I want to say that waking up every morning with an erection and never being able to do anything about it is the worst part, but… that’s fucking stupid. I guess when I think about it, every part is the worst part.

When I open my eyes and everything is pitch black, that’s the worst part, too. When I’m not sure if I can get up and walk around without stepping on some ungrateful bitch, that’s the worst part. Oh, and I really have to pee, which means opening the pantry again. That’s definitely the worst part. I reach into my pocket, but not before jiggling my elbow around; it doesn’t bump anyone, so I know no one is too crowded up against me. I feel the lighter in my hand, but I don’t pull it out; instead, I let my hand linger over to my morning cock and run the side of my knuckle along the shaft through the fabric of my pocket. A thought hits me, and I lay motionless for a second to listen to my surroundings. There are some snores, and someone shifts in the leather chair, but I think I might be the only one up right now at whatever the hell hour it is. There’s something to consider: does such a thing as “time” really even exist anymore? But there’s no time to pursue that thought as I wrap my palm around my erection and start slowly rubbing it.

“Is anyone else awake?”

I let out a strained groan that I only at the last possible moment stop from being me yelling “Fuck” as loud as I can in annoyance. I stand by my original assessment: this is the fucking worst part.

“Yeah, I’m up. Is that you, Care?”

“No, it’s Laura.”

The annoyance in my sister-in-law’s voice enrages me. “Fuck you, too, bitch. You weren’t the one I wanted to talk to, either.” I think that, but don’t say it. I’m holding a lot in already this morning. “I’m just trying to find the lighter. I’ll get the candles going in a sec.”

Some of the snores have stopped since we started talking, and I guess everyone else is waking up, too. I grab the lighter my hand initially searched for and start feeling the area behind me. I always try to settle into a spot just down from the chest Carrah keeps the candles on so I have as easy access as possible in the morning, but sometimes I roll a good bit away from it while I’m sleeping on this god damn floor. If I had known I’d been sleeping here for an extended period of time, I’d have sprung for some thicker carpeting. My decision that our finished basement didn’t need the berber carpet that Carrah wanted? Yeah, that’s the worst part, too.

“Did you find it yet? I need to pee.”

I swear to fucking god, bitch, I’mma eat you my damn self if you don’t shut the hell up. Luckily, I feel one of the thick glass cylinders on the chest. “Yeah, just give me a sec here…” I flick the lighter and the room lights up a bit, enough for me to see the trio of wicks in the candle. I get them all lit and decide against lighting the rest of the candles just yet. Might as well let everyone who’s still asleep get some more rest.

“Where’s my towel at?”

I roll my eyes and hope my wife’s sister doesn’t see, even in the low light the candle gives. If anyone in the world would be able to see it and raise a fuss, it’d be her. “It’s over there somewhere, Laura. I got the light on, so I’m sure you can find it.”

She huffs as she gets out of my leather recliner and walks back towards the pantry. She rifles through the assorted towels and rags, not paying any attention to the ones she is knocking on the floor like the selfish bitch she is. I see her finally grab one and turn to the pantry. She stops, and I can tell it’s because she’s bracing herself. Hell, I actually feel bad for her, too, but we all gotta do it. She finally opens the door, pink towel covering her face, and rushes through. “Shit! God! The towel barely helps anymore!” I hear her exclaim as she closes the pantry.

I try not think too much about what she’s dealing with in there. Like a lot of things, that pantry is only a temporary solution; a stop-gap. But it’s all we got. That’s when the scent from the candle hits me. Mocha. Of course I’d fucking pick that one in the dark right? It’s not that I dislike the smell—just the opposite, really. I miss real coffee. Not that we don’t have any here, but we’re running out fast, just like with everything else. I miss going to Starbucks and getting something besides these generic grounds we throw in the pot that just taste like tar and ash since all the milk went bad. I want a caramel macciato, and screw you if you think that’s a girl drink. Nothing wrong with wanting my caffeine to taste good.

I wrestle with the idea of lighting some more candles to go with the mocha one. On one hand, maybe it will dull my desire for some flavored coffee. On the other hand… it ends up being a god damn cacophony of smells, and I’m going to have to deal with that shit all day when everybody wants as much light as possible. Just not ready for the watering eyes and assaulted nostrils yet.

“Are you all right in there, Laura?” I hear my wife, Carrah, call out. I wonder how long she’s been awake.

“No!” I immediately can tell Laura’s holding her breath and covering her nose in the pantry. “I’ve never wanted a pee to end so much in my life!”

I hear the sound of a muffled male laugh from one of the other bodies near me. With the limited light of just the one candle, I can’t quite make out who it was, but I wish I could tell them I feel the same way.

“We’ve really got to do something about that room, Andre.”

No shit (well, that in itself actually would be a solution, though an incredibly unrealistic one). It’s not like any of us want the damn pantry to be slowly filling up every time any of us has to go to the bathroom, but no one’s got any better idea. “Yeah, I know. We’ll have to think of something with the group,” I say, noncommittally. At least this way it sounds like I agree with her without actually putting me on-the-spot of having to solve any problems.

