Joe slid into my apartment, wearing a filthy pair of jeans and an oversize olive tee with the word ARMY stenciled on the front; his stringy arms were peppered with tracks, his dark eyes broadcast anger. Little Joe the Corsican, we used to call him. Hot-blooded and tough as a rat, he'd been with my squad in Sierra Leone and Bosnia and places you once couldn't talk about. Joe liked to slit throats. And he was good, until he snapped in Sarajevo; after his discharge it was a fast road downhill.

I didn't even know he'd died.

Everyone tried talking to the dead at first. I did. "Joe, Joe. Jesus, man. I -- You look awful. Is there anything. . . " And later, "Look, you sonofabitch, I can't do anything! Get the fuck away from me, okay? Go! Go away!"

But he followed me, close as a shadow. In a small space, his intense field made me sweat and my hair prickle. I stopped going out, since Joe made people around me uneasy and agitated. I took the meds and drank for a time; I talked to him incessantly. After twenty days, he left as suddenly as he came, maybe to haunt someone else. House spooks will do that.

I was stuck in Athens. Though the brutal summer heat had waned, the city was made oppressive by the specters that lived around us. The house spooks in particular sent most people over the edge.

The Athenians put a brave face on it all, dining and dancing in the rooftop restaurants of garlic haloed Plaka, where I always seemed to end up, craving -- like everyone else -- noise and the company of the living. The musicians plucked their bouzoukis and sawed at their fiddles with ferocious vigor, as if by their efforts they would keep the dead at bay.

"Look at thems," said Nikos, my waiter and sometimes drinking buddy, scowling at a silent pair of spooks two tables away. "Always they do nothing, make afraid. Not eat, not sleep, not talk. Do nothing. Típota."

"Take up table space, too." Nobody wanted to sit near a spook, and there was no way to shift them.

Nikos grunted assent. "Every night they take two, three tables. Bad for business. Better for us they make escape from this place."

But the dead would not make escape from this place, whatever anyone alive might wish, and the booming market in ghost-repellent devices and gadgets, oils and scents, candles and aerosols, exorcisms and spells -- none of which worked worth a damn -- showed that Nikos was not alone in wishing them gone.

The next evening, Nikos was grinning as he showed me to my table. "One American woman for you, eh?"

Seated alone across the terrace and two tables back was an attractive, sharp-featured woman, a little angular about the shoulders, self-confident in her bearing. She had short black hair, and her long bones fit interestingly in tailored jeans and a lightweight black leather jacket. She had a half-tumbler of cheap retsina -- it was all the tavernas could get these days -- in one hand and was turning the page of a newspaper with the other. The newspaper interested me almost as much as the fact that she was American and possibly single. If she was American, there was a good chance the paper was in English, and I hadn't seen an American paper or magazine in over a month. The CNN broadcasts had stopped two weeks ago.

I argued with Nikos for a few moments over the price of a decent bottle from the taverna's hidden reserve, until he rolled his eyes and agreed.

I wrote on a napkin, As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country, silent thanks to those four years in Fayetteville Baptist School, and watched Nikos deliver it with a bottle of Tsantali Syrah.

Her brows furrowed as she read the words, and she looked up sharply. Nikos pointed toward my table. I inclined my head in what I hoped was a dignified greeting. A long moment hung between us while she considered me; then a half-smile. I crossed to her table, trying not to appear smug.

"Tom." I extended my hand, which she shook. "Tom Schroeder."

"Marie Walsh." She tasted the Syrah. "Oh my God! This is heaven!"

She had a musical, beautifully modulated voice.

"Yeah," I said, "the retsina gets old pretty fast. But they had to do something with all those pine trees, and the resin flavor masks a multitude of evils."

The paper was the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune, just three days old. "How did you get this?"

"Mm. They had a few at the railway station. I just arrived from Genoa. New York before that."

"New York? By ship?"

She nodded. Her eyes -- light hazel flecked with green, very unusual -- had that lazy look the meds imparted.

