Tales of the Hidden World by Simon R. Green Page B

took them. Good footwear is important when you do a lot of walking.
    I knew why he’d fallen over, why he’d stopped moving. It meant the last living person who knew or cared about him was gone. Nobody remembered him, so there was no one to hold him here anymore. That is why the dead came back, after all. Because we just couldn’t let them go. Because we all had this selfish need to hang on to our loved ones, even after their time was up. We thought of our friends and family and loved ones as ours, our possessions, and we wanted them back so much we called them back up out of their graves. Unfortunately, the part we cared about, the personalities, or souls, had passed on to wherever personalities or souls go. Beyond our reach. All we could bring back was their bodies.
    I’d seen people try to talk to the dead, speaking earnestly and emotionally to blank faces, trying to reach someone who wasn’t there anymore. Heard people raise their voices, in anger and anguish, trying to force or cajole a reaction of some kind from their returned loved ones. Sometimes the living even hit the dead and screamed abuse at them. For not being what the living wanted them to be. The dead didn’t react. The dead didn’t care.
    I didn’t stay long in dead town. I had some thought of bringing other street people here, to make use of the empty homes. It was a lot safer in the dead town than it was in the city. The dead had no reason to attack us, or insult us, or steal from us. But I left, because even as far down as I had fallen, I was still better than the dead. I still had hope, and dreams, and somewhere to go. My life wasn’t over till I said it was.
    I went back to the city, and to the people I knew. Because even if people like you won’t admit we exist, street people still have one another.
    I’ve been watching zombie films, and reading zombie books and zombie comics, for many many years, and I’m pretty much zombied out. So if I was going to write a zombie story, it had to be something different, something new. Less apocalyptic, and more about living through the end of the world. Because every day is the end of the world for someone, when they lose their job, or their wife, or their children. And the connection between how we treat zombies and homeless people was just too clear. . . .

From Out of the Sun, Endlessly Singing
    T his is the story . It is an old, old story, and most of the true details are lost to us. But this is how the story has always been told, down the many years. Of our greatest loss and our greatest triumph, of three who were sent down into Hell forever, that the rest of Humanity might know safety and revenge. This is the story of the Weeping Woman, the Man with the Golden Voice, and the Rogue Mind. If the story upsets you, pretend it never happened. It was a very long time ago, after all.
    This goes back to the days of the Great Up and Out, when we left out mother world to go out into the stars, to explore the Galaxy and take her fertile planets for our own. All those silver ships, dancing through the dark, blazing bright in the jungle of the night. We met no opposition we couldn’t handle, colonized every suitable world we came to and terraformed the rest, remaking them in our image. It was a glorious time, by all accounts, building our glittering cities and proud civilizations, in defiance of all that endless empty Space. We should have known better. We should have sent ahead, to say we were coming. Because it turned out, we were trespassing and not at all welcome.
    They came to us from out of the Deep, from out of the darkest part of Deep Space, from far beyond the realms we knew, or could ever hope to comprehend. Without warning, they came, aliens as big as starships, bigger than anything we had ever built, and far more powerful. Endless numbers of them, a hoard, a swarm, deadly things of horrid shape and terrible intent, blocking out the stars where they passed. They were each of them huge and awful,