The Rising: Selected Scenes from the End of the World

THE RISING:

SELECTED SCENES

FROM THE END OF

THE WORLD

Brian Keene

© 2008, 2009 by Brian Keene

Cover Artwork © 2008, 2009 by Alan M. Clark All Rights Reserved.

For Shane Ryan Staley, who knows a good thing when he sees it. Lets ride the wave of mutilation. Special Thanks to:

Trygve V. Botnen, Mark Beauchamp,

Shannon and Allison Wuller, Roman P. Wuller, Tony and Kim at Camelot Books, Terry Tidwell, Chris Hansen, Brian Lee, Michael Nolan, Jade Rumsey, Robert T. Shea, Jamie La Chance, William A. King, Eddie Coulter, Penny Khaw, Leigh Haig, Larry Roberts, Paul Goblirsch, Michael and Karen Templin, Mike Goffee, Terry Schue, Stephen Griglak, Edward Etkin, H Michael Casper, Donald Koish, Michael Bland, Paul Legerski, Robert Lewis,

Christopher Lee Shackelford, Jason Houghton, Bob Ford, and Paul Puglisi.

ALSO BY BRIAN KEENE

NOVELS:

The Rising

City of the Dead

Terminal

Ghoul

Dead Sea

Kill Whitey

The Conqueror Worms (also published as Earthworm Gods) Dark Hollow (also published as The Rutting Season) Clickers II: The Next Wave (with J.F. Gonzalez) COLLECTIONS:

Fear of Gravity

No Rest for the Wicked

No Rest at All

Sympathy for the Devil: The Best of Hail Saten Vol. 1

Running with the Devil: The Best of Hail Saten Vol. 2

The New Fear: The Best of Hail Saten Vol. 3

NOVELLAS & CHAPBOOKS:

Take the Long Way Home

The Resurrection and the Life

Shades ( with Geoff Cooper)

The Rise & Fall of Babylon (with John Urbancik) The Rising: Necrophobia (with Brett McBean, Michael Oliveri, and John Urbancik)

MISCELLANY:

Talking Smack

The Rising: Death in Four Colors (with Zac Atkinson) AS EDITOR:

In Delirium

The Best of Horrorfind

The Best of Horrorfind II

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about the end of the Earth, specifically, the end of the Earth at the hands of the Siqqusim, Elilum, and Teraphim, led by Ob, Ab, and Api. It does not have a happy ending.

(Can’t say I didn’t warn you this time, fuckers.) I can’t imagine this holds true for any of you, but I guess I’d better say it anyway. If you haven’t read The Rising or City of the Dead, you might want to do so before going any further. Like The Rising: Necrophobia (which it also wouldn’t hurt to re-read), The Rising: Selected Scenes From The End Of The World chronicles what was happening across the rest of the world during my entire zombie mythos; from the appearance of the very first zombie (“Don’s Last Mosh”) to civilization’s breakdown (“Last Chance For La Chance”) to the finale; the planet’s fiery, post City of the Dead destruction (“Two Suns In The Sunset”). There’s even a glimpse of what lays 7

The Rising: Selected Scenes...

beyond that—a peek into the Labyrinth. I don’t recap the previous books, and I’m assuming that readers will understand what the hell is going on. So if you aren’t familiar with the series, and refuse to do your homework, hang on tight and try to figure it the fuck out as we go along. The rest of you know very well what’s in store (insert evil laughter here). These stories coincide with events from the previous three books. Although you won’t see any of the main characters, you’ll catch glimpses of how Jim, Martin, and Frankie’s actions affect these tales. You’ll find references to events from the books, including The Rising: Necrophobia. You’ll even run into a few minor characters from The Rising. And, if you look carefully, you’ll find these stories overlapping with each other, as well. When Shane Staley of Delirium Books originally pitched this idea, I was less than enthusiastic. He offered money. I waved it away. Prestige. I just laughed. He sent over a Swedish Women’s Volleyball team, but even then, I had my doubts. To be honest, I didn’t want to write this book. I’d said all I had to say about zombies, and figured I was burned out. But Shane, being the two-fisted editor (read: slave-driver) that he is, twisted my arm until I relented. (As I write this, he’s trying to convince me to do the same thing with the Earthworm Gods mythos, and the fact that he’s still alive to publish this book is a testimony to our relationship because I would have shot anybody else by now.) In all seriousness, I’m glad Shane convinced me to do this, because halfway through the first story, I remembered why I love zombies, and why I enjoy writing about them so much. It was very easy to become “The Zombie Guy” again, and I was glad for the opportunity. You’ll find some more new twists, things that I wish I could go back and add to the other books (and make sure you read the Afterword for a nice bit involving undead opossums from New Zealand).

This was a lot of fun. I had a good time with it. I hope you do, too.

Our first stop is Escanaba, Michigan, and the show is about to start…

Brian Keene

Journey’s End, Pennsylvania

November 2005

DON’S LAST MOSH

The Rising

Day One

Escanaba, Michigan

Don Koish shuffled forward with the rest of the sheep. In front of him, a bleached-blonde girl with an ass that was barely concealed by her low cut jeans, giggled in excitement. Behind him, a surly Goth, decked out in black and smoking a clove cigarette, sneered at nobody in particular and bumped into Don again.

Don preferred the blonde. She looked nicer. Smelled nicer, too.

He studied the other fans in line. It was a mixed crowd. Thirty-something metal heads and twentysomething backwards baseball hat-wearing homeboys and skate punks in tattered Ramones T-shirts (paying homage to a band that some of their parents listened to). With its hip-hop rhythms and vocals and its mind-searing, Slayer-like guitar riffs, Necessary Evil’s music appealed to a wide cross spectrum, and they were out in force tonight. The Delft Theatre used to be a movie house, before the multi-screen complex opened up across town. It was nothing special, but bands, on their way up or their way down, played there from time to time. It could hold a thousand people, and Necessary Evil looked like it would fill that bill.

The blonde giggled again and backed up, pressing her ass right against his groin. She gasped, and turned around.

“Sorry,” Don said, grinning. His ears turned red. The blonde snapped her gum at him and resumed her conversation with her friend. He didn’t blame her. Don knew all-too well what an imposing figure he cut. He was built like a refrigerator and his shaved head made him look like a club bouncer or mob muscle. He dug the look. It worked for him. Especially in the pit…

Necessary Evil’s mosh pits were legendary, and Don had been waiting six months to try it out for himself, ever since the concert was first announced. He watched some of the younger concert-goers, cocky, arrogant little fuckers that would get in the pit and try to break noses, arms, head—stomp, punch, hit—and call it moshing. He couldn’t stand that shit, and if any of them pulled it on him, they’d be sorry. Stupid fucks. It was that kind of a mentality that led to what happened at that Suicide Run concert in Pennsylvania a few years back. Or even Dimebag Darrel’s death—no respect for the artists. Don wasn’t sure when, but sometime between Anthrax’s Among the Living and Hatebreed’s latest release, it had all become about the violence. The music was forgotten. Same thing happened with hip-hop. From Run DMC’s “Adidas” to Dr. Dre capping motherfuckers’ left and right. The whole world seemed to have gone insane lately. Everybody was angry. Everybody wanted to break things.

Eventually, the doors opened, and the line rushed forward. Don was swept up with them, and managed to cop one more glance at the blonde’s ass before she vanished into the crowd.

He got his hand stamped so that he wouldn’t be sequestered with the under-21 crowd, and then made his way to the bar. He sipped a cold beer and watched the women. None of them had anything on his wife, Debbie. Don missed her. He wished she could have come along, but she wasn’t into Necessary Evil’s music, and had stayed home with the kids. He’d kissed her goodbye before he left. She’d been watching the evening news, something about an accident at a government research facility on the east coast.

A local disc jockey came out on stage and tried to warm up the crowd. He was met with boos and jeers. When he was done promoting the station’s lame, Howard Stern rip-off morning show, the opening band, Your Kid’s On Fire, took the stage. Don had never heard them, but it was clear that the younger kids in the club had. A mosh pit erupted in front of the stage as the band launched into their first song.

The music was typical Nordic black-metal; growly metal is what Don called it. He watched in amused disgust as one kid leaped into the air and landed on another’s back. The unlucky individual crashed to the floor and disappeared beneath a wave of swarming bodies.

Don spied the blonde from the line outside. She was standing at the edge of the circle, laughing with her friends and watching with excited interest. Suddenly, a guy with an eight ball tattooed on his forehead lunged forward, grabbed her arm, and pulled her into the pit. A fist crashed into her jaw, and the gum flew from her mouth.

“Hey,” Don shouted, rising from his seat at the bar. “That’s fucked up!”

He slammed his beer down on the bar and waded into the fray. Blood streamed from the girls head, and then she vanished from sight, bobbing helplessly in the frantic sea of moshers. When Don spied her again, her nose was a swollen, spurting, crimson bulb.

He shoved people out of the way and entered the eye of the storm.

The girl collapsed to the floor, and somebody landed a solid kick to her head with their steel-toed boot. Don slammed into the attacker and knocked him sprawling.

The band stopped playing in mid-song, and the lights came up. Groans of dismay and angry shouts gave way to silence, and a hush fell over the crowd Don knelt beside the girl, cradling her head in his lap. “Call an ambulance!” he yelled.

He checked for a pulse, and found none. Her skin was pale, and Don was shocked at the amount of blood. It was everywhere—on her clothes, her face, the floor. He put his ear to her mouth, but she wasn’t breathing.

“Yo,” a concert-goer behind him asked. “She okay, dog?”

“No,” Don said. “She—I think she’s dead.”

“That’s fucked up.”

Don checked her wrist again, but there was no pulse. The warmth was leaving the girl’s body. He laid her down on the mosh pit floor, just as two beefy security guards pushed their way through the crowd to him.

“Clear a hole,” one of them shouted, eyeing Don with suspicion. “What happened?”

“Somebody kicked her,” Don said. He looked around for the guy with the eight ball tattoo, but the attacker had melted into the crowd.

“Hey,” one of the bouncers suddenly shouted.

“She’s alive. She’s moving!”

The blonde sat up, her blood bright and garish against her alabaster skin. She grinned, and then sank her teeth into Don’s crotch.

Surprisingly, there was no pain, just a dull, cold sensation. He looked down and saw her burrowing into the streaming wound, like a dog burying a bone.

His last thought was one of quiet dismay. He’d never get to see Necessary Evil’s mosh pit for himself.

FAMILY REUNION

The Rising

Day Two

Ghost Island, Minnesota

Terry Schue yawned and said, “Where are they?”

“Maybe they got delayed,” Chip suggested.

“Traffic could have been bad.”

“No.” Terry shook his head. “They would have called.”

“This is your family we’re talking about,” Chip grunted. “Do you really expect your mom or stepfather to pick up the phone and let you know they’re running late? That would indicate common courtesy on their parts.”

“What are you saying?”

“I mean your mom was mentally abusive to you all these years, and your stepfather used to beat the shit out of you both. Why would they feel the need to call and let us know they’re late?”

“Okay,” Terry replied. “But they’re still my family, and I do love them, despite everything. My step-dad has been trying to make up for all of that ever since he got diagnosed with prostate cancer. And Mom has mellowed with age.”

