THAT

numbers. They raised themselves out of canals and sewer systems and staggered out of
swamps, landfills, and trash dumps. Still others walked out of city ponds and creeks so
foul that these new arrivals had to be washed down with fire hoses before they could be
sent to a shelter.
Public opinion began to turn. It was rumored that the People carried diseases
caught from ticks, mosquitoes, and foul ditch water. They were said to be aliens or
robots, part of a grand design to take control of the world. There was increasing pressure
for more aggressive clinical study of their physiology and origins. Folks like Jan and
I who took them in came under suspicion. Bills were introduced around the country to
round up the People and detain them, supposedly for their safety. Those who had taken in
the People reacted as if the government were coming to seize their children.
The truth is, everyone knew it was the Resurrection. But it wasn’t the resurrection
they wanted or expected. Nobody recognized any of the bodies that came back. It’s
not as if you got to be reunited with your grandparents or someone you lost to cancer or
an automobile accident. They spoke a language no one understood, and acted in ways that
didn’t make sense. It was like entertaining houseguests from the moon.
Bodies began to wash up on beaches around the world, the People having floated
out of shipwrecks only to drown a second time swimming to the surface. . . . Long caravans
of the dead followed the Amazon into the jungle and died again before anyone could
reach them. Untold numbers wandered in wild places where cities once stood and died
for lack of food and water. Cemeteries were reduced to muck and broken stone by men
and women pushing out of the soil, others pounding on lead-lined coffins with anything
at hand: pieces of gravestone, iron pickets from fences, and fallen branches. It was pointless.
The coffins were sealed or they had been pulled down so far by underground erosion
that they could not be retrieved before the dead within them had died again.
People swam up through the muck trying to reach farmland long paved with asphalt
and buried under apartment buildings and tract housing. One could feel the pounding
deep under the earth day and night, a constant low level earthquake. Country churchyards,
old battlefields, and sites of forgotten skirmishes and atrocities crumbled into the
pits that gradually opened in the ground allowing lines of patient, beautiful People to
wander through the country side looking for a place to stop.
It was one huge mess, with the ground torn up everywhere and naked people
coming through the windows and doors, a whole group of them surrounding you at the
dinner table, tits at eye level like muddy puppies wanting to be rescued. Then the group
would wander off and others appear in the yard, so much beauty and sadness passing
through one’s life it was unbearable.
The whole world was a graveyard at one point or another, it seems, or a mass
grave or battle site and these places were full of People wanting to come out of the earth and
chatter in their musical language, putter about the gardens and make themselves useful in
whatever house would take them in. As for who these people were, specifically, the theory
was that the resurrections came in chronological order, from prehistory working gradually
forward. Thus the primitive communication, the unfamiliarity with even the most basic
technology among the People. No recent dead returned but it was only a matter of time.
52 THAT