Zombies are significantly easier to fight when they have arthritis. It’s also harder for a zombie to bite you if you take their dentures first. As well as this, add dementia to a zombie’s already addled brain and they’ll become so disoriented you can simply knock them over and they will wander dazedly away.

Annie meditated on these facts as she sat in her recliner, a rifle scavenged from Dick’s Sporting Goods pointed at the door.

Doris was starting to turn.

Annie had first begun to suspect that her housemate had been bitten when Doris returned late from a trip to the supermarket. Doris was never late, and when Annie had questioned her about it, she’d replied that she got lost on the way back.

Doris had lived in this town for sixty-seven years, so Annie doubted that she could have gotten lost. Things did look different now (six months of mass scavenging and piles of dead bodies will make anywhere look different), but the streets were in the same places, and Doris had never gotten lost before.

Annie didn’t like the idea of people going out by themselves, but Doris insisted that she needed cream for her eczema.

“There’s not gonna be any medical supplies left,” Annie had told her, but Doris had always been a stubborn old cow. She had already been living at Golden Meadows when Annie moved in, and their first meeting had been Doris refusing to let Annie join her in-home bingo team.

And now Annie was going to blast her head off with a bright orange child’s hunting rifle (the only weapon they could find in Dick’s).

She’d told Grace to send someone with her (Grace was the head nurse at Golden Meadows and their unanimously elected leader), but then someone had discovered that there was a zombie trying to climb through the slats of their fence, and by the time Grace had sorted that out, Doris had already left.

“How did she get past the gate?” Grace had asked. There had been an emergency meeting called, and the poor kid who was supposed to have been watching the gate looked like a deer in headlights.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”

Before the whole zombie apocalypse thing had started, Doris was notorious for sneaking out. She was small enough that she could squeeze through the rails of the fence, and she was healthy enough that she could walk herself down the hill and into town, where she was usually found peering through shop windows.

In all honesty, a retirement home was not a bad place to be during a zombie apocalypse. There was a fence all the way around, designed to keep confused seniors from wandering away (confused seniors aren’t altogether too different from zombies, so it did a pretty good job). There was a decent amount of supplies already there, including some medical supplies. The nurses and aids who worked there had already been trained on how to avoid being bitten and/or scratched. There were some pretty comfortable recliners, and once they beefed it up a bit, the gadabout was a very safe way to travel.

The biggest threat to their safety was Doris. Fucking Doris, who hadn’t believed at first that there was an apocalypse (she actually used the phrase “one of those new meme things”). Doris, who refused to use the gadabout because it made her feel old (she was 86, which she considered young).

Doris, who was currently banging on the door of the bathroom she had been locked in. Well, technically she’d locked herself in. Once she’d returned from the supermarket, it was already nightfall. She had been gone for seven hours, and that was slow, especially for Doris, who was actually quite swift. Annie had offered to wait by the door for when she came back. Grace waited with her.

“Doris! Where the hell have you been?”

Doris stood in the driveway, a little blue jar clutched in her trembling, spotted hands.

“I needed my eczema cream,” she said.

“We had a supply trip scheduled for tomorrow.”

“Then tell my eczema to wait until morning!” Doris snapped.

“Why don’t you come inside, Doris,” Grace said. “And we can get you into bed.”

“I don’t need bed, I need food. I’m starving.”

Annie put her hand on the doorknob.

“Grace,” she said quietly. “She might have been bitten.”

“I can hear you, Annie!” Doris said. “Of course I haven’t been bitten.”

“Then why were you late?”

“Don’t be an ass! I just got lost on the way back.”

“Annie,” Grace said. “We’ll make sure she has a physical examination immediately. I appreciate your concern, but we can’t just leave her outside.”

“That’s a shame,” Annie muttered.

Doris refused to submit to a physical examination. Everyone had to go through one every time they left the property, but Doris was being a bitch, as usual, and eventually two of the aids had to hold her down while a third examined her. Doris tried to bite them, which was less of a warning sign than you might expect. Doris frequently bit people. And scratched them. And swore at them.

Doris was an insane woman. Physically, she was in surprisingly good health. Annie suspected that her daughter had dumped her in Golden Meadows less because she needed assisted living and more because she couldn’t stand to take care of her anymore.

They found a bite mark on her elbow. Who the hell gets bitten on the elbow? Doris does. She tried to convince them that one of the other residents had done it.

“It was Pearl!” she yelled as they bundled her towards the door. “Pearl bit me at dinner!”

Pearl didn’t have teeth, so that was unlikely. The bite mark was also already turning green around the edges, so there was no doubt. The three aids were dragging her quickly towards the exit. It was standard procedure to throw anyone who had been bitten outside. The transformation usually happened within a day or two, so there was no time to waste.

It had been hard, at first, to watch their friends begging at the gate to be let inside. But soon enough their speech began to garble, and their skin began to sag. Zombies looked pretty normal for the first few days. But they were still clearly zombies.

Annie was standing at the top of the stairs with another resident, Earl, waiting to see Doris deposited outside.

“I gotta say,” Earl rasped. “I won’t miss her.”

“Nobody will,” Annie said. “She’s a hag.”

But as the aids rounded the corner below, gripping Doris by the arms, the hag somehow hooked her feet on the doorway and twisted, squeezing out of the aids’ grasp. From there, she made a beeline for the stairs. The aids took off after her, but Doris was surprisingly agile. She raced up the stairs and past Annie, who reached out to grab her but missed. Doris sped down the hall and into a bathroom, locking the door behind her.

“You can’t throw me out there, you fucks!” she screeched. “Leave me be!”

The aids reached the door, tried battering it, called in reinforcements, but Doris must have wedged something under the handle.

“Can we go in through the window?”

“Can she get out through the window?”

“This is the bathroom above the patio. If she climbs out the window she’ll fall fourteen feet.”

“She’s not decomposed yet. She’d probably be fine if she fell.”

“Doris would be fine if she fell a hundred feet,” Annie said. “She’ll come out eventually.”

“But what do we do then?” one of the aids asked. His name was Calvin, and he was a student nurse very far out of his depth. Many of the aids and nurses had opted to stay at Golden Meadows after the zombies started getting really bad. The ones who left were mostly the jerks anyway, so the place was actually a bit better now than it was before. Other than the zombies.

“What do we do?” Calvin repeated.

“Shoot her in the head,” Annie said simply.

“Shoot who in the head?” Grace had arrived. “What’s the verdict on Doris?”

“She was bitten and she ran up the stairs and now she’s locked herself in the bathroom and Annie wants to shoot her!” Calvin was on the verge of tears. “What do we do?”

“We wait until she comes out and then we shoot her,” Grace said. “That’s all we can do.”

“I’m not shooting her!” Calvin wailed.

“Of course you’re not,” Annie snapped. “I’ll do it.”

“We’ll take turns waiting here for her to come out,” Grace said. “We need both ends of this hall blocked off, just in case someone misses. Annie, get your gun.”