Mark Rogers - The Dead

“Yes.”

“And the Earth’s become Hell? And those walking corpses are people being punished for their sins?”

“Yes.”

“And the rest of us are poor slobs trying to find salvation in the meantime, like we’re stuck in some kind of divine afterthought?”

“Yes.”

“Shit, you’re a sickie,” Steve laughed.

“So what’s your guess?” Linda asked.

“I don’t have one,” Steve replied.

“But you’re sure there’s some kind of natural explanation?”

Steve nodded.

“There’s a good, sound scientific reason why embalmed corpses are coming back to life?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds to me like your faith’s just as blind as Mr. MacAleer’s.”

“There is a scientific explanation,” Dave Holland put in. “Radiation brings ‘ em back. It mutates ‘em, like in Night of the Living Dead.”

Buddy snorted at his son. “ Night of the Living Dead, ” he said. “How’d your brain get so full of crap when you have a father like me?”

“It was easy,” Dave said.

Before Buddy could reply, footbeats rolled on the cellar stairs, and momentarily Max and Dennis rushed into the shelter; Max shut the thick steel door and locked it, then flicked on the emergency ventilation system.

“What’s happening?” Camille asked Dennis.

“Saw some coming up the street,” Dennis answered. “Twenty, maybe. Torching the houses, driving people out.”

“But how will we breathe if the upstairs burns?” Aunt Lucy asked.

“That’s why I turned on the ventilation,” Max said. “It’s filtered, and the ducts run underground, out into that vacant lot behind the back yard.”

“What about the fire?” Lucy demanded.

“Won’t touch us. The walls of this joint are insulated steel-reinforced concrete. The house is going to come crashing down into the rec room, though. The main door might be completely blocked. We may have to leave by the back way.” Max nodded toward a second steel door on the far side of the shelter. “It opens on a tunnel that leads to a storm sewer main.”

“Dad sure covered all the bases,” Gary said.

“What will we eat?” Camille asked. “And what about water?”

“There’s enough food to last a family of four a year and a half,” Max said. “It’s in the storeroom. Bottled water, too. That’ll have to be recycled, but we’ve got the gear.”

“Can’t hear a thing outside,” Gary said, going to the main door, setting his eye to the thick glass peephole.

“Walls are too thick,” Max said.

Gary peered steadily through the fisheye lens, into the dark rec room beyond. The only light was at the top of the stairs, a few bars of it running down the steps.

“Isn’t there a periscope?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Max said. “But we don’t want to run it up now. Might give those things some idea we’re here.”

“Isn’t it concealed?”

“In the bird-bath stand.”

“The bird-bath,” Gary said, laughing.

“Yeah. But somebody sharp could spot it.”

“What’s above us?” Aunt Lucy asked. “I’m all turned around.”

“The front yard,” Max said. “See anything, Gary?”

“Nothing yet,” heGary answered-just as a reddish flare erupted some distance beyond the rec room door; flaming liquid splattered the stairwell and the steps, quickly setting large patches of carpet ablaze.

“They just torched the living room,” Gary cried.

“We’re all going to die down here,” Buddy said.

“Bullshit,” Max said. “But there’s nowhere for you to run now, so you might as well just sit back and relax. And pray the National Guard’s up there when the fires burn out.”

“Pray to who?” Buddy asked.

“Anyone you like. I’d suggest God.”

Uncle Buddy never did do any praying. Max and the MacAleers and Father Chuck all did, but their prayers weren’t answered, at least regarding the military. Perhaps a request from Buddy might’ve tipped the balance; there was no way to say.

As it turned out, the military proved unable to help much of anyone. Technology failed at every level. Many tanks and trucks wouldn’t start, and most of those that did simply crawled a few feeble miles before they died. Planes dropped from the sky-those that managed to leave the runway. Most small arms still worked, but with transport breaking down or nonexistent, little heavy artillery could be brought to bear.

Army and National Guard units engaged the dead anyway. All across the country, pitched battles raged. Corpses hurled themselves in waves at the living, were dismembered by bullets and grenades. But gun-barrels overheated and warped, and ammunition ran low, and the result was always the same-soldiers slaughtered, the dead unchecked.

It was a scenario played out in every nation on earth. Burning and killing, the shrieking majority rampaged at will. Millions came clawing up from the graveyards in Prague and Rome and Tokyo. Hordes of them covered the African Veldt. Out of the Meccan catacombs they swarmed like angry ants. Mass graves in the Gulag, in Vorkuta and Kolyma and Krasnoyarsk, bulged open like wounds seething with maggots.

Against Baghdad they unleashed a cloud of Saran nerve gas. Far across the Shatt-Al-Arab, in the Martyr’s Cemetery in Tehran, they crimsoned the Fountain of Blood with gallon after gallon of the real thing.

In a ghastly echo of the Terror, half the population of Marseilles was crammed onto ships, which were then scuttled in mid-harbor. Fifty thousand souls in Caracas were drowned in crude oil in the hulls of supertankers. In an Elizabeth, New Jersey chemical plant, ten thousand were shoved into huge tanks of wood alcohol. For the first time in anyone’s memory, Calcutta’s sanitation trucks came to collect the living, and in Beirut, the dead were well into their campaign of slaughter before anyone noticed. Not far to the south, the Knesset became a charnel-house in mid-session. The living in Ethiopia and Kampuchea were annihilated in a matter of hours.

And in South Africa, Apartheid was abolished.

Neither money nor rank nor good intentions availed against the New Order. Junta leaders and cardinals and captains of industry came to their fates as inexorably and hideously as peons and parish priests and welfare moms. Arab arms millionaires in their private 747’s above the Persian Gulf discovered they had unwanted guests aboard; Colombian drug lords in their Andean fortresses learned to their amazement that some foes could neither be bought nor intimidated. At the Vatican, Pope Pius the Thirteenth was dragged down after a desperate last stand by his Swiss Guards. In Washington, the Presidential chopper actually got off the ground and made it to the Mount Weather Complex on the Appalachian Trail, whereupon the Chief and all his men were set upon by the corpses even then overrunning the landing-pad. In Moscow, an electrical malfunction left the main entrance to the Kremlin command center wide open; a half hour after giving the sentries at his tomb a nasty shock, one V.I. Lenin led the mob that captured the Soviet leadership, and he and his comrades formed a strange new Politburo after lovingly disposing of the old.

So it proceeded, implacably, remorselessly. Within twenty-four hours fully one-third of the human race was freshly dead and awaiting resurrection.

During periods when the static relented, the occupants of the Holland bomb-shelter gleaned something of this from the shortwave, enough to realize the full scope of the situation. Coupled with what they’d already witnessed, the news made sleep that night fitful if not impossible. The argument between Mr. MacAleer (sometimes allied with Linda) and his opponents flared up now and then, usually after some new bit of information managed to slip through.