Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology by Anthony Giangregorio

“This was after…
    you know… we cleaned the mess up.”
    Maddie only nodded.
    “I’l stop,” Dave said, “if you can’t bear it, Maddie.”
    “I can bear it,” she said quietly, and Dave looked at her quickly, curiously, but she had averted her eyes before he could see the secret in them.

    * * *
    Davey didn’t know the secret because no one on Jenny knew. That was the way Maddie wanted it, and the way she intended to keep it. There had been a time when she had, in the blue darkness of her shock, pretended to be coping . And then something happened that made her cope. Four days before the island cemetery vomited up its corpses, Maddie Pace was faced with a simple choice: cope or die.
    She had been sitting in the living room, drinking a glass of the blueberry wine she and Jack had put up during August of the previous year—a time that now seemed impossibly distant—and doing something so trite it was laughable: She was Knitting Little Things (the second bootee of a pair this evening). But what else was there to do? It seemed that no one would be going across to the mal on the mainland for a long time.
    Something had thumped the window.
    A bat, she thought, looking up. Her needles paused in her hands, though. It seemed that something was moving out there in the windy dark. The oil lamp was turned up high and kicking too much reflection off the panes to be sure. She reached to turn it down and the thump came again. The panes shivered. She heard a little pattering of dried putty fal ing on the sash. Jack was going to reglaze al the windows this fal , she thought stupidly, and then: Maybe that’s what he came back for. Because it was Jack. She knew that. Before Jack, no one from Jenny had drowned for nearly three years. Whatever was making them return apparently couldn’t reanimate whatever was left of their bodies. But Jack…
    Jack was stil fresh.
    She sat, poised, head cocked to one side, knitting in her hands. A little pink bootee. She had already made a blue set. Al of a sudden it seemed she could hear so much . The wind. The faint thunder of surf on Cricket’s Ledge. The house making little groaning sounds, like an elderly woman making herself comfortable in bed. The tick of the clock in the hal way.
    It was Jack. She knew it.
    “Jack?” she said, and the window burst inward and what came in was not real y Jack but a skeleton with a few mouldering strings of flesh hanging from it.
    His compass was stil around his neck. It had grown a beard of moss.
    The wind blew the curtains out in a cloud as he sprawled, then got up on his hands and knees and looked at her from black sockets in which barnacles had grown.
    He made grunting sounds. His fleshless mouth opened and the teeth chomped down. He was hungry… but this time chicken noodle soup would not serve. Not even the kind that came in the can.
    Gray stuff hung and swung beyond those dark barnacle-crusted holes, and she realized she was looking at whatever remained of Jack’s brain. She sat where she was, frozen, as he got up and came toward her, leaving black kelpy tracks on the carpet, fingers reaching. He stank of salt and fathoms. His hands stretched. His teeth champed mechanical y up and down. Maddie saw he was wearing the remains of the black-and-red-checked shirt she had bought him at L.L. Bean’s last Christmas. It had cost the earth, but he had said again and again how warm it was, and look how wel it had lasted, even under water al this time, even—
    The cold cobwebs of bone which were al that remained of his fingers touched her throat before the baby kicked in her stomach—for the first time—and her shocked horror, which she had believed to be calmness, fled, and she drove one of the knitting needles into the thing’s eye.
    Making horrid, thick, draggling noises that sounded like the suck of a swil pump, he staggered backward, clawing at the needle, while the half-made pink bootee swung in front of the cavity where his nose had been. She