Home Delivery (Stephen King)
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Home Delivery is a short story by Stephen King. It was first published in the anthology The Book Of The Dead, and later included in King's collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes.
[edit] Plot
The protagonist of the story is Maddie Pace, a rather timid and indecisive young woman who lives on a small island named Gennesault (or "Jenny"), off the coast of Maine. Maddie is both pregnant and a widow, having recently lost her husband in a fishing-boat accident.
After a scattering of initial outbreaks, dead bodies all over the world begin to reanimate en mass and attack the living. The source of the phenomenon is eventually traced to a bizarre, presumably alien, construct in orbit high above the Earth's south pole (more precisely "above the hole in the ozone layer".) A space shuttle under joint American-Chinese authority visits the site, and promptly meets with disaster. One of the crew survives just long enough to report that the target object appears to be a giant ball of seething worms which attack and rip open the shuttle. Further attempts to destroy the ball fail, the zombie plague spreads, and civilization collapses.
All of this is witnessed by Maddie and the other inhabitants of Jenny. They gather up all the available firearms to prepare for their own attack, which all too soon erupts from the island's small cemetery. In a horrifically bloody scene, the island's men are forced to destroy the zombies of their dead loved ones as they crawl out of their graves. The still-moving pieces of the reanimated corpses are then burned with kerosene and the remains plowed underground by a bulldozer. Frank Daggett, the elderly man who did most of the organizing of the successful defense, suffers a fatal heart attack, and has himself blasted to pieces so he won't revive.
Maddie remains very much an observer in all of this, only seeing it on TV (as long as there is TV to watch) and hearing about the battle at the cemetery from her neighbor. This changes at the end of the story when she is confronted by the animated corpse of her husband, come back to get her from the bottom of the sea. She succeeds in singlehandedly destroying him/it, and faces the future, however grim, with renewed confidence and hope.
[edit] Notes
As noted, the story was originally published in an anthology entitled The Book of the Dead, which is a collection of overt homages to director George A. Romero's series of "Living Dead" zombie movies. The title is also used for a collection of Egyptian funeral rites, the Tibetan work Bardo Thodol, and horror writer H. P. Lovecraft's fictional creation, the Necronomicon.
There are some differences between the versions published in The Book of the Dead and Nightmares and Dreamscapes, none of which are significant to the plot. Most notably, the space expedition in the original publication was US-Soviet; the change in the later publication reflecting the end of the Cold War.
