The things crawl and caper and drag themselves from their Mother and emerge into the world and thus begins the Dead Age. The world sleeps as they rise but as dawn breaks screams chase the sun into the clouds as blood paints the streets. A man falls into wakefulness at the sound of something scratching at one of the doors. He rises from dark dreams and glances to the place his wife should be and his shoulders slump. Day one hundred and forty three. One more day in Hell. The scratching comes again and he turns his attention to the noise and heads towards the kitchen and the back door. As he passes through the kitchen he glances towards the wall clock and sees it is only six in the morning. He had been out of work for a while now and the last thing he wanted was to be waken up by some idiot with the wrong house. Paper boy. It had to be the paper boy. The man reaches the door and looks down at himself and sees that he is hanging free of his boxers so he tucks himself back in, straightens his undershirt, and unlocks and opens the door.
It’s Greg.
Jesus Christ it’s Greg.
His face is sunken, his eyes gone, and he is covered in dirt but it’s him. Oh god in Heaven it’s his little boy.
The man stumbles forward, tears streaming down his eyes. First it was the job, then Maggie left, and then his boy, his boy, his beautiful little boy had died. The man shook his head, he blinked his eyes but there, there was his boy. His boy was back. He’d come back to him. The man started to bawl and reached his arms out to Greg.
The boy wavered a moment, took one tentative step forward, then another, then third and he opened his mouth to speak and put out his own arms. The man smiles down at his son. The thing that had once been Greg pulled its arms back and then plunged its skeletal fingers deep into the man that had been and the man screamed as blood and gore spilled out across the thin arms of his boy. The man tried to pull away but was losing too much blood and he fell onto his knees and looked into his boy’s eyes and saw nothing. The man tried to scream but the thing’s teeth sank deep into his throat and blood washed across the boy and in another moment the man was gone and all that was left of him was meat for the thing and its friends as they made their way to the feast.
A Book Of The Living Dead
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 