Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology by Anthony Giangregorio

Author:Anthony Giangregorio [Giangregorio, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Horror, Fiction
ISBN: 9781935458258
Google: bm8jQAAACAAJ
Amazon: 1935458256
Publisher: Living Dead Press
Published: 2009-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Bonnie is not far from Grace; she works, shirtless in the early-morning sun, on her knees in the three tal rows of cornstalks. The agricultural wing is like the playing board of a child’s game, with squares devoted to corn, potatoes, beans, peas, squash, carrots, and tomatoes. She wishes they had watermelon, but it would require far too much water to be ecological y justifiable. But at least there’s the fruit grove by the wal , there—right beside the vegetables —with apples, oranges, and lemons. The soils are as rich as possible, having original y been procured from al parts of the United States.

Is it stil the United States? Bonnie wonders. Surely somewhere it must be.

She returns to her work, examining stalks and peeling back husks to check for insects. There are screen doors in the narrow access corridors between the agriculture wings and the Environments, but stil , insects manage to get through. Despite their productive yield the Ecosphere is actual y never very far away from starvation, and the loss of a single crop to insects could be—wel , it just didn’t bear thinking about.

Bonnie likes to work with plants. Not in the same way that Marly does—that appraising, sterile, scientific way— but in a sort of… holistic way. An organic way. Yes, that’s right: organic. She smiles at the word. Bonnie feels a kinship to the plants, with the interrelatedness of al living things. She likes to feel the sunlight on her bare, freckled skin because it reminds her of the ironic combination of her specialness and insignificance. The sun is an indifferent bal of burning gases ninety-three mil ion miles away, yet without it there could be no life. “We are al made of the same star-stuff,” Carl Sagan used to say. Wel , Bonnie feels that stuff in her very cel s. It sings along the twined strands of her DNA.

She certainly doesn’t miss sex. She doesn’t need sex. She hardly ever even thinks about sex.

She sits up and shuts her eyes. She breathes deeply. Om mani padme om. Who needs sex when there is such passion in as simple an act of life as breathing?

She finds a bug in a cornhusk and crushes it between thumb and forefinger.

Leonard Wil ard takes everybody’s shit every day. He puts it in phials and labels it and catalogs it; he analyzes it and files the results. He operates and maintains the waste-reclamation systems and biological and mechanical filtering systems. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. If no one did it, the Ecosphere wouldn’t work. Leonard likes to think of himself as the vital link in the Ecosphere’s food chain. Filtration is his life. Ecosphere gives him an abundance of opportunity to feel fulfil ed: there are filtration systems in the sewage facilities, in the garbage-disposal units, in the water-reclamation systems; there are desalinization units between the Ocean and the freshwater marsh; there are air filtration units, and air is also cleaned

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.