"Attention, SaveMart shoppers! A group of bloodthirsty zombies has invaded the store. Do not be alarmed, but please proceed to the nearest exit in a calm, orderly fashion. Leave all unpurchased merchandise within the store. Regardless of the circumstances, we will continue to prosecute all shoplifters to the fullest extent of the law."

This announcement met with several moments of shocked inaction, then an anthill of activity erupted in the shopping center, as if the pronouncement’s full meaning had hit everyone at once.

"Zombies! Did he say zombies?"

"Like, from a movie? They aren’t real!"

Customers bandied about comments like these for several minutes, until a host of chilling screams and eyewitness accounts verified the implausible story. Zombies were quite real, and had somehow infiltrated the generally secure environment of a SaveMart superstore as their first conquest.

The store’s occupants, customers and employees ran for the exits. They screamed, shoved people out of the way, and knocked displays over; in short, they responded by causing as much commotion as possible. It is a curious anomaly that when large groups of people are instructed to remain calm, they react in the most disruptive manner possible.

"Well, this is something you don’t see everyday," Damon Shields joked as he extricated his hands from a large bin of discounted CD’s. He arched his back and stretched his arms, his white t-shirt straining to contain his muscular upper body.

"Nope," Valerie replied, not looking at her teenage son.

She turned away from the bin and limped towards the exit, her right foot dragging due to a recently pulled tendon. Valerie-- clumsy, accident prone Valerie-- had injured her leg while attempting to keep their Saint Bernard from chasing the mailman.

Watching as she walked away, Damon allowed her to reach the aisle’s end before jogging up to her. He turned and bent down to meet her gaze.

"Mom?" he asked. "What’s wrong?"

"Nothing," she snapped. Then, seeing the hurt play across her son’s face, she added, "Didn’t you hear the announcement? We need to get out of here.

"Besides," she continued, looking into the small shopping basket in Damon’s hand, full of Valentine’s gifts for his girlfriend, "I don’t even know why I came here. You probably have a better idea of what to get your father than I would."

The statement shocked Damon. He wasn’t used to such open pessimism from his usually easygoing mother.

"Mom, don’t be like that." He stooped to place his basket on the ground. "You’ve only been separated a few weeks. He’ll come back."

Damon embraced his mother.

"Don’t all couples go through some tough times?"

"But we’ve been together twenty years, Damon. Twenty years. I don’t know if I could manage without him."

Valerie pulled away, and they continued walking towards the exit. Silence swept over the environment, suffocating their weakening conversation into death, and both Damon and Valerie drifted into their own thoughts. Damon wondered how and when this distance had crept into his family. For reasons unknown to him, an uncomfortable friction had always existed between his parents; it wasn’t a violent situation, just an uneasy separation, and, as long as he could remember, he’d always had to split time between them.

He remembered frequent hunting trips with his father, camping excursions for days at a time. His mother never came along, and Damon never questioned why; it was just the way things were. He recalled other times, spent with his mother, attending local theater productions or cooking desserts in the kitchen. The tension between his parents had boiled over five weeks ago, culminating in an explosive argument and resulting in his father moving out. He didn’t know why it happened, but he somehow always sensed it would happen. After all, things could not continue the way they were.

A mob of twenty-odd belligerent customers milled around SaveMart’s manager, a very nervous looking thirty-something. Two wet spots beneath his arms saturated his denim button down shirt, and he rubbed his hands together as he addressed the crowd. The commotion drew Damon and Valerie from their respective thoughts.

They crept to the back of the crowd.

"What’s going on here?" Damon asked a large black woman in a flowered dress.

"Something wrong with the doors," she replied in a thick Southern drawl. "They ain’t workin’. They can’t be forced, neither."

"So we’re stuck in here?"

"With a bunch of zombies?" his mother interjected. She ran her fingers through her hair, pushing the dark red locks behind her ears.

The woman nodded and mopped her forehead with a handkerchief.

