Awkward

"Well, this is awkward."  Zachary stared at his friend from a bare few feet away.  Between them was the elephant in the room.

"This?  This is not awkward.  Wearing the same dress as your flavor-of-the-moment girlfriend is awkward.  Finding you in bed with the instructor?  That's awkward.  Finding you standing over a dead body?  Is most definitely not awkward."  The voice started as a low hiss and then moved up the scale in both pitch and volume, ending in a shrill of half-shriek.  It was true.  There were many unsaid things between them, and a dead body to boot.

Zachary nodded along with Taylor's assessment, the crumpled form that he'd not mentioned leaking blood across the worn coarse-woolen carpet.  He didn't seem at all guilty nor phased by the corpse or by Taylor's emotional distress.  This in itself was unusual because Taylor knew that Zachary was about as likely to punch someone in the face over an insult as he was to laugh it off.  She had yet to figure out if the schedule was relating to alternating days, phases or the moon, or what letters the name of the day was comprised of.

"It followed me home."

"It follo-what?"  Taylor spluttered in parroting Zachary, her thought processes trundling to a smoking halt.  Even as she stared at him.  It was said so frankly, so deadpan that she was half waiting for camera crew to burst from the broom closet and for him to tell her that she'd been pranked, punked, whatever.

Taylor could only hope this was a nightmare, some half-vision mingled of a dream, cobbled together with clues her subconscious had noticed the past week.  Because how does a corpse follow you home?  Either it was a zombie. . . or the person it had been when it still housed a spark had followed him and taken a wrong turn into Zachary's fist, landing the stranger a spot in the morgue.

This was far, far beyond anything the word 'awkward' was able to cover.