Captain Jack Updike could hear Angels. When he was lying awake at night listening to the voices he often came to the conclusion that he was crazy. But his religious training got him to recant every time. You never know-perhaps that was the way it worked for visionaries or people like Joan of Arc. The messages came garbled at first, in various languages, from a multitude of voices. It was the sound of discussion, debate and dialogue-heard through a wall, the words muffled, the tone carrying the emotion or intent. Rarely did they speak directly to him. Occasionally, he was called “eavesdropper” and at other times, he was encouraged to love and spread peace. He supposed that as long as they weren’t telling him to kill anybody, it was a madness that could be his little secret.
And then one told him to raise an army of the dead.
He first heard the Angels before the Change. After, the reception improved, and he soon received word of his mission.
His behavior during the Gulf War ended his stint as chaplain in the United States Army. He had killed a man who was under his spiritual care. Updike was summoned to a trauma unit to comfort Private Randolph Gauthier, out of Louisiana. He had been mortally wounded. With the soldier’s teary eyes looking on, Updike added a lethal dose of morphine to the I.V. drip. Since the boy had not been expected to live, that would have been the end of it, but for the Angels. They reminded him that confession was good for the soul.
Updike confessed, and was arrested. He endured a long period of incarceration leading up to the trial. Updike maintained that what he had done was God’s to judge, not a military tribunal. His superiors felt the growing media scrutiny was damaging so an army psychologist diagnosed Updike with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Criminal charges were dropped, and Updike was court-martialed and dishonorably discharged.
He spent the next few years before the Change looking for a new religion since Catholicism had abandoned him during his trial. Updike sampled many churches, but none suited him. In time he came to consider himself an untethered Christian minister. He believed the Old Testament was the unadulterated truth and he would preach it in his own way. “ The Bible, capital ‘T,’ capital ‘B.’ The Old Testament brought down to earth by God’s own voice: The Bible with an angry God-the God who killed a man for gathering wood on the Sabbath. That One.”
Updike kept his military rank without the affiliation. If asked, he would tell people that he was a Captain in the Army of God.
Then the Change came. He had little recollection of the first months. The debate in his head had grown to deafening proportion just before it happened-loud voices shouted in ancient tongues, only some of which he understood. They referred to the “Scroll” and to the “Lamb.”
The debate was accompanied by a headache that grew worse with the volume of the voices. The combination made the preacher distracted, and concentration impossible. So acting on impulse, he took a backpacking trip into the hills of Kentucky seeking some solace from the beauty of nature. The debate in his head raged on and his head pounded, but codeine pills kept it bearable. The rain would not let up, but he attributed it to some spawn of Global Warming.
Updike discovered the Change by accident. Passing a church cemetery one afternoon he took shelter under the eaves of a crumbling mausoleum. He was propped up against its ancient door and lighting a pipe when a man came up out of the ground. He was dead-gray and hideous, he clambered up out of the wet earth like a mud guppy, finally pulling himself free by gripping the sides of his rust-colored headstone.
The corpse lay on the ground for a time, his shrunken eyes peering up into the downpour. His suit was all of one color-mud-and his hair was pasted to his head and face. The rain poured down, scoured the dirt from the fellow’s features. The dead man’s lips and jaws moved like they were made of wood. Now certain he was insane, Updike watched this reborn creature bathing in the rain.
“Alive?” it had asked the heavens in a papery voice. It raised an arm.
Updike stepped forward. “Dead.” He looked the man over. “Not for long.”
The dead man’s face contorted with surprise. “What?”
“Dead.” Updike expected this apparition to disappear with the admission. “You just crawled out of your grave.” Updike almost swooned then, but came out of it when the dead man clutched his overcoat. He grabbed the cold hand.
“Easy, my son,” he said, and paused. The words echoed in his head. The debate had stopped. He heard his own voice, none other-and felt no pain.
The dead man sat up, looked around at the headstones-gray lumps in the downpour. His lips drew back slowly in a hideous grin, then the hands clamped over his eyes. “Dead.” The man’s lungs crackled horribly as he wept. He turned to the preacher. “Is this Heaven?”
Updike pondered that. “Not unless I am dead too. I was not buried, and my flesh is warm and my heart is beating.” The preacher set a hand against the dead man’s chest. There was no movement within. “Or I am mad. Finally.” He started weeping then, and fell into the cold embrace of the dead man. The pair of them sobbed a long time.
They had been together ever since. The dead man’s name was Oliver Purdue. He had been a civil servant in life-working for the Department of Agriculture.
They traveled to the next town and discovered that the world had changed. Newspapers and radios proclaimed it loudly. The sun had disappeared behind an endless cloud, and dead people had begun to rise.
