Grave

GRAVE

JOAN FRANCES TURNER

Death was never the end...

Death’s true face, that awful blinding darkness and midnight sunrise spilling from behind the remnants of his human masks, swallowing up the moon and sun and all parts of the sky—I mourned the sight of it, the feel of his presence, that all-encompassing everything and suffocating womb. I mourned it like a lost lover. I wanted him back. I wanted it all back.

Praise for The Resurgam Trilogy:

Dust

“A massively entertaining and seriously revisionist zombie novel...smart, scary and viscerally real.”

—Booklist (starred review)

Frail

“A great, unsettling portrait of raw hunger and hope.”

—Jeff Long, author of
Deeper
and
The Descent

“A gritty and personal post-zombie novel with a clear-voiced, strong female narrator and a fresh new perspective on a saturated genre.”

—Shelf Awareness

Grave

“The Resurgam Trilogy finishes on a high note with this well-written dystopian novel...Turner stands out with a gift for well-turned phrases .”

—
Publishers Weekly

Also in the Resurgam Trilogy:

Dust

Frail

Joan Frances Turner

First edition published 2014.

Copyright © 2014 by Hilary Hall

All rights reserved.

Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission
of the publisher.

Please respect the authorís rights; donít pirate!

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authorís imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

For information, address

Candlemark & Gleam LLC,

102 Morgan Street, Bennington, VT 05201

[email protected]

ISBN: 978-1-936460-55-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-936460-56-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

In Progress

Cover art by RB Griffiths

Map by Alan Caum

Composition by Kate Sullivan

Typeface: ElectraLH

Editor: Kate Sullivan

Proofreader: Aliza Becker

www.candlemarkandgleam.com

In loving memory of C.,
who lives on, somewhere else.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

DOUBT

ONE

AMY

T
he world may be good as ended, but there’s still a Shop-Wel pharmacy every fifty yards. That’s a beautiful thing, really, to know that even after we’re all dead, after we’re all walking around dead, the potato chips and rubbing alcohol and tweezers and condoms and snack-pack ravioli will all live to see another—

I think I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s hard not to, so much has happened in just a few months. Zombies, proper zombies—they already feel like the vaguest of memories. The world we thought we knew—is it already just any old story, a random folktale? Once upon a time, children, just a few short months ago, most people stayed dead when they died, but some just didn’t. They rose up, tunneled out, wandered the earth like vagrants, killing and eating whatever got in their way: wild animals, pets, people. It’d been that way for hundreds of years, thousands. Their numbers grew, slowly, and living humans built fences, sounded alarms, hired security teams with flamethrowers to hold them all back. Everyone knows that much, but nobody ever figured out
why
they were coming back, or what to do about it. There were laboratories, secret ones, or supposed to be secret, built to study the problem. A big one in Gary, Indiana, on the Prairie Beach side along the lake. You didn’t ask what they did. Someone should have. We all should have.