"Most people go the other way," I said. "They say it's better in Western Europe and the US."

"Don't you believe it. It's ugly."

"How ugly?" One headline caught my eye: 'Typhoid Outbreak in San Francisco Brings Ban on Zoroastrian Cult.'

"How?" She tossed back the rest of the wine and slammed the glass on the table. I poured her another, half a glass, the way the Greeks did. "Let me count the ways." She enumerated on her fingers. "Power outages, soaring unemployment; the net's crashed; the suicide rate is off the charts, the economy last sighted somewhere near the Earth's core. Shall I go on?"

all.

A crash of china across the terrace interrupted her. A squat man was standing at a table, his chair overturned, shouting at a seated figure. The object of his anger -- a young woman in a sari, hands resting on her lap -- paid no attention. The angry man's dinner companion, an effeminate young man, began to wail.

"No getting away from them, is there?" said Marie.

"If only." It was a familiar scene. Whenever one of the dead materialized nearby, the sudden shock to the nervous system was intense. The Fukara-Brandt Effect (named after its discoverers, but commonly referred to as the 'fuckup field') accompanied the spooks. Besides screwing up sensitive electronics as badly as an EMP, the field affected the human nervous system like nails on a chalkboard.

"It's the kids I feel sorry for," she went on. "Watching their parents go crazy, or suicidal."

I mumbled agreement. I'd seen it in Athens. Many kids took to begging as the world their elders had built crumbled around them. Strangely, the field didn't affect kids much: the spooks were just more imaginary friends to play with.

I wiped my mouth and set my glass down. I was trying to add Marie up. She was single, free, and must have some money. "And so you took off? No ties, no job. . . ?"

"Not many. Ex-husbands here and there, but they don't count. Job, yes: I'm a journalist. Freelance the last couple of years, Washington Post bureau in Tel Aviv before that. You get a nose for trouble."

I refilled our glasses. "And what does your nose tell you now?"

She wrinkled said nose and smiled at me. A small thrill rippled somewhere inside my ribcage, a sensation I'd not felt in a long while.

"Both nose and journalistic curiosity tell me that it's your turn."

I shrugged. "I'm a consultant. I work in VIP and corporate security. Threat assessment, training, that sort of thing."

"Background in the services?"

"Some. Mostly special ops."

"Your own business?"

"Hardly a business. Actually, I've spent the last three years practicing to become a professional expat. Nine months in Spain, a year in Turkey, then Rome, now Athens. I drift."

"Three years is a long time to be away from home. Anyone in particular you don't miss?"

I laughed. "No. I was thinking of going back to the US for a visit, but with air travel down. . ."

"And you're here alone? Not even a house spook?"

"Not any more," I said, and told her about Joe.

Marie finished her wine and drew her jacket collar up around her neck. "It's getting cold."

"Walk you back to your hotel?"

#

The hauntings, rare at first, had started in February. The scientists had talked about quantum superpositions, dimensional overlap, probability boundaries, and exotic particles. Almost everybody blamed the Americans, and the Americans blamed the Chinese. I don't think anyone had a clue.

The ghosts were distressingly solid and lifelike, able to recognize inanimate objects -- chairs, tables, beds -- and either use or pass through them at will. As the dead became more common, people's fears turned to anger and frustration: someone would take a swing at a spook appearing in a crowded bar; motorists would gun their engines and plow through wraiths in the street, a practice that caused the wraith no harm but resulted in the untimely deaths of many living pedestrians.

There were no patterns, no answers. The rules of the afterlife remained a mystery. But the simple presence of the spooks undercut everything you thought you understood about life and death. Good men and women had been recognized among these lost souls: the saint was destined for the same blind, pointless afterlife as the sinner. Mostly they just wandered about among us, reminding us of our mortality; but the house spooks that came to stay -- family members, acquaintances, occasionally enemies -- wrecked lives. The meds helped, but didn't contribute to efficient work or clear thinking. It was no wonder the economy was collapsing.

