The Rising: Selected Scenes From the End of the World by Brian Keene Page A

her quilt. When she was done, she thought that perhaps she’d read a book.

AND HELL FOLLOWED WITH HIM
    The Rising
    Day Seventeen
    York, Pennsylvania
     
    With only the pale full moon to keep him company, Bob Ford walked out of his home and into the cemetery. It teemed with dead people, most of who were still walking around, and yet he was alone in the crowd. Bob’s grip on the pistol tightened. His ponytail fluttered in the wind, tangling around the shotgun strapped to his back. He pushed his glasses up on his face with the barrel of the .45, and then realized he didn’t need the glasses anymore. Bob found the graves and stared down at them. Freshly turned soil. Crude headstones, fashioned from wood paneling, the names scrawled in his handwriting with a black marker.
    He’d buried them himself—after he died. Bob closed his eyes and heard the gun blasts. Felt the bullet slam into the back of his head and bore through his skull. Smelled the cordite, and the blood. Burning hair. His hair. Heard their cries. His family. Heard them pleading as they were raped and butchered.
    It wasn’t the zombies that had done this. It was his fellow humans.
    Monsters.
    The last thing he saw before he died was the man on top of his wife, the man with a phoenix tattoo. Jen was screaming. Then Bob’s own blood had blocked his vision, and he’d slipped away.
    When Bob opened his eyes again, he’d been back in the house. One time, long ago, a writer friend of his had proposed (over many beers) that ghosts returned to the places they held dear in life. Bob supposed that was true. But that didn’t mean he had to stick around. There were debts owed. And hell to pay…
    A zombie approached him, and Bob realized he could no longer smell them. It was in bad shape, both arms missing, an ear hanging by a thread, and one empty eye socket festering with maggots. He could see something inside the body, a shadowy form, like coiled smoke, nestled in the corpse’s brain.
    “You have no life glow,” the zombie slurred. “You are useless to us. Depart, little ghost. Man’s time is over.”
    “Useless?” Bob grinned. “You’re falling apart. You’ll need a new body soon, I guess. Having any luck finding one?”
    “When this host fails me, I will return to the Void. From there, I can have any body, anywhere in the world, just like that.”
    The zombie snapped its fingers, and the tip of its thumb peeled back like a rotten grape. Bob holstered the pistol at his side. “Yeah, but you’ll have to wait in line, right? If you hunt down a victim, another of your kind gets the body, rather than you. Doesn’t seem fair.”
    “How do you know this?”
    “I know a lot of stuff, now that I’m dead.”
    “It matters not,” the creature hissed. “I follow orders. We are to clear paths for our brethren, until all of us are free. You don’t know as much as you boast.”
    Bob shrugged. “I know enough.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like where the rest of York’s human population is hiding.”
    “Ridiculous,” the zombie scoffed. “The city is full of humans, different factions fighting each other for control, and fighting us as well.”
    “Yeah.” Bob nodded. “But why go all the way into York City and fight a bunch of well-armed skinheads, gang-bangers, bikers, and military guys if you can get an easier—and closer—target, right here in the suburbs?”
    More of the creatures had gathered around them, and seeing that he had their attention, Bob continued.“I know where there’s a house full of scumbags, less than two miles from here.”
    “How do you know this?”
    “My—my family and I were trying to escape. We’d been holed up inside the house. Ran out of food and water yesterday, and decided to make a break for it. We got to York, and it was a war zone. So we turned around and headed for home, thinking we could scavenge food and water on the way back. Some bikers ambushed us, about two miles from here. Twelve of them. They’d taken over