One night, they were camped under the eaves of an old farmhouse-a hotel owner had refused to serve them due to Oliver’s state. The farmer allowed them hot water for tea and washing up, then quartered a loaf of bread and hunk of cheese for them.
“Captain, what about the others?” Oliver’s voice was weak. He soon discovered that gargling with cooking oil improved its strength. He also had to remember to inhale before he talked. “Will they get out?”
“Interesting question, Oliver,” Updike had said over the fire. “Some will.”
“But the others.” His eyes were dull as he looked into the glowing embers. “When I woke up in my coffin, I didn’t feel alone. At first I wasn’t sure what it was. But there was thumping, and a sort of roar-like a hundred voices screaming in the dark.”
Updike had shuddered at the appalling idea.
“I was lucky.” Oliver’s face rose in the firelight. “Someone buried me with an old hunting knife. I could hack my way through the lid of my coffin. But what about the others?”
“Tragic.” Updike dreaded what he had to do but he remembered the Angel whispering that he must raise an army of the dead-and the meeting seemed more than coincidence. They returned to Oliver’s cemetery pushing a wheelbarrow full of tools. They dug at the freshest gravesite. By evening they had pulled Muriel Thorn from the ground. She was in an awful state-being the victim of a car accident, but Updike was so overjoyed by her release that he welcomed her back with a hug.
The next day, they exhumed two more-blinking, mouths open in mute horror-the corpses were pulled from their graves. And it continued from there, the reborn helping with the next exhumation. Updike’s workforce grew each day.
Some dead left to reclaim their old lives and as time progressed terrible stories of rejection trickled back. Updike’s force multiplied. With Oliver as his right hand man, he worked his way across the state, and soon began sending exhumation forces ahead into neighboring states. Soon others, many living, took up the cause.
The exhumed were a dedicated and grateful workforce, who existed on olive oil and little else. They could eat, though there were no digestive processes. Some of the exhumed were too frail to work or were dismembered. But these pitched in as they could with anything from accounting to raising funds.
That was all so long ago, and his mission had seen him build an army of workers that grew with each dig. He felt great pity for those that rose without body or head, or who had been killed by massive trauma, yet still retained some awareness. In those cases he offered a choice. They could try to make the best of it or they could be destroyed utterly by fire. Updike was surprised by the number that chose a living death. The dead had lost their faith in death.
In some cases the dismembered could be stitched and glued back together, and the reattached parts would function without much difficulty. Why? Updike soon stopped asking why. He knew only that the world was a changed place, and so long as there were needy dead people he would do what he could for them.
He soon ran into trouble with the Authorities. In those days, governments and their functioning bodies were in transition, and so he didn’t worry overmuch about red tape. But, he did have to account for dismembered body parts, and brainless dead. These, the Authorities suggested, should be relocated to special Internment Facilities. Updike suggested mass cremation, since even dismembered parts were reanimated, but the Authorities balked at such a final solution.
And with the extinction of earth’s bacteria that fed on dead flesh, the problem grew to ghastly proportions. The Internment Facilities were soon crawling with dead bodies and twitching body parts. Sadly, there were many such facilities operating by the time the problem was recognized. The end result was that the living shunned the countryside. The idea of camping and having your tent knocked over by a headless corpse was too much for most.
Optimistically, Updike reassured himself that the wilderness had been forsaken anyway. God’s word giving man dominion over the animals had been revoked. The first days were horrible. Animals both domesticated and wild attacked their former masters. Pets were caged or destroyed. Others were released or escaped. Farming became very dangerous.
As he worked, Updike watched the evolution of a terrified culture. There were power struggles just short of civil war, and realignment of alliances, often times with the public wondering who was in charge. The living were barricading themselves in walled cities. The dead within were treated sympathetically at first but were finally restricted to special areas.
By the time Authority evolved into the interconnected world giant it now was, it was too late to stop Updike or his followers. When they turned to him the preacher was the leader of a vast army. Digs had already been started under his direction on the other continents. Updike said they would carry on with their mission, but an Angel warned him.
“Disperse,” it said, and he immediately saw the truth. Such a massive army of dead would terrify the living into action. “Accidents” had already happened with Authority Regulators destroying the dead.
Updike broke his army into smaller groups. These moved to towns and villages that had been abandoned by the living. He continued, taking his movement down into Mexico and South America.
His mission unfolded over decades. The first step was the gathering of his force. Whispered among the leaders of the dead were promises of a new world unfolding for all. Updike awaited a sign.
He was in Peru when it came. The preacher was experimenting with a new technique for softening the ancient bodies of dead Incas.
The Angels whispered three words: It is time. Soon after Updike received an invitation to a conference in The City of Light. He was invited to talk about his work. The theme was The Rebirth of the Earth Religions and the Death of Science.
Updike boarded the plane. That was the way the Lord worked. There were no coincidences.