#

We met in Sindagma Square at noon the next day and strolled the city center, trying for normalcy. With fewer cars on the road, the walking was pleasant.

It was also becoming much easier to tell the living from the dead; somebody had had the bright idea of tying a length of green ribbon -- green for safe, green for alive -- around their upper arm, and the practice had taken hold, with green ribbons now for sale on street corners. It made it obvious how many people were stuck with house spooks that wouldn't leave their sides.

Late afternoon found us, with new green ribbons, at a bar. Marie sniffed as an intense scent threaded past our table. She looked around, incredulous.

"I -- God, that smells like -- "

"Opium. It is. Helps people cope."

"And the police?"

I shrugged. "They turn a blind eye. The meds are running out."

She grinned, shaking her head in amused wonder. "You know, that pragmatism's what I love about Europeans. None of that puritan bullshit we're brought up with."

"Would you dine with me this evening?" I asked. "I cook."

She appraised me, one eyebrow slightly arched, a quick twitch of the lips that I took for amused anticipation. She nodded once. I signaled for the check.

One the way back, we passed a suicide. A blue Mercedes stood angled in the middle of the road, its hood slightly creased, the driver's door wide; one headlamp was smashed, the top of the windshield lightly sheened with blood. The body lay a dozen feet away.

Several witnesses had seen the man throw himself in front of the car moments earlier.

Back in the shelter of my apartment, I poured us a couple of stiff Ouzos. The long walk had sharpened our appetites; the drink unwound our nerves. We lit candles, a merry light, placing them about the kitchen counter and on my small pine dining table. I set two places and took salad, bread, a bowl of olives, and a hunk of feta to the table.

We were both still thinking about the suicide we'd seen. Commonplace or not, this was the first time either of us had witnessed one. "Why would anyone want to become one of them?" asked Marie.

I sat across from her and motioned to the food. "I'm afraid we're going to see a lot more people choosing that option as the meds run out. Are you on them?"

"Low dose. I've got a couple of weeks' supply left. After that, I might have to go for the opium." She giggled, a little drunk, then turned thoughtful. "Death on its own, I can handle. Tel Aviv was good training. Being close to them is what scares me."

"The field." I refilled our glasses. "After several days with Joe around, I became less sensitive to it. But it was still unpleasant."

I was clearing the table when I felt her touch my arm, hooking a finger through the knotted green ribbon, and saw the look in her eyes. Her lips parted as I bent to kiss her, and she was in my arms, alive, warm, trembling with need and desire.

#

Sometime during that night, tracing a finger lazily around my chest, she asked, without looking at me: "Did you ever see your own death, soldier?"

The unexpected question was past my sleepy defenses before I could I challenge it.

"Yes," I replied.

And I'm back in the customs shed on the Mano River, the air thick with the smell of burnt cereals and charred burlap from the grenade which has exploded among the sacks of grain piled against the back wall. A sheetmetal symphony reverberates in my skull, dust and gray smoke layer the still air. Xavier is crumpled in a corner like a squashed spider, half his head and one arm blown away. Shouted orders and the slap-slap-slap of bare feet outside.

"Sometimes I almost. . . " I heard myself begin; Marie's finger paused its doodling on my chest.

I shook my head, eyes squeezed tight.

And I'm on my feet, moving as the door flies open, hell pouring from the M16 in my hands, and then it's quiet again. I step over the two dead men in the doorway into a world drenched in sun.

"Almost what?" she said.

I shook my head again.

We lay quiet for a time; eventually, I heard Marie's breathing settle into the slow cadences of sleep, and followed her to that place.

She left her hotel the next day and moved in with me. We were both lonely and neither of us had anything to lose.

#

The dead kept coming, lots of Africans and Asians, respecting the world's demographics but not its geography. In late October, we decided to leave the city. With growing shortages, stores closing, and a steady exodus of its population, the government was passing emergency laws to retake national control. It wouldn't be long before things became ugly: as Marie'd said, you get a nose for these things.