“They’ll have to prove it to me. We’ve been together eighteen years, Terry, and I’ve seen just what your family is capable of. I hate the way they treat you sometimes. Just because Bob has suddenly been humbled by his own mortality, doesn’t excuse the fact that he’s a bully.”

Terry watched the pier through the rain, looking for his mother and stepfather’s car, or his sister’s van. “Besides,” Chip continued, “if your mom is as psychic as she claims, wouldn’t she have seen whatever delayed them in advance?”

“Chantal would call at least. She’s got Dad with her.”Terry’s real father, Mike, had his leg amputated the year before, and now spent his time in a wheelchair, popping pain pills and drinking himself into oblivion. He was coming to the reunion with Terry’s sister, Chantal.

The raindrops whispered against the boat’s deck, and plunked into the waters of Lake Vermilion. In the distance, they could see the town of Virginia. Terry’s family was supposed to arrive around dawn, after driving all night, for the annual family reunion. The gathering was held each year at Terry and Chip’s place on Ghost Island. The lakeside dwelling was accessible from the mainland only by boat. Chip reached out and squeezed his hand. “The weather probably slowed them down. That’s all. Everything will be fine.”

Terry smiled at him, and tried to relax. That was easy to do with Chip at his side. They’d met when Terry was nineteen and Chip was thirty-two, and Terry still thanked God every day for putting Chip in his life.

The boat rocked slightly as Chip walked over to the radio and turned it on. Terry watched him as he moved past—the Richard Gere type, with thick, gray hair and a solid, healthy build. The past eighteen years together had been wonderful, and Terry looked forward to many, many more. Chip had helped him get over so much from his past. Were it not for Chip, he’d never be able to host these annual reunions. Some things never stayed buried.

His past—his family—was one of those things. Chip turned the dial, searching the airwaves. Curiously, there was no music, no traffic reports, no zany morning show antics. Each station featured announcers talking in the same grim, somber tones. Federal authorities were not commenting on why a government research center in Hellertown, Pennsylvania had been shut down overnight. The Director of Homeland Security assured the reporters that the situation was under control, and that there was no danger to the public, but due to national security concerns, they couldn’t say more at this time. Terrorism was not suspected.

In Escanaba, Michigan, over twenty people had been killed, and dozens more injured, when an apparent riot erupted during a rock concert.

Stranger still, some form of mass hysteria seemed to be springing up at random across the country, and according to some reports, throughout the world. The reports didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and it was apparent that some of the newscasters were skeptical as they read them. Stories were told of the dead coming back to life—in morgues and at funerals and in the back of ambulances and on the battlefield.

“Sounds like those movies you always watch,”

Chip laughed. “Where the corpses run around and eat people?”

“Yeah,” Terry replied, shivering. “Weird, huh?”

Headlights pierced the early morning gloom, and a moment later, his sister’s van pulled up, followed by his mother’s car.

Terry took a deep breath. Goosebumps dotted his arms, and he wondered why. He chalked it up to the dampness in the air.

Chip led him across the deck. “Come on. Brave face. It’s only one weekend.”

They climbed onto the dock and slowly walked towards the parking lot. Nobody got out of the vehicles. As they got closer, Terry grew alarmed. There was a jagged, splintered hole in the car’s windshield, and the van’s front grille was crumpled. A splash of red covered the white hood. Terry broke into a run. “Oh God! There’s been an accident!”

He could see his sister’s silhouette behind the rain-streaked van windshield, but couldn’t tell if she was hurt or not. As he dashed around to the driver’s-side door, Chip opened the sliding door on the side.

Terry’s father rolled out on top of him, and sank his teeth into Chip’s ear.

Chantal burst from the vehicle, slamming the door into Terry’s legs. He collapsed to the ground, skinning his palms on the wet asphalt. Chantal giggled. Somewhere out of sight, his parents’ car doors creaked open.

“Sorry we’re late, Terry,” Chantal croaked. “There was a major fender bender in Duluth, and then we stopped for a bite.”

His sister was a grisly sight. Her nose was a swollen, broken bulb, and a portion of her scalp had peeled back, revealing the pink meat between it and her skull. She reached for him, and Terry gaped in horror. His sister’s hand was broken at the wrist, and twisted into a deformed claw.

“Chantal,” he gasped. “You’re hurt!”

Chip shrieked.

“Wow,” Chantel snickered, “I haven’t seen Dad this active in awhile.”

Terry stared in horror at Chip’s ear dangling from his father’s clenched teeth.

His mother, stepfather, and sister advanced on him. His mother’s right arm was missing from the elbow down, and his stepfather’s face was split in two.Terry cast one last, shocked glance at Chip. His father had his face buried in Chip’s neck, burrowing into the flesh.

Then Terry fled. Eighteen years of comfort and bliss were forgotten, overridden by blind panic. Chip’s agonizing final screams echoed in his ears. Terry jumped onboard the boat, started the engine, and sped away across the water.

Back at the house, the radio and television talked about the chaos spreading across the world—worsening by the hour. Later that day, Chip and the others arrived on the island, dripping wet from their walk along the bottom of the lake.

And then they had a family reunion.

AS ABOVE

(Sisters, Part One)

The Rising

Day Three

Belleville, Illinois

Shannon Wuller’s father loaded her younger brother, Dashiell into the car seat. The three-year-old kicked and fussed.

Shannon frowned, and her father noticed.

“You’re in charge until your grandparents get here.” He gave her a hug. “Take care of your sister.”

Well, of course she was in charge. She was the oldest. Shannon was ten and Allison was six. That wasn’t the point. Her father was fibbing, and Shannon knew it.

“It’s getting dark out,” she said. “How long will you be gone?”

“Not long.”

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Nothing, honey,” her father fibbed again, quickly glancing away. “Your Mom worked a double shift at the hospital, and she says she has to stay a little longer. But I think she should come home now, so I’m going to pick her up. Dashiell can help me convince her.”

He smiled, but Shannon heard the fear in his voice. Her father was scared.

And that terrified her.

“I called your grandparents. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

Allison piped up. “Can we go play in the secret clubhouse after they get here?”

“No!”

Both girls jumped at the exclamation.

“Sorry,” their father apologized. “I didn’t mean to yell. Daddy’s just tired.”

“Why can’t we go to the woods?” Allison asked.

“We’ll be back before dinner.”

“I don’t want either of you to go outside, okay?”

He offered no further explanation. “And don’t open the door for anybody other than your grandparents. You promise?”

Shannon and Allison nodded in unison. “We promise.”

“Good.” Their father gave Allison a hug and a kiss, and then turned to Shannon.

She hugged him, and before he could pull away, she whispered in his ear, low, so that Allison wouldn’t hear. “Dad, something bad is happening, isn’t it.”

Her father was quiet, and Shannon didn’t think he’d answer. When he did, she had to strain to hear him.

“Yes, sweetie. Something’s happened. Stay inside and don’t answer the door. And don’t turn on the television. It’s better for your sister not to watch.”

Shannon hadn’t planned on TV anyway. There was nothing on but news. Even the Disney Channel and Cartoon Network were showing news reports—

something about dead people.

Her father kissed her head, and walked to the car. “Now back inside. And lock the door.”

“I love you, Dad,” Shannon said.

“Me too,” Allison echoed.

“I love you, too.” Their father climbed into the car, backed down the driveway, and waved goodbye.

He didn’t return.

Their grandparents never showed up, either. She was worried about them all, her parents and little brother, her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. None of them came to the house. But others did. Strangers.

Though they were sisters, Shannon and Allison were best friends. They played games and watched a DVD. Shannon told herself it was to keep Allison’s mind off of things, but deep down inside, she knew it was to keep her own self from thinking about the situation as well.

The Wuller family’s two-story, French country home sat in a subdivision on a big lot, and was spread far apart from the other homes. Shannon and Allison shared an upstairs bedroom. The house had a half basement and a crawl space. The back yard held a pool, Jacuzzi, and outdoor fireplace, and beyond it was a grape vineyard.

“I’m thirsty.” Allison got a bottle of water from the fridge.

“Get me one, too,” Shannon said.

Allison handed her a cold bottle.

Shannon wiped the condensation on her pants.

“I hope Grandma and Grandpa get here soon.”

Her sister didn’t respond. Instead, she stared out the window into the backyard. Shannon’s eyes followed her gaze.

A naked man stepped out of the vineyard and into the yard. As he got closer, Shannon saw that he was covered with dirt and blood. And there was something else wrong with him, too. She couldn’t pinpoint it, though.

Giggling nervously, Allison pointed. “That man doesn’t have any clothes on.”

Shannon’s heart began to pound. “Go to the basement.”

The man passed the pool, and now Shannon saw what was wrong with him. His insides were hanging out of his stomach.

“Get downstairs,” she repeated. “Now!”

Allison seemed frozen. She didn’t respond, just continued pointing, her mouth hanging open. Then the water in the swimming pool splashed, and a woman stood up in it, surprising both the girls and the naked man. The girls screamed.

“Who are they?” Allison’s grip on the water bottle tightened.

“Bad people. Come on. Go to the basement.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to make sure the doors are locked.”

In the backyard, the woman climbed out of the pool. Her white skin looked like a prune, and her clothing was plastered to her emaciated body. She fell in step with the naked man.

Shannon picked up the phone and dialed 911. She got a recorded message that told her all circuits were busy, and slammed the phone down in frustration.“Stupid phone.”

Allison’s lower lip trembled. “What do they want?”

Shannon didn’t reply. Instead, she grabbed Allison’s arm and dragged her along. Already, a plan was forming in her mind.

The house to the right of theirs, an American Southern, had a never-developed cul-de-sac with woods at its end point. The girls liked to play on the cul-de-sac, and called it the “secret street.” Their topsecret clubhouse was located in the woods beyond the secret street.

Shannon opened the basement door. “Get down there.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I’m going to lock the doors. We’ll hide in the basement. If they get into the house, we’ll go through the crawl space and out to the back yard. Then we’ll run to the secret street and hide in our clubhouse before they figure out we’re gone.”

She shut the door behind Allison, and then ran for the front door. As her fingers touched the lock, she heard voices on the other side.

“Is there anyone inside?” A woman’s voice. The one from the pool?

“Only one way to find out. You’ll have to open the door. My arm is broken, and as you can see, the other one is missing.”

The doorknob rattled, and something pounded against the frame.

Turning, Shannon fled for the basement. The pounding continued behind her, and she heard wood splintering. Before she could reach the basement, the front door crashed open. A stench filled the house. Rotting meat. The way the garbage can smelled when her parents hadn’t emptied it for a few days.

Not wanting to lead the intruders to her sister, Shannon ran up the stairs to her bedroom.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” the naked man croaked. “You’ve got visitors!”

Trying to be as quiet as possible, Shannon ducked into the closet, pulled the door shut behind her, and hid beneath a pile of clothes. There was a loud bang as the intruders knocked something over. Then she heard them start up the stairs. When the foul smell increased, and the soft footsteps padded into her room, Shannon Wuller tried not to scream.

