The Living Dead by Various

first time I understood something else, too: why I had waited years to ring Gwen's doorbell, why even then it had taken an active effort of will not to turn away. It was the same reason: Because it was a game, a game with clear winners and losers, with rules as complex and arcane as a cotillion, and most of all because it partook so little of the messy turmoil of real life. The stakes seemed high, but they weren't. It was ritual, that's all—movement without action, a dance of spin and strategy designed to preserve the status quo. I fell in love with politics because it was safe. You get so involved in pushing your token around the board that you forget the ideals that brought you to the table in the first place. You forget to speak from the heart. Someday maybe, for the right reasons, I'd come back. But not yet.
    I must have said it aloud for Lewis suddenly looked over at me. "What?" he asked.
    I just shook my head and gazed out over the handful of living people, stirring as the ceremony got underway. The dead waited beyond them, rank upon rank of them with the earth of the grave under their nails and that cold shining in their eyes.
    And then I did turn to Lewis. "What do you think they want?" I asked.
    Lewis sighed. "Justice, I suppose," he said.
    "And when they have it?"
    "Maybe they'll rest."
     
    A year has passed, and those words— justice, I suppose —still haunt me. I returned to D.C. in the fall, just as the leaves began turning along the Potomac. Gwen came with me, and sometimes, as I lie wakeful in the shelter of her warmth, my mind turns to the past.
    It was Gran that brought me back. The cast had come off in February, and one afternoon in March, Gwen and I stopped by, surprised to see her on her feet. She looked frail, but her eyes glinted with determination as she toiled along the corridors behind her walker.
    "Let's sit down and rest," I said when she got winded, but she merely shook her head and kept moving.
    "Bones knit, Rob," she told me. "Wounds heal, if you let them."
    Those words haunt me, too.
    By the time she died in August, she'd moved from the walker to a cane. Another month, her case manager told me with admiration, and she might have relinquished even that. We buried her in the plot where we laid my grandfather to rest, but I never went back after the interment. I know what I would find.
    The dead do not sleep.
    They shamble in silence through the cities of our world, their bodies slack and stinking of the grave, their eyes coldly ablaze. Baghdad fell in September, vanquished by battalions of revolutionaries, rallying behind a vanguard of the dead. State teems with similar rumors, and CNN is on the story. Unrest in Pyongyang, turmoil in Belgrade.
    In some views, Burton's has been the most successful administration in history. All around the world, our enemies are falling. Yet more and more these days, I catch the president staring uneasily into the streets of Washington, aswarm with zombies. "Our conscience," he's taken to calling them, but I'm not sure I agree. They demand nothing of us, after all. They seek no end we can perceive or understand. Perhaps they are nothing more than what we make of them, or what they enable us to make of ourselves. And so we go on, mere lodgers in a world of unpeopled graves, subject ever to the remorseless scrutiny of the dead.
     
     

Blossom
by David J. Schow
David J. Schow is a bit of a legend in zombie circles. He's the author of the notorious story "Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy," as well as several others, which have been collected in Zombie Jam . He's also the author of the novels The Kill Riff , The Shaft , Bullets of Rain , and Rock Breaks Scissors Cut . His most recent novel is Gun Work , a hard-boiled crime novel due out in November. Schow co-wrote (with John Shirley) the screenplay for The Crow , and has written teleplays for TV shows such as Showtime's Masters of Horror . As for non-fiction, Schow has authored The Outer Limits: The Official Companion ,