Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (8 page)

“infernal engines of war and hate forged in the factories of hel ”).

It might even have worked… except not a single missile from a single SDI orbiter fired. Each satel ite was equipped with six two-megaton warheads. Every goddamn one malfunctioned.

So much for modern technology.

Maddie supposed the horrible deaths of those brave men (and one woman) in space real y hadn’t been the last shock; there was the business of the one little graveyard right here on Jenny. But that didn’t seem to count so much because, after al , she had not been there. With the end of the world now clearly at hand and the island cut off —
thankful y
cut off, in the opinion of the island’s residents—from the rest of the world, old ways had reasserted themselves with a kind of unspoken but inarguable force. By then they al knew what was going to happen; it was only a question of when. That, and being ready when it did.

Women were excluded.

It was Bob Daggett, of course, who drew up the watch roster. That was only right, since Bob had been head selectman on Jenny since Hector was a pup. The day after the death of the president (the thought of him and the first lady wandering witlessly through the streets of Washington, D.C., gnawing on human arms and legs like people eating chicken legs at a picnic was not mentioned; it was a little too much to bear, even if the bastid and his big old blond wife
were
Democrats). Bob Daggett cal ed the first men-only Town Meeting on Jenny since someplace before the Civil War. So Maddie wasn’t there, but she heard. Dave Eamons told her al she needed to know.

“You men al know the situation,” Bob said. He had always been a pretty hard fel ow, but right then he looked as yel ow as a man with jaundice, and people remembered his daughter, the one on the island, was only one of four. The other three were other places… which was to say, on the mainland.

But hel , if it came down to that, they
al
had folks on the mainland.

“We got one boneyard here on the island,” Bob continued, “and nothin’ ain’t happened yet, but that don’t mean nothin’
wil
. Nothin’ ain’t happened yet lots of places… but it seems like once it starts, nothin’ turns to somethin’ pretty goddam quick.”

There was a rumble of assent from the men gathered in the basement of the Methodist church.

There were about seventy of them, ranging in age from Johnny Crane, who had just turned eighteen, to Bob’s great-uncle Frank, who was eighty, had a glass eye, and chewed tobacco.

There was no spittoon in the church basement and Frank Daggett knew it wel enough, so he’d brought an empty mayonnaise jar to spit his juice into. He did so now.

“Git down to where the cheese binds, Bobby,” he said. “You ain’t got no office to run for, and time’s a-wastin’.”

There was another rumble of agreement, and Bob Daggett blushed. Somehow his great-uncle always managed to make him look like an ineffectual fool, and if there was anything in the world he hated worse than looking like an ineffectual fool, it was being cal ed Bobby. He owned property, for Chrissake! He
supported
the old fart, for Chrissake.

But these were not things he could say. Frank’s eyes were like pieces of flint.

“Okay,” he said curtly. “Here it is. We want twelve men to a watch. I’m gonna set a roster in just a couple minutes. Four-hour shifts.”

“I can stand watch a hel uva lot longer’n four hours!” Matt Arsenault spoke up, and Davey told Maddie that Bob said after the meeting that no frog setting on a welfare lily pad like Matt Arsenault would have had the nerve enough to speak up like that if his great-uncle hadn’t cal ed him Bobby, like he was a kid instead of a man three months shy of his fiftieth birthday, in front of al the island men.

“Maybe so,” Bob said, “but we got enough men to go around, and nobody’s gonna fal asleep on sentry duty.”

“I ain’t gonna—”

“I didn’t say
you
,” Bob said, but the way his eyes rested on Matt Arsenault suggested that he
might
have meant him. “This is no kid’s game. Sit down and shut up.”

Matt Arsenault opened his mouth to say something more, then looked around at the other men—including old Frank Daggett—and wisely sat down again.

“If you got a rifle, bring it when it’s your trick,” Bob continued. He felt a little better with Frere Jacques out of the way. “Unless it’s a twenty-two. If you got no rifle bigger’n that, or none at al , come and get one here.”

“I didn’t know Reverend Peebles kept a supply of ’em handy,” Cal Partridge said, and there was a ripple of laughter.

“He don’t now, but he’s gonna,” Bob said, “because every man jack of you with more than one rifle bigger than a twenty-two is gonna bring it here.” He looked at Peebles. “Okay if we keep

’em in the rectory, Tom?”

