm okay, and I think I might be now. My hands no longer shake and, besides the hollow feeling in my stomach, I feel almost normal.

After what could have been hours or days of uncomfortable silence a nurse finally comes to get me, smiling falsely to all her early morning patients, and the three of us walk in the dimly lit hallway to ward a back room. I briefly wonder where Nora the nurse has run off to when I see her across the phone bank, pulling a scrub top on and grabbing a blood pressure meter. Sphygmometer, the word flows behind my eyes suddenly, a flash back into days of medical terminology and studying anatomy. I remember reading a copy of Nora's once, when I was dead, but this doesn't flow from the same time, doesn't have that blurry but readable texture to it. This comes dreamlike into my head, like something from another life, or perhaps my old life, the only part of me that has gone unhealed.

The nurse doesn't speak, she doesn't ask me questions or smile reassuringly anymore, she takes my temperature, looks in my eyes and checks my pulse silently, her facade washed away with morning coffee. Julie stands in the corner glaring at her. I give her a questioning look but her gaze doesn't leave the nurses face until she's gone from the room and we're left alone. She hops up on the table next to me with the clipboard still in her hand and fans through the pages until she reaches the final page, which contains only two words and two square boxes: Alive and Dead. Underlined and circled in red marker, the word Dead is checked. I shrug.

"Don't worry, Julie, technically I fall under the category. I'm sure they mean it as previously. Besides, why are you offended, ashamed of your zombie boyfriend finally?" I smirk and squeeze her shoulder. She pushes me gently.

"Rude! How could you say that about me? I just think that it shouldn't be so black and white here, in a hospital of all places. It's not simply live and dead anymore, they need to leave room for the in between." She pulls the pen out from under the clip and writes, in large, red letters, 'Post-Death', drawing and checking a box parallel.

"Oh good, I'm a whole new category – Post. That'll go over well, 'Hey you, yeah, Post guy!' I simply cannot wait for that one to catch on. I'll be getting the newspapers in no time," I say, calmly pulling the clipboard from her fingers and placing it on the table across from us.

The door creaks open then, scrubbed up Nora coming through it pulling a large metal cart full of medical devices I've never seen or heard of before, in this life or the last apparently. Julie hops down to stand next to the cart, fingering wordlessly through the drawers and bins.

"Quit touching, butterfingers," Nora mutters quietly as she pulls the blood pressure meter up my wrist and arm. I look at the ceiling as the familiar pressure consumes my arm, leaving my hand tingling. I think she might be doing it wrong but I don't say anything. My episodes have nothing to do with blood pressure, and the ceiling is far more concerning, the cracks so deep and wide that I am genuinely concerned that it may collapse any second. She does a dozen or so more tests on me after this that I have no idea if they were done correctly or not, but it doesn't matter because I know that the only outcome to this scenario ends up with me in an MRI machine in the lab. I ask her what each one is and does, it's medical and common name, if it was made before the Dead or after, and how they work. She only has about half the answers I'm looking for but the information is satisfying, the words palpable and hearty on my tongue, my mind readily accepting them and placing their information neatly near the front. I start to wonder what my profession might have been before I died, if I was possibly a nurse or a doctor or studying to be a doctor. Possibly a phlebotomest, a dental hygienist, or maybe even a vet tech, although I imagine I would have more animal science locked away if that were the case.

I have wires stuck to seven different parts of my stomach leading into a square, metal box that displays green letters on a black screen when Julie speaks.

"You sure seem interested in all this stuff, R," she's sitting on the empty table next to me, holding her chin with one hand and touching my hair with the other. I can tell she's beyond bored, but I haven't heard a single complaint yet. I'm grateful, knowing that if she asked I would excuse her immediately, but I don't want her to leave, don't want to be shipped off to the lab alone. I'm no child, and even in my most terrified moments I can stand tall, but every time I see that white lab coat, a syringe with an off colored liquid, hear them speak to each other in hushed voices, I always get the feeling that they won't be releasing me at the end of the day.

"I think I was in the medical profession. You know, before the whole dying thing happened." She raises her brows to this.

"Really?" she asks, her voice piqued with interest, "You're starting to remember things from your past then?" I shake my head.

"No, not really," her face falls a bit at this, and she goes back to playing with my hair. "More like certain things sound... familiar. No memories, yet." It wasn't a complete lie, but I don't want to tell her the full truth, not here at least, not now. I trust Julie with my life, and Nora close to it but... it's everyone else I worry about. I don't need to be giving them any more reasons to run tests on me.

That has turned out to be my profession here in the Stadium – lab rat. Well, they call me 'Test Subject 001' and claim free will to leave but I've yet to push that right, not knowing whether they are held to good standards. What's one less zombie if it benefits the human race, I guess?

