The guinea pigs had babies while I was out. I scooped up one little yellow and white one with orange spots and cradled her while I walked around looking for Rahul so I could tell him. I couldn’t find him.

I started trimming my hair using the razor comb I’d bought. When I was done, my hands were crisscrossed with a fine, stinging net of tiny slices.

I was walking with CHT and Mom and Serena across a parking lot. People were chasing us–they shot at us–and then somehow we were in an abandoned building/warehouse-type thing. He opened a door and two corpses fell out. One of them was Sean’s girlfriend. We went up spiraling stairs. Rahul was suddenly there and said we should go back and put back the corpses so that Sean wouldn’t be upset when he saw her body lying there–but when we turned around and went back we ran into Sean coming towards us, pushing his girlfriend in a wheelchair. She was a zombie and couldn’t walk so well anymore because she was dead.

I broke the Carlsons’ burglar alarm system somehow, and went out to the mall to get a new one. While I was there, I was distracted by all the poems by Marianne that had been posted all over the Sunnyvale strip mall, on the sides of planters and on the walls between stores. I went into a Payless Shoe Source. I went back home and the guinea pigs had had babies. There were dozens of them, white ones mostly; a few were normal-sized, but the rest were about as big as a garlic clove. I scooped them up and started putting them on one of our metal plates so I could count them and sort them. I didn’t realize that the plate was burning hot, though, and the little guinea pigs started to fry. The ones that were the size of garlic cloves turned into real garlic cloves, splitting and sizzling, and I felt a sense of relief that now I had fewer pigs to worry about. I went back upstairs from the basement where I had been. Gretchen started asking me something and I looked surprised because I thought she was asking me about the guinea pigs, but it turned out she was annoyed because of the burglar alarm, which I’d forgotten to get a replacement for.