Book of the Dead by John Skipp, Craig Spector (Ed.)

hairless skull.
    “Yeah.” Burt’s hand was over his mouth. “I’m sorry.”
    “Work y’fuckin gut all you want,” Frank said briskly. “But get them saws while you do. And you… you… you… you…”
    The last “you” was his grandnephew Bob.
    “I can’t, Uncle Frank,” Bob said sickly. He looked around and saw at least twenty men lying in the tall grass. They had swooned. Most of them had seen their own relatives rise out of the ground. Buck Harkness over there lying by an aspen tree had been part of the cross fire that had cut his late wife to ribbons before he fainted when her decayed brains exploded from the back of her head in a grisly gray fan. “I can’t. I c—”
    Frank’s hand, twisted with arthritis but as hard as stone, cracked across his face.
    “You can and you will, chummy,” he said grimly.
    Bob went with the rest of the men.
    Frank Daggett watched them grimly and rubbed his chest.
     
    “I was nearby when Frank spoke to Bob,” Dave told Maddie. He wasn’t sure if he should be telling her this—or any of it, for that matter, with her almost halfway to foaling time—but he was still too impressed with the old man’s grim and quiet courage to forbear. “This was after… you know… we cleaned the mess up.”
    Maddie only nodded.
    “I’ll stop,” Dave said, “if you can’t bear it, Maddie.”
    “I can bear it,” she said quietly, and Dave looked at her quickly, curiously, but she had averted her eyes before he could see the secret in them.
     
    *  *  *
     
    Davey didn’t know the secret because no one on Jenny knew. That was the way Maddie wanted it, and the way she intended to keep it. There had been a time when she had, in the blue darkness of her shock, pretended to be coping . And then something happened that made her cope. Four days before the island cemetery vomited up its corpses, Maddie Pace was faced with a simple choice: cope or die.
    She had been sitting in the living room, drinking a glass of the blueberry wine she and Jack had put up during August of the previous year—a time that now seemed impossibly distant—and doing something so trite it was laughable: She was Knitting Little Things (the second bootee of a pair this evening). But what else was there to do? It seemed that no one would be going across to the mall on the mainland for a long time.
    Something had thumped the window.
    A bat, she thought, looking up. Her needles paused in her hands, though. It seemed that something was moving out there in the windy dark. The oil lamp was turned up high and kicking too much reflection off the panes to be sure. She reached to turn it down and the thump came again. The panes shivered. She heard a little pattering of dried putty falling on the sash. Jack was going to reglaze all the windows this fall, she thought stupidly, and then: Maybe that’s what he came back for. Because it was Jack. She knew that. Before Jack, no one from Jenny had drowned for nearly three years. Whatever was making them return apparently couldn’t reanimate whatever was left of their bodies. But Jack…
    Jack was still fresh.
    She sat, poised, head cocked to one side, knitting in her hands. A little pink bootee. She had already made a blue set. All of a sudden it seemed she could hear so much . The wind. The faint thunder of surf on Cricket’s Ledge. The house making little groaning sounds, like an elderly woman making herself comfortable in bed. The tick of the clock in the hallway.
    It was Jack. She knew it.
    “Jack?” she said, and the window burst inward and what came in was not really Jack but a skeleton with a few mouldering strings of flesh hanging from it.
    His compass was still around his neck. It had grown a beard of moss.
    The wind blew the curtains out in a cloud as he sprawled, then got up on his hands and knees and looked at her from black sockets in which barnacles had grown.
    He made grunting sounds. His fleshless mouth opened and the teeth chomped down. He was