After a little debate, we decided to make for Italy, since both of us had friends in Rome. And once in Western Europe, the US was a lot closer if we decided to return.

Monday morning I went to the bank. As soon as I saw the line outside, I knew I hadn't moved fast enough, and cursed myself for a fool. Between drink and infatuation, I'd been too self-absorbed to see it coming. Some security expert.

Inside, there was shouting and frustration. A pair of armed guards by the door looked on nervously. When I reached the desk, the harassed teller looked at me with forced patience. "I'm sorry, Mister Schroeder, but it is not possible to close your account. We are under government order which limits any one week withdrawal to one thousand Euros."

"Even for foreign nationals? There's thirty thousand and some Euros in my account, and you're telling me I can't withdraw it?"

"I can give you one thousand Euros only."

The manager was no more help. The government was trying to stop a run on the banks, he explained, adding that I was fortunate to have my money in the largest bank in Greece. "Everywhere our offices are still working, even on the islands. We have robust old-style systems, actually telex, now in place. Your money is safer here than in America, Mister Schroeder."

Marie was halfway through packing when I returned home with my thousand Euros. "Don't worry about it" she said.

I stared at her. "Don't worry about it? I can't leave all that money here! At least not without cashing out some of it. If we leave, it's gone for sure."

"It's only money." She went on packing.

"Marie, it's everything I have." It was true: my retirement funds back home were almost certainly worthless.

"Okay. So we stay in Greece, only not in Athens, a few more weeks, maybe a couple of months. See if the banking system holds up. Maybe you can pull a few thousand out."

I considered that. It might. The international lines, dependent on more sensitive comm networks, were toast, but the domestic phone system was proving remarkably resilient. And the government, through some byzantine barter deal with Turkey and Iran, was doing a good job of keeping the power grid up.

"The islands, then," I suggested, "the northern ones. We could rent a place with some land, and farm; we can fish. What about it?"

#

There were still buses running an irregular schedule from the Liosion Avenue station. After a sleepless night sharing a bench, we boarded a dust-streaked old beast of a Mercedes bound for the port city of Volos, some three hundred kilometers north of the capital. The driver's uniform jacket didn't conceal the bulge under his left arm. Sign of the times.

Several people tried to board with house spooks attached, and arguments broke out when the driver insisted they pay a fare for the spook as well. A few seats were already occupied by the dead; the air prickled with field-feeling.

The bus filled, people choosing to stand rather than sit next to the dead, until the driver threatened to throw them off unless they took the vacant seats.

Marie was asleep before we'd gone a mile. The increasingly ramshackle Athens suburbs were deserted except for the spooks and an occasional cat or half-starved dog. Many stores had been looted, even those which the owners had left shuttered and boarded, and there were no cops to be seen anywhere.

Monrovia, Sarajevo, Port-au-Prince. Manila. Dili.

Memories of other sad suburbs and boarded-up buildings, each with its parade of ghosts, black, white, and brown, crowded in on me. Men I'd fought with, men I'd killed. Blood and stench, and women crying. Always the crying.

We barreled along empty highways. I saw a few trucks, mostly heading back toward Athens; now and then we'd pass a tank or army vehicle. It began raining an hour after we left.

One of the spooks on board stood and walked across the aisle and straight out the side of the bus, passing right through an elderly woman who gurgled in horror, crossing herself and shrinking back against her seat. I dozed.

#

A number of passengers got off the bus at Lamia, including those across the aisle from us. Just three boarded for the final leg to Volos, including an old man with a brown, billiard-ball head and a limp. He scowled at the spooks two rows ahead and sat near us. As the bus edged back onto the road, he struck up a conversation with us. Between my halting Greek, his bits and pieces of English, and the smattering of French he and Marie shared, we managed a lively exchange.

