> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.cristianmihai.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Long Slow Death of the Undead American Dream - URL: https://www.cristianmihai.com/the-long-slow-death-of-the-undead-american-dream/ - Published: 2026-03-17T14:35:13.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-24T02:16:31.000Z - Author: Cristian Mihai - Tags: Short Story Everybody rehearsed for the end of the world. For thirty years television sold them the apocalypse in high-definition gore, and the survival shows taught them how to shoot a neighbor over a can of peaches. The first week the dead got up, Dick's Sporting Goods sold out of aluminum bats before ten in the morning. People bought generators and crossbows they couldn't draw. A pharmacist two streets over from Zeke nailed his kids' bunk beds across his front windows. Then the dead came, and the dead get winded on stairs. They stagger and moan. Their knees pop like bubble wrap when they stand up. They still bite when they remember to, and they mostly forget. People are just as disappointing dead as they were alive, and the world ends with a wheeze. Zeke sits in his Honda Odyssey at the back of the Costco lot with the driver's door open and one work shoe on the asphalt. He's on his fifteen-minute break. The van still smells like Tali's apple juice boxes, and when he lights a Marlboro he holds it outside the door frame so the smoke stays out of the seats. A sleeping bag lies rolled up in the back beside her booster seat. He parks in this spot every break, and the pens along the side of the building sit in his side mirror. The late sun comes in low over the road and turns every windshield in the lot to foil. Out in the intersection, a dead woman in Lululemon holds downward dog on the crosswalk stripes. The back of her sports bra has torn open, and so has her back, and the sun finds white bone and pink meat along her spine. She holds the pose for thirty seconds. Then she remembers she's dead, and she folds onto the asphalt and moans. The dead wear their death like business casual. Loss Prevention herds them with cattle prods now. The guys give each one a tap between the shoulder blades, *tzzt*, and the dead file along the side of the building into the chain-link pens, where they sway like Black Friday shoppers who forgot what they came for. "Line forms on the left, people," Zeke tells the side mirror. "Come on, buddy. Pick up the pace." It's the door voice. For nine years Zeke has stood at the exit with a yellow highlighter and drawn one line down every receipt, and the door voice is the one he uses on members who try to roll a sixty-five-inch Samsung past him with their elbows out. The dead get the door voice now. The dead don't carry receipts. Across the road, the Taco Bell drive-thru line runs out into the street, and every driver rolls the window down just far enough for a Crunchwrap. A dead man in a pinstripe suit stumbles past the van with a Wells Fargo lanyard around his neck. His badge says SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, and the rest of his title has rubbed off where his chin hangs on it. He catches a foot on the curb of the cart corral and goes down, and he spends the better part of a minute getting vertical again. Zeke flicks his cigarette. It bounces off the banker's forehead and keeps burning in the gutter. "We had you people on a pedestal. You had the corner office and your name on a parking space. Your people called my house every morning at eight for a month." Zeke watches the banker sway. "Now look at you." The banker moans. It sounds like a dial-up modem in hospice. "Yeah, I get it." This is how the world ends. Costco will take back anything a member drags through the door, with or without a receipt, and this spring every cemetery in the county adopted the same return policy. Then a sound comes up the lot from the direction of the pens. *Click-drag. Click-drag.* Small feet are crossing the asphalt. One patent-leather shoe clicks, and the other one drags. Zeke's hand stops halfway to the pack on the dash. Behind him, a small voice says, "Daddy?" It's Tali's voice. Tali died eight months ago, two months before the rest of the world caught up. Leukemia took most of a year to do it. The last week, the hospital smelled like industrial pine, like Christmas in a petri dish, and Zeke slept sitting up in a vinyl recliner with one hand through the bed rail and around her ankle. He gets out of the van. The thing wearing his daughter's face stands at the rear bumper in her Easter dress. The dress is white cotton with purple flowers. Tali picked it off a clothing table in this Costco the last normal weekend, and the first place she wore it was the casket. Her skin has gone the gray of wet cardboard, and her eyes look like fogged windows. Under her collarbone, the chemo port still lifts the skin in a bump the size of a quarter. "I'm hungry." Her lips work wrong, like she's learning them again. The dress has new stains. Rust from the pens has printed the fence's diamonds across the front, and the hem has gone brown, and the collar has gone red. Zeke gets a hand on the roof rack, and the lot tilts anyway. "Hey, baby, what do you need?" It comes out in the door voice. She tilts her head the way she did when she wanted one more story. "Take me home?" By the cart corral, the banker stops swaying and turns around. Along the fence, the dead in the pens turn their faces toward the van, and in the intersection the Lululemon woman unfolds from the crosswalk and stands up. Tali lifts her hand. Her fingers are small and gray, and the polish on her nails is chipped and still pink. It's Wet n Wild. She made him buy the bottle at CVS the night before her last trip to the hospital. She painted her own nails at the kitchen table and told him the nurses had to look at her all day. Zeke takes her hand. It's freezer-aisle cold. "I'll take you home." He leaves the keys in the ignition and the driver's door open, and the Odyssey rings its door chime at the empty seat, *ding, ding, ding*, all the way across the lot. One of the Loss Prevention guys lowers his cattle prod. "Zeke, your fifteen's up!" Zeke keeps walking. Tali leads him across the lot, and the banker falls in behind them, and the dead in the pens press their faces to the chain-link and watch them go. The Loss Prevention guys watch too. Past the