Job Assignments: Riley

Shortly before the army men came, I went down to the pit to talk to Mother's vacant body.

I like to imagine she can still hear me ... maybe she's just trapped inside, you know?

That actually seems kind of horrifying, in retrospect. I don't like that idea after all. But the point stands - I went to talk to Mother.

She'd moved.

That was ... unexpected.

I found her laying in the ashes of the fire. I'd never bothered to clean it up - this pit was supposed to be a grave after all.

She wasn't breathing anymore, and she'd wilted, her skin turning dull and brown.

So that was that. Mother was truly dead.

With the thugs' grudging help, I put a fence around the pit, and chained it shut so that nobody could get down there.

It was a grisly memory, one I'd prefer to forget.

So the military men came, and told us who would be doing what. If they noticed that it was only two of us now, they didn't comment.

I looked scrawny, felt scrawny - but maybe they saw something in me that I didn't, because they picked me to join the military. They told Casey he would be part of some kind of Morale Unit - but he plucked one note on Mother's old guitar, and apparently it was just too awful for them. There was an opening at the school as well - something I found funny, to be honest - and the commanding officer barked an order - he'd be working there, looking after other peoples' children.

He'd be watching them carefully while they were outside doing their mandatory physical training - since he was bigger and stronger than I was, he was better suited to protect them from the zombies than I was.

Father mentioned the zombies, didn't he?

Apparently the 'frothing lunatics' - as he called them - were the product of an off strain of vampirism. It was highly contagious and very lethal, and it took root in the human population sometime before Father escaped his school. It started at the school. According to Father's notes, he later discovered that it was part of something called the Lazarus project - a plan to allow humanity to live forever. Only it backfired, and instead of providing eternal youth and power, it killed its victims and raised them as the mindless undead.

One other thing of note: Father says he was bitten once while doing a report, and it was completely harmless - to plants, like us.