The Living Dead

Then, as one being, the throng roared and flew at him. A hundred hands grabbed him, hitting, punching, crushing. They kicked his shins and aching knees. Someone slammed a fist into his side. A woman he had never seen before wrapped her fingers around his clerical collar and choked him, choked hard until he couldn't breathe, couldn't see.

Then the face of the woman swelled with boils. He watched, horrified, as they burst and a thick, oozing pus ran down her face.

"She's got it, too!" shouted a man beside her.

She grabbed her face and wailed. Sores rose on the backs of her hands, exploded, splattering the man's face; and everywhere the infection touched him, pustules rose, crusted, split. The man fell to his knees, shrieking.

The contagion engulfed the crowd like a flood of forty days and forty nights. Cries of terror shattered Father Meyer's ears. The sky pounded with thunder, the hoof beats of four horsemen; timbers and scenery fractured and crashed. The stage split open, and the ground beneath it, and people screamed and flailed wildly as they tumbled into the pit. All, all tore asunder.

A jag of lightning slammed into the cross on the stage, igniting it at the base, bonfire-hot. Hellfire-hot. The zombie opened its mouth once, twice. Its head lolled to the side, and its sightless gaze moved, moved.

It fixed on Father Meyer. Seemed to look at him . . . yes! Froze there, staring at the priest of the Old Church, the Old love.

Behold thy son. Behold him.

Father Meyer raised his hand and blessed him. The zombie bowed his head. The flames engulfed him, and he was gone.

"He did this to us!" Cardinal Schonbrun cried, and three men grabbed Father Meyer, pulling at him, beating him, weeping with rage.

Father Meyer stared at the fire as his arms were wrenched from their sockets, as blows and burning splinters rained down on his head. New sores erupted, burst, ran over his other wounds. No pain could be worse; no agony—

No. No pain could surpass that in his heart.

No fear could be greater than the fear in his soul.

He raised his gaze to heaven. "Father, forgive us," he whispered, with the last breath of his body. "We didn't know. We really didn't."

Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man

by Scott Edelman

Scott Edelman's fiction has appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines, such as Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, Postscripts, Forbidden Planets, Summer Chills, and The Mammoth Book of Monsters. When not writing, Edelman edits Science Fiction Weekly and SCI FI Magazine, and in the past edited the fiction magazine Science Fiction Age.

Edelman is something of a zombie genius. He's had stories appear in each of James Lowder's Eden Studios zombie anthologies: The Book of All Flesh, The Book of More Flesh, and The Book of Final Flesh, and he's been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award three times for his zombie fiction. As I read each of his zombie stories I thought for sure I'd found one to include in the book—that there'd be no way he'd top himself after that story, only to discover that each was better than the last. And that's without even mentioning his brilliant "A Plague on Both Your Houses," a five-act Shakespearean play that he describes as a cross between Romeo and Juliet and Night of the Living Dead.

This story, which is one of his Stoker Award nominees, is not in any way Shakespearean, but one reviewer compared it to the work of another literary legend: W. H. Auden.

Maybe it would be best to begin this way.

Let's start, in fact, on the day that it all started, with Laura already at work in the county library. But here's the thing—as the day goes by, maybe she won't even come to realize yet that the dead are suddenly refusing to stay dead, because life happens that way, with momentous things occurring across town while we, in our homes, in our ignorance, clip our fingernails or floss our teeth. Earthquakes roar, floods rise, towers fall . . . and somewhere on the other side of the globe a man who may not hear of these things for many months, if at all, scrapes with his stick in a small patch of dusty earth and prays for rain. If he ever grows perturbed on that day, it will only be because the rain fails to come, and not due to dark happenings on continents far away.

For our purposes, let it begin that way for Laura, who did not notice her world tilting on its axis. She noticed little that first day of the change because little affected her personally, save that fewer patrons than normal wandered into her branch of the library. The ripples had not yet reached her.