Praise the Dead

by Gina Ranalli

  From somewhere in the crowd, he heard the very distinct sound of laughter, a single voice at first and then growing until it seemed that everyone was laughing. It became a thunderous roar in his ears, an entire stadium’s worth of people laughing and pointing at him.

  Andrew dropped his arms back to his sides as the happiness of the day was bleached out of the world. His cheeks grew hot, his palms began to sweat. His pulse pounded painfully in his temple until he could stand it no more.

  “SHUT UP!” he shrieked. “YOU CAN’T LAUGH AT ME! I’LL KILL YOU ALL!”

  He whirled around, saw the nurse’s fingers pressed to his mother’s throat, her eyes wide with disbelief.

  “Do it!” he commanded the corpse. “Do them all!”

  Waking from her trance, the zombie attacked the nurse. The woman, completely stunned, had no hope of escaping as her flesh was torn from her throat by the hungry thing in the nightgown.

  “Go!” Andrew screamed at Walter. The boy pointed to the crowd gathered across the street and the zombie immediately stalked off, oblivious to the Toyota that screeched to a stop, missing the creature by mere inches.

  The instant the nurse was dead, the corpse of Andrew’s mother was ordered to join her deceased companion in front of the church. Andrew crouched beside the nurse, clutching her warm head between his hands. He squeezed with all his might, wishing he had the strength to pop her skull open like a grape, but instead had to be content with making her live again.

  None of the people seemed to have any concept of what was happening. They stood like shocked sheep until it was the person directly beside them whose intestines were being dragged out of their bodies to glisten in the Sunday morning sunshine.

  Many of them escaped, but many did not.

  At the sight of the carnage and panic, Andrew’s anger was forgotten. He quickly hurried from torn corpse to torn corpse, placing his burning hands upon their heads.

  Bending over the sixth body—a middle-aged man with a spare-tire around his waist and his entire right arm missing—Andrew noticed a curious thing. The man, though clearly dead, began to move before he had placed his hands anywhere near him.

  Startled, Andrew stepped back and watched as the corpse’s eyes sprung open; its one remaining hand began to tremble at its side.

  Andrew looked around and saw the dead were now rising on their own, with no help from him.

  “How . . . ?”

  But the answer came to him even before the question was fully formed in his mind. Of course. It could be no other.

  The work was simply too great for one boy and so he was receiving help from the only one with a power greater than his own.

  Thrusting his arms into the air, Andrew squinted into the blue sky and shouted, “Thank you, God!”

  In the shadow of the steeple, bloody chaos churned and the boy, grinning the grin of the blessed, remained untouched by any of it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  At first, Lindy’d been picking her way over and around tiny bird skeletons, but eventually they had become impossible to avoid. They crunched beneath her sneakers and the sound and texture made her wince with every step.

  Above her, a gray sky boiled, rolling over and over, inside and out, and a single black bird flew high above, soaring with the dark clouds, circling back again, seeming never to lose sight of her so far below.

  Lindy continued through the desolate landscape, the skeletons deep enough to swallow her ankles. She started to weep. Mixed in with the bird skeletons, she began to spot an occasional human skull—small, like a child’s.

  Too much, she thought, breaking into a run. I can’t take this. It’s too much for me.

  She ran until she reached a beach, the sand of which she knew was the remnants of bone trampled into dust.

  In the sky, the bird screamed down at her. “Angels, Lindy! You’re crushing the bodies of angels!”

  “Hey!”

  Lindy cried out, thrashing at the hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes.

  “It’s me, kiddo,” Jackson told her. “You were dreaming.”

  She blinked, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. In front of her, a long, gray highway unfurled. In Jackson’s truck. Of course. She remembered now. There was no beach. No bones. No boiling sky.

  Just a bad dream.

  “Where are we?” she asked, trying to sound casual as she shifted in her seat.

  “Idaho,” he told her. “I stopped and got you a soda.” He pointed to the Coke in the cup holder at the center console. In his lap he held his own cup of coffee. “I also got this.” He pointed to a cell phone on the dashboard.

  “Disposable?” she asked.

  “Yep. Just in case.”

  They’d had to be very careful. At every opportunity, they’d stopped and Lindy had called her mother from payphones, trying to sound as assuring as she could. But none of the offered assurances had kept Amelia from calling the police, claiming that her daughter had run away from home during the . . . well, the bird storm.

  This is what Lindy had told her: that she’d been terrified out of her mind by the odd occurrence and refused to come back until she was less scared.

  It was a ridiculous story and Amelia was furious, demanding that Lindy get her butt home immediately.

  Lindy was not used to hearing her mother yell at her and it took every fiber of her strength to disobey, but she told herself it was something she had to do. If she didn’t, the war would eventually end up on her own front lawn and then where would her mom be?

  But she didn’t want to think about that and she certainly couldn’t tell her mother the truth, so she repeatedly steeled herself by cutting Amelia off mid-sentence, telling her she loved her before quickly hanging up.