"I’m going to talk to the manager about it," Damon said, turning to his mother. "Wait here."

He pushed his way to the crowd’s front.

"—think that one of the zombies has infiltrated our security office and shut down the automatic doors," the manager said with a lisp. The man’s nametag, decorated with a large smiley face sticker, identified him as Stephen. "The proper authorities have all been contacted and will be arriving momentarily. Please, everyone remain calm."

Damon grabbed the manager by the arm and forced him away from the crowd. Stephen winced, but didn’t resist the stronger, younger man.

"We’re locked in this store with a horde of flesh hungry zombies," Damon said as he peered at Stephen, "and you want these people to stand here and remain calm?"

"Sir, we can’t do anything until the proper authorities arrive." Stephen rubbed the white indentations where Damon had gripped him.

"And then what? What will they do?" Damon demanded, a wry grin flashing across his face. "Are they certified in dealing with zombies?"

The manager’s face flushed and he stammered an incoherent reply.

"Why aren’t you directing people towards the fire exits?"

"Despite the stereotypes, these zombies are actually fairly intelligent," Stephen replied, with a bright, approving tone in his voice. "Not only have they shut down the front doors, but they’ve managed to block off the fire exits."

"We’ve got to deal with immediately. Do you have a hunting department?"

"My friend Sariah was telling me about past lives today, in the coffee shop," Valerie explained as she set dinner out for her family, two months before the infamous zombie incident. "I believe it. When I was a little girl, I always felt like I had some sort of past life. Of course, everyone always wrote it off as a childhood fantasy. But I absolutely believe it."

"What is this?" Martin Shields asked, eyeballing the platter in front of him.

"It’s a tofurkey, dear," she replied. "A turkey made out of tofu."

"Well, send it back and bring me the winner," Martin chuckled.

Damon furrowed his brow. His father filled their everyday conversations with in-jokes, which he never explained, leaving everyone else shaking their heads in confusion.

"And who were you in your past life, Mom?" Damon asked her.

"I always used to think I was, I don’t know, an Amazon warrior or something," she replied, lowering her head and blushing.

"Yep, I can tell," Martin added, as he heaped his plate with mashed potatoes. "You’ve got ‘Amazon’ written all over you."

Damon stared at the large display case, a treasure trove of hunting arms for the serious gamesman.

"I don’t know much about guns," Stephen offered, "but I can try to find someone to help—"

A loud scraping sound, accompanied by a short exchange of moans and grunts, interrupted Stephen. Both men turned their heads toward the nearest fire exit. A group of five zombies, working in unison, pushed a large cardboard "28 Days Later" display, full of DVDs, in front of the final unblocked escape route.

"Ingenius," Stephen mumbled, a grin emerging on his face.

Damon shook his head, disgusted with Stephen’s fascination.

"I know enough about guns," Damon said. "Just open the case."

The manager reached into his right pants pocket, felt around for a moment, and then, smiling uneasily, withdrew his hand and tried the other pocket.

"Screw it," Damon said, and smashed a nearby register gun through the glass. The glass shattered. The alarm sounded.

"Well, I’m glad the zombies in the security booth left that intact." Damon rolled his eyes.

"She says some weird things sometimes," Damon said into the phone, pacing back and forth in his bedroom while Nine Inch Nails played on his stereo.

"Yeah," Cynthia, his girlfriend, agreed. "But I like your mom. She’s funny."

"I guess. Like tonight. She made some tofu thing for dinner, and then she was telling me and my Dad about past lives. She thinks that she used to be an Amazon warrior."

He took a bite from the ham sandwich he’d snuck into this room. He felt unusually hungry tonight, following the unfulfilling meatless dinner. Damon liked trying new foods, but within the limits of normality.

"Well, scientifically, we’ve all had past existences," Cynthia began after a few moments of thought. "I mean— the basic elements and atoms that make you up today used to be something else, and after you die, you’re going to decompose and eventually form the basis for other things. That’s not too abstract, is it?"