SO BELOW

(Sisters, Part Two)

The Rising

Day Four

Belleville, Illinois

When she first woke up, Allison Wuller didn’t remember where she was. Her eyes were open, but everything was pitch black. Her aching legs and arms were all scrunched up. She sat up quickly and banged her head.

“Ouch!”

Lying back down, she rubbed her head and waited. She remembered now. She was inside a trunk. She’d hidden inside it when the naked man and the woman opened the basement door. She’d heard them break down the front door, heard them calling out. Their voices were weird—

cold and growly, and they stank like poop. Even hiding down here in the basement, she could smell them.

Allison had waited for Shannon to come back, but she hadn’t. She wondered what had happened to her sister, and tried very hard not to cry. Everybody was gone now. All her family. They probably weren’t coming back. Something bad had happened. And now she was alone in the dark. The zombies (because she knew what they were—she may have been six, but she wasn’t stupid—she knew what zombies looked like) had crashed around upstairs for a long time, before coming down into the basement. Allison had scampered inside the empty trunk and shut the lid just in time. She remained there in the darkness, holding her breath and trying not to move or scream, while they searched the basement.

“I don’t see any life glows,” the naked man said.

“Maybe the house is deserted.”

“There’s a half-full bottle of water,” the woman growled.

“So?”

Allison shut her eyes tight. She’d left her water sitting on top of a box.

“Someone was drinking it,” the woman said.

“Where are they now?”

“I don’t know, but they aren’t here. Let’s check the house across the street, the one with the gardens. Maybe we’ll have better luck there.”

And then they were gone. Allison lay there shivering, afraid to come out. She must have fallen asleep after that. She wondered how long it had been. Could they still be out there? Maybe the zombies were playing a trick on her. Maybe they’d known she was hiding in the trunk, and they were upstairs waiting. Allison squeezed her legs together. She had to go to the bathroom—really, really bad. And she couldn’t stay inside this trunk much longer, either. It smelled like mothballs. She listened carefully, but the only sound she heard was her own breathing. Her parents had always called Allison their

“little spitfire,” and while she wasn’t sure what it meant, she understood what it implied. It meant not being afraid.

So she did her best to be brave.

Slowly, carefully, Allison opened the lid and peeked out through the crack. The basement was empty.

She climbed out of the trunk and collapsed to the floor. Her legs felt rubbery and weak. She lay there panting, until they felt better. Then she climbed the stairs, put her ear to the door, and listened. The house was quiet.

“Shannon…” Allison bit her lip and tried not to cry.There were no zombies in the living room or kitchen. Allison glanced out the window into the backyard, and shuddered, remembering what they’d seen last night. Then something occurred to her. It was daylight outside. When they’d first seen the zombies, it had been getting dark. Now it was morning again, which meant she’d slept all night inside the trunk.

Allison began to get a bad feeling inside—her parents were never coming home, and the zombies had eaten her sister. She pushed the tears away, trying to be a spitfire, trying to be brave, the way they’d want her to. She wondered what to do next. Should she call 911? Go next door to the neighbor’s house? Or just wait? What if the zombies came back?

While she was trying to decide, she heard a noise from upstairs—a soft, muffled thump.

Allison froze.

The sound was repeated, louder this time. Before she could move, she heard the hiss of a closet door sliding back on its track. Allison couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like it was coming from her and Shannon’s bedroom.

She tried to call out, but her mouth was dry, and she could only whisper.

“Shannon?”

Thump…Thump…Thump…

Footsteps.

Allison licked her lips and took a deep breath. She opened a kitchen drawer and took out one of her mother’s steak knives. Her heart pounded in her chest.

The bedroom door creaked open, and the footsteps crept down the hall. Her eyes glued to the stairs, Allison slowly backed towards the front door.

“Hello?” a voice called out, small and afraid. Allison whimpered. “S-Shannon?”

“Allison? Is that you?”

Allison’s spirits soared. Her sister was alive! She ran to the bottom of the stairs. Shannon stepped out into the light, saw her, and began to cry. The two girls rushed to each other and embraced, crying and shaking.

“I thought the zombies got you,” Allison sobbed.

“I thought you were dead.”

“I thought they got you, too. I hid upstairs, in the closet. I must have fallen asleep. What about you?”

“I hid in Daddy’s old trunk, down in the basement. I fell asleep, too.”

They straightened up and wiped their eyes. Allison grinned. “I’ve really got to pee.”

“Me, too,” Shannon laughed. “Oldest goes first.”

Allison scampered up the stairs behind her. “Not fair!”

When they were finished, Allison asked, “What do we do now?”

Shannon thought about it for a moment. “Let’s get all the food and water we can carry, and some books and games, and we’ll go hide in our clubhouse.”

“But won’t the zombies find us there?”

Shannon shook her head. “How could they? It’s a secret. We’re the only ones that know about it.”

They made their preparations, and then, when they were done, the two sisters walked hand-inhand down the secret street. The sun climbed high into the sky and shined down upon them. Then they disappeared into the shadows of the woods, to a good, secret place, where neither light nor darkness could find them.

LAST CHANCE

FOR LA CHANCE

The Rising

Day Five

Baltimore-Washington International Airport, Baltimore, Maryland

Jamie La Chance groaned amidst the chaos.

“What do you mean the flight was cancelled?”

He slammed his palm down on the counter in frustration. “This is the third time you people have done this! It’s ridiculous!”

The girl behind the counter bit her lip and stared at the computer monitor, refusing to meet his eye.

“All flights have been grounded, sir. Nationwide—by order of the President. Nobody can fly right now.”

“But I’ve been here all night! I have to get home—back to California…”

“There’s nothing I can do, sir. I’m sorry.”

The guy behind Jamie shouldered his way forward. He stank of sour sweat and cigarette smoke.

“Where can we catch a train?” he demanded.

“This is bullshit.”

The woman didn’t look at him either. “All trains have been stopped as well. Nothing is running. The President just declared martial law a few minutes ago, and the country is now under a national state of emergency. There’s—”

A commotion broke out three counters down from them, as a wild-eyed young man vaulted over the counter and shoved a ticket agent out of the way. He grabbed the computer monitor and shook it.

“I’ve got to get home,” he snarled. “You don’t understand! My wife is pregnant!”

Jamie watched as the fallen woman rose to her knees. The young man reached down and grasped her hair, clenching it in his fist.

“I need to get home,” he screamed. “Tell me how, god damn it!”

Around them, a few bystanders watched the scene unfold, but no one stepped forward to intervene. More people ran by, screaming at each other, shouting into cell phones, or just looking generally dazed.

Earlier, after the first cancelled flight, when Jamie was stretched out in a hard, plastic chair and trying unsuccessfully to sleep, somebody had mentioned that the world was ending. He’d scoffed. But now he thought they might be right. The crazed man picked up the computer keyboard and slammed it over the ticket agent’s head. Blood flowed. Several people screamed. A few ran away. But most just watched, as if it were a movie or a play.

Jamie wanted to help her; he felt compelled to. But his feet remained rooted to the floor. He could only stare as a National Guardsman finally materialized from the crowd and, without one word of warning, raised his rifle, sighted, and then squeezed the trigger. The attacker’s head splattered against the wall. A moment later, his lifeless body tottered over.A woman standing next to Jamie fainted. Her newspaper fluttered across his feet and he glanced down at the headline. MASS HYSTERIA GRIPS NATION. THE DEAD WALK. BIO-TERROR NOT RULED OUT. Martial law. State of emergency. He needed to call home, needed to check on Joann and his kids, Travis and Leslie, as well as their families. His cell phone battery had died during his extended stay here at the airport. He glanced around in desperation and spied a bank of pay phones. Jamie pushed his way through the crowd, and waited ten minutes for a phone to become free. He had to elbow a fellow traveler out of the way when the man tried to step in front of him. He brought the phone to his ear and heard a dial tone. He pulled out his credit card and dialed his home in Rowland Heights, California. There was a pause, and a series of electronic crackles, but that was it. There was no ring, no answer. Just silence.

“Damn.”

He tried again, and got the same thing. Then he dialed Travis in Buena Park, California, and was greeted with more dead air. Calling Leslie and her husband, Martin, at their new home in Nampa, Idaho. This time, he got a recorded voice that told him all circuits were busy.

Frustrated, he slammed the phone back onto its cradle. His ears began to ring, and his skin felt flushed. Heart attack? Panic attack? He didn’t know but he realized that he needed to calm down. He’d never get home if he were hospitalized here in Baltimore.

The fear in the air increased, becoming almost tangible. Somewhere, a woman began to shriek. Jamie forced his way through the masses again, and exited the airport. He stood on the sidewalk, breathing in car exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke, and tried to think.

A taxi sat next to the curb, the driver slumped backward in the seat, his eyes closed, his mouth slightly parted. Maybe he could get a ride to a friend’s home—he had several that lived in the Baltimore area.

Jamie banged on the taxi’s window, and slowly, the driver opened his eyes.

“You in service?” Jamie asked.

The driver grinned, flashing yellowed teeth. He turned slightly, and unlocked the back door. Jamie hopped in, and closed the door behind him.“How much to take me to Cockeysville?”

The driver paused, considering the request.

“That’s a forty-five minute drive. And everything else is shut down. I can get you there for fifty bucks.”

Jamie grimaced. The cabbie’s voice sounded odd, gravelly. And now that he was inside, he noticed the man’s skin pallor, a sickly, pale color.

“Sounds like you’re my last chance to get out of here. Fifty is fine.”

The cabbie grunted, and pulled away from the curb.

“Hope I wasn’t interrupting anything,” Jamie offered, feeling guilty for waking him.

“Not at all,” the driver hissed. “My host had just suffered a heart attack, and I was still taking stock of his memories. You’re my first customer of the day.”

“What?”

The driver pulled into the parking garage, and turned off the engine.

“Hey,” Jamie protested, his skin beginning to crawl. “What are you doing?”

“Freeing up your body, so that one of my brothers can inhabit it.”

“What—”

Without another word, the cabbie crawled into the backseat and fell upon him.

WATCHING THE

WORLD END

The Rising

Day Six

Snyder, Oklahoma

Wolf Blitzer told William King that the following footage was going to be graphic, but Will had seen it all before, so he changed channels. He clicked to MSNBC, but they were still off the air, and Fox News was re-running the same footage as CNN. In it, the Secretary of State was giving a press briefing, sweating profusely and looking nervous, assuring the assembled reporters that the President, Vice President, and cabinet members were all fine, and that the crisis was passing. The Federal Emergency Management Agency would soon have it under control, and everything would return to normal. Until then, martial law would remain in effect as a cautionary measure.

