Most of today was spent burning things. Setting fires has lost a little bit of it’s fun now that: a. one is usually burning the dead, b. burning the living dead, or c. burning houses or cars that contain either or both.

I used to be something of a firebug in high school…not like arson or anything, just burning lots of junk in the desert. For most of my life, fire hasn’t been of much use in Arizona. You’re hardly ever going to set a fire to keep warm, but now it’s one of the most clean (for you) and pleasurable ways of killing infected.

Today we were looking for supplies in storage around some of the fields near the highways. It’s nice to walk on highways because you can see anything that’s interested in eating you far before it gets close enough to bite you. Some of the fields are still okay, but most of the ones we went through had some dead bodies lying around. It was really miserable to walk through them. I’m probably going to have to design a new hierarchy of what is truly miserable according to the new standards. We avoided corn fields like a plague. There could be a house full of ammo, and guns, and food, and a television, but if it was in the middle of a corn field, zombies could have the whole place for all I care. Corn fields are I-hope-I-don’t-die-in-a-fucking-cornfield-after-all-of-this-surviving-the-apocalypse-shit miserable. The sheds weren’t that bad. I went through them and Rok guarded outside just in case.

There was a really scary moment though when a body fell through the ceiling of one of the shacks. Apparently it had a little attic on top; someone offed themselves up there and the rotting floorboards fell through. I thought it was the other kind of dead body and fired once into it on the way down, but I heard two shots. Rok had shot the body through the window too. The guy was completely motionless; usually zombies either twitch a bit or have full on crazy spasms when they’re still, you know, working, but this guy was completely still. I turned him over with my foot. He’d been dead for a long while. One could classify this as why-can’t-I-be-checking-out-attractive-guys-instead-of-staring-at-this-decomposing-face-like-a-normal-twenty-year-old…miserable. There were some fresh wounds now, Rok got the head, I got the chest. Damn. I didn’t tell him that though when he was leaning through the glass.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

I looked up at the hole in the ceiling; it looked promising, so I went up to see if there was anything of use. I thought maybe guns or something heavy, but I found cans of gasoline, long matches, lighter fluid, kindle, pretty much everything flammable. I put them in boxes and brought them down to Rok.

When I moved all the stuff away from the back though I found a flamethrower curled up in the corner in good condition. It’s beautiful and perfect, and it only has one or two little problems keeping it from working. Rok said it might be a waste of time to fix it and thinks it’s a lazy weapon, but he’ll change his mind when I get it working. We took all our new stuff back to our place. I’ve been thinking of all the different uses we have for it. Burning dead bodies, of course, setting fire to zombies and letting them burn to ashes, making a big fire for a distraction or to scare them away from us, and cooking food or maybe making hot drinks like tea. Since we have the extra materials, we can probably spare some coffee or tea or something. That could be nice and normal.