They watched in horror and revulsion as the skinny man sliced the girl’s throat.
The skinny man was sweating profusely, from both the stifling heat and his own excitement. His long, stringy hair clung to his shirtless back. He pushed his thick, wire-rimmed glasses up on his bony nose and licked his lips in anticipation. After a minute, the girl died, her life-blood covering her clothing and the floor beneath her in a wet spray. A few minutes after that, she began to move again.
And then the skinny man selected a pair of wire cutters from his vast array of tools, and proceeded to snip her fingers off, one by one.
The zombie cursed him in an ancient language. Tony cursed him in a more modern tongue.
“Why are you doing this?” he shouted. “You’re as bad as they are!”
The skinny man giggled. “I have been given the power of life over death.”
“What?”
“I can bring people back from the dead.”
Kim coughed. “You’re insane.”
“Am I?” The skinny man selected a filet knife, gave Tony and Kim a wink, and then moved on to his next victim, a middle-aged Hispanic man.
“No,” the man pleaded. A wet spot appeared on the crotch of his pants. “Please. Please don’t do this. I’ve got a wife—kids. They’re still out there somewhere.”
The skinny man leaned close to him and whispered in his ear. “They are dead, just like everybody else outside. But you don’t have to worry. I can give you something they will never have. I can bring you back.”
The man closed his eyes. “Please, don’t. Please…
please…please…”
Sighing, the skinny man plunged the knife into his quivering victim. He twisted it savagely, and then sliced upward. The Hispanic man’s bowels spilled out onto the carpet.
Kim screamed.
“You should be grateful,” the skinny man told her. “You don’t know how lucky you are. All of you are. You get to be witnesses to the summoning.”
Gritting his teeth, Tony strained against his bonds. The handcuffs cut into his skin, drawing blood. “You sick son of a—”
“Ssshh.” The skinny man brought the bloody knife to his lips and kissed it. “Be quiet. Be still. Don’t blaspheme. Just watch.”
The preacher, who’d fallen unconscious before the girl was slain, finally stirred. He looked around in bewilderment, apparently forgetting their circumstances. “What’s happening?”
“I am giving you what your Savior couldn’t,” the skinny man said. “I am offering life after death. I am summoning these souls back from the other side.”
Kim rattled her handcuffs. “But—”
“Watch.”
The Hispanic man stirred. Something looked out through his dead eyes.
“Release me,” the zombie demanded. The skinny man shook his head. “No.”
Then he poked the zombie’s eyes out with a pair of needle-nose pliers.
The corpse screamed in indignation. “You will pay for this, human! I will feast on your own eyes when I am freed.”
“You’ll do no such thing.” The skinny man grasped its tongue with the pliers, and with his other hand, he sliced the organ off and held it up for the others to see. “If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out. If thy tongue offends thee, cut it out.”
The preacher muttered the Lord’s Prayer under his breath.
“I killed him,” the skinny man explained in a patient voice, as if he were speaking to a kindergarten classroom. “I took his life. And yet, he came back. I summoned him.”
“He’s a fucking zombie,” Tony shouted. “You didn’t have anything to do with it! Everybody is coming back from the dead now. That’s why they call them zombies.”
The skinny man laid down his bloody tools and frowned sadly. “I have shown you proof. I have shown you miracles. And still you don’t believe. Very well. You can be next.”
Tony’s eyes bugged out of his head.
“Listen,” Kim gasped. “Just wait a minute and listen. You don’t have to do this. We believe you now. Tony, tell him you believe!”
Tony’s mouth had suddenly gone dry. He tried to work up enough saliva to speak.
“Tony,” Kim shrieked, “for God’s sake, tell him!”
“I—I believe.”
“Good.” The skinny man smiled. “Let he that believeth in me have eternal life.”
He picked up a propane torch, lit it, and adjusted the hissing flame.
“Oh no.” Kim began to sob. “Please, oh God, please stop! Please!”
Tony shrank away from the blue flame. He yanked on the handcuffs, tried to pull the desk leg free.The skinny man walked towards him. Outside Camelot Books, the heat continued to rise.Inside Camelot Books, the dead continued to rise as well.
POCKET APOCALYPSE
The Rising
Day Thirteen
Towson, Maryland
People said it was the end of the world, but what did they know? In Troll’s experience, most people were inherently stupid. Before the dead started returning, people went through their lives motivated only by their selves. They fed their addictions and rooted for their favorite sports team and political party with equal blind fervor. They paid no attention to world affairs unless it was fashionable to do so, content instead to focus on celebrity gossip and entertainment news. They took no interest in the world around them until that same world encroached upon their own well-being—like it was now.
Yes, it was true that in the last thirteen days over ten thousand years of human civilization had been rendered a moot point, but that didn’t mean it was the end of the world. Not at all. It was just a denouement. For Troll, the world had ended many years before. It died with his daughter.
Unlike the new dead, his daughter hadn’t come back.
Pausing in his thoughts, he picked crumbs from his thick, scraggly beard and tried not to cry. He sat in an abandoned bomb shelter left dormant after the end of the Cold War. It had been his home for a long time.
Troll remembered his other home. His other name. Remembered his previous life. He’d worked for fifteen years as a drug counselor at a clinic in Baltimore. He was highly respected in his field and had the accolades and certificates to prove it. But all of that changed when his daughter died. He remembered that night very clearly—it was burned into his consciousness. One night she’d gone to a party. While she was there, she somehow ended up snorting heroin mixed with a household chemical of some kind. She passed in the back of the ambulance, en route to the hospital.
She was fourteen.
He’d never known she had a drug problem. He never asked. Never saw the signs, even though he was trained to do so. Maybe it was the first time she’d ever tried drugs. Even so, he still didn’t know why she’d done it. Maybe it was peer pressure, or maybe the divorce or trouble with a boyfriend. Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. She died and she didn’t come back—and he died with her. No one called him by his real name anymore. Most people didn’t even notice him. But when they did, they called him what he was—a Troll. Just another homeless person populating Baltimore’s background setting. After his daughter’s death, he’d gone underground, literally. His ex-wife blamed him. He agreed with her. He’d helped so many people, but failed to help his own daughter. So he left after the funeral. Sold his home and all of his belongings and went away. He lived beneath the city streets, inhabiting a network of sewers, maintenance and train tunnels, electrical cable pipes, and other subterranean passageways. He wasn’t alone. When he’d first come here, Troll had been surprised by the number of people living beneath the streets. Like him, not all of them were the dregs of society. There were stockbrokers, lawyers, and even a doctor. Each had their own story, but for whatever reason, they’d flunked out—failed at life and decided to reinvent themselves below or to hide from their mistakes, who they’d been before.