“Damnit, Zed,” I shouted at the dumbfounded zombie standing before me, “what are you doing here??”

“Will,” he managed, stunned, “I don’t know. I was in the grove where you saw me, and then I was here, and that thing… It was like you, but it was very noisy, and then it ran away. It smelled terrible though, what was that?”

I almost laughed, but I was still too upset that he was here. “That’s what women look like in the Middle… And that’s what they smell like. It smells good to other humans. It’s called Chanel Number 5.”

“Disgusting…”

I decided not to tell him what he smelled like to us. I had a serious problem here. First the portal to The Other Side acting weird and disappearing, and then both Zed and myself being dropped here without explanation. I needed to get in touch with the other mediums in a hurry, and I needed to make sure no one else saw Zed.

“Come on, buddy,” I said as reassuringly as I could. I placed a hand on his grey shoulder and the flesh gave way easier than I expected. “Sorry,” I muttered while herding him ahead of me a little more gently.

“For what?” Zed asked, casually reshaping his decaying shoulder to the proper shape.

“Never mind,” I shook my head, “let’s get you back to my place and hide you. I need to figure out what’s going on so that we can get you back home.”

“What’s that?” Zed asked, pointing up and shielding his face with a hand.

“That’s the Sun Zed. It keeps us warm.” I explained, but I already saw that his pallid skin was beginning to singe under the direct light. It had never occurred to me that Othersiders would be that poorly adapted to our world. Before I had much more time to dwell on it, though, I had gotten Zed back into my house, and out of the Sun.

“I’m sorry to do this, man, but I need you to hide in the basement. We can’t have anybody else seeing you. It’ll make it harder to get you home.” I shut the door behind Zed, and cursed under my breath. There was still broken glass and blood on the floor of my house, and somehow a shard had worked its way through the sole of my shoe to poke me in the foot. I took a minute to clean up my mess properly.

I had barely finished sweeping up the glass when my cell phone rang. I looked at it impatiently, and then breathed a sigh of relief. It was Jennifer: the Medium for the Dark Side. If anyone could help me sort this mess out it would be her.

“Jen,” I answered excitedly, but she cut me off before I could say another word.

“What in the seven sides is wrong with you?” her voice exploded through the phone. I actually had to hold it away from my ear in order to make out what she was saying, which was something like: “Are you daft? Have you suddenly forgotten every aspect of your job? Did one of those damned things from the Other Side take a swipe at you and eat your brain, or were you actually born this stupid?”

“Jen, what are you talking about,” I managed, “I was just about to call you to say something weird happened.”

“Something weird?” she snapped, “That’s how you would characterize this?” she hesitated, “Damn it all to the Bad Side, you have no idea what’s happening out there, do you?”

“What’s happening out where?” I wondered, “Talk to me Jen, I have been a bit tied up for the last half-hour with an emergency of my own, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Turn on your television,” Jen ordered.

“What station?” I asked as I flipped past an infomercial for The Greatest Hits of The Doors.

“Any station, you idiot,” she hissed. I flipped for a few seconds without understanding. CNN – Static. Fox news – Static. Something must have been wrong with my cable… BBC – Holy shit.

“Holy shit,” I whispered into the phone.

“There it is,” Jen answered. On the screen, there was a crowd of Othersiders marching across Trafalgar Square, tearing police officers apart. “All of a sudden,” Jen explained, “A few hundred-thousand zombies just up and appeared all over the damn world. People know what to do when they see zombies, Will. They freak out and SHOOT them. I am sure you can more or less fill in the blanks from there. The damned, disgusting things fought back, and I’ll be damned if one of them didn’t figure out that inside of the humans heads were nice juicy brains, and then one thing led to another, and now civilization as we know it is on the brink of annihilation, because you dropped the ball, but please, please Will, tell me what happened that seemed weird to you. I am all freaking ears.”

“The portal,” I explained quickly, “looked normal, but flickered red, when I looked away. It seemed like someone was messing with it. I went over to the Other Side to check things out, and everything seemed fine, but then I was back here, without using the portal, and when I went to look, the portal was gone. I didn’t do this, Jen, I swear.”

“How long was the portal acting weird?” Jen asked, more calmly.

“I don’t know maybe fifteen minutes,” I said, “why?”

“It sounds like somebody screwed with the boundary, and ended up tearing the whole thing down. Now the whole Other Side is in the Middle… Lucky for you, you are too stupid to have done this much damage, even by accident, so you aren’t a suspect, but we will need to bring all of the Mediums together to try to get to the bottom of this. Even I can’t fix this by myself.”

“Alright,” I said, “well where should we meet, I doubt we can do it safely here in the Middle, with things going South this fast.”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was growing softer. “I’m gonna need to make some calls and get back to you. I can’t risk calling you again, by now the NSA and God knows who else is gonna be scanning phone traffic trying to figure out what’s going on, and if we have natural authorities messing with us, we may not be able to fix this at all. I will come to your house to pick you up for the meeting.”

Click.

My heart was pounding. Not just because of the damned apocalypse that was at least partially my fault, but also because Jen was coming. I hadn’t seen her since my initiation, and the memory of her porcelain skin against the sleek black dress she had worn that day was almost enough to make me forget about the disaster outside. Almost.

I sat down and watched the TV in horror. There was a field reporter trying to describe the scene as a mob of Othersiders met police and vigilante humans in the streets of every major city on Earth. This was bad. The Othersiders weren’t violent by nature, but a hundred years of zombie movies had taught humanity that anything with grey skin and rotting flesh was evil and needed to be destroyed decisively, and no creature will sit quietly if you set out to destroy it. It didn’t help that Othersiders were, for all practical purposes, indestructible. Zombie fiction gives the impression that if you destroy their head, they die, and that is the end of it. Hardly. We are talking about a creature that literally sustains itself by eating brains. Every body part can operate autonomously. The camera zoomed in on a man standing triumphantly over a headless Othersider’s body. Then the body moved, dragging the man down, and then it lurched toward the reporter… Static.