The house in the lonely woods was smoking.

In an attempt to allude a hungry owl, a mother raccoon and her kits – which clung to her sides like a saddle bag – jumped from a tree and scurried inside a chimney. Her claws found nothing to dig into, so she slid all the way down. Down, down the raccoons went, and at the bottom, they were met by a warm, cozy fire. Singed fur and burning flesh replaced the smell of the sweet hickory scent that had previously filled the living room. Ablaze and in a panic, the mother raccoon and her saddlebag babies ran and hid under a couch. The underlining of the couch caught fire in a matter of seconds, and soon the entire couch was engulfed in flame. Little by little, furniture caught fire in the living room. When all the furniture was claimed, the fire moved on to the next room, and then the next.

Upstairs were two sleeping zombies. These weren’t your ordinary zombies. They were undead, yes, but they weren’t slow or unintelligible. These zombies had been med school students using the old house in the lonely woods as a place to buckle down and study. A coyote carrying a virus had attacked both of them when they were out for a walk to stretch their legs after a particularly long study session. Since then, they’ve been a little “unwell” but more or less functioning like living people.

Tony, who’s leg had been mangled first by the viral coyote, woke up in his twin bed and started to cough. His vision was cloudy, so he rubbed his eyes when he was able to stop coughing. He blinked a few times but the cloudiness remained. The tip of his nose had fallen off weeks ago, so the smoke that was creeping up through the cracks in the floorboards had easier access to his olfactory sensors.

“Oh shit!”

Tony sprang out of bed and tripped over his gray, decaying feet on his way to the twin bed across the room from his. There lay his roommate, Whitten, fast asleep through all the commotion. Tony tripped again, but it helped him get to the bed faster. As he grasped the side of the bed in an attempt to catch himself, he pulled the sheets off his roommate on his way to the floor.

“Whitten, wake up, man!” Tony shouted from underneath the sheet that had somehow draped itself over his head.

Whitten groaned and tried to pull the covers over his eyes, but his hands found nothing.

Finally uncovered and back on his feet, Tony slapped Whitten’s shoulder. A small piece of molting flesh went flying from said shoulder. “WAKE UP!” Tony screamed.

Whitten slowly fluttered his eyes open. “What?”

“The house is on fire!” Tony shrieked, pointing to the smoke that had just begun to slither under the door.

“Oh shit,” Whitten mumbled, still half asleep. He rubbed the sinewy muscle that had been exposed by Tony’s shoulder-slap. “Hey…” he said, looking down at the fresh, bloodless wound.

Tony rolled his eyes. “Who cares about that!” He circled his bony fingers around Whitten’s atrophied bicep and attempted to pull him up and out of bed. All he succeeded in doing was ripping his roommates entire arm off.

Whitten looked at his limp sleeve, then at his dislocated left arm that was clenched in his roommate’s hand, then at Tony. He gave him the evil eye. “Fuck you, Tony.”

Exasperated, Tony threw the arm down and ran to the door. Upon opening it, a whoosh of smoke hit his face and choked him. He slammed the door shut, coughed up a lung (literally—a chunk came out), then ran back to the opposite end of the room. There was a weird smell around him. He looked down and saw his hand was smoking. Being undead and all, he wasn’t able to feel how hot the door knob had been.

“What are we gonna do?!” Tony let out another shriek as he frantically looked for a safe way out of the second-floor room.

Whitten, now standing but still looking hurt that his roommate and friend had ripped his favorite arm off, looked towards the single window in the room. “We’ll have to jump.”

Tony went to the window and looked down. “Are you crazy? That’s a 20-foot drop.”

Whitten’s mind began to wake up. Nights spent studying the digestive system suddenly brought on a flood of textual memories.

“Our small intestines are 20-feet long…”

Tony eyed him. “You can’t be serious.”

Both of them looked back at the door that was smoking more profusely.

“Seeing as you ripped my arm off, I think we should use your intestines to rope us safely to the ground.” He tried his best to hide it, but a small grin cracked the side of his mouth. Like, it actually cracked.