The Secretary of State mopped his brow, called upon another reporter, and then, suddenly, all hell broke loose. The President darted onto the stage from somewhere off-camera, and sank his teeth into the Secretary of State’s arm. He chewed through the immaculate, tailored suit and came away with a mouthful of flesh. The Secretary of State screamed, the reporters shrieked, and then the President looked at the camera and unleashed a string of obscenities—all of which the media were beeping out. A Secret Service agent pulled his weapon and pointed it at the President, and then a second agent shot the first. Gunfire and chaos erupted in the room, and the screen faded to static, as Fox News joined the leagues of those no longer broadcasting. So Will clicked back to CNN and Wolf Blitzer. What else was there to do? He’d decided yesterday, after he’d killed his mother, Carol, and his sister, Pari. They hadn’t shown any signs of infection yet, but how could he be sure? He’d made the choice. He was going to sit here and watch the world end, via satellite, on his 20-inch television. Snyder was Will’s home away from home. Here, they called him Will, rather than William, which was what they called him back in Portland. The threebedroom rancher sat on the outskirts of town. It was easy to defend, surrounded by plowed fields and rural countryside. The two-car garage had been converted to a den, and after dispatching his mother and sister, Will had barricaded himself inside the den, constructing a plywood and cinder block wall between it and the rest of the house. He’d brought along a rifle, food and water, a first aid kit, and his cats—Hunter, Boo, and Ally.

He reached down and scratched Hunter behind the ears. The gray tabby arched its back in appreciation. Perched on the shelf, Ally looked at him reproachfully.

“What kind of a name is Wolf Blitzer, anyway?”

Will asked the cats.

Hunter purred in agreement, Boo continued napping, and Ally kept staring at him.

“I’m not crazy,” he told her. “So quit looking at me. They could have been infected. The news said that it might have been caused by biological or chemical warfare. Or some kind of virus.”

Ally didn’t blink, and Will tried to read the small calico’s mind.

Yes, it could have been those things. But the news said it could also be government testing, alien invasion, the Second Coming of Christ, and radiation from a meteor.

“That’s ridiculous,” Will insisted, and sipped warm beer from a can. “There’s no such thing as aliens. This was obviously some kind of contaminant.”

He grabbed the remote and flicked through the dwindling number of channels that remained on the air—surfing chaos. In Pennsylvania, a National Guard Colonel named Schow had reportedly ordered the death of civilians by firing squad. They were accused of looting. In Baltimore, zombies overran the entire airport. The Reverend Pat Robertson had committed suicide, believing that the Rapture had occurred and he’d missed it. In China, the dead had seized control of a nuclear reactor and intentionally caused it to meltdown. Chicago was on fire. The military had retreated from New York City after losing control.

“And this just in,” Wolf Blitzer told him as he returned to CNN. “You’re looking at footage from the London Zoo, where The Rising, as it’s come to be called, is also affecting the animals. This thirty-year old elephant died just an hour ago, and now it seems to be infected by the same symptoms as—”

Will froze.

“My apologies,” Wolf Blitzer told the camera. He looked scared. “There seems to be a disturbance outside the studio. As you know, we’re broadcasting from Atlanta, rather than New York, and—”

There was an explosion and the anchorman’s throat exploded in a wet, red spray. A black-gloved hand appeared, blocking the camera. A voice shouted, “Turn it off! Turn it off now! We’re shutting you down!”

There was another gunshot, and then the picture dissolved into snow.

He changed channels, and found the local news broadcast. A county official was wringing his hands, pleading for the populace to remain calm. The reporter laughed at him, but the official continued. But Will wasn’t paying attention. He was still thinking about the zoo—and the zombie elephant.

“The animals, too.”

He stopped scratching Hunter, and picked up the rifle. Ally didn’t move. She cocked her head and continued staring.

Will didn’t meet her eyes when he pulled the trigger.

The blast frightened Hunter and woke up Boo. Both cats scrambled for cover, howling and spitting. Will reloaded and then finished the job, shooting each of them in the head, just as he’d done his mother and sister.

Then he stood panting in the middle of the floor, tears streaming down his face.

“I’m not crazy. I’M NOT FUCKING CRAZY!”

Clutching the rifle by its still smoking barrel, he collapsed into the recliner.

“They could have been infected,” he muttered.

“What else was I supposed to do? I’m not crazy.”

The man on the television agreed with him.

“I’m not crazy,” the official snarled at the jeering reporter. “None of us are safe. There’s no rhyme or reason. Any one of us can become one of these things. And sooner or later, we all will. Sooner or later, we all have to die.”

Will blinked. The guy was right. Despite what he’d done, he still wasn’t safe, not even here, barricaded inside the den. He could become one. Eventually, he would.

So he put the rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger, while the world ended on the television screen.

With the gunshot still echoing inside the garage, the power went out and the screen faded to black.

THE FALL OF ROME

The Rising

Day Seven

Rome, Georgia

Eddie Coulter watched the fall of Rome from inside a little room at the top of the 104-foot Tower Clock. The stone structure sat atop a hill just east of the city’s downtown district, giving Eddie a clear view of the atrocities below.

The street was littered with body parts, and the gutters ran with blood.

He wondered if he should consider himself lucky to be alive, or cursed because he wasn’t dead yet. Of course, if he were dead, then he’d be a zombie. Eddie wondered if they knew—remembered—who they’d been.

The soft strains of Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part One)” drifted from the headphones hanging around Eddie’s neck. The headphones were connected to an iPod that had belonged to a Hispanic guy. Eddie didn’t know his name. Didn’t know anything about him at all, other than he’d apparently liked Pink Floyd, since it was the only thing on the iPod. The Hispanic guy hadn’t been able to speak, because a zombie had bitten his tongue in half. He’d reached the Tower Clock, and Eddie sheltered him, tried to make him comfortable. When he finally bled to death, Eddie dropped the body from the top of the tower before he could wake up again. But the Hispanic guy didn’t land on his head. Sure enough, he rose again, and crawled away on shattered legs in search of prey.

Eddie didn’t put the headphones in his ears. He wanted to be able to hear if the creatures found their way inside the Tower Clock. He wished he could, though. He needed something to drown out the screams from below.

“Remember when you were young?” Roger Waters asked him. “You shone like the sun.”

Eddie did indeed remember when he was young. Hell, he was still young. Too young to die. But maybe too scared to go on living? He wasn’t sure yet.He picked up the sniper rifle, poked the barrel through the window, and sighted with the scope. A zombie staggered by an antique store. Its arms were missing. Eddie squeezed the trigger. The rifle jerked against his shoulder. The explosion drowned out Pink Floyd, and smoke filled the room. The store’s display window shattered, and the zombie crouched down. Eddie fired again. The bullet made a small hole in the back of the zombie’s head, and its face exploded. The creature crumpled to the sidewalk.

Eddie grinned. He didn’t know what type of gun this was, but he liked it. He’d gotten the rifle three days ago, during the siege at the hardware store. A burly man in a straw hat showed him how to use it. Three seconds later, a corpse clambered over the sandbag barricade and stabbed the man in the eye with a knitting needle. Eddie shot the zombie, and then shot the man who’d given him the rifle. Rome was located 65 miles northeast of Atlanta, and had a population of roughly 80,000 people. Three rivers, the Etowah, Oostanaula, and Coosa, surrounded the city’s historic downtown district. The townspeople had tried to make their stand there, cutting off all bridges and roads crossing the rivers, and blockading the streets and buildings. It hadn’t helped. The creatures raided the area’s two National Guard Armories, and then attacked the fortifications with heavy weapons and artillery. Now, as Eddie watched through the scope, a group of zombies drove by in a commandeered halftrack. A pimply-faced teenager in a Slipknot shirt darted from an alleyway next to the post office and tossed a Molotov cocktail at them. It exploded in front of the vehicle, but the creatures paid it no mind. They opened fire with a mounted fifty-caliber. The kid’s body jittered and danced as the rounds punched through him. Then he collapsed. The halftrack rolled on. A few minutes later, the teenager got up again, trailing blood and pieces of his insides. Eddie put him back down with another shot. Located in the middle of the Bible belt, Rome had an overabundance of churches, but God had deserted his people. God was gone. He’d left no forwarding address, and His answering machine was on the fritz.

But that was okay. From his vantage point, Eddie felt like God, looking down upon Creation. Or Hell.

Yeah, definitely Hell.

He could see it all.

Myrtle Hill Cemetery sat on a large hill to the north, just across the Etowah River. It dated back to the Civil War, but the recently deceased would no longer find peace there. Instead, they hammered through their coffins and crawled from the dirt to join their brethren.

The fighting spread to every street, every alleyway, every building. Fighting? More like a massacre. At Berry College, the zombies lined up captured humans like livestock, and cut their throats one by one. Several blocks away, a group of survivors fought a running gun battle with their dead loved ones. Police headquarters was on fire, and the flames were spreading. A pack of undead dogs ripped an infant from a fleeing mother’s arms, and tore it apart. A zombie shot the mother in the back, and then fell upon her.

Rome had survived General Sherman’s march, and the great flood of 1886, but it hadn’t survived The Rising.

Some determined good old boys sped down the main thoroughfare in a camper-covered pick-up. They made it two blocks before the zombies rammed them with a dump truck. Eddie watched as the rednecks were pulled from the vehicle and devoured. He picked one off just as a zombie’s yellow teeth bit into his throat.

So far, the zombies hadn’t discovered him. He’d remained hidden, masked beneath the fighting in the streets, the chaos and screaming and gunshots and dying. Eddie wondered what he’d do when they did find his location, and then decided it didn’t matter. Instead, he pulled the trigger and watched rotting brains splatter across the brick wall of a clothing store.

A large group of corpses gathered around the convenience store. Eddie wondered if there was somebody trapped inside. He lined the crosshairs up with the large propane tank in the store’s parking lot, and squeezed the trigger. The hammer fell but there was no kick, no explosion.

“Shit. Empty.”

The fires spread, engulfing the downtown district, and creeping closer to the Tower Clock. The smoke curled through the window, and Eddie coughed. When he looked up, an undead sparrow sat on the window ledge, staring at him with one remaining eye. A maggot fell from the empty socket. Spinning the rifle in his hands, Eddie swung the weapon like a club. The bird darted out of the way, and the wooden stock splintered on the hard stone windowsill. The impact sent shockwaves up his arms. The zombie bird zipped forward and pecked at his hand, drawing blood.

“Fucker!”

Eddie swatted at the zombie, but it flew away, vanishing into the smoke.

He went to the window.

The flames licked at the edges of the hill. The fire would reach the Tower Clock soon. But he was okay. Stone couldn’t burn, could it?

He looked out over his town. The zombies stared back at him, pointing and shouting. The bird. It must have told the rest of them. Now they knew where he was.Heedless of the flames, the undead began converging on his location, encircling the Tower Clock. Eddie glanced down at the broken, empty rifle, then back to the zombies.

Sighing, he leaned out, looking straight down. He put the headphones in his ears and let Pink Floyd take him away.

Then he leaned out further, and kept leaning until his feet left the floor.

Eddie’s fall was quicker than Rome’s.

WALKABOUT

(Part One)

The Rising

Day Eight

Melbourne, Australia

Leigh Haig opened the blinds a fraction of an inch and peeked out the window. The bright sun dominated the blue, mid-morning sky. A flock of birds wheeled overhead, surfing the breeze. Leigh wondered if they were still alive. On the couch, Penny asked, “What are you doing? They’ll see you.”

“Beautiful day outside,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the smell.”

The stench had gotten bad overnight, as more and more of Melbourne’s population joined the dead. Stinking, rotting corpses ran amok in the streets, leaking fluids and shedding unwanted body parts. The gutters were thick with offal. Between the smell and the screams, it was a wonder they’d slept at all.

