When the zombie apocalypse first started, we scoffed. The zombies were just like we’d seen on TV shows and movies, shambling corpses with not a lick of coordination or intelligence. Any healthy adult would have no problem dealing with them, let alone the combined might of the world’s militaries. We had tanks, planes, nuclear bombs, we reached the moon for goodness sake. Outside of the moral reluctance to kill humans, they were no threat to any nation.

We became even more confident as the weeks passed, and tales of combat trickled in from across the globe. Zombies were weak, consistent tales of small, isolated militias defeating hordes outnumbering them 10 to 1 became common. A video even went viral, of a fit grandmother managing to powerwalk her way away from a zombie and lead it to an intersection, where it was unceremoniously killed by a jogger with a rock. Only a few outbreaks ever became dangerous, and these were in packed third world slums. Months passed, and the zombie annoyance faded into the background.

The first sign of danger came when we counted the kills. Worldwide, 10 million people were unaccounted for, presumably turned.

In that same time period we counted 20 million zombies exterminated.

We were confused of course. We demanded recounts, we checked and doublechecked. But no, the numbers were true. As time passed the trend became more and more pronounced, for every unaccounted person there were soon three zombies. Then four. Five. Military units sent to tiny villages reported hordes thousands strong, vastly beyond prewar human presence. Smaller countries soon began reporting kill counts equivalent to their entire population.

Scientists attempted to discover why. Were zombies reproducing? Were they doing it the old fashioned way, or perhaps splitting apart like cells did? Experiments discovered nothing, captured zombies lay frustratingly still and those we chopped apart stayed dead until they rotted to nothingness. Theories about salt water, zombies popping out of the earth and even aliens were all put forth, all without a lick of evidence in support.

The trend escalated. Zombies began to pile up. The term “mountain of corpses” became literal. Hills of corpses began to appear whenever we finished a battle. Satellite imagery showed zombies pouring like rivers out of cities, forests, and mountain ranges and deserts. A warship blasted its horn off the coast of Singapore, a country of five million people, and thirty million rotting corpses limped their way out of the high rises.

On the war’s tenth anniversary, we hit 50 billion killed zombies.

Most countries have fallen. The UN consists of 13 countries, hiding out in fortified strongholds. We are almost out of ammunition, even at draconian wartime footing every day’s production disappears into the bodies of billions of corpses throwing themselves at our defenses. What satellite imagery we have puts estimates at 100 billion zombies roaming our Earth, and at current growth rates they’ll hit 200 in a year. Then 300, 400, 5.

Maybe one day they’ll reach the moon.