If you're writing a horror story, people are reading it, and nobody's horny, you're doing it wrong.

I slammed another book shut, the only decent book I had had in my backpack when I ended up at Starbucks, an insignificant, trashy vampire erotica. I had reached another end. Another death, another blood orgy of literate proportions. I explored my thoughts once again, explored my desire to write a horror story for nerdy college kids who can't get laid all over the world. How do you write a murder that's mildly frightening and very funny? What makes a set of serial killings feel like the literary equivalent of multiple orgasms?

I search for the answer within myself while in my head runs that scene from Re-Animator, and you know the scene, on a loop. A vampire, a cannibal, a zombie- the taste of human flesh in many forms all at once a metaphor for sexual deviance. No one says it, but it's there, and you notice. I will make you notice. My words will one day be the thing that brings you, if you've been on your bed in the missionary position for your whole life, to your knees in the woods, half-hoping someone is watching with a machete. This is my quest.

The horror phenomenon has never applied to virgins. We're left out. Nobody wants a girl in their story who keeps their clothes on. Sex in horror is not a cliche, it just works. And it's the only way anybody is going to read it. This is why I haven't given up- my audience has not been entirely wiped out. I know this because somewhere in this story I have to lose my virginity. Or I am just never going to die.

I keep writing because I have been walled inside a Starbucks, how cliche, with a backpack full of notebooks. It was the second day of classes and therefore each of them contained only two days of notes. The rest was blank. I had six notebooks full of pages, which would keep me occupied if only until they get in. Or I find an escape route.

Are we talking about an infection here? How the fuck should I know. I've been locked in a coffee shop for three days. The glass walls are what scares me, but it seems as if they've migrated away. I am still too afraid to open the door. My assumption is that the smell of coffee beans shielded my scent, and once the monsters devoured everyone else, I escaped their notice as they migrated to a more habitable city. If this is the case, then where did the barista go? I don't fucking know. Maybe she smelled more meaty than I do.

This is how I find solace here in my lonely little refuge. I remember that zombies never allow a woman to die a virgin. I also remember that that means I can't be alone.

This started on the second day of my sophomore year. I woke up alone, my dorm mate had left before I did. As it was only the second day and she had already managed to skip classes to drink and get laid, I was surprised to see her up and out before I was. But I'm not surprised if she got eaten by a zombie. I dressed, and left my dorm, feeling drained already by the day before. Only fifteen weeks and six days left to go.
Except my professor fucking ate my classmate's brain.

Yep. Last day of classes for me.

An empty classroom with the lights out greeted me at 8:04 on Tuesday morning. I thought that I was late, but the room was empty. I flipped a switch on the wall, and looked around. There was no notice, but there was no one there. I decided to wait until ten past the hour, and abandon class only then. I slunk over to a chair near the middle of the room. I pulled out the aisle chair to claim my seat, but someone was already sitting there. Half of them was, anyway. I screamed, staring down into my classmate's stomach, where it seemed his torso had been cut off. My scream alerted my teacher, whose head, mouth dripping with blood, peeked up over the desk to look around. I saw a ring-adorned hand on the ground now in front of the dry erase board, blood pouring out of the wrist, staining the white tiles red.

My professor's eyes fell upon me. They were blank, their pupils dilated to the point of overcoming them completely. He had blood spattered all down his button-up shirt, his overcoat torn at the shoulder, presumably as another of my human classmates fought for their lives. Luckily I had no friends at school. My instinct to flee danger was second only to my instinct to scream again, and as I did so, I began to run. I expected my teacher to lunge at me, to bound after me as I ran for my life, to overtake me and eat me, too. Instead, he ignored me and continued with the feast he had hidden behind his desk.

I did not slow down until I was outside of school. The campus seemed deserted as if everyone but me had hunkered down into a fallout shelter. Then I saw another one. Off in the distance, on the deserted road, a man in red was dragging away a cheerleader by her ankle, the top of her head sliced off. Her severed head bounced up and down as he dragged her over changes in the pavement. He dragged her over a pothole, her head was jogged up hard, and her brain fell limply aside. The man was distracted. He gently laid her legs down on the blacktop, fell to his knees and climbed over her to sniff the brain hanging from her neck.

I turned away, disgusted but somehow not as freaked out as you'd think. I had seen so many horror movies, read so many books. I could easily convince myself that this was an act of my subconscious. A dream. Until I felt one's breath on my neck.

I didn't know where it could have been hiding, I had only watched the other for a moment, but there was another one behind me. I turned, saw it face to face, those horrible dilated eyes staring aimlessly right in front of it. It was a girl, a young girl with barely budding breasts who must have wandered over from the middle school just down the street. She was nearly my height, and her mouth was heavily lipsticked, but there was no blood, which meant she wasn't homicidal...

... or she was still hungry.

I stared her in the face for a half a second that felt like minutes. She seemed confused, unmoving, for that half a second. She sniffed at me frantically, like a dog, before opening her teeth and gnashing them in my direction. She lunged at me with her face only. I instinctively shoved her aside, and she toppled over. As she fell to the ground in her hipster jeans and Limited Too brand tank top, I saw that her arms were missing. She rolled on the ground like a half-dead waterbug, and I ran once again to the first place I could run to. I locked the door, ran and jumped over the counter and peeked cautiously over the top of it, through the door. I could still see the girl rolling on the ground for what had to be an hour before she steadied. After another five minutes, the man in red had crawled over, given her body a thorough sniff, and sunk his teeth deep into her flesh. I stopped watching again. I slept there behind the counter and didn't move for half the day, until I really really had to pee.

And here I am now. In Starbucks in the middle of the apocalypse. Writing a horror story for an audience that I believe... That I hope still exists.