He stepped away from the window.

Penny coughed, then moaned. “It’s the end of the world.”

“Good day for it,” Leigh said with a smile, trying to make her laugh.

She did, but the grin that crossed her face was a ghost of its former self. Her skin was gaunt and pale, her forehead coated with glistening sweat. Her weak laughter transformed into another bout of coughing. It was funny, Leigh thought. Hundreds, if not thousands of people were dying outside, slaughtered by the zombies, shot, slashed, stabbed—eaten. But here, inside the brick, two-story home they shared, Penny was dying of the flu. She’d come down with it a day before the first news reports started. With no access to medical help her fever spiked and her condition deteriorated in sync with the fall of civilization.

At first, it had seemed like an American problem, (as many things on the news were these days), reports of sudden outbreaks of violence and mass murder. Michigan, New Jersey, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New York. Then came the footage. The dead walked, talked, and killed. And not just in the States, either. It was a global event; and within two hours, the epidemic was in Australia as well. The first reported case was in Coober Pedy, and the second in Sydney. Then a dozen more. After that, he lost count.

The cities became war zones, then cemeteries. The madness spread across the world. Military forces turned renegade. Nuclear reactors melted down. Anarchy was the norm. Bullets were currency. Chaos ruled. And in the space of seven days, Western civilization collapsed. The British Parliament fell first, followed by the Russian and American governments. Leigh wasn’t sure about Australia’s leaders. The power in Melbourne went out on the third day, and neither of them had ventured outside since.

Penny stopped wheezing, and Leigh assumed she’d fallen asleep. Suddenly, she began to thrash on the couch, clawing her throat. Penny’s eyes bulged. Leigh ran to her side.

“Breathe, Penny. Breathe!” He sat her up and pounded on her back. A wad of yellow phlegm the size of a golf ball splattered onto the floor. Gasping, Penny sank back down onto the cushions.

“You okay?” Leigh asked.

She nodded, scratching her throat. When she spoke, her voice trembled. “Cold…it’s so cold in here.”

Leigh felt her forehead. His hand came away slick with perspiration. She was burning up, the fever spiking again.

“You need help,” he muttered. “Medicine.”

“No.” She clasped his hand and squeezed. “We can’t go outside. You know that. We’ve seen—”

Penny broke off into another fit of coughing. Frowning, Leigh fetched a washcloth and ran it under cold water. Then he came back, knelt beside Penny, and mopped her face.

“They’ll fix it soon,” he promised. “The army or the police. You’ll see. They’ll ride in, just like the cavalry.”

She touched his face with her fingertips. “I love you.”

“I love you, too. Now rest.”

She nodded, then closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. Leigh envied her. Though physically and mentally exhausted, he couldn’t sleep. Every time he tried, he heard the screams outside. And the gunshots.

And smelled the dead.

On the fourth day, a zombie came to their door. It knocked, politely at first, but then insistent. When Leigh and Penny didn’t answer, it broke into the house. They’d killed it with a kitchen knife, jamming the blade through the creature’s ear and into its brain. While disposing of the corpse, Leigh noticed that the zombies were marking houses. A bright red X spray-painted on the front doors meant that no living creatures were left inside. He’d painted their own door immediately, and since then, they’d been left alone.

Alive.

As long as they didn’t go outside.

But if they stayed inside much longer, Penny would die anyway.

Leigh Haig didn’t feel very brave. He felt scared, and sick with worry for his wife. He wasn’t an action hero. He and Penny worked in the IT department for Hewlett-Packard. If this were a book or a film, he’d brandish a shotgun and go searching for help. But this wasn’t a book, and they weren’t fictional characters. He and Penny were real. The creatures outside were real.

The danger was real.

He glanced back down at Penny. Her breathing was shallow, her expression frozen in a grimace. He had to try.

The closest drug store, located at the Forest Hill Chase Shopping Centre, was two kilometers away. Surely he could make it that far. They’d have medicine there, if the looters hadn’t cleaned it out. And if he needed to, perhaps he could even make it as far as the Box Hill Hospital. Find a doctor or a nurse. Antibiotics. It was only ten kilometers. When he looked at his sleeping wife, and felt his love for her stirring in his breast, that didn’t seem far at all. He could do it. He had to do it. Leigh searched the house for weapons, and found a wooden mallet and two long, sharp kitchen knives. They’d have to do. He embedded the blades into each side of the mallet, fashioning a crude but effective double-edged axe, and swung it to test the weight.

“Fucking Conan.” He grinned. “Have at thee, dogs!”

He whirled the weapon over his head, and accidentally hit the lamp.

“Shit.”

On the couch, Penny stirred, mumbled, and then went back to sleep.

He went to the window and peeked outside. An undead cat lay twitching in the road, unable to move. Its spine had been crushed and a fresh tire tread stood out in its burst stomach. There were no other zombies in sight. The flock of birds, living or dead, had vanished.

Leigh considered his options. He could sneak into the garage and drive his Honda Integra to the drug store. After a moment, he decided against it. Not only would the engine’s noise wake Penny, but also, it would draw more attention from the things outside. Better to go on foot, stealthily, moving from one hiding place to another. It would be easier to avoid detection that way.

Leigh wrote a note to Penny, and laid it on the table next to the sofa. He kissed her forehead, and whispered softly in her ear.

“I love you. I’ll be back soon. I promise.”

Then, taking one last look out the window to make sure the coast was clear, he unlocked the door and crept outside.

The street was quiet.

“I promise. An hour. Maybe less. Just like nipping off for some smokes or the newspaper.”

Gripping his weapon with both hands, Leigh Haig took a walk through Hell.

HELLHOUNDS ON

MY TRAIL

The Rising

Day Nine

King’s Lynn, England

It wasn’t a good plan. He knew that. But it wasn’t an awful plan either. In fact, it wasn’t so much a plan as it was a final option. Reach the Boal Quay docks without getting killed or eaten, steal a fishing boat, and be well away from land before dark. The docks were three miles from the Queen Elizabeth hospital, where they both worked. Going on foot would take just over an hour. It would be tough with those things outside, but what choice was there? They had to try.

Before they left, Jason Houghton wished (and not for the first time) for a gun. Nothing fancy, just something to even the odds a bit. It wasn’t that guns were non-existent in England. They weren’t. But you had to know somebody who could get you one, and he hadn’t. He was a hospital computer system administrator, not a criminal or a soldier. Even if they reached Boal Quay, neither of them had any idea how to pilot a boat, but they’d learn fast. Hopefully. Still, the open sea was better than staying here. King’s Lynn (or just “Lynn” as the locals called it), located on England’s east coast, was a historic port town with a population of just over 36,000 souls. Now, most of those souls had departed, and something else had taken up residence inside their bodies.

They’d left the hospital fifteen minutes ago. Catherine, his girlfriend of nearly ten years, was armed with a meat cleaver from the hospital’s cafeteria, and Jason carried a makeshift propane bottle blowtorch.

The hellhounds had followed them every step of the way.

Jason had encountered plenty of zombies in the last nine days. The first, on day two of what society called “The Rising,” had emerged from a restroom stall when Jason was at the cinema. He hadn’t even realized it was dead at the time. The fat bastard suffered a heart attack while sitting on the bog. Then he’d tried to eat Jason and another patron. Since then, he’d seen hundreds more. But nothing like what cornered them now.

Jason froze, but his pulse raced. Catherine squeezed his hand. Her nails dug into his flesh, but Jason barely felt it.

The largest of the pack, a mix of Labrador, Beagle, and Rottweiler, stepped forward and growled. A tag around its collar indicated that the dog’s name was Sam. Despite his terror, Jason almost laughed. Sam wasn’t what you named an attack dog. They had proper names like Killer or Lucifer. Sam was what you named a good dog. Perhaps a timid dog, the type to inch towards a stranger with its tail tucked firmly between its quivering legs and ears hanging down, to offer their outstretched hand a timid lick. Now, in death, it was the fiercest of the lot, and would quickly tear off any hand offered its way.

“Good dog,” he stammered. “Hello, Sam. There’s a nice dog.”

The feral zombie growled again, and Jason swore that it was trying to speak. As if there were words in some strange language hidden between the growls. The pack inched closer. Jason considered his blowtorch, but they’d be on him in the time it took to light it.

The wind shifted, and the stench from the rotting dogs filled their noses.

“Oh God.” Catherine squeezed his hand tighter, drawing blood.

Sam tensed, its haunches flexing beneath gorestained fur. The other twelve dogs in the pack growled in unison.

Jason tensed. “Catherine—”

The zombie leaped, trailing a length of purple intestine behind it.

“Run!”

Jason shoved Catherine forward, not daring to look over his shoulder. The dog panted behind him, the harsh, ragged breathing sounding like a steam engine. The rest of the pack followed its lead. Their untrimmed nails clicked on the pavement, nipping at his heels.

If we trip, Jason thought, we’re done for.

“The torch,” Catherine gasped. “Use it!”

“No time. Keep running!”

They dashed from the alley and into the street, weaving their way around wrecked and abandoned vehicles. The dogs pursued them.

“High ground,” Jason shouted. “We need to find higher ground. Some place where they can’t climb.”

Catherine darted towards a parked doubledecker tour bus, and scrambled up over the hood. Jason followed her. The steel buckled under their feet. They huddled together on the roof as the barking pack surrounded the vehicle. One of the dogs tried to leap onto the hood, but it slipped back off. Its claws screeched across the metal like nails on a chalkboard.

Jason’s throat burned. He tried to work up some saliva so that he could talk.

“What—what now?” Catherine gasped.

“I don’t know.”

“Can they get up here?”

“I don’t think so. We’re safe.” Even as he said it, he had to suppress a laugh.

The dogs attempted a few more leaps, and then gave up in frustration. The leader of the pack raised its snout and howled. Then the other dogs joined it. Catherine sat the meat cleaver aside and put her hands over her ears. “Make them stop!”

But they didn’t stop. The hellish cacophony grew louder and more frantic. Soon, the dog’s cries were answered. A dozen human zombies appeared from different buildings along the street. Some carried weapons. Others barely carried themselves. One particularly ripe cadaver had been split open from groin to neck, and its insides were a yawning, empty cavity. Jason wondered how it continued to function. The creatures crept closer, their stench reaching the trapped couple before the zombies did. They surrounded the lorry.

One of the zombies smiled, revealing blackened nubs of broken teeth. “Why not make this easy on yourselves? Come down.”

Catherine screamed, and Jason bit his tongue to keep from doing the same.

“Yes,” agreed another, ignoring Catherine. “We’ll make it quick if you surrender. You won’t feel a thing.”

“Wh-what?” Jason stammered.

“It’s very simple,” the first zombie sighed. “Climb down, and we’ll kill you quickly.”

“Or,” said another, “we can climb up after you, and slowly tear you to shreds. Which do you prefer?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jason saw more of the creatures approaching. The street was alive with the dead. The dogs were growing restless.

“Hellhounds on our trail. Just like Robert Johnson.” Jason was a big fan of pre-war American Blues.

He reached out, took Catherine’s hand, and gave her a gentle squeeze. Then he grinned.

