Free Stay Dead: A Novel by Steve Wands Page B

chunk out of his will and now he was left
feeling uneasy and defeated. Going ahead wasn’t a good idea, but
there was no going back.
    Outside, under the cloak of night, the school
became a lighthouse to the undead vessels lost among the debris of
a world in ruin. Somehow they knew, either by scent or noise, or
some omniscient knowledge. The living dead knew that life was
somewhere inside that building, and they wanted it. With hands
stretching outward and stiff legged movements pulling them forward
they moved closer.
    For those who couldn’t sleep, or needed
something to do, there was a gathering outside the gymnasium. They
got together anything that could be of immediate use. They sealed
up the window Jon-Jon broke and began barricading any other weak
spots they could find. They worked diligently as the others
rested.
     
     

CHAPTER 6: No place like
home
     
     
    After the firefight at the roadblock all the boys in
blue and their mish-mosh of friends and neighbors remained on edge.
All with a multitude of different reasons, and some with no reason
other than the obvious. There were too many questions with too
little answers and nothing was making sense. There had easily been
a hundred of those things descending upon their home, New Haven.
They had every right to feel relief, yet they didn’t feel it. Most
of them were bewildered. Many of them thought that if they had been
dead once before, what was to stop them from getting up after dying
again. They had no reassurances. The best they could do was to put
these dead things into such ill-repair that it would be impossible
for them to move at all afterwards. Would these things stay dead
now, they wondered? But no one knew.
    Dead used to mean dead. No one knew what it meant
anymore. No one knew if it would ever stop. No one knew if things
would ever be normal again, or how many more of those things were
walking to town now. No one knew anything.
    To play it safe, Sheriff Davis had been instructing
everyone to incinerate the bodies as best as possible. There had
been no reports of the undead reanimating multiple times, but Davis
wasn’t going to give these things the chance to. In Davis’s eyes
the news was always bullshit, and biased bullshit at that, he
didn’t think there were any real journalists left on earth, but it
would seem that they were at least partly right about recent
events. The recently deceased were returning to life, in some sense
of the word, though not all. The news had plenty of halfcocked
ideas; a form of human rabies, mass psychosis, murder cults. The
speculative fiction grew wilder from channel to channel. The only
thing Davis and the plethora of news men and women agreed upon were
the means of which to permanently dispatch the dearly departed;
destroy the brain or incinerate the bodies. He’d been doing both
with a mild sense of satisfaction since the first time he witnessed
one of the deaders stumbling through town.
    Plumes of dark velvety smoke filled the air. It
blocked sight of the setting sun, and Davis’s men were choking on
it. The smell was unreal. It was a mix of barbecue, without the
sweet, and week-old summer road kill. Ash clung to their skin and
mingled with their sweat, turning it into a muddy second skin. The
steady, smooth, feathery rainfall helped to peel it away, but not
by much. They dragged the bodies of the dead closer together and
set them to flame. The rain made it tougher, but they eventually
took to it and burned up all the same. What was left of the dead
looked like it crawled from out of the black top. Some of the
bodies burned brighter than others, and when someone pointed it out
Davis told them why.
    “ Women burn brighter, I heard.
Something about a higher fat ratio.”
     
    Back at Jeff’s house, the kids were falling asleep
upstairs as Maria stayed with them to make sure they did so
quickly. Then the adults could talk freely without fear of
terrifying their children further, though Jeff and his family did a
good