Free Book of the Dead by John Skipp, Craig Spector (Ed.)

Turkey? Cream of chicken? Her helpless eyes roved the shelf display for nearly ten minutes before Charlene Nedeau asked if she could help her with something—only Charlene said it in a sarcastic way, and Maddie guessed she would tell all her friends at high school tomorrow and they would giggle about it—about her —in the Girls’ Room, because Charlene knew what was wrong; the same thing that was always wrong. It was just Maddie Sullivan, unable to make up her mind over so simple a thing as a can of soup . How she had ever been able to decide to accept Jack Pace’s proposal was a wonder and a marvel to all of them… but of course they didn’t know how, once you found the wheel, you had to have someone to tell you when to stoop and where exactly to lean against it.
    Maddie had left the store with no soup and a throbbing headache.
    When she worked up nerve enough to ask Jack what his favorite soup was, he had said: “Chicken noodle. Kind that comes in the can.”
    Were there any others he specially liked?
    The answer was no, just chicken noodle—the kind that came in the can. That was all the soup Jack Pace needed in his life, and all the answer (on that one particular subject, at least) that Maddie needed in hers. Light of step and cheerful of heart, Maddie climbed the warped wooden steps of the store the next day and bought the four cans of chicken noodle soup that were on the shelf. When she asked Bob Nedeau if he had any more, he said he had a whole damn case of the stuff out back.
    She bought the entire case and left him so flabbergasted that he actually carried the carton out to the truck for her and forgot all about asking why she had wanted all that chicken soup—a lapse for which his wife Margaret and his daughter Charlene took him sharply to task that evening.
    “You just better believe it,” Jack had said that time not long before the wedding—she never forgot, “More than a lobsterman. My dad says I’m full of shit. He says if it was good enough for his old man, and his old man’s old man, and all the way back to the friggin’ Garden of Eden to hear him tell it, if it was good enough for all of them , it ought to be good enough for me. But it ain’t— isn’t , I mean—and I’m going to do better.” His eye fell on her, and it was a loving eye, but it was a stern eye, too. “More than a lobsterman is what I mean to be, and more than a lobsterman’s wife is what I intend for you to be. You’re going to have a house on the mainland.”
    “Yes, Jack.”
    “And I’m not going to have any friggin’ Chevrolet.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going to have an Oldsmobile .” He looked at her, as if daring her to refute him. She did no such thing, of course; she said yes, Jack, for the third or fourth time that evening. She had said it to him thousands of times over the year they had spent courting, and she confidently expected to say it millions of times before death ended their marriage by taking one of them—or, hopefully, both of them together.
    “More than a friggin’ lobsterman, no matter what my old man says. I’m going to do it, and do you know who’s going to help me?”
    “Yes,” Maddie had said. “Me.”
    “You,” he responded with a grin, sweeping her into his arms, “are damned tooting.”
    So they were wed.
    Jack knew what he wanted, and he would tell her how to help him get it and that was just the way she wanted things to be.
    Then Jack died.
    Then , not more than four months after, while she was still wearing weeds, dead folks started to come out of their graves and walk around. If you got too close, they bit you and you died for a little while and then you got up and started walking around, too.
    Then , Russia and America came very, very close to blowing the whole world to smithereens, both of them accusing the other of causing the phenomenon of the walking dead. “How close?” Maddie heard one news correspondent from CNN ask about a month after dead people