Zombie Garage Doors Part II

    She looks up at the one star, a planet maybe. She thinks, this sky is so huge it can lift you off your feet, sail off into it, oh God if only. This is the predawn sky that can’t be contained in the square of a broken window, it seeps into everything, covers you in gloaming blue. This blue inkwashes your pale hands indigo, it gets in your hair, phosphorescent; it eats you it owns you it gets inside you where all the slitherling things live, where bright things and dark things are and turns them all watercolor blue. You breathe it in and out and taste your whole world and you say okay. Lungs still breathe. Things are okay.

 This is the transitory sky that makes all the spindly building remnants go black black, black citadel spires, almost like the old skylines used to look; and in the cracks between the buildings along the horizon, and reflecting off metal garage doors, the white where the sun is going to come back soon.
    She used to look forward to that part, used to like the odious crass pinks and oranges and even the reds, and the sunlight that smelts your eyelids to your cheeks.
    Now she looks up and counts, ten minutes, maybe. Ten minutes until twilight welken dies, until that last shimmerwink planet star burns and turns its way out, leaves for the rest of the universe, out in the nebula cloud strings and Hubble-bright fairy lights of space, oh little planet star. What you do to me.

    And when she says goodnight to the planet star, when the last of the blue unpaints itself from her skin, she says good morning to the undead. The corpse of the city, skeletal and rotting: smashed-in glass, broken garage doors, warped metals, filthy deposits of detritus. She breathes in the last of the magic predawn air, and then covers her face with her bandanna, to smother the smell of the eviscerated streets. They have to move west, but that means leaving the relative safety of their high-rise. They’ve packed supplies, plotted a hobbit-route across Middle America, and at dawn, they start their farthing travels, no longer safely tucked away in the night.
She leaves her post by the window. Goodnight, blue. Good morning, zombies.