“It’s too bad we can’t ventilate that room to, like, outside or something.” Apparently my cousin Marcus is awake and already offering up his worthless, mealy-mouthed crap.

“Yeah, too bad we can’t knock a wall down or anything and let the outside in.” I want him to think I’m empathizing—he’s not a bad guy, just a little whiny and clueless—but I worry my voice comes out a bit condescending. Eh, fuck it. I don’t really care.

Marcus was actually the first one to get to our house all those days ago, but that makes sense considering he just lived next door to begin with. At the time, I don’t think any of us thought we’d turn into some god-forsaken refuge for damn-near everyone we know.

The pantry door slams shut, and my focus is back on Laura, who is gagging and wiping her mouth with the handtowel. “That bucket is disgusting,” she laments, “I need some water to wash my hands.”

I jump up. “No! We can’t be wasting water on that. Just use the paper towels, we have, like, eighty rolls.”

“Andre, I need to wash my fucking hands. I’ve got to eat with them, and I’ll probably get dysentery or something.”

“What is this, the fucking Oregon Trail? Dysentery? You’re fine; just wipe them off. Hold them over a candle to burn off the germs or something. Fuck if I care. Just don’t waste our water on that shit.”

“We should be so lucky.” I look over my shoulder to see my college roommate Aidan cramming his pillow and afghan under the chest for the day. “At least on the Oregon Trail they could move around and go hunt or whatever,” he continues. “They weren’t stuck in a basement.”

“Yeah, but they had bandits, too,” I answer. “Can you imagine if we woke up one day and there was a note that said ‘Zombies stole three loaves of bread while you were asleep!’. At least they can’t get to us like that.”

“Are the oxen okay, though? I haven’t seen them in days.”

I laugh; Aiden and I are used to living together, so with the exception of the added stress of everything, we tend to get along just fine. He also managed to bring a lot of water and canned food with him, which is more than I can say for some people that rushed over here. I scan the room to see who else might be getting up, and I see Carrah looking down at her cellphone again. I don’t know how many times a day she’s going to look at that thing like the battery is going to miraculously return to life. Not that it matters; there wasn’t any reception before it died anyway; not for any of our phones. I think I heard that in a tragedy, cell phones become useless because everyone tries to use them, so… I dunno.. the airwaves get crowded with cell activity? Fuck, I don’t know. I’m not a fucking phone scientist, I’m a foreman. Or, hell, I was a foreman. I don’t even know what I am now.

“Is there… can you get through?”

Laura sees that Carrah’s on the phone again, and I guess she isn’t smart enough to realize that it’s something my wife does just out of habit now. Or maybe she’s just hoping for the best for the both of them.

Carrah sets the blank phone back down on top of our dresser. “No. I was just… looking. But it’s still out.”

No one says much of anything after that. The five of us are the only ones up for a while after that, but everyone gets up in time and we end up lighting all the candles. I swear to god, these things are going to give me lung cancer. Then that’d be the worst part. After the first few days without power, all I cared about was that I was going to have to scrub the walls down to get all the damn soot off of them when everything went back to normal. Now? I don’t think about things going back to normal so much. And when it comes to the candles we have going for most of the day, all I think about the soot is that it’s covering my lungs. My parents smoked for a hundred damn years and never got cancer, but I’m pretty damn sure I’m going to get it from these fucking candles. I guess it beats sitting in the dark.

Marcus was the first one who got here, like I said before. He’s not a bad guy—and he’s my cousin, so even if he was, I wouldn’t talk shit on him, especially with actual pieces of crap like Laura here—he’s just so damn whiny. He’s been—or he was, fuck—working in a cell phone store for years ever since college, and he just has no damn direction. Sometimes you think, “That guy may not seem like much, but when the chips are down, watch out!”. Well that ain’t Marcus, either. Any time we’ve had to make a decision down here, he just hems and haws and kind of points out what both sides of the argument have already said. It’s like he doesn’t have any damn balls of his own.

Laura was next to come because Carrah was on the phone with her pretty much right when the news started talking about zombies. Of course she blabbed that Marcus came over to hunker down in our basement, so Laura had to come, too. She goes through so damn many boyfriends, you’d think she’d have been fucking somebody she could stay with at the time, but no. So now I have to put up with her. And after she and Marcus were here, Laura and Carrah decided we could hole up with a bunch of people, as long as they brought stuff to make it through, like my basement is some kind of god damned charity bomb shelter. I notice Carrah steal a glance at her phone again between asking everyone who’s waking up if they need anything; not every person we called back then answered.