Elias turned out to be quite a character. Seventy-three years old, he'd done a spell in the merchant navy as a youth before settling down to farm his father's land in the hills north of Volos. His wife had recently died, leaving him alone on the farm. His son lived with his family in Hong Kong. "Is banker, very busy. He travel a lot, visit before, much visit. Now. . ." he made a gesture of resignation. "Impossible visit." He brightened. "And you? Why go Volos?"

We explained that we thought the islands might be a good place to ride out whatever storm was coming. He considered this. "You like work? Farm? You are strong?"

I flexed a bicep and pointed at it. We laughed.

"You come work my farm," he said. "I have olives, fruits, sheeps, goats. Stay in the small house. You like, you make baby there, okay?"

My mouth opened to speak but I hadn't any words ready, so I turned to Marie. She was trying hard not to laugh.

#

Elias's land probably ran to some hundred-plus acres, about a third of which was given over to plum orchards and olive groves, with the rest serving as pasture for the grazing animals. There was a vegetable garden outside the kitchen. Ancient fig trees grew here and there, and wild oregano sprouted in the rocky outcrops. Elias kept a few beehives, as well as a horse and a pair of donkeys. A few hens provided fresh eggs.

The work was arduous but satisfying, the steady rhythms of nature restoring structure and meaning to my life. We got up with the sun, breakfasted on bread and honey and feta, and milked the goats and ewes. Once a week we loaded up the donkeys with cheese and milk and walked the six kilometers to the market in the northern suburbs of the city, the only time we saw much of the dead. We'd pass by the bank and I'd collect my weekly thousand. Marie was happy, the meds no longer needed. In the evenings we'd eat and drink with Elias, then retire to the little stone cottage by the stable yard.

One evening during our third week, Elias brought out a small wooden chest and set it on the dining table before us. His treasure chest of memories. "My parents," he announced, setting the first of a sheaf of grainy black-and-white photos before us, "the days of their marriage. This" -- he indicated the cottage in the background -- "is house you stay in. My father build with his hands in nineteens fifty-one. Died twenty years ago." He laid down another picture. "Last year died my wife, you know this. Died, but now who knows if died? You are afraid of this, Tom, Marie? Never I was afraid to die. Now. . ." he grimaced, perhaps to stop the words forming. "Now I am afraid."

"Did any of them ever come back?" I asked.

The old man raised his chin, tutting once and closing his eyes, the Greek 'no'. "Never, no one spirit come. Even in this old farm."

#

On our fourth trip into town we heard that one of the other farmers had been robbed and killed by bandits. After dinner that night Elias laid a long canvas bundle on the table and unwrapped an elderly but well-stored SKS carbine, complete with bayonet and cleaning rod. With the muzzle pointed upward, he worked the bolt. Satisfied that it was unloaded, he handed it to me.

I checked the chromed bore and eased the bolt forward. "Russian?" I asked, sighting on the hatstand in the hallway.

"Romanian. Also I have balls."

Marie laughed. "Yeah, you've got those okay, Elias," She put an arm around his shoulder, "but I think you mean bullets."

The old man grinned fiercely. "Bullet, yes. Many boxes." He took back the weapon and slapped the stock. "Next week, we take."

#

One morning, as Marie and I were milking the ewes, I saw Marie staring up the hill. "Jesus," she muttered, "I wish they'd disappear, stay dead, damn them."

A couple of hundred yards away, three spooks, one trailing the other two, tramped steadily along the path through the olive grove, arms hanging at their sides, staring straight ahead.

It was only after we'd worked through a couple more of the ewes that I realized something was nagging at me. I stood and stared. The three had been heading toward the house. And they were no longer in sight. Three men. I turned to Marie, but she'd seen my look and read my thoughts. "Shit," I said.

She rose, knocking the stool over. "Tom -- "

"Stay here." I took off at a run for the house.

