Status Updates From The Returned

'She half listened as she went on with her writing. There was nothing new happening anywhere. More Returned were returning. No one knew how or why. The detention centers were growing larger and larger. Entire towns were being taken over, and no longer in just rural areas such as Arcadia, but in larger cities. The True Living were being usurped, or so one of the announcers said.'

'He got out of his truck, clutching his picket sign. He was starting the day in a bad mood. It had been another night of restlessness for him and, as is often the case with certain types of men, he'd decided that being angry in general was the best way to deal with whatever was going on in his heart that he didn't understand.'

"But they didn't understand. I did have to be the one to take him out of that river. I had to be the one to feel how cold and unnatural he was. I had to be the one to know—to be genuinely and truly sure—that he was dead. And that he wasn't ever coming back. We buried him. Because that's what you do to people when they die. You bury them."

'For the past twenty years or more Harold had been the one to do all the driving, and now Lucille was rusty behind the wheel and she didn't trust herself to drive up and down the road to deliver three hot meals. So breakfast she ate alone, with only the empty house to sit and watch her. Only the sound of her own voice to speak back to her.
   "What's the world coming to?" she asked the empty house.'

'They sat in silence, listening to Lucille's breath find itself. She was an old woman now, in spite of being a mother of an eight-year-old. She tired easily.'