Peebles nodded, dry-washing his hands in a distraught way.

“Shit on that,” Orrin Campbel said. “I got a wife and two kids at home. Am I s’posed to leave ’em with nothin if a bunch of cawpses come for an early Thanksgiving dinner while I’m on watch?”

“If we do our job at the boneyard, none wil ,” Bob replied stonily. “Some of you got handguns.

We don’t want none of those. Figure out which women can shoot and which can’t, and give ’em the pistols. We’l put ’em together in bunches.”

“They can play Beano,” old Frank cackled, and Bob smiled, too. That was more like it, by the Christ.

“Nights, we’re gonna want trucks posted around so we got plenty of light.” He looked over at Sonny Dotson, who ran Island Amoco, the only gas station on Jenny—Sonny’s main business wasn’t gassing cars and trucks—shit, there was no place much on the island to drive, and you could get your go ten cents cheaper on the mainland—but fil ing up lobster boats and the motorboats he ran out of his jackleg marina in the summer. “You gonna supply the gas, Sonny?”

“Am I gonna get cash slips?”

“You’re gonna get your ass saved,” Bob said. “When things get back to normal—if they ever do—

I guess you’l get what you got coming.”

Sonny looked around, saw only hard eyes, and shrugged. He looked a bit sul en, but in truth he looked more confused than anything, Davey told Maddie the next day.

“Ain’t got n’more’n four hunnert gal ons of gas,” he said. “Mostly diesel.”

“There’s five generators on the island,” Burt Dorfman said (when Burt spoke everyone listened; as the only Jew on the island, he was regarded as a creature both quixotic and fearsome, like an oracle that works about half the tune). “They al run on diesel. I can rig lights if I have to.”

Low murmurs. If Burt said he could, he could. He was an electrician, and a damned good one…

for a Jew, anyway.

“We’re gonna light that place up like a friggin’ stage,” Bob said.

Andy Kinsolving stood up. “I heard on the news that sometimes you can shoot one of them…

things… in the head and it’l stay down, and sometimes it won’t.”

“We got chain saws,” Bob said stonily, “and what won’t stay dead… why, we can make sure it won’t move too far alive.”

And, except for making out the duty roster, that was pretty much that.

Six days and nights passed and the sentries posted around the island graveyard were starting to feel a wee bit sil y (“I dunno if I’m standin’ guard or pul in’ my pud,” Orrin Campbel said one afternoon as a dozen men stood around a smal cemetery where the most exciting thing happening was a caterpil ar spinning a cocoon while a spider watched it and waited for the moment to pounce) when it happened… and when it happened, it happened fast.

Dave told Maddie that he heard a sound like the wind wailing in the chimney on a gusty night…

and then the gravestone marking the final resting place of Mr. and Mrs. Fournier’s boy Michael, who had died of leukemia at seventeen—bad go, that had been, him being their only get and them being such nice people and al —fel over. Then a shredded hand with a moss-caked Yarmouth Academy class ring on one finger rose out of the ground, shoving through the tough grass. The third finger had been torn off in the process.

The ground heaved like (like the bel y of a pregnant woman getting ready to drop her load, Dave almost said, and hastily reconsidered) wel , like the way a big wave heaves up on its way into a close cove, and then the boy himself sat up, only he wasn’t nothing you could real y recognize, not after almost two years in the ground. There was little pieces of wood sticking to him, Davey said, and pieces of blue cloth.

Later inspection proved these to be shreds of satin from the coffin in which the boy had been buried away.

(“Thank Christ Richie Fournier dint have that trick,” Bil Pulsifer said later, and they had al nodded shakily— many of them were stil wiping their mouths, because almost al of them had puked at some point or other during that hel acious half hour… these were not things Dave Eamons could tel Maddie, but Maddie guessed more than Dave ever guessed she guessed.) Gunfire tore Michael Fournier to shreds before he could do more than sit up; other shots, fired in wild panic, blew chips off his marble gravestone, and it was a goddam wonder someone on one side hadn’t shot someone on one of the others, but they got off lucky. Bud Meechum found a hole torn in the sleeve of his shirt the next day, but liked to think that might have been nothing more than a thorn—there had been raspberry bushes on his side of the bone-yard. Maybe that was real y al it was, although the black smudges on the hole made him think that maybe it had been a thorn with a pretty large caliber.

