Dead Stop.

D. Nathan Hilliard.

Prologue.

Silence.

Nothing.

Then...

Awareness came to the thing that had once been Victoria Valdez.

Only awareness, nothing more as it lay there in the darkness. Not awareness of anything in particular, not even awareness of self...just the simple reception of stimuli without any form of interpretation.

It ignored the blackness and silence, since they were nothing but the absence of light and sound and therefore unrecognized. And with no history of movement, all sensation such as the wetness of the bottom of the casket remained the same as when awareness first ignited, giving nothing to differentiate any of it. The thing merely lay there, not even aware of the simple fact of its own existence.

It just was.

Things continued in this state for an unknown duration, because even time has no meaning in a world without thought.

Then it came...something new.

Something providing the first "newness" to the timeless existence of unrecognized stimuli. That "something" faded to life like the faintest of sparks in the eternal blackness, hovering within the awareness yet providing the first thing for the awareness to turn to. It hung in the dark like a dim ember, slowly filling the empty universe of the former Miss Valdez with itself.

That "something" was called NEED.

It brought focus, and provided a point for the awareness to latch onto. Something tangible. And once this had been done, the most rudimentary form of self awareness came into being. Not much. Not anything normally thought of as such. There was no concept of "I" in the usual sense...the hardened lump resting against the back of its brainpan couldn't formulate anything near so complex...but there now became an awareness of "other." There now existed the knowing that NEED should be filled, and something else existed to fill it.

No true cognition had been involved in the arrival to this conclusion. It came more as a form of recognition. But even at the most primitive of levels, one thing leads to another.

Need requires filling.

Filling requires motion.

A basic reflex, nothing more. This recognition came on a level any insect, or even some lower life forms, could have matched.

But it was enough.

Synapses hardened by formaldehyde sparked for the first time in over two years. Shrunken muscles twitched, and joints brittle from disuse cracked. Victoria's body began to jerk in its confined space...slowly at first, then with more violence as larger muscles were brought into play. The corpse started to buck and flop, filling the confined space with muffled thumps and wet squelches.

In reality, a casket is not the dry place of bones and cobwebs so often depicted in the horror movies. Over time, fluids settle and moisture from the surrounding soil finds its way in as well. Many bodies lie on a layer of quilted cloth soaked in a stew of embalming fluid, water, and bodily secretions. The humidity inside often reaches a hundred percent.

The body thrashed in wild seizures, ripping the soggy linens in its dank cocoon. The crackle of its spine, as it flexed for the first time in years, mingled with the smack of damp meat against wood. The coffin had become a noisy place, a new stimuli now being recognized by the primitive awareness while its body convulsed.

Even the smell, stirred alive again by the thrashing in the mortician's soup of formaldehyde and decay, registered in the dim awareness.

The seizure-like flailings continued for a few more minutes, as signals randomly flitted down disused pathways then returned with the effect of their transmission. Once again, recognition began to seep in. The most primal patterns stamped indelibly in the wasted nervous system began to assert themselves. Movements became less spasmodic, less random, and muscles began to act in conjunction as opposed to fighting each other.

The body began to remember how to move.

Not perfectly. Not even well. But the behavior of a lifetime of motions still resided in the nervous system itself.

Toes curled. Knees bent and straightened. Hands began to clench and unclench, first together then one at a time. Even a few breaths were taken, although the lung linings and other systems needed to make use of the oxygen were long gone. The thrashing subsided as control over movement was reasserted.

Now motion existed alongside need...and the need had begun to grow.

It was time to move...

...time to move towards filling the need.

Purpose had sprung into being.

Fill the need. Go to where the need could be filled.

Rot stained hands searched the coffin. They fumbled along the corpse's sides, then gripped and pulled the shredded linens on the walls of the casket. One tangled itself in the long skirt Victoria had been buried in, but managed to tear itself free after a few clumsy attempts before resuming its mission. They explored the entire casket within easy reach.

