At the Robertaland plantation, the dead rise from the slave graveyard and head towards the Jackson house to demand their freedom. Meanwhile, Abby and the Swamp Thing, watching the entranced extras perform Voudoun rites, sense the growth of a malevolent presence. Abby spots Alice, now speaking in a nineteenth-century slave dialect, fretting about the wind having blown her salt pattern away.
As the Swamp Thing follows Alice, and Abby goes to evacuate the house, Charlotte/Angela weeps for the skinned but still-living William/Billy as Wesley/Richard orders her upstairs to greet their dinner guests. Their only guest, however, is Abby, who notices, as she tries to coax them outside, that the house is changing around her and that the actors are not themselves. Wesley/Richard, angry at the strange trouser-wearing woman for butting in, stabs Abby in the stomach with the knife he'd used to skin William/Billy. Then he goes outside to see what all the noise from the slaves/extras is about.
Elsewhere, Alice discovers the risen dead, and realizes that her salt-laying—apparently meant to keep them in their graves—has failed. She pleads with them to "go back to sleep" until Judgement Day. Then a voice calls her name, snapping her out of her trance. It's her father, who'd died when she was a little girl and whose impoverished family had buried him in the slave graveyard. She weeps over his having to see her "all ugly and old," but he tells her she's beautiful and invites her to join the awakened dead in demanding their freedom. The Swamp Thing, who's gone unnoticed, follows them to the house at a distance.
Inside, Abby suddenly realizes she isn't actually injured. She pulls the knife out and discovers it's a harmless stage knife with a retracting blade, and tries to convince Angela that Billy too is physically unharmed.
Wesley/Richard, armed with a working shotgun, orders the slaves/extras to stop their "devil worship" and go back to their quarters, or he'll open fire...just as he did "the last time this happened." He pauses, realizing that can't be right. Nevertheless, he recalls shooting a woman dead, whereupon the other slaves charged him and, once he'd run out of ammo, beat him to death. Wesley/Richard freezes in confusion, until the risen slaves arrive and Alice's father, followed by the Swamp Thing, implore him to break the cycle of hatred. Wesley/Richard, taking the Swamp Thing for a "juju" creature, shoots him, just as Abby emerges with Angela and Billy. As Abby looks on at his fallen, burning body, Wesley/Richard fires on the crowd, and Alice's father notes that the cycle has begun again.
Just then, the Swamp Thing gets up and, still blazing, declares he won't allow the horror to continue, and goes inside the house to burn it down, ignoring Wesley/Richard running inside in a panicked attempt to stop him.
Abby waits patiently for the fire to die down and her lover to grow another body. When he does, she tells him she's called an ambulance for those actors and crew who are still in shock (including the director, though Alice is back to normal) and feels that most of them will be okay, with the notable exception of Richard, who remained possessed to the end and burned to death. Meanwhile, Angela, now herself again, cradles and comforts Billy, who's still stunned and hallucinating that he's been skinned. Addressing him as "my love," she promises to stay by his side.
As they leave the estate, the Swamp Thing asks whether all the risen dead were destroyed along with Richard. Abby is unsure, but can't imagine where else they'd have gone. Sure enough, some of the undead have managed to escape, including a group who go joyriding in a camera truck, crash it into a post, and walk away laughing. That night, in Springville, Arkansas, a mysterious figure takes a job as a ticket-seller for a twenty-four hour horror cinema, assuring the manager he's unconcerned about pay and having to spend long periods in the box without a break. The manager is happy to have such an undemanding, servile employee...until he sees how eerily content the man—now revealed as Alice's father—looks, sitting in "my box."
Tropes
- The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People: Angela, in her final speech, demonstrates that she—not Charlotte, but she herself—has, as a result of the disaster, not only cast off her former racist attitude, but also come to love the man she once despised.
- Back from the Dead: The risen slaves and their (non-slave) spokesperson, Alice's father.
- Call-Back: Abby says she feels a "clamminess" in the air, which reminds her of the night they fought the Monkey King.
- Fire Purifies: The Swamp Thing stops the cyclic horror by burning the house down.
- Flaying Alive: Subverted. Unlike William in the past, Billy Carlton hasn't really been skinned, but he (along with the similarly-possessed Richard and, at least initially, Angela) thinks he has been.
- Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!: The risen slaves demand their freedom. If, says their spokesperson, Wesley won't grant it, they're willing to repeat that night's tragic outcome for as long as it takes.
- History Repeats: The Robertaland spirits possess the living in order to re-enact the violence there until someone or something breaks the cycle.
- Let the Past Burn: The Swamp Thing decides the only way to stop the Robertaland tragedy from repeating itself is to burn down the house at its heart. As in many instances of this trope, the possessed Richard burns with it; unlike Angela he was unable to shake off the past's hold on him.
- Revenant Zombie: The Robertaland zombies, unlike most contemporary versions of the zombie motif, aren't infectious, mindless monsters, but human beings with diverse, relatable motivations. (At least one of them, Alice's father, can speak articulately.) Nor are they interested in eating the brains of the living.Some wanted a job, and a home, and a right to vote. Some of the women wanted new clothes and some of the men joked about that. As always, there was an unimaginative majority who only wanted revenge...But they all wanted liberty.
- Shout-Out: The issue title references the Abel Meeropol anti-lynching poem "Strange Fruit," best known in its Protest Song version sung by Billie Holiday.
- Slave Liberation: In 1842, Wesley Jackson's slaves rose up against him when he shot one of them dead, and killed him in turn. In 1985, the Swamp Thing, by burning down the haunted plantation house, frees the spirits of slaveowner and slave alike from the cycle of violence which had enslaved them. And the surviving undead slaves free themselves from the plantation.
- Soul Crushing Retail Job: Subverted. Alice's father is just fine with selling tickets in a tiny box for hours on end with no break ("All week...if you like"), because he's used to spending ages in another sort of box. He's so happy to have a box of his own again that he doesn't care about the (presumably minimum-wage) pay. His new boss says he appreciates his not "whining about conditions or union stuff." The implication is that such dead-end, unfulfilling, exploitative jobs as this are the modern-day equivalent of slavery.
