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

There was little pieces of wood sticking to him, Davey said, and pieces of blue cloth.
    Later inspection proved these to be shreds of satin from the coffin in which the boy had been buried away.
    (“Thank Christ Richie Fournier dint have that trick,” Bil Pulsifer said later, and they had al nodded shakily— many of them were stil wiping their mouths, because almost al of them had puked at some point or other during that hel acious half hour… these were not things Dave Eamons could tel Maddie, but Maddie guessed more than Dave ever guessed she guessed.) Gunfire tore Michael Fournier to shreds before he could do more than sit up; other shots, fired in wild panic, blew chips off his marble gravestone, and it was a goddam wonder someone on one side hadn’t shot someone on one of the others, but they got off lucky. Bud Meechum found a hole torn in the sleeve of his shirt the next day, but liked to think that might have been nothing more than a thorn—there had been raspberry bushes on his side of the bone-yard. Maybe that was real y al it was, although the black smudges on the hole made him think that maybe it had been a thorn with a pretty large caliber.
    The Fournier kid fel back, most of him lying stil , other parts of him stil twitching.
    But by then the whole graveyard seemed to be rippling, as if an earthquake was going on there—but only there, no place else.
    Just about an hour before dusk, this had happened.
    Burt Dorfman had rigged up a siren to a tractor battery, and Bob Daggett flipped the switch.
    Within twenty minutes, most of the men in town were at the island cemetery.
    Goddam good thing, too, because a few of the deaders almost got away. Old Frank Daggett, stil two hours away from the heart attack that would carry him off after it was al over and the moon had risen, organized the men into a pair of angled flanks so they wouldn’t shoot each other, and for the final ten minutes the Jenny boneyard sounded like Bul Run. By the end of the festivities, the powder smoke was so thick that some men choked on it. No one puked on it, because no one had anything left to puke up. The sour smel of vomit was almost heavier than the smel of gunsmoke… it was sharper, too, and lingered longer.
    And stil some of them wriggled and squirmed like snakes with broken backs… the fresher ones, for the most part.
    “Burt,” Frank Daggett said. “You got them chain saws?”
    “I got ’em,” Burt said, and then a long, buzzing sound came out of his mouth, a sound like a cicada burrowing its way into tree bark, as he dry-heaved. He could not take his eyes from the squirming corpses, the overturned gravestones, the yawning pits from which the dead had come. “In the truck.”
    “Gassed up?” Blue veins stood out on Frank’s ancient, hairless skul .
    “Yeah.” Burt’s hand was over his mouth. “I’m sorry.”
    “Work y’fuckin gut al you want,” Frank said briskly. “But get them saws while you do. And you…
    you… you… you…”
    The last “you” was his grandnephew Bob.
    “I can’t, Uncle Frank,” Bob said sickly. He looked around and saw at least twenty men lying in the tal grass. They had swooned. Most of them had seen their own relatives rise out of the ground.
    Buck Harkness over there lying by an aspen tree had been part of the cross fire that had cut his late wife to ribbons before he fainted when her decayed brains exploded from the back of her head in a grisly gray fan. “I can’t. I c—”
    Frank’s hand, twisted with arthritis but as hard as stone, cracked across his face.
    “You can and you wil , chummy,” he said grimly.
    Bob went with the rest of the men.
    Frank Daggett watched them grimly and rubbed his chest.
    “I was nearby when Frank spoke to Bob,” Dave told Maddie. He wasn’t sure if he should be tel ing her this—or any of it, for that matter, with her almost halfway to foaling time—but he was stil too impressed with the old man’s grim and quiet courage to forbear.