Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse by William Young

wearing nothing but her underwear was sprawled against the arm of a couch in a stupor, her eyes glazed over and fixed on nothing. She turned her dark eyes up at the two men as they paused in the room.
    “We’re out of coke,” Mariya said, her voice hollow, the words matter-of-fact, plaintive almost, but not desperate.
    Fyodor and Vasily exchanged a look.
    “Have some champagne, honey, there’s plenty in the wine cellar,” Fyodor said, taking the bottle from Vasily and tipping a sip of vodka into his mouth. He turned to Vasily and said, “I’ve never seen a person go through so much coke in so short a time. Does she eat?”
    Vasily shrugged. They walked out onto a balcony and took a helical staircase up to an observation deck atop the house. Broken clouds moved across the night sky, obscuring the stars, but both men ignored the beauty of the heavens and fixed their eyes on the horizon, which was aglow.
    “I can’t believe they burned the fucking city down,” Vasily said, watching the distant smoke columns merge with the clouds.
    “Of course they did. We’re Russians. Nobody but Russians get to live in Moscow,” Fyodor said. “Napoleon and Hitler both learned the hard way. Now, my friend, the undead learn.”
    A series of thunderous booms undulated through the night followed by the sound of distant whistling. The two men turned their heads in a direction and waited a few seconds for the same number of explosions to echo from the horizon. Fyodor took another swig of vodka and set the bottle down on a hand railing.
    “Still fighting the last war, our glorious army at work killing zombies with howitzers,” Fyodor said, patting through his pockets for his pack of cigarettes and bringing one alight. “I don’t know when it became the custom of every Russian army to destroy everything in sight as a means of waging war. If we’re losing, we burn it all down so the enemy can’t have it, and if we’re winning, we blow it all up so the enemy can’t have it.”
    Vasily laughed.
    “Vasily, we’re all or nothing as a people, and soon we will be nothing. For our entire history, nobody has been able to conquer us, not really, not fully, but now, at the apex of human achievement, when life is easy, when you can watch porn on your pocket phone, get any drug you desire, eat anything you want, have any girl you choose, we finally found a way to kill us all off.”
    “Only, we didn’t kill us all off, we just found a way to make all of the stuff we made to make life easy completely useless to us,” Vasily said. “Now, all we want is to wander the earth undead, trying to eat the brains of our fellow man.”
    There was some rustling on a chaise longue and the two men quickly turned their heads to the noise. Fyodor was instantly relieved to see Nikita push her chestnut hair off her face and tuck some locks behind each ear. Her eyeliner streaked down her cheeks from having cried, but Fyodor had no idea what she might have been crying about.
    “This used to be such a nice dacha to come to for a weekend trip, Fyodorovitch, but now it’s just a fucking prison,” Nikita said, her voice soft. “A gilded cage. I want to go home.”
    “You can’t go home, Nikita, the army is burning it down as we speak,” Vasily said.
    Nikita let out the barest trace of a whimper, but she had already cried all of the sadness out of her, leaving nothing but a hollow spot inside her where she should have felt sorrow or despair. She felt nothing but the heaviness of helplessness.
    “Are you going looting tomorrow?” Nikita asked.
    “Foraging, Nikita, not looting,” Fyodor said, taking the bottle from the railing and handing it to her.
    “Whatever. I want to go this time; I want to see some of the world out there on the other side of the fence,” Nikita said.
    The two men looked at each other and Fyodor gave a slight nod. “Sure, Nikita, we’ll get you up after dawn.”
    Fyodor motioned with his head and he and Vasily went back down