"Ashes, Ashes..." by Kelsey M. Graham

Bird sat in the blackened remnants of her home, listlessly gathering handfuls of ash, only to let the wind take it from her cupped hands as her eyes stared blankly into the sun. Dust to Dust, Ashes to Ashes… In the distance, she could hear the hash clang of a bell, and the monotonous “Bring out the dead” of the Dead-collectors. When the madness had first begun, the words had been accompanied by loud weeping and wailing. Now it was silent save for the groans of the dying. No one had the energy to care anymore. Bird licked her lips, tasting dust. Their fault. she thought. Their fault. If they had only listened to her…
Bird glanced over her shoulder. “What’s so funny?” she cried, shaking her ash-smeared fist at the skeleton that stood beside her. The skull only grinned mockingly. The cadavers walked through the town, seen only be the dead and dying. At night they danced on the hills to unheard drums and tambourines, laughing silently at an unknown joke as the living groaned. Fear was no longer just in the darkness, it had spread, so that even in the harsh light of the afternoon it stalked, its full terror unveiled for all to see. Bird had first seen them one day, that awful day, when the exhausted, sick stranger had collapsed in the middle of the town square. She had told her parents not to let him stay, not to touch him, to throw him out to die. But her parents had silenced her, and the townsfolk called her a witch, and the skeletons had grinned with glee. And the dance began. Only she saw the flower-bedecked skeletons dancing away the night, to the music of clicking bone and death-rattles. Sometimes she wondered what folly of man they laughed ceaselessly at- what it was about this macabre spectacle that they found so amusing.

She knew that she would learn soon enough. That morning, she had found the tell-tale rash on her arms and legs, felt her gums begin to swell and bleed. She would soon dance up on the hill, with a shroud of stars.