The other gravedigger pointed at the grave. The corpse of Big Tom Howard was only partly covered and there was a considerable pile of dirt standing in a humped mound. “You want us gone, kid, then you best finish this your ownself. But bury him deep ’cause he’s already starting to stink.”

  He turned away, laughing, and followed his companions back to where they’d left their cart. The preacher lingered a moment, looking like he wanted to say something else. It was the kind of expression people had when they wanted to have the last word in an argument. But the pitchfork had the last word and both he and Neb knew it.

  The preacher backed away, then turned and hurried to catch the gravediggers.

  That left Neb all alone with the half-buried body of his father. They’d wrapped him in white linen, and someone had tied some rope crisscrossed from neck to ankles. Neb figured it was the rope they’d hung him with. People did that because they wouldn’t have to use a bad luck rope.

  Neb jabbed the pitchfork down into the ground at the foot of the grave and pulled the small hunting knife he wore in a leather sheath on his belt. With tears flowing down his cheeks, he stepped down into the shallow grave.

  “I’m sorry, Pa,” he said, sniffing to keep from choking on the words. He bent down and sawed through the ropes. It was a horrible thing to have to do. His father’s body was rigid with death stiffness. Neb knew that this would wear off after a couple of days; he’d seen that with animals he’d hunted and livestock here on the farm. Knowing that his father would go through that process—that he was stiff as a board now—reinforced the fact that Neb was alone. That Pa was dead. That everyone he cared about was dead. He sawed and sawed. It was a task assigned in Hell and he labored at it with the diligence of the insane. He knew it. He could feel parts of his mind cracking loose and sliding away into darkness.

  He stopped abruptly, his face and body bathed in cold sweat, most of the ropes cut, his chest heaving. He felt as if someone was watching him. There was an itch between his shoulder blades. Neb straightened and looked around.

  The house was still and silent. The horses in the corral stood with barely a flick of the ear or swish of the tail.

  But he saw two things.

  One chilled him and the other set fire to something in his soul.

  Above the yard, kettling high in dry air, were buzzards. A baker’s dozen of them, swirling around and around. Here to feast on the dead. Neb wished that there was something like them that feasted on the living. Something he could sic on the parson and everyone who was there at the tree last night.

  The sight of those birds chilled him.

  But the thing that held a burning match to the cracked timbers of his soul was the person who stood watching him. She stood like a specter at the end of the road, her feet on her side but the weight of stare reaching all the way to the grave.

  Mrs. Carter.

  And she was smiling.

  -5-

  It rained that night.

  He saw the storm clouds coming over the mountain. Big, ugly things, dark as bruises, veined with red lightning. The storm growled low in its throat. It sounded like laughter of the wrong kind. The bad kind.

  Neb stood by his father’s grave and watched the storm gather.

  And he was smiling.

  -6-

  Neb filled in the grave with his hands. He didn’t bother to go get a shovel.

  The raindrops began falling as he patted it down over his father.

  “I love you, Pa,” he told the dirt.

  Lightning forked the sky and he looked up, gasping, as thunder boomed above him. The shock of it drove Neb down to his knees at the foot of the grave. He reached up to catch himself on the upright handle of the pitchfork, but his knees buckled, and he slid down. He held onto the hickory handle, though, and laid his head against it, eyes closed as the rain fell.

  “Come back,” he whispered.

  Come back.

  He heard his pa’s voice echo in his memory. There, kneeling much like this at the side of Ma’s bed, holding out the little dead thing and Ma taking it, too far gone to accept that Hannah was dead. Too mad with her own dying to know that the babe she put to her breast was not hungry. Would never be hungry.

  “Come back,” said Neb. He was hungry. Not for food. Not for comfort. Not for peace.

  He wanted to hurt them all. Mrs. Carter. The parson. All of them. Everyone who’d held a torch or raised a fist. All of them.

  “Come back, Pa,” begged Neb. “You don’t belong down there.”

