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SUMMARY: This is a little break in the story in Carol 2. It fits in just before she and Gary encounters the alien sniper. It is not really a story on its own. It's just there to provide a wider perspective for the weirdness.

In the Monee Community Cemetery, two gravediggers stop their work and mutter to each other about cults or maybe the new funeral home trying to cut corners. It has been hard going these past few days. What started with one or two mounds forming on top of old graves has become an epidemic of caskets piling up in family plots and even strewn about the mausoleums right in the open.

They reported it, of course. The police came, took statements and left, but nothing more has been done and more coffins are here every morning. Their occupants are ripening in the warming days. Down in the gully plots it is even worse when it rains. Mud from the disturbed graves runs all through the lawn, carrying bits of broken coffin wood along little rivers from the swamped places where some have erupted right out of the saturated soil.

Today is dry. Tomorrow will be, too. They need to get done what they can while they have the weather. But what is to be done is a thing they cannot figure out. They dig, move, stack, argue, restack and rebury. By now neither of them know who went where or which casket was put back down instead of taken to the stack.

"Where the hell is the old man going to put all these boxes?" Nelson asks.

"Gotta be soon." Pat agrees in his disjointed way, banging his shovel against the side of the one he's found mostly on top of the Peterson plot.

When the shovel collapses the rotten wood, it exposes a blue-green hand. He makes a face at it. He has seen this kind of thing before when exhumations were made for one thing or another. He stares at this one, though, trying to figure out what makes it so strange. "Nelson," he calls after a while. "C'm'ere."

Nelson is no longer the young, impressionable kid he first trained some seventeen years back. He has also seen his share of corpses. "Quit fooling around," he says in reply to Pat's point into the casket. "It's decomposition that makes the fingers look long."

"Yeah, maybe," Pat agrees. But by my count these ones got extra knuckles, too."