She didn’t know, so I made my way up to the next level after handing her and the other doctor inside some real food to eat. Clearing my way through the third floor, this was where it all started, most likely. The ICU probably had a terminal patient die, possibly leaving the nurses who abandoned them all in the first timeline to die horrible deaths, becoming zombies.

Oof, what bad luck. I pause as I reach the top of the third step and can’t help but yell out. “Damnit! I should have recorded that!” I lowered the volume to a more manageable level before I switched the CD to one of mine… My music taste was all over the fucking place. It could be Eminem, a song from the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, or 2000’s, a one-off song by like a thousand bands, classical music, an hour-long gaming soundtrack, hell, it could even be Elvis.

“Andre 3000, nice!” I could sing the entire song, but I was just going to hum it instead. It didn’t elude me how fucked up it was killing these people who were just alive to a soundtrack. One thing you don’t realize is how much you’re going to miss the music. Not much in the way of fun in the apocalypse, I guess. People were more worried about getting food and didn’t remember to bring their computer with the tens of thousands of songs on it. Even then, it would end up in a city leader's mansion.

I had a bunch of these boomboxes and a bunch of personal CD players. Vicky did most of the work with buying stuff to fill up our comfort and fun meters if we were SIMs. I've got to be honest, the game really nailed how uncomfortable you are without those things. I wasn’t going to be so sad, I’d rather cry than go to the bathroom or wake up in the middle of the night to cry, but still… It was closer than I’d like to admit. I wonder how many people off'ed themselves who wouldn’t have if they could just listen to some Dolly Parton or Fleetwood Mac.

It had to be a pretty high number. *Bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang*. I killed the five zombies who ran at me, and also didn’t get the memo that I was a murder machine at the moment. There was… Surprisingly less people than I thought there would be. I was thinking 4 or 5 hundred, but if all the floors were this empty, it would barely break a hundred and fifty.

Well, some might have left yesterday before the zombie outbreak started, braving the waist-high water to get home over staying in a hospital. Then some zombies left, and I killed about a dozen coming in. Yeah, I wasn’t really sure, I knew that soap and running water were two things I’d try to make happen wherever I ended up. I hated how stinky the end of the world really was, and I seemed to be the only one who cared about it still at the ten-year mark.

I step into the four-way of this floor, and my foot stops as I see visible frost crawling up the wall to my right. My instincts fire at me to duck, and I avoid an icicle impaling me through my brain as I do so. Looking over, I see a little silvery-blonde-haired girl zombie holding her hand up in my direction as another icicle begins forming in front of her… She was one of the ones who had a terminal illness… I regretted not taking more of them now.

I knew that gaining a power could heal some wounds, but I was almost certain it couldn’t cure incurable illnesses like cancer. I try to control her. It’s… Too difficult, the most I could do was make her aim falter. I guess the number of zombies I could control heavily depended on how high-quality the zombies were. She might even have a tier three core, which wasn’t a thing until about the second year of the apocalypse last time.

Before I gave up, I morphed into my zombie form for the first time… It felt… Odd, like I could still think, even more clearly than before, if I was being honest. But my emotions felt like they were heavily muted. If I stayed in this form for too long, I might become an unfeeling monster who only cared about growing more powerful… That was if I stayed in this form for a very long time though, I just loved pussy too much to forget about it any time soon.

Did I love Melissa, Vicky, and Lissa? I wasn’t sure, but I knew I liked them a lot right now. Maybe in a few months, or years, I could grow to love them like I did Sophie, but right now, we helped each other. I was going to keep them safe, and they were going to have sex with me; our relationship was mutual, except for Melissa, who already loved me.

Either way, the difficulty I had attempting to bind the zombie under my command had suddenly become much easier as I felt a similar spike in my ability to convert corpses into zombies or manipulate bones. At some point, I became aware that my body wasn’t breathing… And it didn’t need to be in this form. The little girl zombie fell in stride beside me as we more systematically walked through the halls, killing any zombie we saw attempting to hide from us.

After clearing everything on the third floor and before moving up to the fourth, I looked at her and prepared to attack if she fought off my control after swapping out of zombie mode. My body reverts as I take a ragged gasp of breath and feel my heart start pumping again. What a rush coming out of that form gave me. It was like experiencing a runner's high as my body's functions came back online.

I look at her and order her to do a clockwise spin before a counterclockwise spin, and she does so. Once the connection was formed, it was much easier to control them, I knew I could overburden the connections. If I lost control over one, I had the possibility of losing control over all of them at the same time. It was like holding a bunch of balloons and reaching for them after one slipped free; it was possible to keep the others, but I might lose them in the process of the one breaking free.

I could control twenty zombies at the moment, but I wasn’t going to try and take over more than ten just to be safe. I needed to learn all the ins and outs of the power. I was also only going for zombies with powers, like the girl I dubbed Elsa, as she had silvery blonde hair and ice powers. I’d put her age at seven. Seeing the young girl was one that died brought sadness to me, but I had seen much worse in my previous timeline. 

The thing with death is that sometimes a person's power activates after they die. It wasn’t very common, but it still could happen. What was more likely to happen was that the person would gain a power and then die and change into a zombie. Powers gave you better resistance to the virus, but it wasn’t complete immunity like I had. A powered person could be converted to a zombie while still living if he was bitten enough.

The Outkast song ended, and ‘How to save a life’ began to play. It was hard not to just sit down and feel the wave of nostalgia the song brought back. Almost a decade with no music, and I was about to cry over a song I hadn’t heard for almost fifteen years. The last time I heard this was right after I graduated, driving to Taco Bell with my friends.

It was the last time I felt like a kid, driving and being silly, singing full volume to a song while a car full of other guys sang along at the same volume. Just us being irresponsible because it was the last chance to. That was the last time I hung out with one of those friends because he moved away for a job. It was the end of an era… I smiled as I made it to the fourth floor. Who's going to stop me from doing it now? I began singing along at full volume. “WHERE DID I GO WRONG!? I LOST A FRIEND!”