Nine o'clock: a quiet cemetery, badly kept, nothing doing.
Nine-oh-four: the sky opens up green and down they come, jars and all, beaming their beam and expecting gratitude.
Nine-oh-six: the dead get up.
Nine-oh-seven — and this is where the visiting scientists lost the thread — the dead keep coming. Up out of the sod in ones and twos and then in a great heaving wave of them, mud-caked, patient, absolutely uncountable, walking straight toward the light because the light is interesting.
There is no order to give. There is no one to give it to.
The last transmission off that saucer was a single word, and it was not in English, and it was not brave.
