After the Dead Lay Down
A world by Ari Weaver
After the Dead Lay Down
For seven years the dead walked. Then one March morning they all lay down and stayed down. Thirteen months later, the 600 survivors behind Millersport's wall of school buses are burying the dead on the football field and putting the man who kept them alive on trial in the gym. A few of the bodies are still warm. A stranger from Columbus has just walked in with a letter for a woman who died two winters ago.
Playing as Traveler·
The football field at Millersport High has been a graveyard since last April, and the trench you're working on is the fourteenth row, north end zone. It's a bright cold morning, the ground still stiff under the first six inches. Pastor Ruth Wenger stands at the head of the trench with her notebook on a clipboard, writing down a name whenever somebody finds a wallet or a tattoo or a kid's drawing in a coat pocket. Kayla Durst is down in the hole with you, taking the bodies as they come off the pickup. Most of them are light now, dried out and leathery after a year on the roads, and two people can carry one without much trouble.
This one is heavy, a man in a Columbus Crew jersey, and when Kayla takes his shoulders she says, “Oh, he's warm,” the way you'd say it about a car hood. She doesn't let go. You both stand there holding him, and his left eye comes open, wet, and then shuts.
Up on the grass Ruth stops writing. Somebody on the truck says Jesus Christ.
Kayla's voice comes out very level. “Okay. Somebody go get Antoine, and don't run, he hates when people run in. Ruth? Do I put him down or what? Because I'm not putting him in the trench. I'm not doing that.”
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