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PLOT The protaganist of the story is Maddie Pace, a rather timid and indecisive young woman who lives on a small island named Jenny, off the coast of Maine . Maddie is both pregnant and a widow, having recently lost her husband in a fishing-boat accident. After a scattering of intial outbreaks, dead bodies all over the world begin to reanimate en mass and attack the living. The source of the phenomenon is eventually traced to a bizarre, presumably alien, construct in orbit high above the Earth's South Pole . A Space Shuttle under joint American-Chinese authority visits the site, and promptly meets with disaster. One of the crew survives just long enough to report that the target object appears to be a giant ball of seething worms which attack and rip open the shuttle. Further attempts to destroy the ball fail, the zombie plague spreads, and civilization collapses. All of this is witnessed by Maddie and the other inhabitants of Jenny. They decide to prepare for their own attack, which all too soon erupts from the island's small cemetery. In a horrifically bloody scene, the island's men are forced to destroy the zombies of their dead loved ones as they crawl out of their graves. The elderly man who did most of the organizing of the successful defense then dies of a heart attack, and has himself blasted to pieces so he won't revive. Maddie remains very much an observer in all of this, only seeing it on TV (as long as there is TV to watch) and hearing about the cemetery-battle second-hand from one of the men involved. This changes at the end of the story when she is confronted by the animated corpse of her husband, come back to get her from the bottom of the sea. She succeeds in singlehandedly destroying him/it, and faces the future, however grim, with renewed confidence and hope. NOTES As noted, the story was originally published in an anthology entitled ''The Book of the Dead'', which is a collection of overt homages to director George A. Romero 's series of "Living Dead" Zombie movies. The title is also used for a Collection of Egyptian funeral rites, the Tibetan work Bardo Thodol , and horror writer H. P. Lovecraft 's fictional creation, the Necronomicon . |
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