Lazarus here. That’s my Christian name so don’t get any wrong reeking ideas. I don’t know too much about my family tree but I’ve been given to know that its Old World roots ran deep. My missionary parents had the bright idea that we all came from one big divine family tree, roots deep in dirt and branches high in Heaven. Who knows? Maybe they were right, maybe they weren’t psychotic zealots after all. But that was way before the rise of the Deaders, back when we were sitting on top of the world and didn’t know the planet was destined to be overrun with the walking dead or that we were to be the favorite food of zombies teetering at the top of the food-chain.

     Brother Pythagoras had his own ideas of how things should be. He saw himself leading the walking corpses to God. He was convinced that the Deaders had souls and that he was their spiritual compass, the divinely-tuned instrument of their salvation.

     Sister Sybil was his right-hand gal, a lovely vision in faded white frills and as true a believer as you’d ever meet. She’d been a registered nurse before the Clysm and did a decent job of treating the minor nicks and knocks suffered by our ragtag cadre.

     For all her piety, I sensed in Sybil a deep passion, silent as empty graves. Her wheat-straw hair was long and she wore it up in a thick bun on the back of her head for services. Her face was waxy white and gave her the look of a classical statue. But for her, I would’ve left the mission long ago and headed for the highlands where the Deaders didn’t like to go. I saw in her a sunlit purity and a promise of better days ahead. At night she sometimes came to me in dreams that weren’t so pure.

     “It ain’t right,” Pynch said, his rifle hanging by a soiled canvas sling from his shoulder.

     “So you’ve said,” I said.

     “You saying it is?”

     “I’m saying so you’ve said.”

     “That ain’t saying nothing.”

     I said nothing.

     “Shit.” He came down a step so he was on the same step I stood on, his boots rasping against the gritty stone. He locked his eyes on mine and opened his mouth to say something else but the pealing anthem of the pipe organ surged out of the wide church doors behind us and Pynch unslung his rifle as I unslung mine.

     The church bell tolled and we watched the empty street and waited for the dead to straggle in from their Ghost-town hidey-holes.

     “We could stop it,” Pynch said. “We should stop it. Cohen is one of us. Or was.”

     “He’s as good as dead already,” I said, keeping my eyes on the town’s main street. “There’s no cure for what he’s got.”

     Pynch persisted: “You don’t actually believe this lead-the-zombies-to-Jesus crap, do you?”

     “What’s it matter what I believe? Me or anybody else?”

     “Cohen is one of us,” he said again. “He’s a Jew, but still.”

     One of us. Whatever that meant. I didn’t know anymore. Maybe never had. All I knew was that us was the living and them was the reanimated dead. Pythagoras occupied some mystical middle-ground no-man’s land and he held it with a spooky come-to-Jesus fervor. And now Cohen was there too, suspended above it in his dying delirium.

     “Jesus was a Jew,” I said. “Cohen’s the perfect stand-in.”

     “Yeah, well, he ain’t got no res’rection waiting at the end.” He turned his ballcap backwards and said, “Wish we could pop a few like we used to. Need the practice.” He brought his rifle up and fired imaginary bullets at make-believe Deaders. “Pough, pough, pough…”

     I watched the street. The wind kicked up and I smelled them coming.

     “You ain’t a Jew, are you, Laz?” Pynch asked me.

     I gave him a shrug. “Christian. Got a Jew name but that’s as far as it goes.”

     “Just the same, don’t go getting sick or old Pythagoras might take a notion to offer you up on the cross.”

     “That’d be the day I put one in his head.”

     Pynch chuckled, then said, “Here come the chunks.”