"And then she was talking about how," Damon continued, steamrolling through the question, "in unusual circumstances, these past lives can emerge in present day, if we let them."

"I don’t know," Cynthia replied. "Sometimes, I think we spend too much time thinking about these things and not enough, I don’t know, thinking about more practical things. I still don’t know where I’m going to school next year."

Damon sighed.

"I’ve been thinking about joining the military," he said. "I’d really like to serve my country. You know, protect people."

Damon pumped his right arm up and down, loading the shotgun, as he walked into the kitchen department. The kitchen department—the last refuge for those soulless undead flesh puppets. After searching the electronics and hardware departments to no avail, a shaken customer sales representative had directed him to the kitchen department.

Zombies had strewn empty appliance boxes all over the floor, the contents smashed and broken in the aisles. The various devices bled mechanical innards into a pile inches thick on the floor, a layering of springs and batteries, wires and buttons that shifted with every uncertain step Damon took. Sparks flew up from an overturned microwave oven, while static and white noise issued from the downed machinery.

Damon walked down the aisle, sucking air in slow gulps, straining his ears for any sound of movement. From the white noise and static, a dull moaning emerged. Damon’s head cocked in the sound’s direction.

"Mom?" he ventured.

"Damon!" she called back.

"I’ll be right there!" Damon hurdled a pile of toasters.

Perhaps the zombie’s supernatural powers affected Damon’s already flustered state of mind, or the laybrinthe corridors of SaveMart were too complex for easy navigation; in any case, it took him several minutes to locate the source of his mother's cry. Finally arriving on the scene with sweat streaming down his face and out of breath, Damon looked on in amazement.

Valerie, grasping a gourmet chef knife in her left hand, stood opposing a huge zombie, a creature straight out of a ‘B’ movie. No longer recognizable as either man or woman, it wore the tattered remnants of a dull green sweater and a pair of khakis, both in rags and covered in filth. Its flesh, shriveled and discolored, hung from its body in thin strips. In many places, missing chunks of skin left muscle and bone exposed.

Even more remarkable, to Damon, was his mother. She stood in a tense fighting stance, her feet shoulder width apart and with the knife held out before her. Her eyes gazed ahead, not at the zombie or even at her surroundings, but vacantly, at something Damon couldn’t see. The corpses of three other zombies lay broken on the rubble around her.

A primal yell erupted from her mouth, curdling Damon’s blood and causing his shotgun to drop from his hand and clang on the tile floor. No longer a middle aged mother, no longer an abandoned wife, Valerie was an Amazon warrior, the gourmet chef knife in her hand a deadly weapon. She brandished this with the skill of a practiced warrior, keeping the zombie at bay with deft cuts, then thwacking it in the face with the blade’s flat end. The brittle remnants of its nose shattered.

His mother followed with a spinning roundhouse kick to the zombie’s throat, displaying no evidence of her former ankle injury. Damon heard a crack, then the zombie stumbled, falling against the wall, knocking pots and pans into the aisle.

Valerie, after surveying the results of her actions, emerged from her trance like state with a jolt. She blinked several times and glanced at her surroundings once more, this time with an expression of disbelief. She swooned and collapsed on the floor. The knife clattered off a metal sheet pan.

Static once again reigned.

Damon approached with wide eyes, trying to comprehend what had just transpired. He stepped over and around the zombies’ bodies, maintaining as much distance as possible, fearing that any moment they might spring up and resume their assault. Shuffling to his mother’s side, he knelt down and cradled her head.

"Mom, are you all right?"

Coughing, she lifted her head and opened her eyes.

"Damon? What’s going on?"

"I don’t know," he replied. "You just fought off a group of zombies that invaded SaveMart. You don’t remember?"

"No… I just blacked out."

"But are you okay?"

Damon strained his ears to her the whispered reply.

"Yeah," she said, and smiled. "I think everything’s going to be okay."