The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Read Free

is worse - a God who does not care to understand His creation, or a God who thinks that He does.
     

XII
     
    Lazarus stands at a window listening to the sound of Rachel and her husband making love. A dogs sniffs at him and then licks his damaged palm. It nibbles on his tattered flesh, and he watches it blankly.
     
    Lazarus stares at the night sky. In its blackness, he imagines a door, and behind that door is all that he has lost, all that he left behind. This world is an imperfect facsimile of all that once was and all that should be.
     
    He returns home. His sisters no longer speak to him. Instead, they gaze at him with cold eyes. They wanted their brother back, but all that they loved of him died in the tomb. They wanted fine wine, but all they received was an empty flask.
     

XIII
     
    The priests come for him again, arriving under cover of darkness. They make much noise - enough, he thinks, to wake the dead, were the dead man in question not already awake - but his sisters do not come to investigate. This time, he is not brought before the council but is taken into the desert, his arms tied behind his back, his mouth stuffed with a rag. They walk until they come at last to the tomb in which Lazarus had once been laid. They carry him inside, and they place him on the slab. The rag is removed from his mouth, and he sees Caiaphas approach.
     
    ‘Tell me,’ Caiaphas whispers. ‘Tell me, and all will be well.’
     
    But Lazarus says nothing, and Caiaphas steps back in disappointment.
     
    ‘He is an abomination,’ Caiaphas tells the others, ‘a thing undead. He does not belong among us.’
     
    They bind him once again in bandages, until only his face remains uncovered. A priest steps forward. In his hand he holds a grey stone. He raises it above his head.
     
    Lazarus closes his eyes as the stone descends.
     
    And Lazarus remembers.
     

WHAT MAISIE KNEW
     
    BY DAVID LISS
     
     
     
     
    There was never a time when keeping Maisie in the apartment felt right to me. It was always a bad deal, right from the get-go, but there were no good deals, and this was the least-bad deal going. I couldn’t let her stay out in the world, knowing what she knew, blurting out what she did. It probably would have been fine if I’d left it alone, but I could not live with such a flimsy guarantee. It was the chance that things would not be fine that nagged at me, that kept me awake at night, that made me jump every time the phone rang. I had a wife I loved, and we had a child on the way. I had a life , and I wanted to keep it. A person can’t live like that, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and so I did the only thing I could do - the only thing I could think of. It was the right call, but it just so happened that it didn’t turn out the way I wanted.
     
    It should have been fine. Everything I knew about reanimates told me it should be fine. I’d been around them almost all my life. My parents could barely make car payments, but they rushed out to buy a Series One from General Reanimation when they first came on the market. Kids growing up today can’t even imagine what those early models were like - buggy and twitchy, with those ugly uniforms, like weird green tuxedos. I was only five at the time, and the reanimate creeped the hell out of me when it would lumber into my room to check on me at night or when it would babysit while my parents were out. I still remember watching it shamble toward me, a TV dinner clutched hard in its shaky hands. I wasn’t phobic the way some people are. I simply didn’t like them. Dead people should remain dead. That’s one of those things that always made sense, maybe now more than ever.
     
    So I hated going to that apartment where I kept my dead girl, which, on top of everything else, was hard to afford and which I had to hide from my wife, who managed most of the household finances. I’d have rather been anywhere else - at the dentist, the DMV, a tax audit, a prostate exam. But I was