The Resurrected Compendium Read online

  Life.

  The word meant nothing now in this world where the dead came back to rageful animation, infected with whatever it was that had come out of those flowers. Abbie had survived the infection, but that didn’t matter when she’d lost everything else that had ever been dear to her. All she could do now was be the best mother she could be.

  All she could do now was find a way to put them both down.

  63

  Maggie had imagined situations in which her husband and her once-upon-a-time lover would share a dinner table, but it had been a cotton-candy tinged fantasy in which somehow leaving Bill would not have exploded into a volcano of animosity and fuckery, and her new life with Jake had been able to merge with the old. She’d dreamed of strained smiles at graduations and weddings. She’d never thought of the three of them sitting around her kitchen table.

  Bill greeted Jake with a handshake and not so much as a wary glance. Her introduction was of Jake as a colleague, someone she’d worked with on some nameless project, years ago. It wasn’t a lie. They had worked together. It had been years ago. A lifetime.

  “We had an agreement,” she told her husband. “It was a joke at the time. But he told me if he ever heard about the end of the world before I did, he’d tell me.”

  Bill didn’t ask why this other man would’ve promised his wife such a thing, but she thought he probably knew. There were many things she and Bill had never talked about over the years, but that she was certain he’d guessed. The nights she’d stayed up late to cry in the shower, slipping in to bed hoping to find him already asleep and hearing by the sound of his breathing that he’d been waiting for her. The times he’d had to repeat himself when he asked her a question, because she’d allowed herself to fall so deep in reverie there was nothing in front of her but the memories. She’d never left, but she thought her husband knew, just the same, that something had stolen her away.

  Jake had finished off another glass of whiskey and taken a refill, but he was only staring at it now. He turned the glass around and around in his hands, leaving a wet ring on the kitchen table. He cleared his throat. “They got word of something heading to Earth just a day or so before it hit the atmosphere. I heard about it only in passing, in the lunchroom. It wasn’t really my area of expertise, you know? And it wasn’t classified information or anything. It wasn’t anything that seemed to be a big deal. Stuff hits the earth all the time.”

  “But this was different,” Bill said.

  Jake looked at him, then gave a solemn nod. “Yeah. Whatever it was split as it entered, heading off in a whole bunch of different directions. Like it was guided.”

  “And nobody noticed this?” It had been years since Maggie had worked with advanced weapons systems, but surely things hadn’t changed that much. “Nobody figured out it wasn’t organic?”

  Jake shrugged and sipped from his glass. For the first time since arriving, he shivered at the drink. Coughed a little. He looked at her. “It was organic. That’s the thing. Nothing came up on any systems indicating any sort of guidance or navigation. No source of fuel or power. According to what came through the system just after the pieces hit, whatever it was…it was completely natural. But intelligent.”

  “Intelligent?” Bill’s chair scraped against the hardwood floor. “What’s that mean?”

  Jake scrubbed at his hair, then rubbed his eyes. “It means that some…thing…of unknown origin and composition entered the earth’s atmosphere in one form, solid, a meteorite of approximately fifteen feet in diameter. It broke into something like fifty pieces or so, all of which hit the earth at trajectories that could not have been possible without some sort of external force or guidance. Or if they were alive.”

  Maggie had been toying with a cup of coffee, long gone cold. Now it splashed when her hands jerked. “Alive?”

  Bill got up from the table to pace. Without her husband at the table, all there was between Maggie and Jake was a bottle of whiskey and an unbridgeable distance made by time and the memory of the last time they’d seen each other. She wanted to reach for him. The sudden, urgent need to touch his hand skidded her fingers on the table’s sleek surface. But she didn’t touch him.

  He looked at her, though, for the first time since knocking on her door. Looked at her and actually saw her. Did she imagine a flash of grief there? Regret? Or was that only wishful thinking, that maybe in all this time, he’d missed her as much as she had yearned for him.

  “Are you trying to tell us this was some kind of…I don’t know. Alien invasion?” Bill carefully turned, hands on his hips.

  Jake nodded.

  Bill began to laugh. At first it was just a small chuckle, but it became a chortle. Then a guffaw. And finally, a full-on, rib-busting chain of snorting, choking and totally unconvinced string of giggles. It embarrassed her, how blatantly her husband was making fun of Jake, but Jake didn’t seem perturbed.

  “The meteorites struck over a hundred different locations across the United States. There was another, similarly sized meteor tracked in the UK. One in Russia. They suspected a much larger one over China, but were unable to confirm it.” Jake paused. “All of them split once they hit the atmosphere, and all the pieces broke away from the main one and found paths that could not have happened through a natural trajectory.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then…the storms,” Maggie said.

  Maggie and Jake shared a look. Once upon a time they’d been able to say so much without words, with only a blink or a sigh. It was one of the reasons, only one, she’d fallen so hard in love with him. That unspoken communication. The way he understood her so easily and completely, in a way nobody else ever had.

  “Yes,” Jake said, ignoring the next round of Bill’s scoffing laughter. “Tornados. Water spouts. All over the place, both in locales where storms like that are common, as well as a spate of them in places it’s unusual. In or close to all the places the meteorites hit, there was unusual storm activity. And after all those storms, something was left behind.”

  “Like what?” Bill pulled up a chair and turned it backwards to straddle it.

  Maggie hated when he sat that way, but said nothing about it now. “Does this have something to do with that preacher? That one on the TV?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jake said. “I’ve been on the road for a few days, but it’s been hard to get here. It’s a six or eight hour drive, and I was stopped a lot along the way, both because I was trying to get through regions hit hard by the storms and because there are a lot of roadblocks and stuff up. What preacher?”

  “Young guy. Wears a white suit. Claims to hear the voice of God.” Bill snorted more laughter, though he sounded slightly more reverent. “Well, I guess they all do, don’t they?”

  Maggie got up from the table and, wonder of wonders, found the remote for the small television Bill had installed under the kitchen cabinets, though she hated having it on all the time and he never seemed to want to turn it off. She clicked through a few channels showing static — when was the last time she’d seen static on a TV channel? Until she came to the new station. It had been running nonstop stories on the storms; Maggie knew that much, even though she tried to avoid them. But Bill had been fascinated and he’d been home on extended leave over the past few days due to disruptions in his construction business from to those same storms, so the TV had been on all the time. Over the past day or so, the stories had switched from coverage of the devastation to some more focused on individual stories. One about a passenger craft that had been lost in North Carolina. One about rumors of some cult taking refuge in an underground haven in preparation for the end of the world. Stories like that were usually reported with a tongue-in-cheek sort of tone, but not this time.

  “Here,” Maggie said, stopping on the channel. This was the other story that had been running over and over. “This guy.”

  It was the same clip. The white-suited preacher, stalking the stage. Gaze intense. They’d mut