For a few minutes, Julie does try to recount the Gilmore Girls reboot season, but her heart isn't in it, and the blob is not a great conversational partner anyway. Closing the boxes of Captain Trips is never quite enough, at least not when she cracks certain ones open.

She hadn't thought of Becca in nearly four years. Had almost forgotten her swollen, rotting belly. The box is closed, but the image hasn't disappeared yet.

Julie falls silent. Grits her teeth as her gaze goes unfocused, her mind somewhere else. The sweltering heat of the direct sunlight as she walked along unshaded country roads. House after house, room after room of bodies, rotting in the summer warmth. Corpses clutching each other, pets lifeless at their owners' feet. The small, dated kitchen where she'd collapsed and sobbed on the linoleum when she realized she would have to leave her parents unburied, that she wasn't strong enough to move them to the hole she'd slaved to dig. The wheat and the corn in the fields, swaying with the breeze as she'd walked down the road, doomed to rot with no one to harvest it. The weight of her shotgun at her side.

Leaning her head back against the sofa, she chugs some more wine.