Read Online Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology by Anthony Giangregorio - Free Book Online
Authors: Anthony Giangregorio
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When you could no longer cal the 800 number and order the Boxcar Wil y records that were not available in any store, when there were for the first time in her living memory no Operators Standing By, the end of the world was a foregone conclusion.
She felt her rounding stomach as she stood there by the phone on the wal in the kitchen and said it out loud for the first time, unaware that she had spoken: “It wil have to be a home delivery. But that’s al right, as long as you remember, Maddie. There isn’t any other way, not now. It wil have to be a home delivery.”
She waited for fear and none came.
“I can cope with this just fine,” she said, and this time she heard herself and was comforted by the sureness of her own words.
A baby.
When the baby came, the end of the world would itself end.
“Eden,” she said, and smiled. Her smile was sweet, the smile of a madonna. It didn’t matter how many rotting dead people (maybe Boxcar Wil y among them) were shambling around on the face of the world.
She would have a baby, she would have a home delivery, and the possibility of Eden would remain.
The first news had come out of a smal Florida town on the Tamiami Trail. The name of this town was not as colorful as Wet Noggin, but it was stil pretty good: Thumper. Thumper, Florida. It was reported in one of those lurid tabloids that fil the racks by the checkout aisles in supermarkets and discount drugstores. DEAD COME TO LIFE IN SMALL FLORIDA TOWN! the headline of Inside View read. And the subhead: Horror Movie Comes to Life! The subhead referred to a movie cal ed The Night of the Living Dead , which Maddie had never seen. It also mentioned another movie she had never seen. The title of this piece of cinema was Macumba Love . The article was accompanied by three photos. One was a stil from Night of the Living Dead , showing what appeared to be a bunch of escapees from a lunatic asylum standing outside an isolated farmhouse at night. One was a stil from Macumba Love , showing a woman with a great lot of blond hair and a smal bit of bikini-top holding in breasts the size of prize-winning gourds. The woman was holding up her hands and screaming at what appeared to be a black man in a mask. The third purported to be a picture taken in Thumper, Florida. It was a blurred, grainy shot of a human whose sex was impossible to define. It was walking up the middle of a business street in a smal town. The figure was described as being “wrapped in the cerements of the grave,” but it could have been someone in a dirty sheet.
No big deal. Bigfoot Rapes Girl Scouts last week, the dead people coming back to life this week, the dwarf mass murderer next week.
No big deal until they started to come out everywhere. No big deal until the first news film (“You may want to ask your children to leave the room,” Dan Rather introduced gravely) showed up on network TV, creatures with naked bone showing through their dried skin, traffic accident victims, the morticians’ concealing makeup sloughed away either in the dark passivity of the earth or in the clawing climb to escape it so that the ripped faces and bashed-in skul s showed, women with their hair teased into dirt-clogged beehives in which worms and beetles stil squirmed and crawled, their faces alternately vacuous and informed with a kind of calculating, idiotic intel igence; no big deal until the first horrible stil s in an issue of People magazine that had been sealed in shrink-wrap like girly magazines, an issue with an orange sticker that read Not For Sale To Minors!
Then it was a big deal.
When you saw a decaying man stil dressed in the mud-streaked remnants of the Brooks Brothers suit in which he had been buried tearing at the breast of a screaming woman in a Tshirt that read Property of the Houston Oilers , you suddenly realized it might be a very big deal indeed.
Then the accusations and the saber rattling had started, and for three weeks the entire world had been
She felt her rounding stomach as she stood there by the phone on the wal in the kitchen and said it out loud for the first time, unaware that she had spoken: “It wil have to be a home delivery. But that’s al right, as long as you remember, Maddie. There isn’t any other way, not now. It wil have to be a home delivery.”
She waited for fear and none came.
“I can cope with this just fine,” she said, and this time she heard herself and was comforted by the sureness of her own words.
A baby.
When the baby came, the end of the world would itself end.
“Eden,” she said, and smiled. Her smile was sweet, the smile of a madonna. It didn’t matter how many rotting dead people (maybe Boxcar Wil y among them) were shambling around on the face of the world.
She would have a baby, she would have a home delivery, and the possibility of Eden would remain.
The first news had come out of a smal Florida town on the Tamiami Trail. The name of this town was not as colorful as Wet Noggin, but it was stil pretty good: Thumper. Thumper, Florida. It was reported in one of those lurid tabloids that fil the racks by the checkout aisles in supermarkets and discount drugstores. DEAD COME TO LIFE IN SMALL FLORIDA TOWN! the headline of Inside View read. And the subhead: Horror Movie Comes to Life! The subhead referred to a movie cal ed The Night of the Living Dead , which Maddie had never seen. It also mentioned another movie she had never seen. The title of this piece of cinema was Macumba Love . The article was accompanied by three photos. One was a stil from Night of the Living Dead , showing what appeared to be a bunch of escapees from a lunatic asylum standing outside an isolated farmhouse at night. One was a stil from Macumba Love , showing a woman with a great lot of blond hair and a smal bit of bikini-top holding in breasts the size of prize-winning gourds. The woman was holding up her hands and screaming at what appeared to be a black man in a mask. The third purported to be a picture taken in Thumper, Florida. It was a blurred, grainy shot of a human whose sex was impossible to define. It was walking up the middle of a business street in a smal town. The figure was described as being “wrapped in the cerements of the grave,” but it could have been someone in a dirty sheet.
No big deal. Bigfoot Rapes Girl Scouts last week, the dead people coming back to life this week, the dwarf mass murderer next week.
No big deal until they started to come out everywhere. No big deal until the first news film (“You may want to ask your children to leave the room,” Dan Rather introduced gravely) showed up on network TV, creatures with naked bone showing through their dried skin, traffic accident victims, the morticians’ concealing makeup sloughed away either in the dark passivity of the earth or in the clawing climb to escape it so that the ripped faces and bashed-in skul s showed, women with their hair teased into dirt-clogged beehives in which worms and beetles stil squirmed and crawled, their faces alternately vacuous and informed with a kind of calculating, idiotic intel igence; no big deal until the first horrible stil s in an issue of People magazine that had been sealed in shrink-wrap like girly magazines, an issue with an orange sticker that read Not For Sale To Minors!
Then it was a big deal.
When you saw a decaying man stil dressed in the mud-streaked remnants of the Brooks Brothers suit in which he had been buried tearing at the breast of a screaming woman in a Tshirt that read Property of the Houston Oilers , you suddenly realized it might be a very big deal indeed.
Then the accusations and the saber rattling had started, and for three weeks the entire world had been
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