Read Online The Rising Dead by Stella Green - Free Book Online

village. In the middle of the night, a band of Salvadorans had attacked. Two of them had guns, and they shot many people before burning the huts and leaving the survivors homeless. The man told them that even though the whole village fought back, there were still many robbers left. “They killed us like mosquitoes.” He urged the villagers to flee.
    The Stranger, who now spoke excellent Mayan, picked up his walking stick. “Where are these men?”
    In spite of his wife’s protests, the Stranger headed off alone to find the invaders. As he left, he could hear the shaman calling him back, and even though the shaman sounded desperate, he kept going. The old man’s rituals took too much time. Some of the villagers ran after him, but they couldn’t keep up. He had to stop the criminals before they got near his village. Besides, he did not need a protection spell in order to fight. He had more than a century of experience battling evil men.
    Smoke from the burned huts led him to the carnage. The attackers were still there among the ruins—not just evil, but also stupid, because they had no shelter, either. One was on the ground, shirtless and snoring loudly. As the Stranger got closer, he couldsmell the wine on him. Some gourds of liquor, a bit of corn, and some pretty cloth: that was all these people had to steal, and yet a village had been slaughtered. The man’s chest, covered with peeling gray skin, rose and fell with his snores. Black beetles were devouring his dead flesh and mating on an exposed rib. Out of his open mouth dripped globules of pus. It had been years since the Stranger had seen people covered with proof of their evil. The Mayan villagers weren’t free of bad behavior, but their crimes were petty and caused by emotion: jealousy, anger, and fear. There had been no murders, no rapes, and no acts more serious than a fistfight or the theft of a gourd of wine. The shaman judged the offenders, punishment and restitution were ordered, and life went forward with forgiveness.
    However, these men dripped evil—just like the ones in the life he had left behind. They had murdered people who would have happily shared. Guatemalans treated their guests well. The smoldering houses and the massacred bodies of the villagers, including children, filled him with rage. These could be his people. A bloodied, naked child cried as she wandered through the smoke. Behind her a man whose face was covered with fuzzy blue mold yelled at her in Spanish to be quiet. When she continued to cry because she didn’t understand him, he threw a rock and knocked her down. The Stranger moved quickly and surprised the man with a blow to the head strong enough to kill him. He pulled the child to her feet. “Run.” She seemed too scared to move, so he pointed toward the jungle and repeated, “Run!”
    Using his walking stick, the Stranger poked the snoring man on the side where his skin still looked normal. The drunk just rolled over. Before the Stranger could give him a harder poke, he heard noise behind him. Two others were advancing toward him withmachetes. The Stranger turned to face them, and when they were close enough he brought the stick down with a swooping swing that clipped one in the solar plexus and the other in the knees. Then, reversing the arc of the swing, he brought the stick back from the other direction, hitting the first one in the side of the neck and breaking the vertebrae. Continuing the swing, he flayed the other across the ribs.
    A bullet whined past. The Stranger dropped to the ground and crawled behind the ruins of a hut. He had been warned about the guns. Around him the ground thudded as four shots were fired at the burned-out home. The shots were spaced out rather than rapid—they were conserving their ammunition. He took cover in a barbecue pit and pulled a nearby section of roof thatching across it. Charred bits of wood crunching under the men’s feet told him they were advancing. When they got close, he