Free Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology by Anthony Giangregorio Page A

said, and there was a ripple of laughter.
    “He don’t now, but he’s gonna,” Bob said, “because every man jack of you with more than one rifle bigger than a twenty-two is gonna bring it here.” He looked at Peebles. “Okay if we keep
    ’em in the rectory, Tom?”
    Peebles nodded, dry-washing his hands in a distraught way.
    “Shit on that,” Orrin Campbel said. “I got a wife and two kids at home. Am I s’posed to leave ’em with nothin if a bunch of cawpses come for an early Thanksgiving dinner while I’m on watch?”
    “If we do our job at the boneyard, none wil ,” Bob replied stonily. “Some of you got handguns.
    We don’t want none of those. Figure out which women can shoot and which can’t, and give ’em the pistols. We’l put ’em together in bunches.”
    “They can play Beano,” old Frank cackled, and Bob smiled, too. That was more like it, by the Christ.
    “Nights, we’re gonna want trucks posted around so we got plenty of light.” He looked over at Sonny Dotson, who ran Island Amoco, the only gas station on Jenny—Sonny’s main business wasn’t gassing cars and trucks—shit, there was no place much on the island to drive, and you could get your go ten cents cheaper on the mainland—but fil ing up lobster boats and the motorboats he ran out of his jackleg marina in the summer. “You gonna supply the gas, Sonny?”
    “Am I gonna get cash slips?”
    “You’re gonna get your ass saved,” Bob said. “When things get back to normal—if they ever do—
    I guess you’l get what you got coming.”
    Sonny looked around, saw only hard eyes, and shrugged. He looked a bit sul en, but in truth he looked more confused than anything, Davey told Maddie the next day.
    “Ain’t got n’more’n four hunnert gal ons of gas,” he said. “Mostly diesel.”
    “There’s five generators on the island,” Burt Dorfman said (when Burt spoke everyone listened; as the only Jew on the island, he was regarded as a creature both quixotic and fearsome, like an oracle that works about half the tune). “They al run on diesel. I can rig lights if I have to.”
    Low murmurs. If Burt said he could, he could. He was an electrician, and a damned good one…
    for a Jew, anyway.
    “We’re gonna light that place up like a friggin’ stage,” Bob said.
    Andy Kinsolving stood up. “I heard on the news that sometimes you can shoot one of them…
    things… in the head and it’l stay down, and sometimes it won’t.”
    “We got chain saws,” Bob said stonily, “and what won’t stay dead… why, we can make sure it won’t move too far alive.”
    And, except for making out the duty roster, that was pretty much that.
    Six days and nights passed and the sentries posted around the island graveyard were starting to feel a wee bit sil y (“I dunno if I’m standin’ guard or pul in’ my pud,” Orrin Campbel said one afternoon as a dozen men stood around a smal cemetery where the most exciting thing happening was a caterpil ar spinning a cocoon while a spider watched it and waited for the moment to pounce) when it happened… and when it happened, it happened fast.
    Dave told Maddie that he heard a sound like the wind wailing in the chimney on a gusty night…
    and then the gravestone marking the final resting place of Mr. and Mrs. Fournier’s boy Michael, who had died of leukemia at seventeen—bad go, that had been, him being their only get and them being such nice people and al —fel over. Then a shredded hand with a moss-caked Yarmouth Academy class ring on one finger rose out of the ground, shoving through the tough grass. The third finger had been torn off in the process.
    The ground heaved like (like the bel y of a pregnant woman getting ready to drop her load, Dave almost said, and hastily reconsidered) wel , like the way a big wave heaves up on its way into a close cove, and then the boy himself sat up, only he wasn’t nothing you could real y recognize, not after almost two years in the ground.