Zombie Bombs
by Mike Allen and Ian Watson

Now they fall in clusters,
sticky masses of squirming black
titanic insects' egg sacs
that plummet past the towers,
splatter in the streets to spew
cores of moving dead,
those not shredded on impact
crawl from the red pulp,
often too broken to stand,
lifting their softened heads
to quest for us in some way
we cannot understand.

At first they fell in ones and twos, these sacs,
and emergency services
could cope, medics striving to
assist just as at a plane crash.
But soon volunteers were shoveling
squirming protoplasm into trucks.
Some helpers were engulfed, suffocated.
The rain of living dead
increased, burst and broken, unable
to die. The army brought flame-throwers.
Did the steam scream?

No sonic booms annouced the bombings.
I remember
the first time I saw a ship,
a dark movement in the sky
like a whale's lumpy back breaking
an ocean surface turned upside down;
then gone. Moments later bodies burst,
limbs writhed on lawns, roofs, driveways.
When mobile flesh began to push
against my front door, I nailed
towels in place. On TV soon:
skyfalls in Japan, India, Brazil...

Will we invent matter transmitters
and fill interspace with echo-copies
which enraged aliens cleanse thus?
Will aliens decide to genocide us --
doubly, by dumping upon the past?
Is this merely the garbage collection
of overpopulation from future Earth-hive?

If many realities exist, ours is chosen
as a necro-dump, while brighter timelines
sail onward blithely. Or may this be
the Second Coming of everyone who ever lived,
a Devilish miracle? For God has died
and now an even greater blackness
bloats the sky. The living dead are voiceless.

How desperately I wished they would speak,
my own throat closed in breathless fear
at what they might say -- or what story
I might tell. For by ghastly "luck"
while watching the latest horrors
from Mexico, a news camera zoomed close
and I saw my own fouled gasping face:

same brown eyes, same eyebrow scar,
beard grayer, thinner. My hand groped
toward the newsman; on my ring finger
I recognized my widower's band.
I can't get to Mexico in time
to stop myself from being burned,
bulldozed, buried. If I could,
if I stared into my own ruined face,
could I unstop my throat to scream:
How and when will I fall from the sky?