  He did not know if he meant that his father did not belong in the ground or in the Hell that everyone said he was bound for.

  The rain began to fall in earnest. Big, cold drops that hammered down on him and pinged on the leaves of the oak tree and peppered the shingles on the slanted roof. Thunder rumbled and rumbled under a sky torn by lightning.

  “Come back to me,” cried Neb Howard. “You don’t belong down there, and I need you here.”

  The hurt in his heart was so big, so deep, so unbearable that he could not even kneel there without caving over. He fell onto his chest, onto his face. He beat the ground as the rain turned the dirt to mud.

  The storm kept getting bigger. Louder. Darker.

  The clouds swirled and changed from purple to gray to a black so pervasive that it swallowed everything. Only the lightning carved edges and curves onto the things around him, trimming everything with cold fire.

  The world seemed to be so huge and so dark and so empty of everything important. No love, no heat.

  “Come back, come back, come back,” he wailed. “Please, Pa, don’t leave me alone. Come back.”

  A light flared in the darkness and Neb stared at it. It was the Carter place, and Mrs. Carter was lighting her lamps against the darkness. He watched with hateful eyes as the house seemed to open its eyes, but then the woman began closing the shutters. The effect was like wide eyes narrowing to suspicious, accusing slits.

  Neb did not even realize that he had clutched two handfuls of mud until the muck ran from between his fingers. He looked down at the mess. It was so soaked with rain that it ran like black blood down his wrists.

  “Come back,” he said. Then he pointed to the distant house with one muddy finger. “If you can’t come back for me, Pa, then come back for her.”

  As he said it the lightning struck directly above him, bathing him in so brilliant a light that it stabbed through his eyes and into his brain. Neb cried out and fell backward, flinging an arm across his face, screaming at the storm, hurling his rage, his curses, his damnation at the sky and all who lived under it. Hating Mrs. Carter and everyone in this damned town with a purity and intensity that was every bit as hot and bright as that lightning.

  “Please,” he whispered as he lay there. The rain fell like hammers, like nails. “Please come back to me.”

  Neb Howard lay in the cold mud and prayed his dark prayers as the heavens wept and the thunder laughed.

  -7-

  He did not remember falling asleep.

  He did not know how long he slept.

  Neb became aware of being cold. Of hurting from the cold.

  It took him a long time to wake up.

  When he did, the world was wrong.

  He wasn’t in the front yard anymore.

  He was covered in mud, cold and sore, still dressed in filthy clothes, shoes and all. But he wasn’t outside. He was in the house. Upstairs.

  On the bed where his mother died. Where his sister never even got to live.

  Laid out on the bed, but he knew he hadn’t walked up here. He never came into this room. Never. He knew that he would never have gone to bed wearing muddy clothes. Never would have laid down with his shoes on.

  Never.

  Neb sat up very slowly. It took a lot to do it, his muscles hurt that bad. So did his head. As soon as he sat up a cough took him and wouldn’t let him go for five long minutes. It was a bad cough. Deep and grating and when he was done coughing there were drops of blood on the hand he’d used to cover his mouth.

  Sunlight slanted through the window and outside he could hear the morning birds. A couple of cows mooed out in the field, needing to be milked. Dunders whinnied in the corral.

  Neb got out of bed, moving carefully, afraid of that cough coming back. His feet were unsteady and his body kept wanting to fall. He stayed up, though. And he got all the way to the top of the stairs before something occurred to him. He turned and looked the way he’d come. He saw the faint dried-mud smudges of his shoes on the floorboards, but they were coming out of the room. There were none of his footprints going in. There should have been, and his feet were covered in mud.

  Not that there weren’t footprints, though. It’s just that they were too big. A man’s shoes.

  Like all the boys his age he knew how to hunt and how to track. He knew how to tell one set of footprints from another, animal or not. The shoes that made those prints were shoes he recognized.