cart corral, the dead become the city's problem. It's a mile and change from the Costco to Evergreen Court, and she walks the whole way. Her Mary Janes keep time on the sidewalk with one click and one drag. They pass the Petco, where the adoption dogs barked for four days after the staff stopped coming in, and then the dogs quit. Somebody wrote STILL ALIVE across the Subway window in mustard, and the mustard has gone brown. The bat racks in the Dick's window still hang empty. The late sun stretches their shadows across the Subway lot until they're longer and thinner than either of them ever was, and Zeke's shadow holds Tali's shadow by the hand. The dead shuffle along after them. The banker comes first, and the Lululemon woman comes next, and a teenager in a Fortnite hoodie follows her with his jaw gone, and he makes wet noises through the open bottom of his face. A man in an H&R Block polo brings up the rear with a dead phone pressed to his ear. They follow Tali the way members follow the sample lady. She squeezes his hand once, the way she did when the flying monkeys came on in *The Wizard of Oz*. "Are you in there, Tal?" She keeps walking. She leads him, and she leads all of them, and Zeke fills the quiet. "It's okay," he tells her, and he tells the mailboxes and the hydrants. "We're almost home. It's left on Evergreen, and it's the blue door. You picked that color." She takes the left on Evergreen before he gets to it. The subdivision opens around them in beige and in a darker beige the brochure called Sandcastle. Every lawn is perfect. The HOA survived the end of the world. Zeke's lawn is perfect too, and Mr. Sexton next door has cut it in the same diagonal stripes as his own. The door is blue. The paint chip said Cosmic Cobalt, and Tali held it up to her face in the Home Depot aisle and said it matched her eyes. It didn't match her eyes. Zeke bought four gallons for one door. Tali goes up the walk ahead of him and crouches at the ceramic frog by the step. She tips it back with both hands, *skrrk*, and the spare key lies in its square of dry dirt where he left it. She holds the key up to him with one hand and sets the frog down with the other. At the curb, the dead stop. They stand in a row along it like carolers who forgot the words, and Zeke opens his mouth to tell them the line forms on the left and closes it again. The banker straightens his tie and checks a wrist that has no watch on it. Zeke unlocks the door, and Tali walks in ahead of him. The house smells like a lunchbox left in a hot car. Tali's drawing still hangs on the fridge under a Domino's magnet. In crayon, a tall man and a short girl stand under a yellow sun in front of a blue door, and the blue runs past the lines. She signed it TALITHA in letters that climb uphill. The cereal bowls from the last morning sit in the sink under green fur, and whole new neighborhoods have moved into the dried milk. Tali opens the fridge, and the light still comes on. The jug of Kirkland milk on the top shelf has swollen until its cap bulges. "I'm hungry." Zeke opens the freezer. Frost has furred the family box of pepperoni Hot Pockets, and the cold spills out and pools around his ankles. "You want one of these? You'd burn the roof of your mouth every single time, and every single time you'd act surprised." She turns and looks at him, and then she looks through him. She puts one gray finger on the inside of his elbow, on the soft place where the nurses used to tap for her veins. "I want Daddy." So this is how it ends. It ends in his own kitchen with the freezer door open and the cold pooling around his ankles. Zeke leaves his arm where it is. Tali tilts her head. Her words are coming back to her in pieces, and the wrong pieces came first. "It isn't time yet, Daddy." She takes a Hot Pocket out of the box, and the frozen crust *crunches* when she bites through the middle. Ice crystals stick to her lips. The pink polish stands out on her gray fingers. She chews and swallows, and she takes another bite. Through the window over the sink, Zeke watches the dead drift off the curb and go back to their loops. The Lululemon woman heads toward her intersection. The banker goes wherever bankers go after close of business. Zeke sits down at the kitchen table. His old chair still faces the window, and past the glass Mr. Sexton is mowing his lawn. Mr. Sexton mows twice a week. The apocalypse is no excuse for crabgrass. He sees Zeke in the window and lifts two fingers off the mower handle, and he keeps mowing. Tali climbs into her chair across from him. She eats the first Hot Pocket down to the crimped edge and takes another one out of the box. She eats this one slower. Zeke folds his hands on the table. "How long do I have?" She looks at him the way the visitors looked at her the last week, over the bed rail with their coats still on, and the look holds long enough for Zeke to see the girl who picked the dress off the clothing table and the thing that climbed out of the ground in it, and both of them sit in the same chair with crumbs on the same chin, and the chair is the one she climbed into every morning for Froot Loops, and the kitchen is the kitchen where the milk swelled for eight months while the porch light came on every night for nobody. "It'll be soon." She holds up the Hot Pocket with the bite gone from its middle. "It's when I'm not hungry for these anymore." The refrigerator hums. Tali chews. Out on the step, the ceramic frog guards the door. The sun goes down behind Mr. Sexton's garage, and the mower cuts out. The porch light comes on by itself and lays a yellow square across the walk. Zeke put in a dusk-to-dawn bulb three years ago, during the winter Tali decided the frog moved around at night. Tali's chewing slows down. Zeke gets up. He takes a Hot Pocket out of the box and slides it into its crisping sleeve the way the box says, and he puts it in the microwave for two minutes the way the box says. The plate turns in the yellow light. The Hot Pocket goes around and around, and the cheese starts to spit inside the crust. *Beep. Beep. Beep.* He sets it on a paper towel in front of her. Steam rolls out of the crimped end. Tali puts down the cold one and takes the hot one in both gray hands. She opens her mouth wide over the middle, where the cheese is hottest, and Zeke leans across the table until he can feel the cold coming off her open mouth.