The Rising Dead by Stella Green

CHAPTER ONE
    A yellow jacket was circling Matt’s fourth cup of coffee. He’d been shooing it away for the last half hour, but the creature wasn’t giving up. When a woman leaving the diner smiled and offered him a newspaper, Matt took it, intending to roll the
Provo Times
into a flyswatter until he spotted the headline “Miraculous survival turns tragic.” That could have been the title of Matt’s life story. Coincidence? Probably not. The article was partly obliterated by a murky stain, and was unreadable under the cheap fluorescent bulbs. The yellow jacket finally got to taste the wonders in the cup because Matt was out in the sunlight reading about the teenage mountain climber who had fallen into a crevice and survived eighteen days. His rescuers couldn’t feel a pulse, but he surprised them by reviving during the helicopter ride to the emergency room. The EMT trainee who practiced CPR on the climber for forty-two minutes was given an award.
    A few weeks later, after all the celebrations were over, the young man had begun insisting that some of the people around him looked like monsters. He had even chased the mailman away with a baseball bat. Afraid his hallucinations meant he was suffering from a head injury, his mother had checked him into a hospital. The hospital moved him to the psych ward, and now he was fighting to prove his sanity and gain his freedom. Matt suspected that the teenage climber saw what he saw: the evil inside a person appearing as putrefied, reeking flesh—usually on the person’s face. Ever since Matt had come back from the dead, he could see and smell the rot. The more decay, the closer the person was to committing some heinous act. He avoided talking about it because he knewit sounded crazy. Could the teenager prove what he saw wasn’t a delusion? Matt didn’t think so, but it seemed important to get to Denver. Maybe he could help. A stay in a mental hospital for another man like them had ended in a bloody mess.

    “No.” The admissions clerk looked at Matt with glassy, tired eyes. She seemed sad and so weighted down by her troubles that sitting upright took all of her energy.
    “Would you check again?”
    She looked rattled by the request, but agreed. Matt carefully spelled the climber’s last name for the second time while the clerk typed into her computer.
    “No. No patient by that name.” She sighed, relieved that she had accomplished the task.
    Matt pulled out the newspaper and slid it across the counter.
    A worried expression appeared on her face as she realized he wanted even more effort from her. After slowly smoothing the pages, she read using her finger to follow the words.
    “Oh.” When she raised her head, she had a slight flush and she looked at Matt carefully, as if he had suddenly become interesting. “How do you know him?”
    “I’m just a friend.”
    “A good friend?”
    “Good enough. Is there a problem?”
    She sat up a bit straighter and hesitated, as if she was trying to come up with the right words. “I’m afraid your friend is dead. He committed suicide a couple of days ago.”
    Matt got the feeling she would be telling this story for months to come. He didn’t care. “What happened?”
    “Well, he jumped off the balcony. From the seventh floor. Such a shame.” There was no sadness in the words, only excitement. She paused and then asked, “Do you want to see where he landed?”
    Matt must have looked surprised, because she quickly added, “It’s been cleaned up.”
    Back outside, Matt moved quickly off the medical center grounds. The sad little ghoul at the desk hadn’t done anything to improve his opinion of hospital employees. He was free to move on, but for the moment, there was nowhere to go. Even if there was, he didn’t want to leave because he still felt that he was meant to help somehow. Matt decided to visit the young climber’s family.

    Their home was a sweet little A-frame near the forest. Before he rang the bell, Matt noticed