It's a long time before I'm off the table, well into late afternoon before I actually see a doctor. Julie is somewhere in the hospital on a mission to find food when a man in gray slacks and button down shirt enters the room. I sit up straight, making sure to act as human as possible: look him in the eye, deep breaths, little sniffles. Julie may have changed my information in the nurses original paperwork, but he's thumbing through Nora's test results and I do not know what is written on them. I don't need my medical doctor thinking that I am anything less than a living human right now. A fully functioning human who pukes up oily slop every few hours. After a few minutes in uncomfortable silence, I clear my throat. It seems to distract him from his papers, glancing over at me briefly before looking back down, frowning. He slaps the folder down suddenly, surprising me and making Nora jump in the seat she has taken in the corner, ripping the stethoscope from his neck and checking my chest for sound. He grabs the otoscope, my mind pouring the word into my vocabulary, and looks in my eyes for a long minute.

He pulls back and frowns at me for another minute, staring. Nora looks between us uncomfortably before he finally speaks. "You're dead." I frown, confused.

"You have been fucking dead the entire time!" I glance at Nora and she looks as baffled as I feel.

"I was, sir. Is that... a problem?" he scoffs, ripping through the paperwork again.

"Every single sheet in here says you are alive when, clearly, you are not."

"Sir?" Nora asks, startled when he flings the door open in response.

"You, young miss, have wasted hours upon hours of this hospital's time doing tests made for the living, not the dead!" She stands, eyes wide, and holds the clipboard in front of herself defensively. He continues, his voice raising in volume, "If you have learned so little here that you would be so completely incompetent as to not recognize a live test from dead one then I don't know what you are doing here. Both of you, out of my office and sight. Take him to the lab!" he yells. Julie is at the door now, peering in from the hallway with a half opened cup of dehydrated noodles in her hands.

The doctor turns to leave but is blocked by Julie, staring at him with wide eyes.

"What's the problem?" her tone is curious, but I can feel the ferocity in her voice, on the very edge of tipping over. I fear what would happen if he pushes her over the edge, the long hours spent in the hospital obviously wearing her patience thin. He tried to move past her but she places a firm hand on his chest, shoving him back. "What is the problem?" she asks again firmly.

The doctor looks aghast, and the tension is suddenly palpable, the entire room feeling suddenly hot.

"And who, might I ask, are you?" he asks, inclining his head disdainfully.

Here it comes, my least favorite part of the day – Julie's detonation, when she reaches the end of her very short fuse and topples over the edge of discomfort into furious. She stands very tall, rigid and tense, her eyes burning into his.

"I, sir," she spits, "am Senior Officer Cabernet, second in command to Colonel Rosso. Your patient is Private R and he is under my command. You are required by law to surrender the Private's medical information over to his commanding officer. That being said, you might be wanting to tell me what the problem is here." She cocks her head, waiting for a response. The doctor looks at her for a while, contemplating whether or not to believe her words.

Hesitantly, he replies, "Well, Senior Officer Cabernet, it seems that we have had a miscommunication within the staff. Someone has tampered with the paperwork and my nurses have performed medical tests specifically designed for the living on my patient who is clearly a deceased. The Dead belong in the lab where they perform specific tests designed for them." The sentence, while very obviously forced out, came out very direct. The racism within it was almost unnoticeable, but Julie saw it as well as I. This doctor does not help the Dead.

"Private R is not deceased, he is post-Death and making a fine recovery."

He sighs, "The Dead do not recover, Senior Officer. I have spent years in the lab, testing hundreds upon hundreds of zombies and they have all determined that the Dead are incurable. No amount of medicine will help them, and their sudden second-life is a fluke. The patient's symptoms have made it very clear: the Dead will stay dead, one way or another. The only place for him now is the lab, there is nothing more we can do here. Now if you will excuse me I have real patients to attend to. Nurse," he directs at Nora, "Please escort Mr... R to the lab."

Julie salutes, watching him with a hard look as he walks down the hall and around the corner. Nora stands and holds her fist out to Julie, who taps it mildly with her first.

"Nice bullshitting," Nora says quietly, picking the clipboard up from the desk and transferring the papers into the manilla envelope in her hand, "I don't think he bought it, though." I sit dumbly and watch the girls, both standing quietly, thinking to themselves. I would just give in and suggest we visit the lab but I know it's likely to set Julie off again.

I hop down from the table and wrap my arms around her neck, touching her forehead lightly with my lips. Nora leaves the room quietly, closing the door behind her.

She loosely puts her arms around my waist and we stand in silence. I think about where we should be, where I promised her we would go today, and cringe. Another day of her mother's grave left lonely and forgotten to bury into her mind and into my guilty conscience.