  They’d been on the road for about eighteen hours and Lindy had called her mother three times total. She was already dreading the next call and wondered how long it would be before she stopped calling altogether.

  To get her mind off it, she popped open the soda and took a long gulp, eyeing the scenery around them. “Where are we going?”

  Jackson gave her a surprised glance. “I thought you knew.”

  “All I know is east.”

  “Same here.” His face was grim. “But I guess we’ll know the place when we see it.”

  She nodded. “It’ll be the place with all the zombies.”

  Again, Jackson looked surprised. “How long have you known?”

  “A while.” She shrugged. “Long enough.”

  “Do you know what we have to do when we find them?”

  “I think I know what I have to do. But . . .” She trailed off, troubled. “I don’t know if I can.”

  There was a long moment of silence between them. Finally, Jackson said, “Maybe you shouldn’t think about it right now.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about it! I feel like I’m gonna puke all the time! What if we get there and I can’t?” She fought back tears and turned her face away.

  “When we get there . . .” Jackson began. “When we get there, I have faith that you will do what you need to do.” When she didn’t reply, he added, “You’ll lead. If you couldn’t do it, you wouldn’t have been chosen.”

  “I think it’s a mistake,” she croaked. “There’s been a terrible mistake. I’m just a kid! I don’t know anything about leading or anything else!”

  “There are no mistakes, Lindy.”

  “That’s not true! There are mistakes all the time!”

  “Not this time. Sometimes things happen and people think they’re mistakes, but if you give it time and look back on it, you’ll see the things you thought were mistakes happened just as they were meant to happen.”

  Lindy sank deeper into her seat. She knew she was pouting now, and arguing with the wrong person, but Jackson was the only one she could argue with and, truth be told, in addition to being scared, she was just flat-out angry, too. “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  Jackson sighed. “It’s not me
you have to believe, kiddo. I didn’t make the rules. I was told what to do, same as you.”

  “And what do you have to do?”

  He gave her a sad, crooked smile. “Same thing I’ve always done, I guess: Protect and serve.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The downtown suburban neighborhood in which Andrew lived was two things at once: dead and alive.

  Sitting on a bench in front of a hardware store and eating his third candy bar in a row, the boy watched the festivities with great interest, his eyes sparkling with delight.

  This was better than any Christmas he’d ever experienced. More exciting than any movie could ever hope to be. Way cooler than any stupid football game, no matter what dumb old and dead Walter would have said, if he could have said anything. Which he couldn’t.

  Andrew laughed, showing his chocolate-smeared teeth.

  He remembered a phrase that Walter had been very fond of. The man had repeated it at least a thousand times: “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Every time he uttered this mysterious sentence, Walter would chuckle, leaving Andrew baffled. The boy had no idea what the original joke meant, but he was using a modified version of it now.

  “No one expects zombies!” he shouted joyfully as a bloodied kid ran past him, crying.

  It was a boy he recognized from school. Paul something-or-other.

  Andrew stopped laughing and focused all his mental energy on Paul as the kid ran away. Andrew had been trying to make his powers control the living as well as the dead, but as Paul became a smaller figure in the distance, he sighed heavily. Still no luck.

  Annoyed, his eyes found a dead woman in Paul’s vicinity and he made a simple gesture—dragging one pointed finger through the air, making an invisible line from the zombie to the fleeing boy—and just like that, the dead woman lunged, knocking Paul clean off his feet. She fell on top of him and went to work devouring his flesh.

  The scene interested Andrew for about twenty seconds before he sat down again, searching for some new thing to entertain him.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  Soon came the sound of fast-approaching sirens. Someone had called the police.

  He sat up straighter on the bench and ripped the wrapper off another candy bar. He wiggled with anticipation. This, he knew, was going to be good.

  As if by design, the cruiser screeched to a halt almost directly in front of him. A lone officer emerged, hand already hovering above his holster.

  “Hi, Mister Police Man,” Andrew called jovially. “How are you today?”

  The cop, probably in his early thirties, barely glanced at Andrew, his attention understandably elsewhere.

  “Nice day, isn’t it?” Andrew grinned. “There’s no telling what could happen on a day like today.”

  The cop gave him a perturbed look. “Get lost, kid.” His voice was gruff, but Andrew could see the escalating fear in his eyes. What had he been called down here for? Someone disturbing the peace?

  Andrew laughed at the thought. Someone was disturbing it, all right. And even more someones would be disturbing it by the time he was through. The whole world was going to be deeply disturbed when he was done.

  From somewhere down the block, a woman screamed.

  The cop flinched and drew his weapon, but remained at the side of his cruiser. Andrew heard him mutter a curse, which delighted him to no end.

  “Sounds like something scary is going on,” Andrew said, trying not to giggle but failing to hold it in. “Ooooo. Scary!” He wiggled his fingers in the air. “No telling what it could be.”

  “Shut up!” the cop snapped.

