Artifact by Shane Lindemoen

and it appeared that she shot this one.
    I stood up, ready to make my way toward the scream again, and the body at my feet twitched.
    I looked down just as its hand snatched my ankle. The front half of the janitor’s head lolled forward and he let out a gurgled moan.
    He rolled toward my foot teeth first, just as I kicked my leg out of his grasp. I put a few feet between us, as he rolled onto his stomach and started crawling toward me one centimeter at a time. Because the back of his head was blown away, the muscles in his neck didn’t appear to be attached to anything, so he couldn’t lift his head.
    I remembered that Patrick shot Joseph in the head, but he didn’t die either.
    No, that’s not true. The Joseph who animated that body was surely gone. What remained was something else.
    I noticed that the Janitor’s abdominals had been chewed away, so he must not have had the muscle control to hold himself upright or walk. I turned toward the other end of the hall again, desperate to find Alice, reeling from the thick stink of stomach fluids and blood. I left the Janitor where he lay, unsure about how to put him out of his misery.
    I walked toward a set of doors, and recognized my name at the end of the hall, two down from Alice’s office. Most of the offices I passed were open and empty. There was no sight of her.
    I carefully moved toward my office door, which was closed, and a sense of gravity and significance made the hair on my arms stand on end. The act of walking into my own office was somehow metaphorically significant. Maybe Alice was right. Maybe this was some deeper level of experience that I just couldn’t understand nor articulate.
    As I opened the door and took in the disheveled state of the room, the disorganized stacks of folders teetering on the edge of a cheap particle–board desk, dusty old textbooks, journals, awards, and cardboard boxes full of odd ends, I looked back at the dead janitor who continued clawing at the air between us. I was suddenly struck by another terrifying thought.
    I was right. I had no frame of reference for what dreams were like. For any dream. The weight of that truth sucked me in, like the gravity of a massive star. I realized then, without really understanding why, that I had no other experience to compare this dream with, because deep down I knew that I had never dreamt before. Rather, that the dream has always been, and always will be my reality. Things were as real as they had ever been. The only thing that had really changed was the accident. That much I was sure of.
    A scream pulled me away from the Janitor.
    It was clearer this time.
    It was coming from outside the window.
    6.
    One story below my office, a young woman and a little girl clung to each other on top of a fifty-foot semi–trailer. There was a man with dark hair wearing a blue and black plaid jacket hanging halfway out of a sunroof above the riding cabin, a few inches in front of the air dam. He was face down and lifeless – I could see a thin streak of dark red blood spilling over the edge of the engine compartment, dripping onto the roadway. Several zombies were relentlessly trying to claw their way up the side of the door to reach him.
    The countless others that surrounded the trailer began piling onto one another, creating a sort of hill of corpses, which was steadily getting higher. The woman pressed the little girl’s head into her chest so that she didn’t have to look. I immediately recognized her – leather jacket, fully shaven head, mid–twenties.
    When Sid and I reached the entrance to the CEM, just before I punched in the key–code, as my heart dropped into my stomach when I realized that the doors were barricaded, I saw the three of them on top of the truck, clinging to each other.
    Which meant Sid and I must not have been far–
    –Six shots suddenly rang out from somewhere down the road. The woman heard them too, and started frantically waving in the direction of the gunfire.
    I craned