Elias slept with the loaded carbine by his bed, and I wouldn't want to be the one to surprise him. Hammering uphill, I expected any moment to hear the shot ring out, but quiet reigned as I neared the house. The cold air burned in my chest as I sprinted around the stable. Just three spooks, I told myself, and then I saw the wide open door and the figure in the dim kitchen beyond, back turned. I skidded to a halt and ducked to the side of the doorway. Three. One in sight. I was unarmed; there were hammers and iron tools in the stable, but one of these jerks could be entering Elias's room now. Go for it and rely on surprise.

I was in the door and on top of the man in the kitchen almost before he knew it. I slammed the heel of my hand against his ear and he went down without a sound. Young, twenty at most. Then a creak on the landing above, and I pressed myself flat against the wall as someone came down the stair, leisurely. "Stavro!" he called, "ndaxi." It's alright.

The big man stepped off the bottom step and I took him with a punch full in the face. He staggered back but kept his balance, and to my horror I saw that he carried Elias's carbine in his right hand. He was quick. I saw the glint as he swung the muzzle up, but he'd been cradling the weapon and his finger wasn't near the trigger. Out of time, he dropped his left hand down to the muzzle and swung the butt at my face like a club as I came at him. I jerked my head to the side, felt the rush of air by my ear as he caught my collar a numbing blow an instant before my knuckles smashed into his windpipe and my knee into his groin. I snatched the rifle and ran up the stairs as he choked his life out.

Elias lay in his blood-soaked bed, his throat cut, the room turned upside down. I heard Marie calling my name outside, a short distance. I cursed. Where was the third one?

I smashed the rifle butt through the window and shouted to Marie -- nowhere in sight -- to stay under cover. I checked the other bedroom, then ran downstairs and out into the yard. Nobody. The third one had to be in the cottage, and pray Marie hadn't gone in there. I was halfway across the yard when a man ran out of the cottage clutching my duffel bag. I shouted at him to stop and raised the carbine. He screamed something at me, started for the corner of the building, and I shot him. A second later Marie came running around the same corner. She was okay. I was too, except for a searing pain spreading along my left shoulder and up my neck from the blow I'd received.

"Elias?" she asked.

I shook my head slowly. "There's one of them out cold in the kitchen." I started back. "Stay close behind me."

But the kid was gone. I ran to the back door, found it open. The kid was about fifty yards away, managing only an unsteady trot after my blow to his ear. I shouted at him to stop and fired a shot in the air, but he kept going. I lowered the rifle and sighted on him.

"Tom, no!" Marie shouted, "He's running away! There's no need!"

I hesitated, the running figure full in my sights, the heavy trigger under pressure. He was just a kid. But he might come back. "No!" Marie repeated, "for God's sake, Tom, no more death! No more!"

And maybe she was right. Maybe.

I relaxed the pressure on the trigger and slowly lowered the muzzle. Marie was crying. Overhead, a crow cawed.

#

It took two days to get things straightened out with the Volos police. The man who'd killed Elias had served time for burglary and manslaughter, which made what might have been a sticky situation for us -- two foreigners with Elias and two other dead locals to explain away -- rather easier to deal with.

Elias's will left everything to his son. We had the contact phone numbers for the son in Hong Kong, but the international lines were still down; the police promised to get a message routed through government channels.

The days that followed were hard. We buried the old man on the North side of the olive grove, next to his wife and father. We worked ferociously on both the house and the land. Our tenure had become suddenly insecure; though it seemed unlikely that the son in the Far East would rush back to reclaim the property, it was a possibility. Marie cried from time to time. Our lovemaking grew intense in proportion to the tragedy.

#

One cold, early morning down by the stream, we were helping a ewe with a difficult delivery when we felt it: a shiver, a flicker running through the whole of creation like someone walking quickly in front of a movie projector; a sense of the world turning inside-out; an impossible sound, the ripping apart of a universe, but soft, too terribly soft.