“What then?” he asked the creatures.

The lead zombie frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, if we accept—if we let you kill us quickly—what will you do with us after?”

“Your bodies will house our brothers. There are many of us waiting on the other side. Our number is more than infinity.”

Catherine stared at Jason, her mouth hanging open. Jason winked at her.

“Have you lost your mind?” she hissed.

“We’d prefer not to be eaten,” Jason told the corpses. “Is that possible?”

Catherine gasped. “Now look—”

The zombie interrupted her. “Those terms are acceptable. We just devoured a jeweler’s family earlier. But our brothers need your bodies. Come down.”

“No,” Jason said. “I’ll do it from up here. You get the bodies when I’m finished.”

“Bollocks,” the zombie snapped. “We’ll do it.”

“I’ll do it, or we’ll sit up here all day.”

“Then we’ll bloody well come up after you.”

Another zombie pulled the first aside. “Ob’s orders were to—”

“Ob’s not here, is he? He’s on the other side of this miserable planet.”

As they argued, Jason leaned over to Catherine and whispered in her ear. Her eyes grew wide as she listened. She shook her head.

“Catherine, it’s the only way.”

“No, I won’t!”

“I love you,” he said, and he meant it. He’d never meant it more than he did now.

He turned on the propane bottle and picked up the cleaver. The gas hissed.

One of the zombies spotted him and cried an alarm. The rest turned their attention back to their prey.Before they could reach him, Jason swung the cleaver, splitting Catherine’s head in half. Then he struck the match. The propane bottle exploded. Both of them were incinerated within seconds. Their souls were free, as were their bodies. The wind scattered their ashes, and as it whistled over the rooftops, it sounded very much like two voices, whispering of undying love…

SPOILERS

The Rising

Day Ten

Columbus, Ohio

After five days, the creature’s skin looked like a greasy, bloated sausage casing. The zombie was tied to the chair, and its flesh was swollen around the ropes, rupturing and leaking a stew of toxic juices. Mike replaced the rope with heavy stainless steel chains and padlocks instead.

Mike Goffee lived on the south side of downtown Columbus in a two-story house with ugly yellow siding. The home was in need of repairs, but he wasn’t much of a maintenance person. The front porch and back deck both leaned, and the garage needed painting. He’d been in no hurry to do it. Single, he lived alone, except for his cat. Five days ago, the cat got loose, jumping over the fence in the backyard. Mike hadn’t looked for it, because even then, it was dangerous to go outside. But that night, the cat came back—dead. And it brought company, a human zombie. Both had immediately attacked him. Mike crushed the cat’s head by dropping the microwave on it, and then pushed the refrigerator over on the other zombie, pinning it to the floor. Then, before it could free itself, he’d hacked its legs off at the knees and its arms at the elbows, and tied it to the chair in the living room—a captive audience.

If someone had been around to ask him why he’d done it, Mike wouldn’t have had an answer. Certainly, he’d never done something like this before The Rising started. He wasn’t sure why he did it now.

He guessed that he was just lonely.

Mike recognized the zombie as one of his former neighbors. He’d never known the man’s name, never talked to him while he was living. Just the occasional head nod from over the fence. But he talked to him now. Talked to him every day. Mike scratched himself through his dirty jeans. The power was off and he couldn’t do laundry, and even before The Rising had started, he was down to his last clean pair.

Something ruptured inside the zombie and foul black sludge dripped from its nose.

“Whew!” Mike fanned his nose and reached for the can of air freshener.

“This body is rapidly decomposing.” The zombie struggled against the chains. “Free me, so that I may find another.”

Mike shook his head and sprayed a cloud of air freshener. “I don’t think so. Not yet.”

“We’ve been over this,” the zombie reasoned. “It does you no good to keep me captive like this. What’s the point? You don’t ask me for information on the Siqqusim, to determine how to destroy us. You don’t do anything—

except talk about movies and books.”

Mike sat the can down and gestured around the living room. The shelves overflowed with books, records, DVDs, CDs, and videos. “Well, as you can see, I like to read and watch films. Don’t you?”

The zombie sighed. “How many times must I tell you? I am merely borrowing this shell. My host liked to hunt and fish. He never read a book after high school, and he only watched action movies.”

“I enjoy old foreign and independent films, mostly,” Mike said, ignoring the comment. “I used to go down to the Drexel and the Wexner Center to see them. Books, too. Usually, whatever wasn’t popular. Mystery, horror, non-fiction. Whatever.”

“Fascinating.” The corpse rolled its one remaining eye. Mike sprayed some more air freshener. “No need to be sarcastic.”

“Eons spent in the Void, and I am freed only to discuss obscure pop culture with the likes of you.”

Mike shrugged. “It’s not so bad, is it?”

The zombie spat out a broken, yellowed tooth.

“Please, human. I’m begging you, something that the rest of my brothers would ostracize me for doing, if they saw it. Kill me. Dispatch me back to the Void, so that I may get a new body. Shoot me!”

“I hate guns.”

“Then crack my skull open and scoop out the brains!

Burn me to ashes. Drill through my head. I don’t care how you do it. Just kill me!”

“And miss all this great conversation?” Mike chuckled. “No. Afraid not. Your predicament reminds me of a good book, though. Cold As Ice by Adam Senft. Did you ever read it?”

“I told you—”

“He was a mystery writer. Went insane a few years ago. Didn’t get popular until after he’d killed his wife.”

“Death? Now you have my interest, human.”

“Anyway, the book was about these two guys—

lovers. They’d been partners for over thirty years. Then, one of them got cancer. It was terminal, but slow. I remember the character described it as creeping death.”

“There is a demon known to me that has the same name,” the zombie said.

“So the guy is dying of cancer. It’s bad. Ravaging his body, just eating through him until there’s nothing left. He’s in a great deal of pain.”

The zombie grinned. “Sounds beautiful.”

“It’s horrible,” Mike argued. “It was really brutal and sad, the way the author wrote it.”

“Did this character linger with this pain?”

“Yes, he did. And that’s why this situation reminds me of the book. He keeps begging his partner to kill him. To put him out of his misery.”

“And does he?”

Before Mike could answer, there was a loud crack. Splinters of wood exploded from the front door as an axe head battered through it. He dropped the can of air freshener and screamed. A chainsaw stuttered, then roared to life. Within seconds, the front door was gone and four zombies rushed into the room. They shot Mike in the back as he ran for the back door. He tried to crawl away, but his legs didn’t work anymore. Then the creatures fell upon him and slit his throat.

“You’re free,” shouted one as it cut through the chains binding its brother to the chair.

“It’s about time.” The zombie tried to stand, but fell to the floor. More fluid drained from its body.

“He’s had me trapped here for the last five days.”

“That’s not long, considering how long we’ve been imprisoned inside the Void.”

“No, it’s not. But the indignity of it all is what really angered me.”

“Come, brother. Let’s go hunt some more.” The zombie with the chainsaw started towards the damaged front door. “Or would you prefer we destroy your current form so that you can find a more mobile body?”

The freed zombie scuttled forward on its bloody stumps, then pointed at Mike’s corpse. “Wait until one of our brothers has inhabited his shell.”

“Why? There is much to be done.”

“He was telling me about a book, before he died. Once his body has been possessed by one of our kind, I want to know how the book ends.”

THE MAN COMES

AROUND

The Rising

Day Eleven

Fort Bragg, California

Terry Tidwell sat in the darkness, drinking a warm can of Foster’s Lager and listening to the dead outside. Woody, his Jack Russell Terrier, growled at his feet, ears cocked. Woody didn’t like zombies. Especially the seal.

Five days ago, a bloated bull seal lumbered into the driveway, chasing after a still-living cat. The sounds it made were horrific, and the sounds the cat made as the creature slaughtered it were even worse. Woody started barking. Terry had tried to quiet him, but he kept growling and scratching at the door. The seal turned its dead, black eyes toward the house, attracted by the noise. Then it alerted the other zombies in the area, and soon the house was surrounded.

Woody didn’t bark anymore. He’d figured out that it had no effect on the zombies, and was content now to merely growl. But it didn’t matter. The creatures already knew they were alive and inside the house, and the zombies had the patience of death. Terry and Woody were under siege.

It was pitch black. Terry knew better than to light even a single candle. The power had been out for days, and the food in the fridge was starting to spoil, enough that the kitchen smelled like the zombies. But he still had plenty of beer, canned goods, and dog food. Water was going to be a problem if they stayed trapped in here much longer, but they’d make due. Terry had taken to pissing in empty beer cans, so that the toilet water would remain untainted. He’d drink from the commode if he had to. Why not? Woody did it all the time.

“But we’ll go stir crazy,” he said out loud. “We need to get outside, sooner or later.”

Woody gave Terry a look, as if to say, “Surely you jest, master. I’ve grown quite accustomed to you letting me shit in the spare bedroom this last week and a half. I don’t need to go outside to pee anymore.”

“Don’t give me that look,” Terry scolded.

“Eventually, we’ll run out of food. And beer.”

Woody’s ears perked up and he tilted his head. His master had now mentioned two of his favorite things—outside and food. He flipped his tail cautiously. Terry rubbed the stubble on his face. “Wonder if we can make a break for it?”

Holding the beer in one hand and picking up his old .30-30 rifle with the other, Terry crept to the window. He edged open the blinds with his beer hand, and peeked through a crack in the plywood that he’d nailed over the windows. The moon was full, and he could see clearly. His lawn looked like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Hundreds of zombies, mostly seagulls and crows, perched on the treetops and phone wires and scurried across the grass, waiting patiently for Woody and Terry. The stench from their rotting carcasses wasn’t bad—the ocean breeze blowing in from the Pacific swept it inland toward the majestic redwoods. The smell from Terry’s own kitchen was worse.

At least there were no human zombies. Not yet. Undead humans would have been a problem. They had opposable thumbs that could open doors or wield tools to smash them down (if their thumbs hadn’t rotted away). All the windows had been boarded over, but human zombies could make quick work of that.

Terry eyed his truck, an F-250 Ford diesel. It was covered with undead animals. If he and Woody ran outside, could they make it to the truck? He wondered how many birds he could bring down with the rifle. He hadn’t fired it in thirty years—and wasn’t even sure if it still worked.

Woody trotted over to him, nails clicking on the floor.

Terry sat the rifle aside, then bent down and petted him. He could carry Woody, he supposed. But he couldn’t work the lever on the rifle and fire it at the same time if he were carrying the dog. Terry drained the beer, crumpled the can, and belched. “I think we’re screwed.”

Woody flipped his tail in agreement.

Terry started to turn away from the peephole, and that was when night turned to day. Hot, white light burned his eyes. The brightness was dazzling. A second later, there was an explosion. The house shook. His bookshelves crashed to the floor and pictures fell from the wall.

“What the fuck?”

Yelping, Woody dashed for the bathtub.

“Woody! Come back here right—”

Another explosion cut him off. Clods of dirt and grass flew into the air. Terry heard the sod splattering onto the roof. His front yard was now pockmarked with craters. Squawking, the undead birds took flight.

“Holy shit.”

Woody reappeared, creeping up behind his master and looking sheepish.

