“Oh, hell…you know, in a way, it would be easier to take if they did want to eat us-or rip us apart, or…something! At least then we’d have some kind of…I don’t know…reason for it, I guess. Something tangible to be afraid of, an explanation for their behavior…and did you notice how quickly all the smarmy experts and talking heads on television gave up trying to offer rational explanations for how it is they’re able to reanimate? Have you ever…when one’s been close enough…have you ever looked at their fingers? Most of them are shredded down to the bone. People forget that it’s not just the coffin down there in the ground-there’s a concrete vault that the coffin goes into, as well. So once they manage to claw their way through the lid of the coffin, they have to get through four inches or so of concrete. At least, that’s what all you good folks who’ve buried your loved ones have paid for.
“Think about it, folks. I don’t give a Hammer-horror-film shit how strong the walking dead are supposed to be, no way could they break through concrete like that, not with the levels of decomposition I’ve seen on some of the bodies. So, then, how do you explain so many disturbed and empty graves in all those cemeteries all around the world? Easy-you’ve been getting screwed. Those vaults that you see setting off to the side during the grave-side service? Have any of you ever stuck around to watch the rest of it be lowered over the concrete base? Shit-it wouldn’t cost anything to pour a base underneath the coffin. A lot of us have been getting scammed, people, and I think it’s high time we got together and did something about it! Funeral homes and cemeteries have been charging all of us for a single concrete vault that never actually gets put in the ground!
“Anybody out there got a better explanation for how a moldy, rotting, worm-filled bag of bones can dig its way out of a grave so quickly? If you do, you know the number, give me a call and let’s talk about it, let’s raise hell, organize a march on all funeral homes and cemetery offices…
“But the ones who came out of the graveyards, they’re only a part of it, aren’t they? Remember the news footage of that Greenpeace boat that went after what they thought was a wounded whale, only once they got close enough to see that it was dead and had just come back to life, it was too late? One of them had already touched it by then. Christ, how many kids did we lose when they went outside to see that Fluffy or Sprat or Fido or Rover was back from doggy heaven? I smashed a silverfish under my shoe a few days ago, and what was left of it started crawling again. I’ve got towels rolled up and stuffed under the doors in case there’re any ants or cockroaches your friendly neighborhood Orkin man might have missed the last time he was here.
“Were television stations still broadcasting when Sarah Grant came home? Wait a second…some of them had to’ve been or else I wouldn’t remember seeing it. Okay, right. Anyway, locals will remember Sarah. She was a four-year-old girl who disappeared about five years ago, during the Land of Legend Festival. Ten thousand people and nobody saw a thing. The search for her went on for I-don’t-know how long before they just had to give up. Well, about two weeks ago, the night all of this first began, what was left of Sarah Grant dug its way out of the grave in its pre-school teacher’s back yard and walked home. She tried to tell them what had happened but her vocal cords were long gone…so when the police showed up and saw her, they just followed her back to her teacher’s house where she showed them the grave. The police found the teacher hanging from a tree in the back yard; he’d evidently witnessed Sarah waking up from her dirt nap and knew what was coming.
“By then the police had seen more than a few dead bodies get up and start walking around, so little Sarah didn’t come as much of a surprise to them. A lot of missing children started showing up at their old homes. Sometimes their families were still living there, sometimes they’d moved away and the kids didn’t recognize the person who answered the door-this is when people still did answer their doors, in the beginning, when we thought it wasn’t something that would happen here, no-it was just going on in China, or what used to be Russia, or Ireland, or…wherever. Everywhere but here. Not here, not in the good ole US of A. Downright un-American to think that. Christ, there were idiots who stood up in front of Congress and declared that all of this was just propaganda from Iraq, or Hong Kong, or Korea. Can you believe that? And of course it was all a plot against America, because the whole world revolves around us. Fuck that noise. Nations as we knew them don’t exist anymore, folks-and this is assuming that the entire concept of ‘nations’ was ever real and not just some incredible, well-orchestrated illusion dreamed up by the shadows who’ve really been running the show all along. It doesn’t matter. It’s all just real estate now, up for grabs at rock-bottom prices.
“Remember how happy a lot of us were at first? All that news footage of people in tears running up to embrace their loved ones fresh from their graves? Mangled bodies pulling themselves from automobile accidents or industrial explosions or recently bombed buildings… all those terrified relatives standing around crash, accident, or other disaster sites, hoping to find their husbands or wives or kids or friends still alive? Reunions were going on left and right. It would have moved you to tears if it hadn’t been for a lot of them missing limbs or heads or dragging their guts behind them like a bride’s wedding-dress train. That didn’t matter to the grieving; all they saw was their loved ones returned to them. They had been spared. They had been saved from a long dark night of the soul or whatever. They didn’t have to give in to that black weight in their hearts, they didn’t have to cry themselves to sleep that night, they didn’t have to get up the next morning knowing that someone who was important to them, someone they loved and cared about and depended on, wasn’t going to be there anymore, ever again. No. They were spared that.
“It didn’t take long before we figured out that the dead were drawn back to the places or people they loved most, that meant everything to them while they were alive-at least Romero got that much right in his movies. At first I thought it was just a sad-ass way of reconciling everything, of forcing it into a familiar framework so we could deal with the reality of these fucking upright corpses shambling back into our lives-hell, maybe it was just a…I don’t know…a knee-jerk reaction on the dead’s part, like a sleepwalker. Maybe their bodies were just repeating something they’d done so many times over the course of their lives that it became automatic, something instinctual. I mean, how many times have you been walking home from someplace and haven’t even been thinking about how to get from there to here? Your body knows the way so your brain doesn’t even piss away any cells on that one. Home is important. The people there are important. The body knows this, even if you forget.
“But then the Coldness started. I…huh…I remember the initial reports when people started showing up in emergency rooms. At first everyone thought it was some kind of new flesh-eating virus, but that idea bit it in a hurry, because all of a sudden you had otherwise perfectly healthy, alive human beings walking into emergency rooms with completely dead limbs-some of them already starting to decompose. And in every single case, remember, it started in whichever hand they’d first touched their dead loved one. The hand went numb, then turned cold, and the coldness then spread up through the arm and into the shoulder. The limbs were completely dead. The only thing the doctors could do was amputate the things. If the person in question had kissed their loved one when they first saw them…God Almighty…the Coldness spread down their tongues and into their throats. But mostly it was hands and arms, and for a while it looked like the amputations were doing the trick.