The Resurrected Compendium Read online

  Kelsey slammed open the cafeteria door and ran for her life.

  69

  Maggie swiped the hair from her face. She stunk of sweat and gasoline and mud. She had spent the last few days in the basement of the grocery store where once upon a time she’d bought birthday cakes and eggs and diet cola. She’d been taken there with twenty others; only she was left.

  Numbed, drained, incapable of doing more than putting one foot in front of the other, she pulled herself through a fallen wall of concrete rubble. There’d been an explosion. More than one, actually. Fire and smoke. The sprinkler system had not yet been disabled, and the water had turned everything into a sea of filthy, thick mud.

  Someone had drowned, face down in the mud, crushed. The others had gotten out the best they could, fighting for access to the stairs and the barricades that had been meant to keep them in. Maggie had made it out, pushed ahead of the crowd, unable to stop herself from stepping on the hands and backs and faces of anyone who fell in front of her as mass of panicking people behind her refused to stop pushing. The crunch of bones would be loud in her head for the rest of her life, though not as loud as the sound Bill’s voice saying her name over and over the way he had just before he’d died.

  So many had died.

  Maggie was alive. She thought she was. There was pain, all throughout her arms and legs, her lower back. Her jaw ached. So much pain had to mean she was still alive, didn’t it? Surely whatever greater force there was in the universe would not suffuse the afterlife with agony. She stumbled over another pile of fallen concrete and twisted her body to get past a freezer case that had been pushed onto its side. Scattered glass glinted in the light from the big plate glass windows at the front of the store, all of which had also been broken. Only empty frames stood between the store and the parking lot. One large, jagged piece that remained was the final resting place of some poor asshole who’d tried to get in or out and ended up falling, instead.

  She didn’t want to pass that body.

  Didn’t want to try to sidle past it, to wait and see if it would shiver and grunt and come to life. Maggie had always been the first to go into those October haunted houses made from old barns. Fearless in the dark, knowing that whatever was going to jump out and startle her, it wouldn’t really hurt her. But that body might not be dead, it might indeed writhe to sick and vicious life. It could hurt her, very much. It could kill her.

  Death might be a blessing, actually. The world shimmered and blurred in front of her. Tears or imminent unconsciousness, she couldn’t be sure. She reached and found the support of a candy rack. It had been emptied of its contents long ago, but at least it was upright and hadn’t been knocked over. Maggie’s fingers gripped the metal tight enough to turn her knuckles white. She could not let herself fall. She might not get up. And still she went to her knees, trying to breathe through lungs that feel coated in mud. The floor was cool on her cheek.

  There was darkness.

  Maggie closes her eyes and holds her knees close to her chest. She is in the shed, tucked behind a wall of stacked lawn chairs and cushions that reek of mold and rodent. Stuffing falls from a chewed hole in one of them, and something rustles inside. She doesn’t care anymore about the mice living in her expensive lawn furniture, but she will scream if one runs across her face again, the way it did last night while she slept. She will scream. And scream. And scream.

  It had been Bill’s idea to build this shelter in the shed. He’d meant it for camouflage, building up the inside space behind a bunch of junk that wouldn’t attract anyone. Not when the house was full of good stuff. Better to be alive with less, than dead with more. It had been a good idea. Impressive. Maggie had been proud of him, thinking so clearly and quickly. For the first time in years she’d remembered how it felt to love him.

  Maggie can’t keep herself from drifting, though she’s desperate to stay awake. She needs to be on her guard. There is nobody else to protect her. Bill is gone. Jake, too. The men who killed her husband might’ve done the same to Jake; at any rate, both of them are gone, but the men come back at regular intervals. They sweep the neighborhood, looting and raiding and looking for whatever they can take, and not just food or supplies.

  They’re taking people, too.

  She can’t keep herself from sleeping. And sleeping, she dreams of Jake and startles herself awake with her heart pounding. Stomach sick. The roil of arousal low in her belly is shameful. Painful. She presses her fingertips to her eyelids to keep the tears from sliding down her cheeks.

  Bill died protecting her, and still she dreams of another man.

  Maggie weeps, shoulders shaking. Remembering. The first few weeks after the storms, when the people started getting sick, they were all okay there in their house. Fortified doors and windows. Stocks of food. Weapons. Before the power went out for good, the stories on the TV had seemed such fantastic science-fiction, unbelievable. Infection spreading from spores, the undead rising and attacking the living. And yet, they’d relaxed into their safety — the resurrected weren’t smart enough to come after them, hidden away inside their castle.

  It wasn’t the resurrected they had to worry about.

  They sit around the table by candlelight. Dinner was macaroni and cheese and tuna sandwiches. There’s no way to keep leftovers, but they were all so hungry there’s nothing left but scraps anyway. They play cards now, the three of them. Jake could easily win but has let Maggie pull ahead. Even Bill is laughing.

  The knock at the door stops them all. It comes again, soft but insistent. Bill and Jake, guns in hands, go to the door and check it, and while Maggie is still stunned and horrifying amused at the Wild West attitude both her menfolk have taken on, she’s also relieved.

  Outside the door is a young boy, maybe twelve. He doesn’t look familiar. Not a kid from the neighborhood.

  “I lost my mom and dad,” the kid says.

  “Don’t let him in.” That’s Jake’s advice, but Maggie can’t turn away a child. Jake is not a parent. He can’t understand.

  They feed the kid and give him a place to sleep, but sometime in the night he lets himself out the front door. Maggie worries. Jake tells her not to bother.

  “He’ll be back,” he says. “He’ll be bringing others. He was a scout, Maggie.”

  She doesn’t ask him how he knows this. While once upon a time she could have told you the number of eyelashes in each of his eyes, the exact number of breaths he took between each blink, the number of times his heart beat a minute…there are many details of his life she’s never known.

  “What do you mean, a scout?” This comes from Bill.

  He doesn’t like Jake, but he’s never said so. Never acted on it. Whatever he might think he knows about the relationship between his wife and this other man — and he could never know it all, never guess it, not the fullness of it anyway. But whatever he thinks he knows about it, he’s never said a word. He might not like Jake. He might even hate him, if Bill is capable of such a thing, and Meira’s not sure he is, since hate requires some depth of feeling her husband seems always to have lacked. But he respects Jake, at least so far as stuff like this is concerned.

  “They sent him ahead to see what sort of supplies we have, and weapons, and how easily we trust.” Jake doesn’t look at Maggie when he says this, but she knows he means her. He’s not scolding her, but this is her fault. She’s the one who insisted on letting the kid in. “They will be back, with more of them, and they will try to take what we have.”

  “What do we do?” She asks, thinking of her own children. If something had ever happened to her, she would have wanted and expected that someone else would take them in. How was what she did wrong?

  “We fight,” Jake says. “We have guns. We have fortification. That was the point of all of this.”

  “We fight,” Bill says with a nod, like that is the answer he was waiting for.

  But they don’t.

  It doesn’t happen right away, there’s a week that passes between