...

You were standing on the exact overpass where you'd crashed your sedan. You could feel them waking up below.

"Run," a voice hissed from behind a toppled semi-truck. A woman in a blood-stained nurse's scrubs waved you over. "Don't fight it. It'll just summon more. They talk to each other through the dirt."

Elara saw it. Her face went pale. "You've been marked."

It had been six months since the "Stitching," as the survivors called it. Not a virus. Not a bite. One night, every corpse on Earth—from the embalmed patriarch in his mahogany casket to the unmarked pauper in a shallow grave—simply stood up .