That evening, Seph felt completely drained and had no desire to cook. She ordered Chinese food through Panda Express, tossed together a simple salad, and quickly fried two eggs with perfectly runny yolks. She arranged her dinner on the small IKEA coffee table in the living room and sat down on the carpet to eat.
Absentmindedly, she switched on the old television, flipping through channels until settling on the news. As she ate, Seph half-watched the trivial stories playing out on the screen: a man from some state breaking into a house just to shave the cat bald before leaving; a woman walking into a store at nine in the morning, pretending to be the manager and promptly firing all the employees; two nudists parading down a street, who then got into a fistfight with an exhibitionist; even more bizarrely, police spent an entire afternoon chasing away an alligator that had decided to take a leisurely stroll downtown.
By the time Seph had finished her noodles, nothing particularly important had appeared on the news. As she prepared to get up and clear away the dishes, something on the screen caught her eye. She stopped, remote in hand, halfway to switching the TV off.
The news showed police arresting a group of drug dealers. One of them displayed alarming strength, tackling a police officer to the ground and requiring four or five men to finally subdue him. The camera zoomed in for a close-up: the dealer's face was ghostly pale, eyes unfocused, dark bruising around his eyes, nose, and lips, and his movements were oddly stiff and unnatural. To anyone else, this might have seemed like symptoms of advanced drug addiction.
But Seph knew immediately that this man wasn't a drug addict—he was a zombie. Having lived through this nightmare once before, she recognized those features instantly. Although zombies might superficially resemble addicts at the final stages of substance abuse, their strength was another matter entirely. Drug addicts became physically weak, unable to muster such force; they certainly wouldn't require a handful of strong adults to restrain them.
The screen switched abruptly to a different story about organized crime and prostitution raids. Seph quickly switched off the television, tossing the remote onto the table. She didn't even bother to clear her dishes. Instead, she returned to the couch and sat down heavily. The zombie she had seen on TV shattered the brief period of calm she'd been enjoying. She had believed she still had a full year to calmly prepare, but it was now clear she was mistaken.
The zombies had already begun to appear. Their numbers were small, so most people hadn't noticed. Even when they did, they mistook it for drug-induced behavior and alerted authorities, who quietly took control of the situation. Outwardly, the city remained bustling and orderly, but it was like an apple left too long on a shelf—shiny on the outside, rotten beneath the surface.
No one knew better than Seph how precarious things had become. Perhaps, hidden in some nearby corner, zombies were already lurking, watching crowds like predators, selecting their next victims.
It was undeniable—the apocalypse had quietly begun.