     As Deaders go, this bunch that made up our current congregation didn’t smell so bad. Most of them had been dead a long time. The fresher Deaders were the ones that stank to highest heaven. These older skinbags were as leathery as an old lady’s cowhide purse. They were easier to handle too because they moved slower, like the walking stiffs they were, with eyes dulled and deeply fixed in their sunken sockets. You could see that whatever dark miracle kept them going was losing its grip on them as they were slowly winding down like rusty clock springs. If Brother Pythagoras was going to save their souls, he had to work fast before they went to ground and then to dust. You’d see the fallen sometimes on the side of a road or lying in a field, too desiccated to walk or crawl anymore, their jaws still working as if trying to eat the earth. Seeing them like that, I didn’t see how they could still have souls—if they ever had. I didn’t like to think too much about that; the idea that I might be nothing more than a glorified meat machine myself didn’t exactly fill me with joy or give me good reason to go on living in this dead damned world. Pythagoras saw those pathetic earth-eating zombies as the ultimate insult to the natural order of things. That their souls might be trapped in their clockwork bodies, he said, was too terrible to abide.

     A dozen Deaders ambled toward the church steps. The choir inside began their choral reading.

     “That crap gives me the creeps,” Pynch said. “Ain’t like the chunks know what the words mean. Don’t know myself, far as that goes.”

     The choir’s reading drifted out in broken pieces: “…thank Thee for mercies of blood…martyrs and saints…enrich the earth…create the holy places…”

     “Sounds like T. S. Eliot,” I said. “Sybil gave me a book of his shit.”

     “Fucking creepy is what it is.”

     “…fear the hand at the window…than we fear the love of God…”

     “It’s about what you’d expect from Brother Sly-thagoras. High-tone doubletalk, smooth as shit through a goose. You know he keeps a Deader’s head in a birdcage and uses its jaws for a nutcracker?”

         I watched a naked Deader shamble out of the gutted drugstore and shuffle after the others. She was fresher than most of them, veins showing through her sallow flesh like blue highways on a yellowed road map. She fell in behind the others as they made their way toward us.

     There was a whisper of bare feet and I glanced back to see Sister Sybil standing behind us, resplendent in the folds of her white robe.

     “Such terrible beauty,” she said. “God’s wayward souls, our orphans of the Last Judgment.”

     “Spawn of Satan, you ask me,” Pynch said.

     “O no, don’t you see? It’s their very souls that keep them going. What else could animate dead flesh? They’re hungry for the Holy Spirit.”

     “Everybody wants a free lunch.” Pynch spat on a lower step.

     She ignored him and said, “Such a glorious day! Those puffs of clouds look like cat’s paw prints.”

     Pynch nudged me with an elbow and said, “Let’s herd these damn dead cats, Brother Lazarus. It’s showtime.”

     The sunlight on Sybil’s skin and hair smelled so sweet I almost didn’t notice the moldering reek of the advancing dead. I did a quick headcount: eleven Deaders. The usual gang plus the new naked one from the drugstore.

     As they straggled to the steps, I glanced up at the morning sky. The clouds did look like paw prints and I tried to imagine the angelic cat that might’ve made them.

*   *   *

     I don’t want to say what happened inside that pathetic sanctuary but there is no way to stop the bleeding now. Like murder, it will out.

     Damn them all and let it bleed.

*   *   *

     The dead are dropping clumsily to their knees at the altar rail. He of the slick silver hair, Brother Pythagoras stands behind the altar and in front of unclothed Cohen, who has been roped to the tall wooden cross, his chin on his chest, mouth slack and drooling. Cohen’s fever has ravaged him so badly that there isn’t much meat left on his bones. Shocking to see how quickly a man can waste away. Three days ago he was fine. Now he’s living death, deader than Deaders.

     Sister Sybil stands to the left and a step behind Pythagoras, a tarnished silver platter in her hands. A slender stainless-steel carving knife rests on the platter, pointing at Sybil’s belly.

     Like armed ushers, Pynch and I have stationed ourselves on opposite sides of the chancel. A squadron of flies buzzes about the heads of the dead. The Pope twins stand ready with cattle prods, in case any worshipper should stray.

     The organist plays a single sustained bass note that resonates deep in my belly. The tension is visceral, aching to break. I swat a fly out of the air.

     Pythagoras lifts his hands and then says, “Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day.” He turns to Sybil and takes up the knife.

