4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas by Cheryl Mullenax Page A

existence. But somehow it did not distress her. Somehow it seemed as if it were meant to be exactly like this. If the vultures came in the morning to do their part in eating Magda out of the world, that would be fine and natural. God put bacteria and buzzards on the earth to clean up the mess death leaves behind.
Life
leaves behind.
    There was no pain. Where in life there were aches and pains of every variety, now there was only the sluggish heaviness of gravity and an all-over numbness akin to the effect of Novocain dentists use to deaden your mouth.
    It came as a surprise and a revelation that she could move the unbroken parts of her dead body. At first this horrified her. It was ghoulish. It made her an evil instrument of the Devil. But then she found the rosary she had put on like a necklace before she left home, and she lifted it off over her head, kissed the attached crucifix and mouthed her heart’s prayer: “Hail-Mary-full-of-grace-the-Lord-iswith-thee-Blessed-art-thou-among-women-and-blessed-is-the-fruitof-thy-womb-Jesus-Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinnersnow-and-at-the-hour-of-our-death. Amen.” Then she amended: “Now
after
the hour of my death. Amen.”
    She made the sign of the cross with the rosary, fingers brushing the mutilated remains of her chewed-up breasts. The woman who’d done the chewing had apparently eaten her fill and stalked off into the dark. In search of fresher meat?
    Magda wondered where she herself would go if she could walk. Where was there to go? If a dead Catholic girl cannot go to Heaven, why go anywhere? No, it was just as well that she could not get up and walk. She believed with certainty that there was no decent destination for the walking dead.
    If idle hands were the Devil’s playthings then surely the feet of the walking dead were something much worse.
    Clutching the rosary’s crucifix in both hands, she silently uttered another prayer the nuns had taught her: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell and lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy. Amen.”
    She avoided looking at the evil eye in the night sky. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate her thoughts on the Savior but she was finding it more and more difficult to hold thoughts long in her head. Death was eating away at her thought processes.
    Fear seized her in its crushing grip. She was all at once terrified by the notion that her soul was doomed to wither with her body.
    An explosion of light burned through her eyelids. She gasped, or would have if there had been anything other than dead air in her deflated lungs.
    She opened her eyes.
    An elongated sphere of blindingly bright white light towered over her. The air hummed with anticipation. Deep blue blossomed in the midst of the white light. The blue of a long, shimmering gown.
    “Do not be afraid, little one,” the light said.
    Magda mouthed the words “¿Madre santa?”
Holy Mother
.
    She could just make out the apparition’s elegant face in the center of the light as a feeling of peace washed over her like a warm and gentle wave from a holy ocean.
    —
Have you come to take me to Heaven?
Magda asked in her mind.
    “No, little one,” said the Lady of Light, “I have come to tell you to show others the way.”
    —
But I died. I can’t walk. I can’t even talk. Except to you. What way?
    “The way to the Kingdom of Heaven. But don’t fret, Magdalena, you will move through this land of death in your risen body, immaculate and uninjured. You will be in this world but not of it.”
    —
Like … an illegal?
    The Holy Mother smiled. “More like this,” she said and extended a white hand from the blue folds of her gown and held it inches above Magda’s head. She did this without having to bend over and it wasn’t till then that Magda realized that she was floating in the air. The holy apparition had made her levitate.
    An incredible instant later, everything changed.
16
Underground With the