  “Help!” Presumably the same woman who had screamed had spotted the cop car and was now running towards them. Even from almost a block away, Andrew could see she was covered in blood. “He ate my baby!” she wailed, arms flailing wildly. She’d lost a shoe at some point and her frantic lopsided gait was quite comical.

  The cop raised his pistol. “Hold it right there, ma’am.”

  The woman continued towards them as if she hadn’t heard the command. She was hysterical, screaming and crying; it was entirely possible she hadn’t heard the officer, lost as she was in her own terror. “Please! Please, my baby girl!”

  “I said, hold it!”

  Andrew was tempted to open another candy bar but didn’t want to risk missing even a second of the drama that was unfolding in front of him. This was better than the movies!

  “I’m not going to tell you again, ma’am,” the cop barked. “STOP RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE! HANDS IN THE AIR!”

  This was going to be good, all right. “She’s not stopping,” Andrew sang, hoping to push the cop closer to the edge. “Wow! Look at all that blood!”

  “You have to help my baby girl,” the woman shrieked. “He has her!”

  The sound of the gunshot was loud enough to make Andrew jump; the woman dropped like a stone to the street.

  The cop stood still for several seconds, blinking sweat from his eyes.

  “Nice shot,” Andrew said. “That’ll teach her to not listen.”

  As the cop’s shock dissipated, Andrew looked around for the nearest zombie and did the finger dragging motion once more.

  Returning his gun to its holster, the cop rushed forward to the woman crumpled up on the ground. He was checking her pulse when the zombie fell on top of him, ripping out the back of his neck as if it was no more substantial than a hunk of cotton candy.

  The screaming was brief and when it was over, Andrew rose from the bench and strolled over to the cop, whose body lay sprawled on top of the woman he’d killed.

  Andrew stood over the scene looking down and licking chocolate from his fingers. He suspected more cops would be arriving soon and he sighed, annoyed at the prospect.

  His eyes fell on the cop’s holstered weapon.

  “Cool!”

  Leaning over, doing his best to avoid the worst of the gore, he yanked the pistol free and straightened up again. The gun was heavier than he’d expected, but not too bad. He was confident he could shoot it.

  Wondering how many bullets it held, he remembered how much he liked surprises and he was willing to bet the other town cops liked them, too.

  “Everyone likes surprises,” he said.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so excited.

  Chapter Eighteen

  They met the albino woman in a truck stop just outside Helena.

  How she had come to be there was a mystery, but the message she carried was one of great importance.

  Sliding into the booth beside Jackson, she stared intently at Lindy from across the table and said, “You’re making a huge mistake.”

  It was closing in on 11:00 p.m. on a Tuesday night and the sight of the strange woman, along with her sudden appearance, almost caused Lindy to choke on her French fry. She coughed while Jackson turned to the albino and said, “Take a hike, lady. We don’t have any money.”

  But even Lindy could see the woman was not some homeless beggar out to harass people for change. The albino’s pale blue eyes never wavered from her face, even when Jackson put a hand on her shoulder and gently pushed in an attempt to get her out of their booth.

  “You’re not prepared yet,” the albino told her. “You have no idea what you’re getting into.”

  Lindy stared in stunned silence at the stranger. She was beautiful, with her sharp features and alabaster skin, her white hair pulled back into a long, straight ponytail.

  “Who are you?” Lindy asked.

  Jackson pushed the woman harder. “I said, get out of here!”

  Ignoring him, the woman replied, “My name is Jado. The messengers led me to you.”

  Finally, Jackson removed his hand from the woman’s shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

  The albino woman looked at him for the first time. She pointed out the window they sat beside. In the yellow glow of the sodium vapor lights of the large parking lot, Jackson and Lindy saw the shadows of birds flying high,
black shapes against the dark sky.

  “I’ve been following them for the last twelve hours,” Jado said.

  Lindy’s eyes widened. “They talk to you, too?”

  “Talk?” Jado asked, puzzled. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly. It’s more of a feeling I get. A sixth sense, maybe. I’m not really sure how to explain it.”

  “Okay,” Jackson said, looking between the girl and the woman. “Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?” Facing Jado, he added, “Who did you say you were?”

  The corner of Jado’s mouth curved up in an amused smile. “Did you think you would be her entire army?”

  “I . . .” He trailed off, flabbergasted. “What?”

  Catching on far quicker than her adult guardian, Lindy said, “She’s here to help, Jackson.”

  “Help?” he said. “But—”

  “There are more of us,” Jado said. “Not many, but a few. We’ve all dreamed about you and each other. We knew you’d be here eventually. And we knew we had to stop you from continuing on.”

  “I have to,” Lindy said, staring down at her dinner plate. “I have to stop him.”

  Jado shook her head. “You can’t stop him. Not just yet. He’ll be protected and getting to him will be impossible.”

  “You mean . . . protected by . . . by them?”

  “Them and others.” Her pale face grew somber. “Some people will see this as an opportunity and they’ll be motivated by greed. They’ll protect him at any cost, seeing him as . . . kind of a . . .” She stopped, clearly reluctant to finish the sentence.