The Rising: Selected Scenes from the End of the World

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.