The door smmed behind them, and Heidi and Faith ran, only to find more undead bodies slowly making their way toward them at the other end of the hall. Their skin sagged on their decaying bodies, and as one of them took a step, the muscle on its arm tore, dropping a few of the bones on its hand to the floor. Heidi shut her eyes and covered them with her hands."It's not real, it's not real, it can't be real, it isn't happening, Faith, it's gotta be expinable, everything's expinable."Faith pulled her arm and ran into one of the side rooms from the hallway, shutting the door. Dead end, just a room filled with musty old spare pews and a few boxes."One of these rooms has to be the main like, churchy bit." She thought aloud to herself, "We find a weapon in here, and we make our way to the uh... the... thingo...""The nave..." Heidi muttered.Faith chuckled, "Really? It's actually called that?"A bang on the door. Heidi yelped, and began to cry."Fuck. Okay. Heidi. Rex, calm down. It's okay, you're okay.""I'm not okay!" She screamed. Another, louder bang on the door, followed by a scream of terror from Heidi."Okay, then you're not okay... but that's fine, because you're with me, and I won't let anything bad happen to you. And maybe you're right, maybe it isn't real. Maybe it doesn't have to be."Heidi wiped her tears and calmed down a little, "Wh- what do you mean? Of course it's real, I saw it.""We don't know what we saw. It's te, we're in a cemetery, maybe that knocking at the door is just... a clock, somewhere, ticking away? Maybe the things we thought we saw were a mirror. But it is too scary for you right now, isn't it?"Heidi nodded, "But... everything you're saying isn't logical."Faith sighed, smiling, "You're too smart for your own good sometimes... but I think I can take your mind off of it."She stared into Heidi's eyes, behind the inky bckness of her pupils. She was afraid, and so Faith put her hand on her cheek to comfort her. Heidi froze up, panicked for a moment. And in that moment, she saw the future. And in that future, she kissed Faith back.

  ***

  J sat at his desk and sighed. This wasn't enough. None of what he was doing was enough. He picked a bottle off of the table and smashed it onto the floor, cursing."No, no, stupid!" He quickly called out, picking up a handkerchief from his desk and covering his mouth and nose, "You idiot, those fumes will cause you serious lung damage!""Are you okay down there, son?" His dad called out, "You're not dying are you?"J turned on his fan and pulled the handkerchief down, "No, dad, I'm alright, I'm just- just praying!"What an utter lie. He was ashamed. He couldn't hear god, not anymore, not since that day. And his calcutions had amounted to shit. Nothing he could do. Nothing he could use to make himself love them again.

  When he was a kid, things were so different. His dad was a great cop, he was a great man who could carry the world on his shoulders and on top of that, he would protect people. He was a hero, that was how J saw his dad. A hero who would go out on the streets, beat up bad guys like Batman would, and then come home and py video games with him where they'd gun down zombies. His mum was great too. J's dad would often tell the story of how she'd pursued a doctorate in neuroscience, but right near the end of her degree, they'd fallen in love, and she decided to quit and start a family instead. Always, his dad would praise her for being such a caring and dutiful mother. Praise her for giving up on academia, to devote herself fully to her husband, her son, and their god. And J himself had been the picture of a perfect kid. Loved his mum, loved his dad, loved god, he would study hard in school, join a sports team, settle down with a beautiful girl and be a strapping young man, with impeccable muscles. Granted, after he had developed a little and found that he wasn't exactly the best with women, did not have the physique of a demigod, and had the athletic prowess of a twig, he realised the only thing he was definitely going to get right was the studying. He was, after all, regarded as a genius, a perfectionist, and a prodigy. His mother couldn't be prouder of him!

  But he was trying to impress his dad.

  And his dad wasn't impressed.

  The fan had cleared out most of the toxicity, but a foul smell still hung in the air. He went over to the cupboard and picked up a bucket of sand he had aside for this purpose. Shovelling it onto the spill, he thought about his calcutions some more, menting the irony of his decision. In order to shut off the parts of his brain that over-analysed everything they could, in order to target the specific areas of the brain he needed to dim his mind, he had studied rigorously. He'd reviewed his mother's old neuroscience books countless times over, each time learning a little more. There was a part of him that knew what he was doing was only hurting himself. That he would be killing his brain just to feel loved by a man who didn't deserve him. That by doing this, he'd throw away those questions that lingered in the back of his head at night, the ones he refused to ask himself because he was terrified of the answers. The answers he knew, deep down, he already had.

  No. That was a future he feared. He couldn't abandon his family like that, they needed him, and they would never go along with it. He'd drop out of school. Tell them he wanted to do the Lord's work, become a priest. He wouldn't ever change the world, and he might only preach a gospel he knew he couldn't really believe in, but he wouldn't know any of that, that was the beauty of it.

  He'd just be stupid for the rest of his life, and he'd be loved. That was all it took.