Tony’s arms crossed low over his belly. “I don’t know, man.”

“Come on, bro. You owe me.”

Tony looked back at the door one more time. “Fine,” he sighed, uncrossing his arms. He lifted his shirt to exposed his abdomen and angled himself towards Whitten.

In one fell swoop, Whitten’s hand disappeared into Tony’s stomach and reemerged with an ash-colored organ. Tony nearly keeled over—not from pain, but from the shear force of Whitten’s hand punching a hole into his stomach.

“Aha,” Whitten stood triumphant with the intestine held proudly above his head. He opened the window and threw it out. Both young men watched the intestines unravel until the end scraped the ground. Tony grabbed his ascending colon to stop any more of his insides from becoming outsides.

“Looks like I get to go first,” Whitten said smugly.

Tony sighed more heavily than last time and handed Whitten his guts. Whitten grabbed hold, jumped onto the sill, and slowly descended with the organ rope wrapped around his remaining arm. When his feet were firmly on the ground, he looked up and shouted, “Ok, now you…”

“Oh.” They said at the same time.

There was a loud creaking noise behind Tony. As he turned to see what caused it, the hinges of the door exploded off and the fire pushed its way in. The flames lit the room and Tony was momentarily blinded.

“You’ll have to jump!” Whitten exclaimed.

But his exclamation was unnecessary. The fire bursting into the room with its blinding light caused Tony to stumble, and out the window he fell. It all happened so suddenly that Whitten had no time to react. His roommate hit the ground with a hard crunch.

It felt like an hour had passed before Whitten processed what happened. “Tony!” he shouted when the wheels in his head started turning again. He ran over to his friend and knelt down beside him.

Tony was flat on his back. Some lower ribs stuck out and his legs were bent in wrong directions. Even the mangled leg he’d been living with since the coyote got him looked worse. He coughed up a puff of smoke and gave Whitten the thumbs up.

The sides of Whitten’s mouth pulled back and his eyes widened. “Yeah, man. That… that was a good landing.” His voice was shaky and unconvincing.

Rustling came from behind the line of pine trees at Whitten’s back. He spun around and saw a flash of eyes low to the ground.

“Tony, I think—” But before he could finish his thought, the same rabid coyote that got them months ago was back staring them down. Nobody moved.

Some residual smoke from his lungs found its way to Tony’s sinuses. He tried to fight it but couldn’t. A sneeze. A simple achoo and the coyote went berserk. It charged and grabbed Tony’s intestines that were strewn about.

“No, that’s my sausage,” Tony groaned.

The coyote didn’t care. It ran off into the woods with the intestines in its mouth, disemboweling Tony completely.

Whitten stared at Tony.

Tony closed his eyes. “Now we’re even,” he said with a slow, fried tone.

Losing an arm versus loosing an entire lower half of organs didn’t seem like a fair trade, but Whitten was too stunned to argue.

“What are we gonna do now? We have no place to live,” Tony asked.

Whitten thought for a moment. “Think our parents will let us move back home?”

Tony bit his lip and shook his head. “No. They think we’re dead. And we kind of are. They wouldn’t appreciate that.”

“Well, shit.” Whitten shifted his weight to sit heavily on his hip. He heard a bone snap as he did so but was unconcerned about where the noise originated.

Silence stretched between them. The air around them was quiet except for the crackling of the fire and wood beams splitting and falling to the ground. The coyote never came back, so it was safe to assume it had more than enough to eat thanks to Tony. The two young men just sat there, wondering what they could do. They were deep in the lonely woods, and with Tony’s broken legs, it would take them weeks to get to the main road to hitch a ride—that is assuming they’d even find anyone crazy enough to pick up two zombies.

Finally, Tony spoke: “Will you carry me on your back to the lake and drown me?”

Whitten looked down at Tony’s glazed eyes and smiled weakly.

“Sure, buddy. What are friends for?”