     I close my eyes. I’m a child of six years, hiding in the bulrushes of Djibouti and watching fanatics with long knives murder my father and rape my mother before cutting her throat. I freeze in fear, and the shame will never leave me. The killers are so fierce in their dedication to their dark god’s death cult that they’ve become single-minded demons. I want to cry for help from Heaven but I can’t without giving myself away. I watch the slaughter in silence, swallowing the evil like a bitter seed. As a final insult, one of the demons stuffs my mother’s silver crucifix into her mouth and says, “Here is your Christ, choke on him.”

     Cohen’s shriek snaps my eyes open and I see that the blade has sharpened his senses, at least for the moment. Blood is streaming down from the wound in his side. Pythagarus places a sliver of the sacrifice’s flesh on the silver platter and then surehandedly takes another cut of meat from the sick man on the cross. Cohen shakes his head in confusion and calls out for his mother. A couple of impatient Deaders rise up from their knees and ty to clamber over the altar but the Popes zap them back into place with the cattle prods.   

     I look away and silently curse this church and everybody in it, living and dead. I could stop this sick show if I had the will. I’m the guy with the rifle. I could end Cohen’s suffering with a headshot. I could punch Pythagoras a ticket to Heaven with a well-placed bullet. But I lack the will. The will to kill. Killing is not what it used to be. And Sybil would hate me for sabotaging the service.

     So I do nothing.

     Pynch is antsy. He shoots me a look of disgust and just for a moment I have the faint hope that he will intervene, but then he just shrugs and stares off and loses himself in a stained-glass window of haloed saints, and I know there will be no escape from the suffering of the flesh.

     “Body of Christ,” Pythagoras says as he shoves a piece of Cohen into a grizzled Deader’s mouth.

     “Body of Christ,” he says as he goes to the next ghoul, Sybil following with the bloody tray.      

     Time crawls slow as a snail, making a bloody slime trail. When Pythagoras comes to the last Deader at the altar rail, Sybil suddenly squeals and drops the platter. Wearing the expression of a wounded and bewildered child, she holds out her hands to show the bleeding holes in her palms. Blood trickles from her scalp and drizzles down both cheeks. There is a bright red stain on her white dress, below and to the left of her breast.

     I crane my head to see that her bare feet also bear bleeding wounds.

     “Praise God!” Pythagoras shouts to the ceiling.

     Sybil’s face changes, fear and confusion replaced by a look of rapture.

     The Deaders get frenzied at the sight of her blood. One of them, a leather-skinned woman with large hips and breasts like deflated basketballs, grabs Sybil’s left wrist and yanks her halfway over the rail.

     I raise the rifle and fire, the round smacking the Deader bitch right in the ass. Stunned by the shot, the ghoul lets go of Sybil’s arm, but Sybil says, “No, Lazarus, it’s all right. It’s meant to be this way, don’t you see?”

     “God’s will,” Pythagoras declares.

     With exaltation etched in her face, Sybil leans against the alter rail and offers her bleeding hands to the communicants. They receive her ravenously, lifting her over the rail and ripping off her dress to get at her appetizing flesh and sacred blood.

     Pynch says, “Jesus fuck,” spits on the floor and then walks down the aisle and out of the church.

     I can’t follow him. I owe it to Sybil to witness her sublime sacrifice, no matter how sick inside it makes me. The Deaders go at her like pigs in a trough, snorting and snuffling and gnawing her flesh.

     Pythagoras presides over the gluttonous slaughter like a fiery-eyed prophet. He raises his arms in demented benediction and says, “Do this in memory of me. If you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will abide in me and I in you. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

     His eyes fall on me, as I knew they would. There is not a glimmer of grace in them. I shoulder my weapon and put one up his nose that pulps his head. He falls over the altar rail and becomes the next course of the Deaders’ holy feast.

     For Sybil’s sake, I make the sign of the cross and say, “Godspeed.”

     Outside on the steps, Pynch says, “You killed him?” I nod. He nods back.