Restless, the dead rolled over in their graves, struggling against the pine ceilings that had collapsed under the weight of soil and years. Claustrophobic and filled with an ill-defined hatred of the living, they began to claw their way through the earth, swimming in very slow motion toward the surface. Hands were thrust into the chilly night air, fingers spread out and then slowly forming a vengeful fist before they began to haul themselves up. Though all had woken at precisely midnight, most of them were not shambling through the fog until two or three in the morning.

Their first victim was, of course, the gravedigger and groundskeeper who kept his vigil in a shed near the gates, smoking cheap cigars and reading harlequin romance novels when he wasn’t sleeping on the job. They grabbed him with dramatic flair: as he leaned his chair back, the window behind him burst open and half a dozen rotting arms clamped around him, dragged him into the fog kicking and screaming. Soon after, by group consensus, the undead headed in every direction in groups of a couple hundred each, taking the quiet streets of that small city yard by yard.

The first survivor of an attack was a punk, a teenager whose group of torn-jacket wearing, spiked-hair, chain-smoking delinquent youth was annihilated. He ran to the bar and begged the townsfolk to listen to him. A middle-aged man in a mac jacket told him he was an idiot and to get lost almost simultaneously with the flow of living dead that rushed the bar from its back entrance. Only the punk and a waitress escaped, and together they made for the police station.

Irritable the dead may be, but fickle they are not. Theirs is the collective retribution of those denied the opportunity to settle their affairs, to say things left unsaid, to watch those who have not yet joined their ranks continue talking, laughing, fornicating, drinking without them. If that was the source of their implacable violence, then it was fair enough. If not, then there were any number of other reasons for them swarming the auto shop, the houses of attractive young couples lying in naked embrace, the old folks’ home, the gun store whose proprietor held them off for hours before being swamped. And who can say why those who were chomped into turned against their friends of just a few minutes ago? The motivations of a person who tried to conceal their infectious bite from their closest comrades until it was too late are hard to define.

Perhaps they were infiltrators, living men and women with a subconscious desire to help the deceased. Maybe all humans secretly want the rest of the species to wander the earth in a restless, homicidal state, and cannot bear to see intrepid survivors such as the punk and the waitress and their oddball comrades, the police officer, thirteen-year-old, and the disgraced university professor, hold out to the last on the roof of a shopping mall. Maybe humans are just stupid, ignorant things who couldn’t tell you why they do anything with even the slightest shred of honesty. Maybe there’s some greater plan at work.

The town fell, as many towns did, and the army came, as it did to many places, and cleared the place of zombie monstrosities. In the end only the waitress and the thirteen-year-old survived, and then only because of the punk’s heroic sacrifice. The undead were piled up in the streets and set alight, burning for days and filling the town and the surrounding countryside with the stench of burning hair. Graveyards were destroyed, every trace of mankind’s old ritual of burial replaced by mandatory cremation. Life remained uncertain, death the only sure thing.

And still, borne on black clouds, little shreds of conscious thought remained in the ashes of the myriad undead. Vague now, unable to coalesce, but still held by a palpable, righteous indignation in every molecule. There was a sense of things left not quite finished, and a breathless hope that mass murder might someday still be possible.