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they simply had to check their files for local repeat offenders and snatch one off a dark street. As long as they were discreet and cleaned up the mess at the cemetery each morning, they had a good thing going. Sure, once or twice a year some innocent would end up on the cemetery menu. Like the Sheriff said, they were collateral damage.
    But something about the look on the girl’s pretty face had gotten through to Zack. He wouldn’t sleep much that night. Even less than he normally did. His dreams were filled with faces of terrified people. And faces of the walking dead.
    “Think about it, son,” the Sheriff said gently, like a father explaining some sad but necessary fact of life to a backward child. “We’re simply doing God’s work. If He didn’t want us doing it, He wouldn’t have given us this incredible opportunity. He made the dead rise. He hallowed that ground. He brought our families to it, and made us its keepers. It’s our legacy. Our sacred responsibility. So stop your worrying. We’re blessed to be part of it. Be thankful. Otherwise you insult the Lord by disparaging the honor He bestowed on us.”
    Zack nodded complacently.
    Sheriff Leeds is right. As always. He’s a righteous man. A good man.

 
     
     
    8
     
     
     
    Emma pulled the vintage Ford into the driveway of her family home and cut the engine. She sat silently, her mind reeling, still struggling to make sense of the nightmarish evening. It had been just minutes since she’d commandeered the car and the faint relief she’d felt after escaping Russell’s clutches hadn’t lasted long.
    The heavily wooded access road from the cemetery had dumped her out onto a highway she knew all too well—on the edge of the town she lived in. She had passed the overgrown mouth of that road thousands of times and always assumed it led nowhere other than an interstitial pocket of undeveloped South Jersey wilderness. The cemetery had to be New Jersey’s best-kept secret. Although it was only a few miles from her home, Emma hadn’t even known it existed before this night.
    She peered through the steamed-up windshield. Her family’s rundown bungalow sat before her, a gloomy clapboard box rising from a carpet of fog. It was set fifty feet off the road, on a lot surrounded by woods. She lived there alone with her mother, ever since her father grew tired of dealing with his wife’s hair trigger temper and ran off with a barmaid from Wildwood.
    Even on clear moonlit nights, the place was eerily dark. The community’s low-powered streetlamps barely lit the sparsely used roads. Tall trees separated the house lots. Thick woods hemmed the back yards. Light spilling from house windows on the street helped dilute the pervasive darkness, but not much.
    Emma shivered, afraid to get out of the car and cross the short distance to the house. She gazed at the slowly drifting fog and the black woods beyond. Those things might be out there now… all around me. They can’t just exist in that cemetery… could they?
    Maybe they can. Maybe it’s some kind of cursed place. If not, why haven’t they been discovered?
    How is it they can be so close yet nobody knew about them? If they roamed the roads, someone would have spotted them. Someone would have to know about them by now.
    Someone other than the Sheriff and his deputy.

 
     
    9
     
     
     
     
    Mary Ellen Ett inger pulled her collar tight as she exited the mini-mart, where she’d stopped to gas up her car and buy a few hoagies. She’d worked late at the liquor store and was anxious to get home and rest her feet. She was too tired to cook and her boys would be hungry. The delicious submarine sandwiches would be a treat.
    Traffic on scenic Route 47 was bumper to bumper all summer, when streams of tourists passed through on their way to the beach towns of Wildwood and Cape May. Autumn was much less busy, but weekends brought a modest influx of city folk who enjoyed the off-season solace of their summer homes. Only