Christmas With the Dead Read Free

down.
    As if it mattered, as he wheeled out of
the lot, he tossed up his hand in a one finger salute.
     
    * * *
     
    “They were so pretty,” Ella had said
about the lightning flashes.
    She had awakened him as he lay snoozing
on the couch.
    “They were red and yellow and green and
blue and all kinds of colors,” Tina said. “Come on, daddy, come see.”
    By the time he was there, the strange
lightning storm was gone. There was only the rain. It had come out of nowhere,
caused by who knew what. Even the rain came and went quickly; a storm that
covered the earth briefly, flashed lights, spit rain, and departed.
    When the rain stopped, the people who had
observed the colored lightning died, just keeled over.
Ella and Tina among them, dropped over right in the living room on Christmas
Eve, just before presents were to be opened.
    It made no sense. But that’s what
happened.
    Then, even as he tried to revive them,
they rose.
    Immediately, he knew they weren’t right.
It didn’t take a wizard to realize that. They came at him, snarling, long strings of mucus flipping from their mouths like rabid
dog saliva. They tried to bite him. He pushed them back, he called their names,
he yelled, he pleaded, but still they came,
biting and snapping. He stuck a couch cushion in Ella’s mouth. She grabbed it
and ripped it. Stuffing flew like a snow storm. And he ran.
    He hid in the bedroom, locked the door,
not wanting to hurt them. He heard the others, his neighbors, outside, roaming
around the house. He looked out the window. There were people all over the back
yard, fighting with one another, some of them living, trying to survive, going down beneath teeth and nails. People like him, who for
some reason had not seen the weird storm. But the rest were dead. Like his wife
and daughter. The lights of the storm had stuck something behind their eyes
that killed them and brought them back—dead, but walking, and hungry.
    Ella and Tina pounded on his bedroom door
with the intensity of a drum solo. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam,
bam. He sat on the bed for an hour, his hands over his ears, tears
streaming down his face, listening to his family banging at the door, hearing
the world outside coming apart.
    He took a deep breath, got the shotgun
out of the closet, made sure it was loaded, opened the bedroom door.
    It was funny, but he could still remember
thinking as they went through the doorway, here’s my gift to you. Merry Christmas, family. I love you.
    And then two shots.
    Later, when things had settled, he had
managed, even in the midst of a zombie take over, to take their bodies to the
dumpster, pour gas on them, and dispose of them as best he could. Months later,
from time to time, he would awaken, the smell of their burning flesh and the
odor of gasoline in his nostrils.
    Later, one post at a time, fighting off
zombies as he worked, he built his compound to keep them out, to give him a
yard, a bit of normalcy.
     
    * * *
     
    Calvin looked in the rear view mirror. His
forehead was beaded with sweat. He was still wearing the Santa hat. The
snowball on its tip had fallen onto the side of his face. He flipped it back,
kept driving.
    He was almost home when he saw the dog
and saw them chasing it. The dog was skinny, near starved, black and white
spotted, probably some kind of hound mix. It was running all out, and as it was
nearing dark, the pace of the zombies had picked up. By deep night fall, they
would be able to move much faster. That dog was dead meat.
    The dog cut out into the road in front of
him, and he braked. Of the four zombies chasing the dog, only one of them
stopped to look at him. The other three ran on.
    Calvin said, “Eat bumper,” gassed the
truck into the zombie who had stopped to stare, knocking it under the pickup.
He could hear it dragging underneath as he drove. The other zombies were
chasing the dog down the street, gaining on it; it ran with its tongue hanging
long.
    The dog swerved off the road and jetted
between