The others started coming over when we still had power and the loudmouths on the cable news were still telling us this was temporary and that if we’d voted for their party last time, this wouldn’t have happened. End of the god damn world shit going on, and all they cared about was that the people who weren’t dead yet thought it was the other guys’ faults. Seems like for-fucking-ever ago. Like I said, Aiden brought over a bunch of gallons of water and shit like beans and canned fruit and tuna fish. And that was before we even knew for sure the power and water were going to turn off. The bastard helped get me through college when I didn’t think I was going to pass half my classes, and he’s still saving my ass. Gotta give credit to Carrah’s coworker Ashley, though, too. We all thought “what the hell?” when she showed up with a bunch of rolls of toilet paper, but it’s been a godsend. Besides them, we’ve got three more: our neighbors down the road, Jamison and Emma Gray, and Carrah’s friend Drew. Because of course my wife invited another guy to the fucking apocalypse.

I’m distracted from mentally checking everyone off the list to make sure they’ve woken up—and yes, I’m aware of how creepy that is to have to do—by the sound of liquid splashing the metal sink basin. I whip around, candle in hand, to see Laura fucking washing her god damn fucking hands! I yell something that’s more like an animal noise and any word I could recognize and run over.

“God damn bitch!” I shout as I yank the water bottle out of her hands. It splashes all over me, and that just makes me even more mad. It’s everything I have in me to not slap her across the face. “What the fuck did I tell you?”

“Andre, you just wasted half the bottle splashing it around like that!”

I turn to my wife, and I am just shy of seeing red. “Are you fucking kidding me? She was throwing the whole damn bottle down the sink! At least I saved some of it!”

“She just needed to wash her hands; it’s not the worst thing in the world.”

“Yeah, it might be,” I mumble to myself before refocusing on the matter at hand. “Her hands are fine. All our hands are fucking gross, but we can’t go wasting water over it. You think I don’t want a shower or something? I do! But I have these little things called priorities. Oh, and a fucking brain.”

I hear Laura mumble behind me in that “oh, I want to be quiet and sneaky, but I want you to hear it, too” voice. “Asshole”.

“You can leave any time you want, princess,” I growl back at her. I lean forward and stretch out my arms like a stupid, posturing gorilla, but I don’t care. “See if the dead people outside have any water for you.”

“Hey guys, shh!”

I see Drew holding a finger up to his mouth and using his other hand to point upward. We all freeze in place and start listening. We sit there for a few minutes and strain our ears, but nobody seems to hear whatever Drew heard.

“Was there something?”

“I don’t know,” Drew answers while rubbing the back of his head, “I thought I heard something, but it might have just been something you guys did during your little fight.”

Little fight. Jackass. Maybe next time I’ll just sit down and let everyone else throw our water down the drain then, idiot. You can sit there and pretend to be looking out for all of us in front of my wife then, too.

“You don’t think they came back, do you?” Emma asks. “We haven’t heard them upstairs in… it’s been a while, right?”

Her husband’s right there with her. “I don’t think. They never knew we were down here. I guess they just moved on to look for more living—to just go wherever it is they go.”

“You don’t think they cured it or stopped it or whatever, do you? Like, maybe they’re all gone now?”

I shake my head at Carrah’s question. “They didn’t cure the electric and water being off, so I doubt it.”

I guess my reminder that everything is still fucked kind of kills the momentum our conversation built up, because no one says anything for a while. We just kind of sit there uncomfortably while all the stupid candle light jiggles around on the panel walls. It really makes you kind of sick to watch it for too long, you know? It’s the only consistent movement in the basement, and it’s all swaying and shaking around like it’s underwater or something. Just when I think I’m about to puke from it, Aiden gets my attention.

“Hey, Andre? Can you come over here, man?”

He leans in close to me when I get over to the cupboards. “I don’t want to freak anybody out, especially when Drew just thought he heard something, but we’re running low and shit, man. Like…low-low.”

I pull back, a little shocked by what he’s telling me. I mean, I obviously knew we were running out of luxury crap like coffee, but we can’t have been down here for that long, I think. I try to keep my voice hushed. “Like what?”

He opens the cupboards and starts picking through everything innocently like he’s just looking for something specific. “Like everything, I guess? I mean, we’ve still got a case or two of water and the gallon jugs we filled up, but as for food? We’re almost out of a lot of the stuff that hasn’t spoiled already. Canned meat like tuna fish? We got maybe two dozen cans. Beans and veggies? A little more than that, maybe. Crackers, we’re on the last few boxes…”

“Shit. Fuck. What can we do?”

He just shrugs. “We got a lot of crap. Like… literal crap. I doubt you’ve got some kind of magic machine that can turn that back into food, right?”

Just when I think I can’t get flustered enough, Laura speaks up because apparently God hates me. “What are you two doing over there with our food?”

How haven’t I choked her yet? She didn’t contribute anything to these cupboards when her sorry ass just showed up here.  “Nothing. Nothing. Just taking inventory.” I lean back in to Aiden. “Should we tell them?”

He bites his lower lip and just kind of looks back-and-forth between me and the cupboard for a few seconds. “Might as well. It’s not like not telling them is going to make them oblivious to the fact they aren’t eating in a few days.”

To Be Continued