"Let's go," I say, pulling Julie towards the door.

Stars are beginning to flood through the cloud cover by the time we've reached the curve in the hill, the small upward rise of land near the eastern edge adorned crooked rows of grey and brown markers. The area is empty, leaving us alone with the graves. Julie stands staring at one particular gravestone, clutching a single dandelion tightly in her hands. We are well into spring now, the warm air pushing weeds and flowers out of the ground. Most are either picked or trampled early on, but this particular flower must have been waiting for this occasion to bloom because it was found in our front yard when we arrived home. Julie cried when I presented it to her, but I think it was the overwhelming pressure of today at fault and not the innocent plant. I wonder what is going through her head as I stand and watch her silent interaction with her mother; her silence in the last hour has me weary, and I wonder how long before she reaches her breaking point with me.

I wonder, too, about what is happening to me. Could it be that the virus within me has not gone, that what I thought was a cure was simply a fluke – a brief period of time that my body resided on the winning side of the battle, only to once again be overcome? Will I recede into my former self once more? Maybe it will be more gradual than last time, a slower heart rate leading to a colder body temperature, my hair will stop growing, my cuts will stop bleeding until I halt. Corpse once more, my mind will turn to mush, my vivid images and memories of the past weeks gone, vanished, scribbled out and tossed away in my garbage can of lost memories within my head. My hear suddenly races, the though scaring me in a way I have not felt in this life yet. I begin to sweat, and my breathing catches. What if everything I have been through, everything I have built with my beautiful girlfriend and my wonderful home and my new friends and memories will vanish, giving way to the sickness inside of me? I do not think there could be a more terrible punishment. Is it my sentence, what I get for the crimes I have committed during my new life? Or is it simply that my body is done fighting, that it is laying down to give in to easier urges, taking a break from fighting and letting it consume me again? Everything is easier when you give up, but seldom is it worth it.

I unfold the red blanket in my arms to distract myself, walking over to Julie's place mark and laying the blanket out by her feet, patting the seat next to me. She looks at the spot for a long time before deciding to oblige, placing the wilted flower gently on the stone block and taking her seat. Summer is around the corner, but the air is still chilled and the clouds suggest precipitation in the near future. I curl the blankets edge up and over her shoulders, handing over the loaf of cheap bread while I open the old jar of peanut butter we discovered on our last trip out of town. The jelly we use is kitchen-made in the cafeteria in the Stadium. It's not very sweet or tasty, but it does balance out the sticky texture of the peanut butter and adds needed calories. She makes her sandwich with the enthusiasm of a child on timeout; I don't know if it's where we are or my new found sickness but I can tell she's somewhere else right now, somewhere dangerous. I remain silent and eat my sandwich, the meal tasting blander than usual.

We walk home in silence, the streets empty but for a few homeless post-zombie stragglers that haven't quite meshed back into society yet. M is waiting outside our door without a key looking slightly perplexed. He has been staying with us in Mr. Grigio's room on and off for the past few weeks when he isn't staying at Nora's. We made the agreement that some nights we needed to ourselves, but tonight is obviously not going to be one of those nights, so I let him in without a word. We share a look when he notices Julie's face and I shrug, the energy required to even begin telling today's story far gone right now.

When I enter our room the lights are off and she is already in bed under the covers, facing the wall. I strip down to boxers and join her, laying far enough to my side that I don't touch her and stare at the ceiling. Her aversion to me is not only annoying but hurtful. My heart resides in my stomach and as hard as I try I can't get my heart to stop beating so painfully. Have I begun to reverse, began the process once more so that I will wake up some morning with the urge to gnaw on my girlfriend's flesh? Does she wonder the same thing? Maybe I am thinking too hard on it, it is possible I am just ill. The flu is one of the highest causes of death within the Stadium, even with the lab's requirement of the flu vaccine amongst all of the residents. I got my shot the first day I became a living citizen, but many people still catch it. Either way, the painful rejection is causing me anxiety, and I turn to my side and pull Julie towards me. She does not pull away as I had expected, but leans into me, lacing her fingers with mine and pulling my arms tightly around her. I smile a goofy grin and my stomach's wrenching, anxious pain retreats immediately. What I had mistaken for anger at me I now realize to be something else, and I hear the little sniffle now, her telling sign. For being such a spit-fire tough girl, when we're alone and she is within safe walls it always comes out. But she is hiding her sorrow from me this time, likely for my benefit. She must know I am terrified as well. Her breathing steadies, and I follow her in sleep soon after, the exhaustion of the day finally having won over my body.

A/N: after the beginning paragraphs this chapter seems a bit slow but it'll speed up again soon.. and I got tired of it just sitting in my word processor so here it is.