Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology Read Online Free Page A

you got him! Great throw!”
    The shape didn’t move, didn’t cal back to her.
    It turned away.
    “No!” Jean cried out. “Don’t leave! He’l come to and kil me! Please! I’m cuffed here! He’s got the key in his pocket. You’ve gotta unlock the cuffs for me. Please!”
    The figure, as indistinct in the darkness as the bushes and trees near its sides, turned again and stepped forward. It limped toward the glow of the fire. From the shape, Jean guessed that her savior was a woman.
    Others began to appear across the clearing.
    One stepped out from behind a tree. Another rose behind a clump of bushes. Jean glimpsed movement over to the right, looked and saw a fourth woman. She heard a growl behind her, twisted around, and gasped at the sight of someone crawling toward her. Toward the Reaper, she hoped. The top of this one’s head was black and hairless in the shimmering firelight. As if she’d been scalped? The flesh had been stripped from one side of her back, and Jean glimpsed pale curving ribs before she whirled away.
    Now there were five in front of her, closing in and near enough to the fire so she could see them clearly.
    She stared at them.
    And disconnected again.
    Came out of herself, became an observer.
    The rock thrower had a black pit where her left eye should’ve been. The girl cuffed beneath the tree was amazed that a one-eyed girl had been able to throw a rock with such fine aim.
    It was even more amazing, since she was obviously dead. Ropes of guts hung from her bel y, swaying between her legs like an Indian’s loincloth. Little but bone remained of her right leg below the knee—the work of the Reaper’s woodland troops?
    How can she walk?
    That’s a good one, the girl thought.
    How can any of them walk?
    One, who must’ve been up here a very long time , was managing to shamble along just fine, though both her legs were little more than bare bones. The troops had real y feasted on her.
    One arm was missing entirely. The other arm was bone, and gone from the elbow down. Where she stil had flesh, it looked black and lumpy. Some of her torso was intact, but mostly hol owed out. The right-hand side of her rib cage had been broken open. The ribs on the left were stil there, and a shriveled lung was visible through the bars. Her face had no eyes, no nose, no lips.
    She looked as if she might be grinning.
    The girl beneath the tree grinned back at her, but she didn’t seem to notice.
    Of course not, dope. How can she see?
    How can she walk?
    One of the others stil had eyes. They were wide open and glazed. She had a very peculiar stare.
    No eyelids, that’s the trouble. The Reaper must’ve cut them off. Her breasts, too. Round, pulpy black disks on her chest where they should’ve been. Except for a huge gap in her right flank, she didn’t look as if she’d been maimed by the troops. She stil had most of her skin. But it looked shiny and slick with a coating of white slime.
    The girl beside her didn’t seem to have any skin at al . Had she been peeled? She was black al over except for the whites of her eyes and teeth—and hundreds of white things as if she had been showered with rice. But the rice moved. The rice was alive. Maggots.
    The last of the five girls approaching from the front was also black. She didn’t look peeled, she looked burnt. Her body was a crust of char, cracked and leaking fluids that shimmered in the firelight. She bore only a rough resemblance to a human being. She might have been shaped out of mud by a dim-witted child who gave her no fingers or toes or breasts, who couldn’t manage a nose or ears, and poked fingers into the mud to make her eyes. Her crust made papery, crackling sounds as she shuffled past the fire, and pieces flaked off.
    A motley crew, thought the girl cuffed to the limb.
    She wondered if any of them would have enough sense to find the key and unlock the handcuffs.
    She doubted it.
    In fact, they didn’t seem to be aware of her presence at al . They