  “No,” he told the morning.

  No.

  The prints remained, however.

  Frightened, Neb hurried downstairs, clutching the bannister for support. The front door was open, and there was a pool of water in the living room. There was a line of muddy prints leading in through the open door, through that puddle, and on up the steps.

  “No,” he said again.

  Neb walked wide of the footprints and had to step over them to get out of the door.

  He walked across the front yard to the little family cemetery. The muddy mound over his father’s grave was torn up and sunken in.

  Neb backed away from it.

  He stood halfway between the house and the corral, looking everywhere for answers, needing to find some that did not match the pictures in his head. The cough came again. Worse this time. So deep. So bad.

  When it finally passed the whole yard seemed to tilt and slide sideways. It took forever for Neb to saddle his horse. Dunders kept shying away from him and he kept dropping things. The blanket, the saddle, the reins.

  Finally, he managed to climb up onto the horse’s back.

  They rode away from the house.

  The way to town took him past the Carter place. Neb stopped by the gate and studied the house. Their door was open, too. He could see faint light inside, as if no one had bothered to turn down the night lanterns.

  “No,” he said one more time.

  He turned the horse and walked Dunders up the lane to the Carters’ porch steps. He could see how it was. The doorframe was splintered, the lock torn clean out of the wood. The porch rocker lay on its side. There was a muddy handprint on the door.

  But Neb knew it wasn’t mud. Blood turns chocolate brown when it dries.

  He slid from the saddle and staggered up the steps. There was mud on the porch. Footprints in that familiar shape. Going in. Coming out. They were the only footprints on the porch.

  Neb stepped over them and went in without knocking.

  He stood for a long time looking at the living room. Seeing it yanked him out of that moment and took him back to his Ma’s room and how it seemed to have been painted red. This room was painted red, too.

  Mrs. Carter sat on the sofa.

  Some of her did, anyway.

  The rest of her …

  Well, it was gone. Even from ten feet away Neb could tell it wasn’t a knife that did this. Nor a wood axe either. He’d seen animals in the wood that had been set upon and half eaten. He knew how that looked.

  He knew what he was seeing.

  Once more the world tried to tilt under his feet.

  Neb hurried outside and vomited over the porch rail. Half of the vomit was red with his own blood. He gagged, coughed, gagged.

  Dunders nickered and tossed his head, his big dark eyes rolling, alarmed at the smell of sickness and of death.

  Neb shambled down from the porch and climbed into the saddle. He went back out to the road. Along the way, there in the center of the road, he saw those same footprints. One set of tracks coming here to the Carter place. Another set coming out and then turning, turning, not heading home. Heading to town. There were dark splotches of dried blood mixed in with the mud.

  Neb sat on the horse as more of that awful coughing tore at him. He knew he was sick. Laying out there in the cold and the storm … that had been bad. There was something burning inside his chest. In his lungs.

  He sat astride Dunders, feeling lost, feeling sick, feeling like he was already falling into darkness. The footsteps went on ahead and vanished into the distance.

  Neb did not follow them into town.

  He knew what he would find there.

  “No,” he said one last time. But this time he knew that he meant ‘yes.’

  He turned Dunders around and let the horse take him home.

  Once he was there, he removed the saddle and bridle and let the horse go. Not into the corral. Just go.

  Then Neb walked up the few steps to his porch and sat down on the chair.

  And waited for his Pa to come home from town.

  When I became a novelist, I had no intention of ever writing a short story. I had no interest and didn’t really understand the form. Then my friend Kim Paffenroth—who has the unique (I believe) distinction of being both a professor of divinity and a horror writer with an insatiable love of zombies—asked me to write a story for him. Specifically for an anthology called History is Dead. All of the stories would focus on zombies causing trouble in different historical eras. I spent two weeks starting my first short story. Starting and continually failing, because everything I started to write kept wanting to be a novel. The absurdity of me ever writing a short story became laughable … which resulted in me writing not only a story, but a comedy story. I figured Kim would get a chuckle, ultimately say no, and that would be that. Instead, I rather liked the story. So did he. And so did the readers. It remains one of my most popular short stories. I have since written 125 short stories, I’ve edited over a dozen anthologies of short stories, and edit a magazine—Weird Tales—filled with short fiction.

