"Daniel" is the first thing I can remember. It may be my name - my old name - or who she was calling out to, seeking help, a last, frantic plea for rescue from the unthinkable world she was plunged into so forcefully. Highbrow thinking for my type? I thought nothing of the kind at the time, mind you. I felt little then but hunger, confusion, the pain of breaking teeth and fingernails, and then fingers, as I tore at her trying to get to my goal. A true savage, single-minded, insane.

The hunger is what drove everything in the beginning. I could feel memories slipping, and I could see the girl's expression change from grief to fear, at least that's what I've reconstituted over the weeks from a jumble of impressions. The first thing I'm truly clear on is "Daniel", the first sound etched in memory from my birth - my rebirth. I felt no grief or fear of my own as I clawed and bit at her, screaming in hunger, pain, and wrath. Nor did I feel remorse over her fate as I fought off the others who heard the struggle and also came to attack her, trying to steal my kill and claim her as their own.

One of my competition wielded a large rock, which he used to beat back the others vying for an easy meal, and presumably planned to use on the girl - inasmuch as any of us were capable of planning in those early days. His struggle with me was less successful: I ducked when he swung at me, genius thinking for a newly-changed, he fell off balance, and I jumped on his back. Our fighting allowed the girl to escape to a nearby tree, and climb it high.

None of us had the self-control to climb after her. I felt that I knew how to climb, but the sight of prey induces panic, a desperate hope that the hunger can be assuaged, and it took some time before any of us learned how to quiet that enough to make good decisions. There were several aborted attempts by the pack of us to reach her. Some, myself included, tried to scurry up the tree, but couldn't get their limbs to work together, and we ended up only exchanging skin for bark. The ones not able to comprehend distance just reached up and moaned pathetically. We piled up on top of each other, but could never manage to cooperate. The one with the rock dropped it and climbed over our pile, and actually made it to a semi-standing position on the lowest branch before falling off backwards, landing with a loud crack as the small of his back broke over his own rock. And still he struggled on, clawing at the ground to inch himself forward, dragging his lifeless legs behind him, reduced so quickly from the competent tool user/alpha zombie he was just moments before. That was my first lesson, one I studied on intently in the days to follow.

The girl's breathing slowed and her eyes dimmed, symptoms I would later associate with the change, but in the early days I was too stupid to make any sophisticated connections, still dumb enough to bite randomly at someone uninfected without a plan to finish them off. If the bite takes hold, the infection spreads, and the brain is inedible. Soon after, you've given birth to more competition for your food. So, you stay hungry if you can't plan. Most of us stayed hungry.

Shortly after the crawler made his way back to the tree, I decided that I needed the rock, and struggled to pick it up, falling over it in the process. I laid over it, frustrated, and tried to concentrate on how to stand up and lift the rock. The mental effort must have tuned out everything else, because when I finally decided how to pick up the rock and get back to my feet, I saw that most of the others were laying dead - truly dead - and an uninfected man was firing a long gun at the others, shouting "Die, you bastards!", "Back to hell!" and such.

I've since figured out that he must have been trying to rescue the girl. Due to my stillness he thought I was either already dead, or he lost track of which of my kind he had dispatched and assumed that I was among that number. At any rate, his back was to me when I stood up with the rock. He was looking at the girl then, shrieking "No! No!" when I shambled up to him, my weapon at the ready. He slowly raised his gun to aim at her and muttered a soft "Goodbye, my love" when I brought the rock down firmly on his skull and split it open.

He fell by the base of the tree, twitching, and I dined quickly on his brain. He grew more and more still as I ate, until he finally stopped moving altogether. The change finally took My Love in the tree, and she fell comically on top of both of us, suddenly unsure of how to use her limbs.

In the minute it took me to unravel myself from the pile and retrieve my rock, My Love had shuffled to the dead man and finished off what remained of his brain. I was feeling more alert and coherent after my meal, and the same must have happened to her. We have never been able to exchange words, and have only communicated through gesture and pantomime, but I deduced that she thought I left part of my first kill for her deliberately, and that I planned on taking care of her.

Nothing of the kind was true, of course, but it turned out later that we were invaluable in taking care of each other. Through circumstance, she was relatively uninjured after her fall and dined on fresh brain very soon after her change. This meant mainly that she grew smart quicker than most of us did, and that she could pass briefly for an uninfected.

Through trial and error we came up with a tolerable kill strategy: she played the frightened, fleeing victim, I the shambling pursuer. Invariably a heroic "die bastards" type would intercede on her behalf by standing between us, his back to her, preparing to shoot thunder at me and gain the rewards of a grateful, scared young girl. She would, thankfully, grab his weapon before he shot me with it, and I would quickly close the distance before his shock abated and his wits returned. The two of us would finish him off by banging his head against the ground until it split open (carrying large rocks turned out to be impractical).

Eventually decomp got the better of her, and she was recognized as infected by a die-bastard, who got off a couple of ineffective gut shots on her before we wrested away his weapon and killed him. After that close call, we knew our out-in-the-open strategy would continue to fail. We waited for inspiration, growing more hungry and stupid every day. Since neither of us could visually pass for an uninfected any more, the winning strategy was not with sight, but with sound.

