Chuck Palahniuk - Zombie

The televisions show people outside in parking lots and in tow-away zones, all holding hands. Bonds forming. Everyone's uploading video of everyone, people standing miles away but still connected back to me.

And crackling with static, voices come over the walkie-talkies of the Homeland Security guards, saying, "If you hurt yourself, you hurt me—do you copy?"

By that point there's not a big enough defibrillator in the universe to scramble all our brains. And, yeah, eventually we'll all have to let go, but for another moment everyone's holding tight, trying to make this connection last forever. And if this impossible thing can happen, then who knows what else is possible? And a girl at Burger King shouts, "I'm scared too." And a boy at Cinnabon shouts, "I am scared all the time. " And everyone else is nodding, Me too.

To top things off, a huge voice announces, "Attention!" From overhead it says, "May I have your attention, please?" It's a lady. It's the lady voice who pages people and tells them to pick up the white paging telephone. With everyone listening, the entire airport is reduced to silence.

"Whoever you are, you need to know…" says the lady voice of the white paging telephone. Everyone listens because everyone thinks she's talking only to them. From a thousand speakers she begins to sing. With that voice, she's singing the way a bird sings. Not like a parrot or an Edgar Allan Poe bird that speaks English. The sound is trills and scales the way a canary sings, notes too impossible for a mouth to conjugate into nouns and verbs. We can enjoy it without understanding it. And we can love it without knowing what it means. Connected by telephone and television, it's synchronizing everyone, worldwide. That voice so perfect, it's just singing down on us.

Best of all…her voice fills everywhere, leaving no room for being scared. Her song makes all our ears into one ear.

This isn't exactly the end. On every TV is me, sweating so hard an electrode slowly slides down one side of my face.

This certainly isn't the happy ending I had in mind, but compared to where this story began—with Griffin Wilson in the nurse's office putting his wallet between his teeth like a gun—well, maybe this is not such a bad place to start.