The sky had been gone from an angry grey to pitch black in a matter of hours. Karen assumed it was night but it was impossible to tell in the driving rain. The rain had been bad when she'd left her job dashing to the car with a travel brochure held overhead. In the half an hour it took her to get half way home it had become a torrent that forced her to pull off the road and wait for a break in the weather. She knew that the rain couldn't actually tear her SUV open but that was the only thing keeping her sane. The entire vehicle was thrumming from the coin sized drops pummeling it from every angle.
It was impossible to know exactly where she was on the road home. The rain was so thick it formed a solid curtain. Karen couldn't only see the outline of her windshield wipers, which were stuck in an upright position from where she'd turned the car off. The only thing way she could tell was to guess and even that was hard because she hadn't been able to see any of her landmarks through the rain. Her radio, cell phone and GPS were all crapping out on her. It seemed impossible that the rain could be blocking signals but none of it was working well. The radio had been sputtering the occasional word along with the static the last time she'd checked.
Karen crawled into the back seat and curled up with a beach towel and some old clothing that had been left in after a trip to the beach a month earlier. The towel wasn't designed to keep her warm but it was better than nothing. It was enough that her teeth weren't chattering any longer.
A fork of lightning speared the asphalt and the accompanying thunder covered Karen's terrified shriek. Normally she liked thunder but normally she wasn't trapped in her car. She wasn't used to feeling the air thickening with water or feeling the water flowing around her. The sneaking fear that she would be swept away kept creeping around the edges of her mind. A second bolt of lightning nearly stopped her heart. A third drove her from the back seat to the floor covering her head with her towel doing everything she could to hide from the storm until it passed.
There was no way to tell in the near complete darkness how much time had gone by since she started cowering in the back. If she could reach her cell phone in the glove compartment she would have known it was just over an hour but Karen was too scared to move half that distance. A groan she'd never heard before forced her to lift her head. It had to be loud because it was drowning out the battering rain against the roof but whatever was making the sound was out sight. It sounded like it was right on top of her, or actually right beneath her. Frantically she dove from window to window searching for the source of the noise.
Karen realized what the sound was at the same time that the freeway barked its final protest to the amount of stress it had been subjected to and buckled beneath her vehicle. The SUV rode a chunk of concrete down halfway down the mountainside before it tumbled off. Inside the vehicle Karen screamed and cried as she bounced from roof top to seat bottom until her forehead slapped the steering wheel and the near complete darkness became absolute.
The shriek of torn metal yanked Karen back into reality trying to see the world around her. The blackness that had engulfed her was reluctant to release her forcing her to fight for every inch of her awareness. At first she though that was what kept her right eye sealed shut but as she gained a little more of herself she realized it was dry blood that kept her partially blind. Her left eye was able to see that the rain had slacked of some and that her vehicle was lying on its side slowly filling with mud.
Every inch of her body was in pain but as she wiggled her fingers and toes nothing seemed to be broken. Karen grunted and stood up opening passenger side door. She was almost half way out when she realized where her car had tumbled.
St. Francis Cemetery. Her SUV had stopped sliding down the hill because it had collided with a stone angel that was staring down at her as she emerged. The entire lot was completely flooded raising some of the unburied coffins out of their holes and the current had carried them to Karen. All around her and the stony angel were floating coffins.
There were dozens of them bumping against roof of her car and each other. Karen stared in horror at the floating dead in all their coffins some ornate and other plain as shipping boxes. Over the steady patter of rain there was groan that echoed through the night. It was the kind of sound that a person doesn't hear so much as feel. The eerie howl was in her bones more than her ears.
There was a bolt of lightning but instead of thunder it was followed a human roar and one of the caskets exploded open launching its lid skyward. There was no way of knowing the name of the man who'd been buried that coffin. It wasn't important any longer because he was dead. What was important was him sitting upright and locking focusing his attention on Karen. His eyes were red like embers against the dismal night. The look in his eyes was unmistakable. Even on the dead the look of lust was unmistakable.
Karen's shriek pierced the sky. She wasn't fully in control of her body yet but she knew she had to get away. Nearly a dozen coffins were open now and all of them had the same look of hunger burning in their eyes. Fear drove Karen's limbs to pull her free of the SUV and charge the hill. Climbing the mudslide quickly proved to be impossible. Her fingers dug into the soft earth but the entire hill was flowing towards the graveyard and the coffins.
The first of the dead stepped out of his coffin and into the knee deep water. He made no effort to climb the hill that Karen was trying to scale. Instead he simply waited at the base until she slid far enough down for him to grab her ankle and drag her down. She had just enough time to get a single kick that landed squarely on his jaw dislocating it before the rest of the horde descended on her. There were hands everywhere on her. Her clothes didn't last long. Two dozen hands ripping, tearing, shredding and stripping had her down to just her sneakers. The clothing that the dead wore were literally rotting off of their bodies, filled with holes and soaked from the driving rain.