Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology by Anthony Giangregorio

was al the soup Jack Pace needed in his life, and al the answer (on that one particular subject, at least) that Maddie needed in hers. Light of step and cheerful of heart, Maddie climbed the warped wooden steps of the store the next day and bought the four cans of chicken noodle soup that were on the shelf. When she asked Bob Nedeau if he had any more, he said he had a whole damn case of the stuff out back.
    She bought the entire case and left him so flabbergasted that he actual y carried the carton out to the truck for her and forgot al about asking why she had wanted al that chicken soup—a lapse for which his wife Margaret and his daughter Charlene took him sharply to task that evening.
    “You just better believe it,” Jack had said that time not long before the wedding—she never forgot, “More than a lobsterman. My dad says I’m ful of shit. He says if it was good enough for his old man, and his old man’s old man, and al the way back to the friggin’ Garden of Eden to hear him tel it, if it was good enough for al of them , it ought to be good enough for me. But it ain’t— isn’t , I mean—and I’m going to do better.” His eye fel on her, and it was a loving eye, but it was a stern eye, too. “More than a lobsterman is what I mean to be, and more than a lobsterman’s wife is what I intend for you to be. You’re going to have a house on the mainland.”
    “Yes, Jack.”
    “And I’m not going to have any friggin’ Chevrolet.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going to have an Oldsmobile .” He looked at her, as if daring her to refute him. She did no such thing, of course; she said yes, Jack, for the third or fourth time that evening. She had said it to him thousands of times over the year they had spent courting, and she confidently expected to say it mil ions of times before death ended their marriage by taking one of them—or, hopeful y, both of them together.
    “More than a friggin’ lobsterman, no matter what my old man says. I’m going to do it, and do you know who’s going to help me?”
    “Yes,” Maddie had said. “Me.”
    “You,” he responded with a grin, sweeping her into his arms, “are damned tooting.”
    So they were wed.
    Jack knew what he wanted, and he would tel her how to help him get it and that was just the way she wanted things to be.
    Then Jack died.
    Then , not more than four months after, while she was stil wearing weeds, dead folks started to come out of their graves and walk around. If you got too close, they bit you and you died for a little while and then you got up and started walking around, too.
    Then , Russia and America came very, very close to blowing the whole world to smithereens, both of them accusing the other of causing the phenomenon of the walking dead. “How close?”
    Maddie heard one news correspondent from CNN ask about a month after dead people started to get up and walk around, first in Florida, then in Murmansk, then in Leningrad and Minsk, then in Elmira, Il inois; Rio de Janeiro; Biterad, Germany; New Delhi, India; and a smal Australian hamlet on the edge of the outback.
    (This hamlet went by the colorful name of Wet Noggin, and before the news got out of there, most of Wet Noggin’s populace consisted of shambling dead folks and starving dogs. Maddie had watched most of these developments on the Pulsifers’ TV. Jack had hated their satel ite dish—
    maybe because they could not yet afford one themselves—but now, with Jack dead, none of that mattered.)
    In answer to his own rhetorical question about how close the two countries had come to blowing the earth to smithereens, the commentator had said, “We’l never know, but that may be just as wel . My guess is within a hair’s breadth.”
    Then , at the last possible second, a British astronomer had discovered the satel ite—the apparently living satel ite—which became known as Star Wormwood.
    Not one of ours, not one of theirs. Someone else’s. Someone or something from the