My Love and I were hiding behind some bushes a couple of hungry days after she got shot, and we witnessed a pack of shambling newly-changed chasing a man who had lost his long gun. His short gun had run out of thunder and started clicking, and so he pulled out a third weapon, a shiny, long, rounded piece of metal. With the new weapon he knocked a couple of the quicker infected down with a resounding "ping!" He was panicked at this point, and a badly timed swing at a third zombie caused him to wince in pain. He dropped the weapon then, and fled to a nearby house. He slapped quickly on the door three times, and after a moment of rumbling and shifting behind the door (the uninfected put clutter inside houses to keep the doors from opening) it swung open, and the man ran inside. Others fanned out with long guns and killed the shamblers. Since there were a lot of men with long guns in that house, we moved on, but we remembered the three slaps.

I was glad to see the man go inside. This type of die-bastard is the worst: fast and brave, eager to shoot. Most of them get too angry and make mistakes, and are quickly overcome by packs of us, as this man almost was. Some of them are more successful and take out many packs of us. Not that I pity them; they compete for my food, and most of them are clumsy, noisy, idiots.

We went back to look at the weapon he dropped. It had a rubber grip at the thin end, was slightly wider at the top, and much lighter than it looked like it would be. A couple streets over we saw a pair of uninfected with bundles sneaking around (they go out every few days to search for food and weapons), and watched them go into another house. We watched for a long time, until we were sure they were the only ones in the house.

I stood by the fence gate and let out a low shambler moan. My Love slapped quickly on the door three times, and crouched down, concealing the metal bar, while I inched slowly up the walk. A die-bastard came flying out of the house ready to shoot me, running past the girl without realizing she was infected. She sprang up and cracked his skull with the bar, felling him. I patted her head as I ran past her (our signal for "you eat the rest") and entered the house to quickly find and dispatch the other uninfected. I narrowly avoided being shot, but was rewarded for my risk by a good meal, abating my hunger, and gaining back some temporary calm and sanity.

We continued on this way for several days, staking out those hiding out in small numbers, slapping doors and surprising bastards, not knowing that we were being stalked and hunted.

On an otherwise uneventful night, we approached a house that had only one uninfected in it (a fine treat! They always want to save the girl so that she will thank them, and they make more mistakes trying to look heroic). My love slapped the door, and I felt thunder go through me, and I fell down. She ran to me, the mistake that cost her her life. The thunder hit her in the head, spraying brain on me, and she fell on me for a second time. This time there was no comedy.

I looked back from the direction the shot came from, and saw the bastard from the house packed with uninfected men. One hand was taped from where he had hurt it with a bad swing of the metal bar. He had doubtless heard the unique "ping" from his weapon every couple days and gone out to investigate, tracking us.

The single hero in the house, confused, came out to see what had happened, to meet his rescuer, and to examine the two dead zombies laying in his lawn. I pushed the girl off of me and jumped to my feet, then swung the bar at his nose with all my might. The cracking sound as I caved in his skull was delightful, but did little to calm my anger at losing my partner. More shots were fired as I pushed my kill into his house and scooped out as much brain as I could fit in one hand before running out the back door.

"Fucking shit!" the taped bastard shouted as he ran to follow me, "What the *fuck*! They can't move like that!" Ordinarily he would have been right. Hungry newborns are slow and clumsy, not able to think rationally, and only enough feeding calms them and gets their brains and muscles working right. Most of us don't make it beyond a few days before being felled by thunder. The infected working alone or in small packs only succeed in making new zombies, rarely making a good kill and getting to the brain before it sours. The ones in packs can be heard a long way off, and are easily avoided.

A few, like me and my partner, and the man with the rock before his unfortunate accident, achieve more after lucky early kills. We gain sentience and full control of our bodies - what's left of them after the change. We plan. We lie in wait. We watch you, and see the mistakes you don't even know you're making. We attack quickly, from surprise, and blend into the background after the kill, and what remains of the living don't know we exist - until it's too late to tell anyone. We are the real monsters, even in a world filled with undead.

The next days were maddening for me as I hid near his house, waiting until conditions were just right. Hiding so close was what kept me from being discovered by the search parties. They had gone out in twos and threes with guns, and many times I heard variations on "get the fast one" and "the one with the bat". After a few days of that, their courage returned and they went back to a normal routine of going out alone for supplies and weapons. I had a hard time by the end remembering that there were 8 men living in the house, and keeping track of how many were out scavenging or hunting was almost impossible.

On the last day, there were two in the house when the taped bastard (he had shed his tape by this time, the uninfected don't stay injured) came back alone. He had been gone for a long time, and looked tired from his journey and from carrying the large bundle of supplies. I knew that an attack as he approached the house would fail, as they are always alert when they are out alone, trying not to be tracked back home.

I waited until he got inside, then I ran to the door, using up all that remained of my self-control to keep from crying out in rage, giving myself away. I stood between the door and a window, holding the bar at the ready, and thought of my love as I slapped three times.