Val exhaled and opened her eyes.

Chris lay in the floor next to her. A crimson flow of blood leaked across the tiles, bits of flesh and skull flowing with the gray matter.

“You coward!” she yelled, sobbing uncontrollably. “Why? You filthy coward!” She grasped his collar to pull him towards her. His body shifted and the pulped contents of his skull spilled across her hands. She retched violently across the floor. Her nausea was magnified by the growing fever in her mind.

She sat on her knees, crying, with her gore slicked hands cradled in her lap. The urge to vomit would surge forward turning her cries to heaves. Finally, Val bent forward to look into his eyes once more. She wanted see Chris’s face before she succumbed to the fire in her veins.

Chris had shattered his skull with that bullet. His face no longer resembled the man she loved. The head looked deflated, rubbery, like a discarded Halloween mask full of blood and meat.

Val knew she should be nauseous.

Instead, she was ravenously hungry.