“Of course, if we were lucky, we wouldn't be getting chased by an army of zombies through the quarantine area that used to be downtown Santa Cruz. We'd be somewhere safer, like Bikini Atoll just before the bomb testing kicked off.”

“The garage door slid open as we pulled into the driveway, registering the sensors Shaun and I wear around our neck. In case of viral amplification, the garage becomes the zombie equivalent of a roach motel: Our sensors get us in, but only a clean blood test and a successful voice check gets us out. If we ever fail those tests, we’ll be incinerated by the house defense system before we can do any further damage.”

“People used to romanticize the natural world, before the Rising. These days, we mostly just run away from it.”

“If we didn't fear the truths we didn't hear, we'd lose the need to fear the ones we did.”

“So hell, maybe we just killed the last grizzly in the world. I'd feel bad about that if it hadn't been an infected zombie bear that wanted to eat my delicious flesh.”

“…and Dave and I, we were doing this…this weird circling thing, like we needed to figure out every single line of the script before we could even start the movie. I knew, and he knew, and we didn’t do a damn thing about it…It’s like we thought everything had to be perfect, or it wouldn’t work. Like it was a story.”

“We were the ones on scene when everything went down. We weren't better. We weren't worse. We were just the ones standing in the blast radius.”