The Fournier kid fel back, most of him lying stil , other parts of him stil twitching.

But by then the whole graveyard seemed to be rippling, as if an earthquake was going on there—but
only
there, no place else.

Just about an hour before dusk, this had happened.

Burt Dorfman had rigged up a siren to a tractor battery, and Bob Daggett flipped the switch.

Within twenty minutes, most of the men in town were at the island cemetery.

Goddam good thing, too, because a few of the deaders almost got away. Old Frank Daggett, stil two hours away from the heart attack that would carry him off after it was al over and the moon had risen, organized the men into a pair of angled flanks so they wouldn’t shoot each other, and for the final ten minutes the Jenny boneyard sounded like Bul Run. By the end of the festivities, the powder smoke was so thick that some men choked on it. No one puked on it, because no one had anything left to puke up. The sour smel of vomit was almost heavier than the smel of gunsmoke… it was sharper, too, and lingered longer.

And stil some of them wriggled and squirmed like snakes with broken backs… the fresher ones, for the most part.

“Burt,” Frank Daggett said. “You got them chain saws?”

“I got ’em,” Burt said, and then a long, buzzing sound came out of his mouth, a sound like a cicada burrowing its way into tree bark, as he dry-heaved. He could not take his eyes from the squirming corpses, the overturned gravestones, the yawning pits from which the dead had come. “In the truck.”

“Gassed up?” Blue veins stood out on Frank’s ancient, hairless skul .

“Yeah.” Burt’s hand was over his mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“Work y’fuckin gut al you want,” Frank said briskly. “But get them saws while you do. And you…

you… you… you…”

The last “you” was his grandnephew Bob.

“I can’t, Uncle Frank,” Bob said sickly. He looked around and saw at least twenty men lying in the tal grass. They had swooned. Most of them had seen their own relatives rise out of the ground.

Buck Harkness over there lying by an aspen tree had been part of the cross fire that had cut his late wife to ribbons before he fainted when her decayed brains exploded from the back of her head in a grisly gray fan. “I can’t. I c—”

Frank’s hand, twisted with arthritis but as hard as stone, cracked across his face.

“You can and you wil , chummy,” he said grimly.

Bob went with the rest of the men.

Frank Daggett watched them grimly and rubbed his chest.

“I was nearby when Frank spoke to Bob,” Dave told Maddie. He wasn’t sure if he should be tel ing her this—or any of it, for that matter, with her almost halfway to foaling time—but he was stil too impressed with the old man’s grim and quiet courage to forbear. “This was after…

you know… we cleaned the mess up.”

Maddie only nodded.

“I’l stop,” Dave said, “if you can’t bear it, Maddie.”

“I can bear it,” she said quietly, and Dave looked at her quickly, curiously, but she had averted her eyes before he could see the secret in them.

* * *

Davey didn’t know the secret because no one on Jenny knew. That was the way Maddie wanted it, and the way she intended to keep it. There had been a time when she had, in the blue darkness of her shock, pretended to be
coping
. And then something happened that
made
her cope. Four days before the island cemetery vomited up its corpses, Maddie Pace was faced with a simple choice: cope or die.

She had been sitting in the living room, drinking a glass of the blueberry wine she and Jack had put up during August of the previous year—a time that now seemed impossibly distant—and doing something so trite it was laughable: She was Knitting Little Things (the second bootee of a pair this evening). But what else
was
there to do? It seemed that no one would be going across to the mal on the mainland for a long time.

Something had thumped the window.

A bat, she thought, looking up. Her needles paused in her hands, though. It seemed that something was moving out there in the windy dark. The oil lamp was turned up high and kicking too much reflection off the panes to be sure. She reached to turn it down and the thump came again. The panes shivered. She heard a little pattering of dried putty fal ing on the sash. Jack was going to reglaze al the windows this fal , she thought stupidly, and then: Maybe that’s what he came back for. Because it was Jack. She knew that. Before Jack, no one from Jenny had drowned for nearly three years. Whatever was making them return apparently couldn’t reanimate whatever was left of their bodies. But Jack…