Terry heard a new sound, the deep rumbling of a motor. Moments later, an armored halftrack clanked down the street, followed by another and another. Then came Jeeps and Humvees and a tank. Soldiers dressed in what looked like radiation suits sprayed arcs of fire from the flamethrowers on their backs. The bull seal charged them and a second later; a burst from an M-16 dropped the creature in its tracks.

“It’s the army, Woody! We’re saved!”

Without thinking, Terry ran to the front door and unlocked it. Still clutching the rifle, he flung the door open. Barking, Woody dashed between his legs and ran outside.

“Woody, wait!”

The soldiers swiveled towards them.

Terry dropped the rifle and held up his hands.

“Don’t shoot. We’re not dead! Don’t—”

The rest of his pleas were drowned out by thunder. Woody yelped once, and then collapsed. He did not move. The ground around him was red.

“Woody!” Terry ran to him.

“Stop where you are,” a voice boomed through a bullhorn. “Keep your hands up.”

Terry collapsed to his knees in front of his dog, hands in the air, tears streaming down his face. Woody was no longer recognizable—especially his head.

Two soldiers cautiously approached him, their rifles un-slung and pointed at Terry.

“Say something,” one of them ordered. “We need to see if you’re one of them.”

Still staring at Woody, Terry cried, “Why?”

“He’s alive,” a soldier shouted. “Get a medic over here to look him over.”

The other soldier knelt beside Terry. He reached out and grasped the grieving man’s shoulder.

“Hey buddy, you okay?”

Terry stared up at him with red-rimmed eyes.

“My dog…you shot my dog, you fuckers!”

The firing stopped and somebody shouted out that the area was clear.

“Sorry about that.” The first soldier shook a cigarette out of its pack and fumbled for his lighter. “He charged us, man. Thought he was a zombie. But cheer up. You’re rescued.”

Terry coughed. “Rescued?”

“Yep,” the soldier said. “General Dunbar himself should be along in a minute, if you want to thank him.”

“Thank him?” Terry stumbled to his feet.

“Sure, man. He’s leading the fight, you know?

Making things safe again.”

The second soldier nodded. “He’s in charge now. Everybody else is gone, or in hiding—or dead. General Dunbar is the man. He’s going around, kicking ass and taking names.”

The other took a drag off his cigarette and pointed at Terry’s rifle, lying in the dirt. “You know how to use that thing? If so, we could use you.”

Terry stooped and picked it up. He worked the lever.

“Use it? Yeah, I know how to use it.”

He pulled the trigger. The first soldier’s crotch turned red. Screaming, the man slumped to the ground, cigarette still dangling from his mouth.

“Thank you, you son of a bitch! Thanks for rescuing us…”

Terry thanked several more of them before they finally gunned him down. His body fell next to Woody’s. The troops made sure neither of them would get back up again.

The armored column rolled on. When it had departed from sight, the zombie birds returned to feast on what remained of their bodies.

THE SUMMONING

The Rising

Day Twelve

Land O’ Lakes, Florida

By noon, the rain had ended and the mercury skyrocketed again. The streets and sidewalks steamed in the heat. Outside the store, right along the main highway, a family of four cooked inside of their stalled vehicle. That slow, agonizing death was preferable to getting out of the car. The street was eerily quiet. Even the zombies seemed to have moved on, other than the dead birds which perched on the car, daring the family to open their doors or roll down a window.

The family died in the shadow of Camelot Books. The building had once been an old GTE switching station, but Tony and Kim turned it into a bookstore. The walls were sixteen inches thick, and built to withstand hurricane force winds. A glass atrium, now blocked off with plywood and empty bookshelves, stood at the front of the store. Next door was an old United Methodist church.

The family’s reanimated corpses got out of the car and surveyed the street. Eventually, they moved on in search of prey.

Camelot Books’ thick walls prevented the zombies from hearing the screams coming from inside the store.

Before they opened the store, Tony had once owned a gun shop. He knew how to defend himself. But defense was an impossible thing when you were handcuffed to a desk leg. Kim was cuffed to the other side. The minister from next door was duct taped to a chair. Other people, mostly store customers and parishioners from next door, were bound upright to bookshelves.

They watched in horror and revulsion as the skinny man sliced the girl’s throat.

The skinny man was sweating profusely, from both the stifling heat and his own excitement. His long, stringy hair clung to his shirtless back. He pushed his thick, wire-rimmed glasses up on his bony nose and licked his lips in anticipation. After a minute, the girl died, her life-blood covering her clothing and the floor beneath her in a wet spray. A few minutes after that, she began to move again.

And then the skinny man selected a pair of wire cutters from his vast array of tools, and proceeded to snip her fingers off, one by one.

The zombie cursed him in an ancient language. Tony cursed him in a more modern tongue.

“Why are you doing this?” he shouted. “You’re as bad as they are!”

The skinny man giggled. “I have been given the power of life over death.”

“What?”

“I can bring people back from the dead.”

Kim coughed. “You’re insane.”

“Am I?” The skinny man selected a filet knife, gave Tony and Kim a wink, and then moved on to his next victim, a middle-aged Hispanic man.

“No,” the man pleaded. A wet spot appeared on the crotch of his pants. “Please. Please don’t do this. I’ve got a wife—kids. They’re still out there somewhere.”

The skinny man leaned close to him and whispered in his ear. “They are dead, just like everybody else outside. But you don’t have to worry. I can give you something they will never have. I can bring you back.”

The man closed his eyes. “Please, don’t. Please…

please…please…”

Sighing, the skinny man plunged the knife into his quivering victim. He twisted it savagely, and then sliced upward. The Hispanic man’s bowels spilled out onto the carpet.

Kim screamed.

“You should be grateful,” the skinny man told her. “You don’t know how lucky you are. All of you are. You get to be witnesses to the summoning.”

Gritting his teeth, Tony strained against his bonds. The handcuffs cut into his skin, drawing blood. “You sick son of a—”

“Ssshh.” The skinny man brought the bloody knife to his lips and kissed it. “Be quiet. Be still. Don’t blaspheme. Just watch.”

The preacher, who’d fallen unconscious before the girl was slain, finally stirred. He looked around in bewilderment, apparently forgetting their circumstances. “What’s happening?”

“I am giving you what your Savior couldn’t,” the skinny man said. “I am offering life after death. I am summoning these souls back from the other side.”

Kim rattled her handcuffs. “But—”

“Watch.”

The Hispanic man stirred. Something looked out through his dead eyes.

“Release me,” the zombie demanded. The skinny man shook his head. “No.”

Then he poked the zombie’s eyes out with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

The corpse screamed in indignation. “You will pay for this, human! I will feast on your own eyes when I am freed.”

“You’ll do no such thing.” The skinny man grasped its tongue with the pliers, and with his other hand, he sliced the organ off and held it up for the others to see. “If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out. If thy tongue offends thee, cut it out.”

The preacher muttered the Lord’s Prayer under his breath.

“I killed him,” the skinny man explained in a patient voice, as if he were speaking to a kindergarten classroom. “I took his life. And yet, he came back. I summoned him.”

“He’s a fucking zombie,” Tony shouted. “You didn’t have anything to do with it! Everybody is coming back from the dead now. That’s why they call them zombies.”

The skinny man laid down his bloody tools and frowned sadly. “I have shown you proof. I have shown you miracles. And still you don’t believe. Very well. You can be next.”

Tony’s eyes bugged out of his head.

“Listen,” Kim gasped. “Just wait a minute and listen. You don’t have to do this. We believe you now. Tony, tell him you believe!”

Tony’s mouth had suddenly gone dry. He tried to work up enough saliva to speak.

“Tony,” Kim shrieked, “for God’s sake, tell him!”

“I—I believe.”

“Good.” The skinny man smiled. “Let he that believeth in me have eternal life.”

He picked up a propane torch, lit it, and adjusted the hissing flame.

“Oh no.” Kim began to sob. “Please, oh God, please stop! Please!”

Tony shrank away from the blue flame. He yanked on the handcuffs, tried to pull the desk leg free.The skinny man walked towards him. Outside Camelot Books, the heat continued to rise.Inside Camelot Books, the dead continued to rise as well.

POCKET APOCALYPSE

The Rising

Day Thirteen

Towson, Maryland

People said it was the end of the world, but what did they know? In Troll’s experience, most people were inherently stupid. Before the dead started returning, people went through their lives motivated only by their selves. They fed their addictions and rooted for their favorite sports team and political party with equal blind fervor. They paid no attention to world affairs unless it was fashionable to do so, content instead to focus on celebrity gossip and entertainment news. They took no interest in the world around them until that same world encroached upon their own well-being—like it was now.

Yes, it was true that in the last thirteen days over ten thousand years of human civilization had been rendered a moot point, but that didn’t mean it was the end of the world. Not at all. It was just a denouement. For Troll, the world had ended many years before. It died with his daughter.

Unlike the new dead, his daughter hadn’t come back.

Pausing in his thoughts, he picked crumbs from his thick, scraggly beard and tried not to cry. He sat in an abandoned bomb shelter left dormant after the end of the Cold War. It had been his home for a long time.

Troll remembered his other home. His other name. Remembered his previous life. He’d worked for fifteen years as a drug counselor at a clinic in Baltimore. He was highly respected in his field and had the accolades and certificates to prove it. But all of that changed when his daughter died. He remembered that night very clearly—it was burned into his consciousness. One night she’d gone to a party. While she was there, she somehow ended up snorting heroin mixed with a household chemical of some kind. She passed in the back of the ambulance, en route to the hospital.

She was fourteen.

He’d never known she had a drug problem. He never asked. Never saw the signs, even though he was trained to do so. Maybe it was the first time she’d ever tried drugs. Even so, he still didn’t know why she’d done it. Maybe it was peer pressure, or maybe the divorce or trouble with a boyfriend. Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. She died and she didn’t come back—and he died with her. No one called him by his real name anymore. Most people didn’t even notice him. But when they did, they called him what he was—a Troll. Just another homeless person populating Baltimore’s background setting. After his daughter’s death, he’d gone underground, literally. His ex-wife blamed him. He agreed with her. He’d helped so many people, but failed to help his own daughter. So he left after the funeral. Sold his home and all of his belongings and went away. He lived beneath the city streets, inhabiting a network of sewers, maintenance and train tunnels, electrical cable pipes, and other subterranean passageways. He wasn’t alone. When he’d first come here, Troll had been surprised by the number of people living beneath the streets. Like him, not all of them were the dregs of society. There were stockbrokers, lawyers, and even a doctor. Each had their own story, but for whatever reason, they’d flunked out—failed at life and decided to reinvent themselves below or to hide from their mistakes, who they’d been before.

Troll made a new home for himself, a new life. And when the world fell apart above, he figured the apocalypse was just catching up to everyone else. Pausing again in his ruminations, Troll sniffed the air, making sure there were no zombies around. Their stench usually gave them away, even through the thick walls of the shelter. The coast smelled clear. The only corpse was Sylva’s, still lying in the corner because Troll was too exhausted to haul him out. The attacks were increasing in frequency, even down here beneath the city. So far, the undead contingent had been mostly four-legged. A few dead humans had shown up in the tunnels—homeless people who were killed topside and then returned for their friends below. They were easy enough to fight. The zombie rats presented a bigger problem. They were smaller, sneakier, and their numbers multiplied faster. He’d seen them swarm over people, stripping them to the bone within seconds. Whenever he left the shelter, he carried a metal spray can full of gasoline and a lit torch. This makeshift flamethrower had kept the rats at bay so far.It might have worked on Sylva too, if he’d had the nerve to try.