  Pegleg And Paddy Save the World

  -1-

  I know what you’ve heard, but Pat O’Leary’s cow didn’t have nothing to do with it. Not like they said in the papers. The way them reporters put it, you’d have thought the damn cow was playing with matches. I mean, sure, it started in the cowshed, but that cow was long dead by that point, and really it was Pat himself who lit it. I helped him do it. And that meteor shower some folks talked about—you see, that happened beforehand. It didn’t start the fire, either, but it sure as hell caused it.

  You have to understand what the West Side of Chicago was like back then. Pat had a nice little place on DeKoven Street—just enough land to grow some spuds and raise a few chickens. The cow was a skinny old milker, and she was of that age where her milk was too sour and her beef would probably be too tough. Pat O’Leary wanted to sell her to some drovers who were looking to lay down some jerky for a drive down to Abilene, but the missus would have none of it.

  “Elsie’s like one of the family!” Catherine protested. “Aunt Sophie gave her to me when she was just a heifer.”

  I knew Pat had to bite his tongue not to ask if Catherine meant when the cow was a heifer or when Sophie was. By that point in their marriage Pat’s tongue was crisscrossed with healed-overbite marks.

  Catherine finished up by saying, “Selling that cow’d be like selling Aunt Sophie herself off by the pound.”

  Over whiskey that night, Pat confided in me that if he could find a buyer for Sophie, he’d love to sell the old bitch. “She eats twice as much as the damn cow and don’t smell half as good.”

  I agreed and we drank on it.

  Shame the way she went. The cow, I mean. I wouldn’t wish that on a three-legged dog. As for Sophie … well, I guess in a way I feel sorry for her, too. And for the rest of them that went to meet their maker that night, the ones who perished in the fire … and the ones who died before.

  The fire started Sunday night, but the problem started way sooner, just past midnight on a hot Tuesday morning. That was a strange autumn. Dryer than it should have been, and with a steady wind that you’d have thought blew straight in off a desert. I never saw anything like it except the Santa Anas, but this was Illinois, not California. Father Callahan had a grand ol’ time with it, saying that it was the hot breath of Hell blowing hard on all us sinners. Yeah, yeah, whatever, but we wasn’t sinning any worse that year than we had the year before and the year before that. Conner O’Malley was still sneaking into the Daley’s back door every Saturday night, the Kennedy twins were still stealing hogs, and Pat and I were still making cheap whiskey and selling it in premium bottles to the pubs who sold it to travelers heading west. No reason Hell should have breathed any harder that year than any other.

  What was different that year was not what we sinners were doing but what those saints were up to, ’cause we had shooting stars every night for a week. The good father had something to say about that, too. It was the flaming sword of St. Michael and his lot, reminding us of why we were tossed out of Eden. That man could make a hellfire and brimstone sermon out of a field full of fuzzy bunnies, I swear to God.

  On the first night there was just a handful of little ones, like Chinese fireworks, way out over Lake Michigan. But the second night there was a big ball of light—Biela’s Comet, the reporter from the Tribune called it—and it just burst apart up there, and balls of fire came a’raining down everywhere.

  Paddy and I were up at the still, and we were trying to sort out how to make Mean-Dog Mulligan pay the six months’ worth of whiskey fees he owed us. Mean-Dog was a man who earned his nickname, and he was bigger than both of us put together, so when we came asking for our cash and he told us to piss off, we did. We only said anything out loud about it when we were a good six blocks from his place.

  “We’ve got to sort him out,” I told Paddy, “or everyone’ll take a cue from him and then where will we be?”