Picture a lonely human, sleeping fitfully atop a cold marble slab in an alien cemetery, his dreams threaded by a night-long threnody of the undead – a crooning zombie serenade.

How restful would you find that, after a long hard day getting pummeled by bourgeois werewolves, seeing your comrades snatched away by cloaked figures in the night, and then losing even the distant comfort of contact with your starship, orbiting far overhead?

Would your slumber be fitful? Disturbed… on this night of the living dead?

Not mine. For the rest of that long first night on Oxytocin 41, I slept like… well… the dead… somehow knowing that my new friends – Moulder and Sully – would guard me until dawn. Protecting the most precious thing that I had left. Something the two of them no longer possessed.

Life.

The next morning’s weather was “perfect” for my kindly hosts. Dank, chilly and overcast, but not too humid. An ideal sort of day for “recents” – the newly risen dead – to stroll into town.

We had to wait, of course, for the great Zombie Conclave to break up, after that strangely stirring nightlong dirge. The (literally) haunting harmonies at last began to fade, along with the brittle constellations, when a pale morning glow spread in the east. Gradually, through a predawn mist, shambling figures could be seen descending through the graveyard, returning to tombs and crypts and cenotaphs, then pulling shut their hinged lids, leaving behind a trampled slope scattered with various organs, limbs and other fallen parts, twitching, then dissolving into sludge and vapor.

A few of the oldest walking cadavers – nearly fleshless and evidently confused – wandered past the tombstones and monuments, moaning softly as they meandered toward the dim city skyline, heedless of a mine field that lay in the way, just short of the town wall. A staccato of muffled explosions made me wince. But Moulder, the male Zoom who had befriended me last night, grunted with satisfaction each time a detonation resonated through the rows of tombs.

“That’s how I plan to move on, when the time is ripe,” he commented. “With a bang. None of that soul-o whimpering for me!”

A final coffin lid slammed shut, even as the mist condensed into swirls and then clouds that drifted upward, revealing the resplendent skyscraper towers of a city that had been named – until yesterday – Cal’mari. In this light, the metropolis looked pretty typical for a Stage Eighteen world… only with some unique features. For example, a maze of netting – like spiderwebs – making it next to impossible for any creature (alive or undead) to fly between most buildings. One of many defensive measures erected by the planet’s living population, I supposed. Perhaps paranoid… but understandable, given what I had learned so far.