Skeleton Crew by Cameron Haley

undead state.”
    â€œAnd the cause of all this is that their souls can’t leave their bodies?”
    â€œTheir souls are not leaving their bodies,” Lowell said, “and that’s causing the undead state. We don’t know why it’s happening. We don’t know if the souls can’t leave or won’t leave.”
    â€œMaybe hell is full,” Granato said, snickering.
    â€œFuck you, Granato.” I felt like saying more but he pissed me off so much I couldn’t think of anything.
    â€œWe do know a little more,” Lowell said, “based largely on your reports and our own efforts to control the out break.”
    I nodded. “We can free the souls from the bodies. But they still can’t move on—the ghost remains trapped with the remains.”
    â€œThat’s the part we haven’t figured out yet,” said Lowell. “We haven’t identified the cause. We’re not even sure how to go about looking for it.”
    â€œNot for lack of trying,” said Granato.
    I glanced at him and narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”
    Lowell drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We felt the only way to identify the cause was to observe subjects at the moment of death…”
    â€œYou didn’t.”
    â€œWe have, yes. Hospice patients. Their estates receive sizable settlements and they’re all volunteers. By the time we make contact, many of them have already pursued illegal end-of-life options.”
    â€œDo you at least warn them they’ll turn into fucking zombies?”
    â€œNot exactly,” Lowell said. “But we’re hopeful we can resolve this crisis and give them the rest they deserve.”
    â€œThey were going Zed, anyway,” Granato said. “At least this way we might learn something from it.”
    â€œAnd did you?”
    â€œNot yet,” said Lowell. “The fact is, it’s hard to observe a negative. At the moment of death, we observe all the physical changes we’d expect—cessation of life functions, basically. But neither Granato nor I can identify anything supernatural happening. Clearly, something is supposed to happen and it’s not.”
    â€œSo how is your little shop of horrors supposed to help me solve the zombie problem, Lowell?” I couldn’t see I’d learned much, and what I had learned didn’t seem all that useful.
    â€œWe’re sharing the information we have, Ms. Riley,” Lowell said.
    â€œWe’ve also modeled the contagion mathematically,” Cindy said. “We looked at multiple scenarios—unconstrained outbreak, quarantine, eradication. The scenarios are complicated by the fact that we don’t know why the phenomenon is localized—limited to the Greater Los Angeles area—or whether it will remain so. However, none of the scenarios produced markedly different results.” She tapped the screen on the tablet and brought up a graph. A green line showed human population and a red line representedzombies. The green line sloped downward, sharply, from left to right; the red line sloped upward, just as sharply. “As you can see,” Cindy said, flipping through multiple screens, “all scenarios end the same way.”
    â€œZero human population,” I said.
    Cindy nodded and tapped the screen again, displaying rows of mathematical equations that meant absolutely nothing to me. “Since all the eigenvalues are nonpositive, the apocalyptic equilibrium is asymptotically stable. At least within the affected environment.”
    â€œWhat the hell does that mean?”
    â€œWe’re fucked,” Cindy said, and shrugged. “The biggest problem will be population clusters.”
    â€œIt will spread fastest in the most densely populated parts of the city,” I said.
    â€œThat’s right,” Cindy said. “The models depend on assumptions, and one of those assumptions is the