Nancy pressed her back against the rear wall of the old curio she’d crawled in. “Well, this is it,” she thought. “I’m done. He’s got me pinned.”

At the same time, another voice in her head, the one who was quieter, but that Nancy liked quite a bit more, told her not to be stupid. “They’re not intelligent. If you keep your wits about you, he’ll give up.”

Nancy hated that she tended to listen to the former voice more often than the latter. It’s just how she was. She wondered how long she could hold her breath.  The thing chasing her came into the room. It moved with a slow, deliberate step, Click clumping as its shoes shuffle stepped across the hardwood. Click Clump. Click Clump.

“He’s drawing a bead on you right now,” the former voice said. “You might as well scream and get it over with.”

Nancy agreed. She would have screamed, but something caught her breath in her throat. She wanted to flail her arms and kick and shriek, but something—probably terror—or a deeply engrained paralyzation reflex—like those fainting goats on the BBC—held her steady. She wished the latter voice would say something reassuring. Thinking about the later voice gave her enough pause to breathe again.

Click clump, Click Clump. The man—creature- thing—whatever it was—  it was probably a man once— shuffled around the room. The click clumping moved away from the curio momentarily, and then moved closer again. Then the thing walked into the credenza on the wall next to the curio, spilling the liquor bottles set out on top of it. They fell with a crash. The thing never missed a step. Steady click-clump Click clump. Now it was moving toward the curio again.

Nancy froze once more. It was stupid. They—the things, the once-dead, or zombies, or whatever they were—weren’t smart or determined. They just stumbled and bumbled, bumped. Driven not by thought or even instinct, Nancy reminded herself—or was it the later voice reminding her. She was too scared to really think about it.

The undead. Once dead. Whatever—  They didn’t so much even act on instinct, as much as they did on routine. They walked around where they’d walked in life. They bumbled and tripped over things that they were unfamiliar with, but they moved with elegant precisions over things they’d done repeatedly in life. Before.

Before the toxins, the former vice sneered in Nancy’s head. Before the world went mad and the people fell over and then started walking again. And weren’t you glad they did.

At least I got out of going to work, Nancy thought. Or the later voice thought for her.  It wasn’t like the later voice to be sarcastic.  At some point, she figured, this would all start to feel normal. And, seriously, her job answering phones at the machine shop was really awful. She couldn’t help but wonder why she was out taking her chances with the walking dead in order to get there.

“The portrait,” she reminded herself, under her breath. “I have to get the portrait.”

The thing suddenly stopped click-clumping, and she could hear it whirling its head around. They don’t hunt, she reminded herself. They don’t hunt. Then the thing in the room slide directly—meaningfully— toward the curio. It was moving so close now; it had to be on top of her. The door rattled as the thing bumped up against it, shoved twice into the curio, as if it were trying to walk through it. Nancy tried to imagine herself falling through the back of the curio, as if in some children’s fantasy novel.  She pressed and pressed her back against the wood paneling, willing it to fall away.

No such luck.