No coherent thought guided their action, but they did move with purpose. And as they moved, the thing recognized it was inside. It was inside and it needed to get out. Out to where the need could be filled.

And outside meant going up.

Once more the hands moved with purpose. This time they attacked the top of the enclosure with a power the deceased Victoria would have found surprising if she had been able to witness it. But Victoria wasn't here...not really. The flashes of activity now happening in what remained of her nervous system had little to do with the graceful young woman who played clarinet in the marching band, wrote poetry, and dreamed of designing fashions before a bad dive off a high diving board had brought all that to an end.

The assault on the coffin lid was clumsy, but it was also strong and relentless. Neither fatigue nor despair ever entered as a factor. The hands clawed and pounded the wood with no variation in their intensity, and within an hour the first trickle of dirt fell into the fetid box. In another few minutes one of those hands tore through the lid. The earth now poured into the casket, but it meant nothing to the digger. It struggled and forced itself through the widened hole, clawing its way up through the damp packed earth.

It was tight, seemingly impossible work but now the outcome was inevitable.

The abomination that had once been Victoria Valdez pulled itself out of the ground on the afternoon of October 28th in a rural south Texas graveyard.

Armageddon had arrived.

CHAPTER ONE: AFTERNOON.

Afternoon - Deke.

"Deke! Wait a minute!"

Deke groaned, and the boy's wiry shoulders sagged as he pulled open the front door. His mother's shout cut like a bandsaw through the tiny house. Her timing couldn't have been worse, and he winced in the knowledge she could now probably be heard by everybody on the block.

"Aw mom," he sighed loudly and hung his head, "I gotta go. Harley's waiting."

"Harley?" Her voice floated in from the back bedroom over the chatter of an unseen TV. "Harley Daughtry? What are you doing running around with him?"

Deke gritted his teeth as he clutched the handle of the screen door. He really didn't need this on top of everything else.

Hell, Mom...who else is there to hang out with? All my friends have gone to college or got jobs in Houston or San Antonio while I'm still stuck in this shitty little dump of a town.

"Harley's okay, Mom," he pleaded. "Please don't start this."

He may as well have been asking for the earth to stop turning.

"He's a bum, Deke. He's just as shiftless as his old man, and he'll probably end up the same way, too. Besides, he's older than you."

"He's only five years older and he's back from the Army, fer Pete's sake...not prison. Give the guy a break."

"He's no good! He's going to get in trouble some day, and I don't want you around him when he does."

"Mom," the boy groaned, "he's not his Dad. You can't blame him for stuff he didn't even do."

"I worry, Deke. I worry about you."

"I'll be fine. I gotta go!" He pushed the screen door open.

"Well, where are you going? When will you be back?" The voice now carried a hint of whine, causing Deke's jaw to clench. "You know I don't like staying here alone with my back what it is."

I'm going nowhere, Mom. Nowhere at all. And it ain't much of a trip because I already live there.

"We're just going to drive around for a while, then we'll probably go hang out at the Textro. I'll be back by midnight."

"Midnight! There's a storm coming in!"

"Maybe sooner!" he called back over his shoulder as he stepped out. "I love you, Mom!"

"Deke! Don't just..."

The door slammed shut, and he hustled across the small wooden porch towards the old pickup truck. His boot heels made sharp reports on the old boards before landing with a crunch in the gravel driveway. In Masonfield, concrete driveways and sidewalks were for the people who could afford to build their houses since the nineteen seventies. They had their own side of town...and this wasn't it.

The youngster ran across in front of the beat up Chevy and around to the passenger door. He reached in through the window and pulled the inside handle to open it. There was no outside handle, but Harley had only paid seven hundred dollars for the vehicle so he seemed fine with it. Of course, Harley seemed fine with pretty much everything.

Deke pulled himself into the weathered vinyl seat and slammed the door closed behind him. Free at last. He puffed his cheeks out and pulled down his straw cowboy hat, then glanced over at Harley who grinned quizzically at him.

