Hope and Undead Elvis by Ian Thomas Healy

in the valley below.
    "Are you all right, Li'l lady?"
    "No, I'm not. I'm horrified, Elvis. What a terrible thing to do to someone. I guess I was hoping everyone we might meet here in the end of the world would be decent people, but to do something like this…" She shuddered. "That's just evil."
    Undead Elvis said nothing, but his bowed head spoke volumes about his feelings.
    Hope wondered how a dead man could even have feelings, but then, he was a reanimated corpse, so she presumed anything was possible. She steeled herself for what she knew they had to do. "Come on, Elvis. We shouldn't leave them like that."
    "Are you sure?"
    "Yes. They died because somebody wanted to send a message. Nobody needs to see it after us."
    "You're a good person, Hope."
    Hope shrugged. "I guess this kind of puts it in perspective. I never really thought of myself as a very good person. Certainly more a sinner than a saint. But I could never even imagine doing something like that. That's true evil, and it terrifies me that people are still around who would do it." She took Undead Elvis's cool hand in her grimy one and they descended the slope together. An idea occurred to her. "Hey, do you think those black bird men things could have done this?"
    "I don't know, Li'l lady."
    "I think they're like demons or something. They don't belong in this world."
    "Like me."
    "Well, no. It's not that you don't belong here. You're just… misplaced. You belong in Graceland, Elvis."
    "That I do, Li'l lady."
    Hope grew somber as they approached the dead victims. The sweet burnt smell of their flesh was making it difficult for her to keep from vomiting in spite of her efforts to the contrary. "Do you think you'll die when we get there?"
    "I'm already dead," said Undead Elvis.
    The wood piled beneath the victims still smoldered, which had created the columns of smoke Hope had seen from the road. The people—she couldn't tell if they were men or women--had died in agony as their skin and hair blackened and burned away. One had thrown his or her head back as if to scream "Why?" at the heavens above. The other's head was bowed, perhaps in a final prayer. They looked so much like the lamb's heart which Asher had burned in his grill that Hope swore off all meat ever again. On the heels of that thought, she wondered if food would be so scarce that survivors would have to resort to cannibalism. And then, unbidden, she wondered how they might taste.
    "Stop it," she said aloud. "That's horrible."
    "What's the matter, Li'l lady?"
    "Nothing. Bad thoughts."
    "Thoughts aren't bad. They're just thoughts. It's what you do with them that defines good and bad."
    "Actions over thoughts?"
    "Yep."
    "I'd like to think we're doing a good thing by taking these bodies down." Hope reached out a hand. Residual heat washed across it, but she didn't think the chains holding the victims to the crosses would be too hot to handle. She walked around the crosses and saw that the chains had been cinched down to cruel tightness using ratchet binders like truck drivers used. The poor victims must have already been suffering in agony well before the fires were lit beneath them. She walked back around to the front of the crosses once more. She wanted to look upon the people who'd died on them, to fix the image in her mind forever that there were still people in the world evil enough to do such things, because this was what her baby would grow up to stop.
    One victim's eyes opened.
    Hope staggered back in horror, tripped on a stone, and plopped down amid the ashes. The victim took a deep shuddering breath as if in preparation for a scream. Bits of charred flesh flaked off ribs as they expanded, showing for the first time lumps of charcoal that might have been breasts. Hope didn't want to look closer, but now that she realized the victim was a woman, she couldn't help but see the swell of hips, the slender waist. She'd had a beautiful body before she'd been burned. A dancer's body, like Hope's. The