My blood froze. I turned to Marie, my hands still holding the ewe's legs, hers around the emerging lamb's slick hindquarters. She shook her head, frustrated. "Wait!" She tugged the lamb's other hind leg out. "I've almost got it." A moment later she eased the tiny lamb out with a wet pop. Marie, who rarely cursed, looked at me, bloodied hands unraveling the umbilical. "Holy shit! What the fuck happened just now?"

In the stable, the horse and donkeys were raising hell, neighing and braying and kicking at their stalls so that the building shook and rattled. It took us several minutes to calm them all down, talking softly at first, then stroking and brushing them until the tremors that raced and rippled below their skin slowed and stopped. We crossed to the house where, despite our sick dread, everything seemed normal. Marie threw dried fruit and cheese and a flask of water into a light pack; I shouldered the carbine and pocketed a handful of stripper clips, and we started off toward town to try to understand what had taken place.

An hour later we were approaching the point where the road from the farm joined the main road, when we heard the sound of raised voices ahead. We approached the bend in the road cautiously, unsure what to expect, and I carried the carbine at ready, muzzle down and safety off.

As we turned the corner, I barely glimpsed a crowd a dozen yards ahead when my insides clenched in a spasm of overpowering dread. My vision went black. I fell to my knees, retching. Marie moaned.

After a few moments the nausea receded and my sight returned.

Marie lay unconscious beside me. A simple faint; she was already coming around as I lifted her to a sitting position. I looked up, and the sheer surrealism of the scene, a fantasy from a studio lot during Hollywood's golden age, was enough to overcome my immediate physical distress.

A man in a ragged powder blue tunic and pale yellow hose who looked as though he was taking a break from a Robin Hood film was haranguing a lean, cross-eyed fellow in a tight pink Hussar uniform straight out of the Napoleonic wars; a group of wiry-haired aborigines squatted on the ground nearby, talking softly among themselves; four pale women in immaculate crinolines with parasols and button-down shoes were attempting to talk to a big, unkempt man who, in his furs and crude leather boots, might have been a Viking. Beyond them, other figures were coming our way from the direction of the town.

I dragged the flask from the pack with an effort and splashed water over my face, then handed it to Marie. The combined field from so many spooks together came at us in waves, an appallingly physical thing, motion sickness combined with the worst hangover imaginable.

We watched helplessly for some minutes as the weird crowd argued and carried on.

The aborigines got up and wandered off. The Victorian ladies gave up on the Viking and joined the Hussar instead. A few drab, nondescript Asians in loose clothes, Chinese, perhaps, tramped past and onward, uninterested in the noisy group.

Slowly, my nervous system settled to the point where I could function. I turned to Marie.

"Can you stand?" I asked.

She nodded, and I helped her do so. She gestured vaguely toward town, her face moon-white, and we edged unsteadily through the dead. Fighting the field-sickness, I tried to engage one of the Victorian women, who was speaking what sounded like a German dialect, but it was as if I didn't exist.

As we stumbled through the suburbs and into the city proper, pausing occasionally when the sickness grew too strong, the scene went from one of mere strangeness to full-blown chaos. History, it seemed, had vomited its full cast of characters into our world, a rowdy, jabbering crowd that outnumbered the living by an order of magnitude. Cavemen and Corinthians jostled Romans and renaissance courtesans in the streets and bars and on the waterfront by the bronze statue of the Argo. Who knew that Jason, the city's proudest son of old, might not himself be somewhere nearby?

Cries and curses and sobs, the sounds of the living, bled from open windows as we walked. A living priest, pale, black-robed, and grim, inclined his head and signed the cross at us, murmuring a brief benediction as he hurried past. In a spook-thronged square we stared in fascinated horror as a group of laughing children ran by, making up games around the dead. Neither of us spoke.

Drawn by the shouts, we came upon a full-blown fight down by the harbor: a score or so Wermacht soldiers were punching and wrestling several dozen tall blacks in loincloths, ghost pistols and assegais both evidently useless. There was no blood, but the blows brought cries of pain.