"Don't worry about it," the boy grunted, "Let's just get out of here."

"You got it, amigo," Harley drawled and looked over his shoulder as he backed the pickup out of the driveway and onto the cracked pavement of Terrance Street. "How far are we heading?"

"How much gas you got?"

"That bad, huh?" Harley laughed and rested his elbow on the sill of his open window as they drove down the street.

Some people said Harley Daughtry was born with a smile on his face. Tall, rangy and laid back, his white teeth were almost always cheerfully visible. Even in other than happy circumstances, his smile usually remained...yet never in an inappropriate way. His grin had different expressions the same way other people's faces wore theirs.

His flannel shirt had the sleeves ripped off, revealing long arms that were hard with lean muscle. His blue jeans and boots were staple wear for this neck of the woods, and the small felt cowboy hat perched on his head was so beat up Deke had once told him it looked like it had lost the Afghan war all by itself.

The second he said it he had bit his lip, wondering if maybe he had crossed a line, but Harley had only laughed. The man was just good natured and not prone to taking insult.

Currently that grin had a tinge of concern to it as he looked over at his younger passenger.

"You okay, buddy?"

"Yeah," Deke sighed. He watched the line of small, five-room houses go by and remembered how he thought they were the norm when he was a kid. Somehow the memories of happily chasing and playing amongst them with his childhood friends now depressed the hell out of him. "I'm fine. Just another glorious day in Hooterville."

"Uh huh. Is it the job hunting, or your mom?"

"It's just the same old thing. No big deal. How about you, any luck on a job?"

"Sort of," Harley slowed to a stop as a toddler in overalls chased a dachshund across the street in front of them, with his mom screaming bloody murder not far behind. She caught him on the other side, scooped him up, and started whaling away at his butt while glaring in all directions as if daring somebody to say anything about it. Neither Harley nor Deke were so inclined. They drove onwards, leaving the scene behind.

"Sort of?" Deke pressed.

"Yeah. County Electric told me I can have old man Foley's job reading and installing meters when he retires. Of course that's still not for about a year. So I guess I'll just hang loose and pick up a little here and there till then."

"County Electric? Sounds pretty good. I hear working for the county can be a sweet gig."

"It suits me," Harley nodded. "I'd get to get out and drive around, not be stuck indoors all day. And the county pays benefits. I'd be pretty much set."

"Yep," Deke agreed with little conviction. "I guess you got it made."

The truck turned onto Main Street and the boy watched in silence as the row of ancient brick buildings glided past. About half were boarded shut, and the other half all owned by people in their sixties or seventies...people hanging on simply because they didn't know anything else to do. The recently opened Superstore. six miles to the north in Craigsford, now got most of the business anyway. Deke figured in ten more years the whole street would most likely be deserted.

"You betcha," Harley mused cheerfully aloud, "The house is already paid for and so is my truck." He gave the door an enthusiastic pat that reverberated through the cab. "But you know what I mean...you got the same sweet setup coming."

Deke realized it was true, as far as it went.

The little house he had been born and raised in had been paid off long ago. And the same held true for the old Ford four-door sedan his mom let him drive to go shopping or hunt work.

Yep, lucky me.

He pictured the little ramshackle house on the quarter acre lot in his head. The porch already had a bit of a droop at one corner, and the shingles were now bleached white and starting to curl with age. The paint was lumpy and flaking off in places because his Dad had simply painted it directly on top of the old paint a few years back...right before he left for parts unknown. The wood revealed underneath was gray, and the whole place shook if somebody stomped their feet.

"Oh yeah, lucky me," Deke muttered half aloud. "One day all that will be mine."

Harley cast a sidelong glance at his younger passenger.

"Okay, dude," he sighed, then squinted narrowly at Deke, "I can tell this has gotten serious. You have let this whole bummed out thing take over your world and it's time for an intervention."

Suddenly Deke wished he had kept his mouth shut.