Mark Sylva was one of Troll’s closest friends—or perhaps, the closest thing he had to a friend. Originally from Boston, the younger man had drifted south, going from city to city, staying in various soup kitchens and shelters. He was schizophrenic; never had enough money for medicine or a family to take care of him. Eventually, he’d ended up in Baltimore’s underground. Troll had sort of adopted him.

This morning, feverish, dehydrated, and suffering from dysentery and a nasty bite on his thigh—a wound inflicted by a zombie rat—Sylva had begged Troll to kill him.

Troll shook his head. “I can’t.”

“Please,” Sylva moaned. Bloody sputum had dried on his chin. “I’m dying anyway, man. I don’t want to go out like this.”

“You’re not dying,” Troll lied. “We just need to get some more liquids in you, and I need to find some antiseptic for that—”

“Fuck the antiseptic!” Sylva coughed. His entire body shook. Yellow-white pus oozed from his swollen thigh. “Grab a pipe and bash my head in, Troll.”

“No. I can’t.”

“You have to. It hurts.”

“I can’t do it. Please don’t ask me to.”

“You used to help people,” Sylva said. “You told me that. You used to help people who were in pain. That was what you lived for.”

“But this is different.”

“No, it’s not. You can help everyone else, but you can’t help me?”

“That’s not fair!”

“Why?”

“Because I did help everyone else and none of it mattered. Look what happened in the end. I wasn’t much help to my daughter now was I?”

“So start again,” Sylva wheezed. “You want to forgive yourself for that? You want to live again?

Well then help me out, man. Kill me.”

Rather than responding, Troll got to his feet and grabbed a candle. He tipped the wick into the flame burning atop a second candle next to Sylva’s makeshift cot. The younger man’s flesh looked waxy in the flickering light.

“I’m going to look for something to clean that wound up with. Some medicine, too—something for your diarrhea. You rest. Try to drink some water while I’m gone. You need to stay hydrated.”

“Troll...”

“Rest. I’ll be back soon.”

Troll had spent the rest of the morning searching for supplies and battling the dead. When he returned, Sylva was gone. He’d left behind a note, scrawled on the back of a soup can label. It said that if Troll couldn’t kill him, then he’d do it himself. He didn’t want to suffer any longer, and he didn’t want to come back as one of them.

But he did, anyway.

Later that evening, while Troll read a Stephen Crane poetry book by candlelight, Sylva’s corpse came back. It opened the hatch door and lunged into the shelter, giggling like a child. The suicide method was immediately obvious. Sylva had cut his wrists and slashed at his throat, mistakenly believing that it would prevent him from returning. But it hadn’t.

“You should have killed me when you had the chance, Troll.”

“You’re right. I should have.”

After a brief struggle, Troll put him down again by driving a rusty railroad spike through the zombie’s head. Then he knelt over the body of his friend and wailed.

Not for the first time, Troll wanted to die. He wanted it with all of his being. But he couldn’t. Couldn’t summon the courage to end it all no matter how bad he felt. Couldn’t surrender to the rats or other zombies, no matter how badly he wanted to sometimes. His survival instinct always overrode those urges. All he could do was suffer while the world fell apart around him.

The end of the world? Hardly. Everyone had their own personal apocalypse. His world had ended the same day as his daughter’s life. He’d died with her. And all of the things that had happened since: the homelessness and hunger and sickness, and more recently, the zombies—everything that came after his pocket apocalypse?

This was just Hell.

Troll wanted to live again. Instead he was a ghost, haunting the underground. A living dead man battling the living dead. Maybe Sylva had been right. Maybe, if he embraced his purpose and found someone to help again, maybe then he could finally start living.

Several days later, he did. Her name was Frankie. And though he died while helping her, Troll died alive.

THE VIKING PLAYS

PATTY CAKE

The Rising

Day Fourteen

Detroit, Michigan

The air burned their lungs, thick with smoke from the fires—and the cloying miasma of the dead. Chino pushed a branch out of the way and peered through the bushes. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Don’t know.” King shrugged. “He ain’t a zombie. Looks more like a Viking.”

They studied the giant on the park bench. He was impressive; early forties but in good shape, well over six feet tall, decked out in tattoos and earrings. His hands clutched an M-1 Garand, the barrel still smoking from the round he’d just drilled into a zombie. The creature sprawled on the ground ten feet away—minus its head. The grass and pavement were littered with more bodies. An assortment of weapons lay scattered on the bench: two more rifles, four grenades, a dozen handguns, and boxes of ammunition for each. Next to those was a large backpack, filled with bottled water and food. The Viking sat like a statue, his eyes roving and watchful. Another zombie closed in on him from the right. The rifle roared and the creature’s head exploded.

The Viking never left the bench. He brought down three more before the rest of the creatures fell back. From their vantage point, Chino and King heard one of the monsters ordering others to find guns. Several of them raced off.

The Viking began muttering to himself. “Patty cake, patty cake…”

Chino crouched back down. “The fuck is wrong with him? Why don’t he hide?”

“I don’t know,” King said. “Maybe he’s crazy.”

“Got an awful lot of firepower,” Chino observed.

“We could use that shit.”

“Word.”

The Viking fired another shot. From far away, deep inside the city, more gunfire echoed. Chino’s fingers tightened around his .357. “That the Army guys shooting?”

“Maybe,” King said. “They’ve been trying to take the city back. Held it up to the railroad tracks down on Eight Mile, but then they got overrun by them things.”

Chino shook his head. “Why bother? Ain’t nobody in charge anymore. Why don’t they just bail?”

King peeked again. The zombies still kept their distance from the man with the guns, but more were coming: dead humans, dogs, cats, squirrels. The Viking calmly reloaded, still mumbling under his breath.

“Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man…”

“What’s he doing?” Chino whispered.

“Playing patty cake.”

Chino grunted. “Whole world’s gone crazy.”

“There’re still people in charge. You know Tito and his crew?”

“The ones holed up inside the public works building?”

King nodded. “I was talking to him three days ago. Went out there and traded six cases of beer for some gasoline. They got a ham radio.”

“How they working it? Power been out for a week.”

“Generator,” King said. “They heard some military general got parts of California under control. And there’s a National Guard unit in Pennsylvania that’s taken back Gettysburg. Could happen here, too.”

Chino frowned. “That would suck. I like the way things is. Do what we want, when we want. We got the guns.”

“Not as many as that guy.” King nodded at the Viking.

Both men peeked out of the bushes again. The zombies inched closer, circling the park bench. Some now carried rifles as well. The Viking put down the Garand, and picked up a grenade. His eyes were steel.

“Open fire,” one of the zombies commanded. “He is just one human.”

With one fluid movement, the Viking pulled the pin and tossed the grenade toward the undead. There was a deafening explosion. Dirt and body parts splattered onto the grass. The Viking threw a second grenade, but one of the creatures snatched it up and flung it back. The explosive soared towards the bushes—the bushes concealing Chino and King.

“Shit…” King shoved Chino forward. “Move your ass!”

The grenade failed to detonate, but neither man noticed. They were too busy dashing from the shrubbery—and directly, they realized too late, into the firefight. The M-1 Garand roared, and the zombies returned fire.

“Motherfucker,” Chino shouted. “We done it now!”

Bullets plowed through the dirt at their feet and whizzed by their heads. Chino and King opened fire, helping the Viking mow down the remaining zombies. Within seconds, all of the dead were dead again.

The Viking turned his weapon on the men.

“Whoa!” King held up his hands. “We’re alive, yo. Don’t shoot!”

The Viking didn’t respond.

“Chino,” King whispered. “Put your gun down.”

“Fuck that.” Chino spat in the grass. “Tell that puta to put his down first.”

King smiled at the Viking. “We don’t mean no harm. Hell, we just helped you.”

“Why?”

King blinked. “Because you were in trouble, man. Why you sitting out here in the open like that, Mister…?”

“Beauchamp.” The Viking’s shoulders sagged, and he put the rifle down. “Mark Beauchamp.”

Chino lowered his weapon, wondering what King was up to.

“Why you out here on this bench, Mr.

Beauchamp?” King’s eyes flicked over the stranger’s arsenal. He licked his lips. “Wouldn’t it be safer trying to find some shelter? Come wit’ us, we can hide you.”

“No.” The Viking shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m waiting.”

“Waiting? For what?”

The Viking’s eyes turned glassy, and King realized the man was fighting back tears.

“I had a job at the Ford stamping plant, just south of the city. Wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life, but it was okay. Fed my family. Had a wife, Paula, and four kids. My son’s twenty-one. My daughters are fifteen, fourteen, and five months.”

The Viking paused, and despite the tears welling up in his eyes, he smiled.

“I think raising my boy was easier than the girls.”

King nodded.

Chino shifted from foot to foot, his finger flexing around the trigger. Was King just going to talk the guy to death?

“I was at work when it happened. I heard it all started in Escanaba, but it spread to Detroit fast. By the time I got home, Paula and the kids were gone. No note. Nothing. The evacuation order didn’t go out until a day later, so I don’t know what happened.”

His face darkened, and then he continued.

“There was blood in our kitchen—a lot of blood. I don’t know whose it was. And one of the windows was broken. But that’s all.”

“Sorry to hear that,” King said.

“I spent the first twelve days looking for them. But then I got an idea. We used to come here. I’d sit on this bench with my daughter, Erin, and we’d play patty cake. So I’m waiting, see? They’ll come back. Paula wouldn’t just leave like that. She knows how worried I’d be. I’m waiting for my family. I miss my kids.”

“And just shooting zombies?”

“Yeah. I’ve become a pretty good shot. Used to have a kick-ass pellet gun.”

“What about the birds, man? How you gonna shoot them?”

“Haven’t bothered me yet. And my family will be here before the birds show up. You’ll see.”

King glanced at Chino, then back at the Viking. He tried swallowing the lump in his throat.

“Sure you won’t come with us?”

The Viking shook his head.

King slowly approached the bench. Chino tensed. Here it came. King had the guy off guard. Now he’d pop him, they’d grab the shit, and get the hell gone before more zombies came back. But King didn’t waste the guy. Instead, he shook his hand.

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

King turned back to Chino. “Come on. Let the man wait in peace.”

Chino’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Say what?”

“You heard me,” King growled. “Let him be.”

King trudged across the grass, and Chino ran to catch up with him. He grabbed King’s arm and spun him around.

“The fuck was that all about? We could have smoked him.”

“No,” King said, his voice thick with emotion.

“We ain’t touching him.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” King sighed, “I miss my kids, too.”

An artillery shell whistled over the city. The explosion rumbled through the streets. Beneath it all, they heard the Viking playing patty cake.

IF YOU CAN SEE

THE MOUNTAIN…

The Rising

Day Fifteen