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After Elaine died in the night, she tried to kill Hank. Her lips were cool on his skin when she bit his arm.  He didn't notice right away: she was always cold from the cancer treatments.

But Elaine didn't have her teeth in, and the ferocity with which she gummed his arm woke him from his fitful sleep.

Hank had been sitting in the rocking chair, waiting and not thinking.  He did that a lot since she had started chemo.  Hank had taken care of Elaine for all of her adult life and most of his, from marriage through childlessness to the cancer.

Now Hank pushed Elaine away--her skin was already stiffening, becoming waxy rather than crepe-paper-soft--but she twisted her head to keep biting him.  A thick strand of saliva trailed from her mouth to his arm.  Her cancer-ravaged body had new strength, but Hank was a big man.

"Elaine," he said, "oh, Elaine." Tears blurred his vision.

The last two days on the television they had been talking about the dead getting up. He hadn't paid it much mind; Elaine was sick, and he only watched TV to take his mind off that. But it was true.

He stood and pushed her back down on the bed, then wiped his eyes, dried his hands on her floral bedspread.  She got back up; he pushed her down again.  She got back up.

He had not realized how relentless the dead were.  "Worse than a two-year old," he told her as he pushed her down again.  Her nightgown rode up, exposing her thin frail legs, but she didn't pull it down again.  He held her and tugged down her gown.

She made no sound, except when his pushes squeezed her chest; then she half-sighed, half-moaned.  She reached for him; he easily batted her arms away.

He lumbered to the bathroom and remembered to shut the door when he heard her bump into the dresser.  He put on the privacy lock as he peed, and wondered what to do next.

He had half hoped she wouldn't rise again.  The rise of the dead might have been some massive hoax, and Elaine was dying.  Hank had had other things to think about.  But now she was slowly and methodically pounding on the bathroom door.

He glanced down at the water-filled cup by the sink.  Maybe she wants her dentures, he told himself, and hated himself for it.

He had thought, before, that he might kill himself, so they would be together--but now he realized Elaine had no sense of "together."  She had no sense at all.  Joining her would mean nothing.

But now what?

He washed his hands and looked at himself in the mirror.  Sixty-eight years old.  No kids.  More gut than he should have, less hair than he liked, and now no wife.

On the television they said that you should hit them on the head or burn them, and he couldn't.  This was Elaine.  She wasn't really dead, this was like a new stage to her illness.  He had cared for her through the lump, and the biopsy, and the exploratory, and the chemo, and he would not abandon her now.

He took a deep breath before opening the door, and then it was almost as if she were alive: her arms were open and she embraced him, her body still mostly warm, and then he shivered with disgust as her cool wet mouth fastened on his neck.

He pulled her off and went downstairs.  She followed:  but she stumbled on the stairs and knocked him down.  He lay at the bottom, breathless, suddenly scared he might be dying, even as she pulled on his foot and tried to stuff it in her mouth.  He unfolded himself from her and pulled his foot away.  She crawled along the floor, clutching spastically for his leg but missing.  Not until he had crossed the cluttered living room did she stand up.  An arc of dust clung to her nightgown; Hank had not been cleaning house these last few months.

She took a piece of plastic fruit from the coffee table and stuck it in her mouth.  She tried to chew; the plastic grape fell to the floor.

Hank went to the kitchen window and flipped on the front porch light.  Through the bars, across the unmowed grass, he could see a man in a motorcycle jacket clutching the base of the Japanese maple.  The dead man's legs were floppy and useless, the denim of his jeans dark and shiny with blood.  When the light came on, he tried to crawl to the front porch but he got caught in the snow fence Hank had never taken down, because Elaine had been sick by then.

There were no others out there.

They had expected to have neighbors when they bought this house, but the developer's plans fell through.  Hank and Elaine were perched just outside the city limits, not rural, not urban.  Hank guessed that was a good thing.

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