Marie's hand was tight on mine, her features rigid. "Something's snapped," she said. "A barrier between the worlds. If it's like this everywhere. . . "

I nodded. My head was bursting. "Let's get back."

#

The road home was busy as the dead took to exploring their surroundings, but the sickness fell away quickly once we left the spectral crowd in the city behind.

A group of paleolithic types were in Elias's orchard when we returned, and a pair of blonde women in pencil-line skirts and crisply starched white blouses, pool typists from the 1940s, maybe, appeared to have settled into the main house; the women spoke some Nordic tongue. We moved awkwardly around them in the kitchen while we assembled a crude dinner, draining a bottle of retsina in the process, then repaired to the back porch with food and a second bottle.

Marie was silent for a long time after we finished eating. The sun was sliding down the sky toward the low hills beyond the orchard, and the air was cooling.

"I don't know if I can do this, Tom." She swept an untidy bang from her face. "They're not going to go away, are they? Not these." She jerked a thumb back at the house. "I mean, all of them."

"Maybe not. You said something had broken between the worlds? It may be for good. We might have to live with this."

She reached for the bottle, refilled her glass, and stared a long time at it before speaking. I drained my own glass and she did the same.

"If everywhere is like Volos," she said, "there are billions and billions of them. Everyone who ever lived. I read an article once that speculated that could be over a hundred billion. What room does that leave for us?"

I remained silent, thinking. A hundred billion dead to six billion living.

"Once," she went on, "before all this started, USDA Vector Control tried to stop the spread of Mediterranean Fruit Fly in California by releasing millions of sterile medflies into the environment. The idea was to drastically dilute the population of the invaders so that it'd be virtually impossible for two fertile flies to mate."

I shook my head. "The living can still recognize one another."

"But psychically, emotionally, what's the outcome? We're sidelined, aren't we? It's not our world any more. We don't matter the way we did, and never will. They can't die, Tom, how could they? They'll always be there, always outnumber us."

I thought, it's worse than that: what happens when a person now living dies? Will the dead keep growing in number? I put my glass down on the step and stood. The air had become quite still.

"We don't have any choice." I remembered the lamb we'd helped deliver just hours ago, when our world ended. "Unless you're in a hurry to join them, we can only choose life. More than that, we have to promote life." I looked into the kitchen window. The women were out of sight, but I could hear the primitives chattering inside.

"You saw the kids playing in Volos. What was it Elias told us? You like, you stay, make babies, yes? That's what the world needs now, Marie. Children born into this, able to play the hand that's dealt them. A fresh start."

She snorted her irony. "Brave words, Tom. You might be strong enough. But the rest of us? Most people couldn't even deal with phase one of this mess without the meds, and you think we can stay sane enough to raise sane kids? Face it, Tom: we're fucked, gone, beat. Exeunt Omnes. Fade to black." She threw her glass into the shrubs, picked up the bottle, and drained that too. She turned to me, eyes shining, slid the hand holding the bottle around my neck, pressed her body tight to mine; her other hand went to my crotch. "No kids, okay?" she whispered, her lips brushing my neck; I felt myself getting hard. "Just fuck me instead."

#

I woke to an empty bed. When I saw the note, my gut twisted. It said:

I love you. We'd never said those words. Were we simply afraid, or was the sentiment somehow diminished in the absence of true death?

She'd taken one of the donkeys. I considered following her -- I was willing to bet she'd taken the West road, away from the town, and I could easily have overtaken her on the horse -- but decided against it. She had to find her own peace.

I had breakfast, said good morning to the cavemen in the living room, and went out onto the porch. The day was bright, with a warmer note to the air than on recent mornings.

I threw on a jacket and picked up the carbine; after a moment's thought, I unloaded it and locked it in a closet.

There were three bedrooms in the main house, two more rooms in the cottage. I could sleep at least eight besides myself, and maybe build on. There'd be families who couldn't cope, orphans and street kids.

I mounted the horse and took the road to Volos.

THE END