The Resurrected Compendium Read online

  That’s why her brother and his friends liked that movie. Well, Maddy kind of liked it too. Not just the boobies, though definitely when she dreamed about what it would be like to be older she always imagined herself hand-in-hand with her new best friend Kaylee, and never with that gross boy Zac from her class who always looked at her with his mouth open. No, Maddy liked the way the zombies fell apart when you shot them.

  Blam!

  Kaboom!

  Blood and guts and gore, brains splattered all over the place, limbs flying. It wasn’t really like that in real life, though. Real people, she thought with a bit of scorn, held together better than the ones in movies.

  The hanging men were starting to fall apart. The one on the far left, with the baseball cap, had been dangling a few feet above the floor originally, but now the toes of his bare feet— they’d taken his boots, because shoes were in shorter supply than other things, brushed the floor. When the overhead vent rattled on, sending a gust of stale-smelling air through the corridor, the three of them all started to twist. Slowly, slowly, so slow you wouldn’t notice unless you’d been staring at them for a long time the way she was.

  The ropes creaked.

  The one in the middle had pooped his pants. Maddy didn’t like to look at that, even if it was sort of funny. The one on the right was the only one she’d known, before. Now she stepped up to him, eyeing his tongue, which was stuck halfway out of his mouth.

  The chairs they’d been forced to stand on were all still in the hall. Two of them were knocked onto their backs, but the third she pulled from its spot along the edge of the wall. She settled it in front of him, then sat on it to unlace her skates. In her sock feet, she hopped up on the chair to study him a little closer.

  From her pocket, Maddy pulled a small sewing kit she’d pinched from one of the store rooms she’d passed along the way. The travel kits had been packaged for use in hotels and would be useful someday when the other supplies ran out. She should’ve been more scared to take it, considering she was staring at the face of a man who’d died for stealing from the complex, but Maddy didn’t worry too much about it. She was just a kid, after all. They didn’t kill kids.

  The kit had a small piece of paper with needles and pins stuck into it. Three needles, each threaded with a length of different colors, white, black and navy blue. Six pins. There were a couple of buttons tucked beneath the paper, along with a few safety pins.

  Maddy took the first needle from the package and looked at the dead man. Then she grabbed the edge of his tongue and pulled it out further to jam the needle, thread dangling, into it. His tongue already bristled with needles and pins, his cheeks adorned with buttons attached to the sagging flesh with safety pins, a few of them sewn directly with thread.

  “You shouldn’t steal,” Maddy said solemnly. “And you shouldn’t touch little girls.”

  She’d been saving the eyes but must’ve waited too long because when she twisted the biggest needle into it, the eyeball didn’t pop the way she’d imagined it would. A tiny bit of fluid leaked out and the needle sagged for a second before falling out. It hit the floor with a little “plink.”

  He groaned.

  She was startled but not scared — she’d seen the things outside, and he wasn’t one. It was the rope creaking again, rubbing at his throat and neck. His body weight was pulling him down, and when she tugged his tongue, it had shifted his body enough that the rope now dug so far into his skin she couldn’t see it. The man wasn’t groaning with his voice. It was the passage of air along the gash opening in his throat.

  She studied this for a minute or two, waiting to see what would happen. Dad said bodies collected gas as they rotted. Dad had told them all stories of corpses groaning, twitching, some sitting up reflexively on the autopsy table. Maddy could believe anything was possible.

  When nothing else happened, the man swinging slowly in silence next to his buddies, she frowned, disappointed, then got off the chair and returned it to its place along the wall. She looked for the fallen needle, but it had disappeared. Then she laced up her skates again and took off, moving fast and faster until she whipped past the doors so fast she couldn’t have seen through the windows even if the lights had been on inside the storage units.

  She went all the way to the big double doors at the end. These were padlocked and also had blinking keypads beside them that needed a special code to open. Beyond the doors was more storage, of what, she didn’t know. Someday she thought she might find out, but it didn’t matter now. This was the end of her journey.

  Not ready to go back even though it would soon be time for lunch, Maddy practiced spins and skating on one foot. She pretended she was one of those fancy ice skaters she used to watch on TV. She’d wear a costume with fluttery bits on it to make it look like flames, that would be cool. Her stomach was growling by the time she got back to the hanging men. Mom would wonder where she was, and if she missed their lunch slot she’d have to wait until dinner, so Maddy pushed off faster.

  With the three blocking the corridor it was tricky getting through without touching any of them. She tried to slow herself but overshot and bounced off the wall a little, knocking into the man on the right. The body swung against its neighbor, setting it swinging harder into the one on the other side. Then back. Like that thing her dad used to have on his desk, the hanging metal balls. You lifted one and it hit the others, back and forth. That’s what the bodies did.

  Except bodies weren’t made of metal.

  With a sound like ripping wet paper towels, the man on the right’s head separated from the rest of him. The rest of him knocked Maddy to the ground. The stink of him was bad, but that’s not what made her choke and gasp and scream. It was the way his arms fell around her, how he pinned her to the floor.

  She fought him the way she had that first time, but now when she kicked upward, instead of him doubling over in pain from a hit to the nuts, the man only sagged. Limp. Her skates made her feet too heavy to lift far. She jerked a bare knee but it sunk into him, sickly warm, with a squelch.

  He had no head, no face, no mouth to try to kiss her with, but the torn edges of his neck and throat hit against her, spilling goo. She rolled as best she could, scrabbling in a panic at the floor. Her nails bent back, and that hurt so bad she screamed.

  The body on top of her didn’t fight back when she clawed and kicked and fought. It fell apart, bit by bit, until at last she was able to get out from under it. Breathing hard, Maddy shuddered and spit out the taste of him, but it was all through her. She was covered in sludgy bits of hanged man.

  Boy, was her mom gonna be mad.

  43

  “There’s one.” Borden pointed to the side of the road. “Hey Digger, should we stop?”

  They were the last of the convoy, the cleanup crew when necessary, though at this point most of what people had started calling the Resurrected had been wiped out along the highways. They were easy enough to pick off, even though all those zombie movies had lied. A headshot wasn’t enough. You had to obliterate them. Burn them, and even then, the corpses kept walking. That’s why instead of guns, they had flamethrowers.

  Digger wasn’t his real name, but his parents had owned a couple funeral homes and he’d joined the crew with the nickname already in place. He eased his foot off the gas, slowing the pickup truck to look out the window. “I guess we could.”

  They weren’t Army, those trucks had all gone ahead. Dover Airforce Base was only an hour or so farther, maybe less because the roads were all closed to any traffic but government issue and those soldiers like to roll, and roll fast. He and Digger could easily keep going, nobody would notice.

  Except…it was their job. Borden no longer really had any hopes of being paid. Shit had gone down, the world was a different place than it had been a few weeks ago. Still, it was no longer the money that motivated Borden. Food, shelter. Those were more important.That, and wiping out these freaks.

  Digger had been closer to death for his whole life