I thought the style of this was its best feature, a nostalgiac look at the zombie wars. The reading was great and served to enhance the story very well.
There was definitely too much "As you know, Bob" dialogue with the kid though. Not only is he telling the kid everything that happened before, but everything that he already ought to know about the present, and the details of how to kill zombies are well known both to the characters and to anyone who's heard of zombies, so the story could've been tightened considerably.
For most of the story it appeared that you had to be dead before you would zombify, but then someone turns into a zombie when they were apparently alive and aware moments before. Perhaps I missed something but that didn't make sense at all given the information in the story before that.
And apparently I'm the only one who didn't understand the big headband revelation that seemed to be the point of the story. The best I could figure is the following:
Every living human has to wear a headband with explosives and a microchip.
Not everyone was willing to agree to this at first, those people were killed.
If you are not "lively" enough in some undefined way, then the headband explodes, though I wasn't sure if the "lively" meant psychologically or physically.
So the idea is that zombies are less lively in that undefined way and this will dispatch the zombies since they are both too stupid to act lively, and too stupid to remove the headband?
So why did the narrator take his headband off at the end? Won't the kid shoot him? Is he testing the kid? Or is he committing suicide? Maybe it was supposed to be an open ending, but it just plain didn't make sense to me. And since everything in the story seemed to be structured around the reveal of the purpose of the headband, since I didn't understand that, I just don't think I got what was intended out of the story at all.