The Undead That Saved Christmas Vol. 2 (12 page)

“But I’d like one more carol

Before we go down!”

The zombies were inching

Getting ready for a fight;

When our voices sang steady

Of that first…
Silent Night
.

We sang to the rooftops

We sang to the rafter;

Not caring a whit

For what might happen… after.

I waited each minute

For a crunch or a bite;

For the gnawing to start

On this
non
-Silent night.

But the zombies stood still

And drooled on their feet;

As our singing and caroling

To them was... quite sweet.

The song it did end

And the zombies all clapped;

Sue Briggs tried to run –

In no time she was trapped.

Before we could sing

Before we could try;

They ripped her to pieces

And sucked her bones dry.

We all stood there trembling

As they wallowed in gore;

Until I haltingly suggested

That we best sing…
one more
!

With each Christmas carol

The zombies they sighed;

But each time we stopped

The next caroler died!

We sang and we sang

That long Christmas day;

Until the last zombie

Just… drifted away.

“We still have three songs left,”

The last caroler said.

Then I looked all around

To find my friends… dead.

The street was quite empty

The town deadly still;

I stepped on a finger

It gave me a chill!

I wandered for hours

Until it was night;

And found no survivors

Nope, not one in sight.

On the far edge of town

I heard quite a grumbling;

Like the groaning and retching

Of a hundred stomachs rumbling.

I still had my elf cap

Fixed tight to my head;

As I approached the zombie gathering

With fear and with dread.

They stood there and waited

Gore stuck in their teeth;

As I crept up toward them

As neat as a thief.

I stood there before them

And sang
Oh, Christmas Tree
;

Though each inch of my body

Wanted to flee.

They smiled and shuffled

They burped and passed gas;

But no mattered how hard I tried

They would
not
let me pass.

I settled in and gave them

The show of the year;

Grinning and smiling

In spite of my fear.

Their bellies were hungry

But the carols were soothing;

Even if my neighbors’ bones

They were chomping and toothing.

I wasn’t afraid

Oh no sir, not me;

I sang without falter

I sang loud… with glee.

I knew I’d be safe

From this living dead throng;

At least until I came

To the very last song…

Story Art Cover

By Mark Pascale

www.tvboardz.com

Dedication

For my brother Jay, and for Samantha

Author Bio

Jamie Freeman
(
www.jamiefreeman.net
) is a part-time writer with a full-time day job. He dabbles in genre fiction (horror, scifi, erotica and romance), reads obsessively, knows every musical theater lyric ever written, and watches more movies in a year than he can count. He has an empathic younger brother with whom he shares an eerie psychic link.

Zombies We Have Heard on High

By Jamie Freeman

When my father won his second Oscar, he started building Shangri La.

When people at cocktail parties asked him where it was, he would tell them, “Shangri La lies at the end of a long, unmarked road.” He liked the vaguely allegorical nature of the response. It was good acting, he once said. Could mean one thing, but maybe also means another.

He won the Oscar playing a white supremacist named Eli Turner who built a compound in the Rocky Mountains where he planned to wait out the coming race war. Dad received the kind of universal acclaim that’ll get you one-to-one odds in Vegas and precipitate a pre-Oscar shower of second-tier gold statuettes. But the thing about the movie that changed my father was not the Oscar or incredible spike in his subsequent paychecks, but the research he did for the role. My mother always called him the last of the red hot method actors. She learned to act standing in front of her bedroom mirror and practicing poses and faces. I’m not knocking her method—she had an Oscar and three nominations of her own—but my father took the craft seriously and she liked to have fun. He spent a year living with various survivalist groups out in the wilds of Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. He cut himself off from the family and the world and submerged himself in race hatred, paramilitary organizations, anti-government activities, Jesus Christ, and a messianic leader named Daniel Walker. And when he came stumbling out of the desert he turned in the greatest performance of his career.

He always used to say he played with whole movie with his eyes, and I think if you’ve seen it, you probably know what he’s talking about.

But he never got back to normalcy. His year in the wilderness made him scared and wary, both of the government and of those who opposed it. He became convinced there would eventually be a showdown between the forces of chaos and the U.S. government and he wanted to be prepared.

So still flying high on the Oscar updraft he accepted four throw-away action films that netted him $120 Million, and he began construction of Shangri La. Shangri La was to be a self-contained, self-sustaining fortress in the Rocky Mountains that could support the extended family and a group of key friends and colleagues when the Christian Soldiers started firebombing schools and synagogues, or when the government started rounding up political activists.

The first part of the master plan involved the construction of an enormous fortified house with a commanding view, perched atop Mount Plenitude. The unmarked road down into the valley twisted back and forth in front of the house—well within range of the armaments that would eventually top the trio of towers. Beneath the house was a tunnel that connected the exterior compound to a vast space built inside the mountain. A series of cavernous rooms laid out like a small village with cavernous storerooms, living spaces, a gym, an Olympic swimming pool; it would have been like the lair of a Bond villain … if had been completed. The main house—with walls that surrounded a trio of cottages, rows of garages, stables, greenhouses, and an indoor arena space—was completed in 2010. The tunnel was completed the same year. The excavation of the cavern began in January 2011 and continued until the week before Thanksgiving, when the workers were given two weeks to spend with their families.

And suddenly things changed.

* * *

There are days people remember forever, days they carry around with them whether they want to or not. Think of them as the collective emotional baggage of a generation. My mother used to tell my brother A.J. and me about being home sick from school the day Kennedy was shot. She was lying on the living room sofa when a neighbor came over and told her mother to turn on the television. She always got teary-eyed and distant when she talked about it.

“Something just broke,” A.J. would say.

I share most of my own historical baggage with A.J. because we are always together when things break.

On an otherwise ordinary January day when I was sixteen, I remember hearing A.J. having a fit in the hallway outside my trigonometry class. He was sobbing and I could hear his quavering voice, so I got up and, despite my teacher’s objections, stepped out into the hallway. A.J.’s teacher, Miss Alyson, was trying to calm him but he was just big enough, even at fourteen, to overwhelm her. He was sobbing—snot running down his face—and when he looked at me he said, “Is it true them people died?”

I looked at Miss Alyson and she said, “The shuttle.” I stared at her for a long time before I realized what she must be saying.

“What?” I still asked the question, still wanted her to say it out loud, to make it feel real.

“
Challenger
exploded and we were watching it on television. I tried to calm him down, but he said he had to ask you…” She went on and on, spilling out all of her bottled-up anxiety about the shuttle and her students. A.J. was standing there listening to her, wringing his fingers and sobbing.

“It’s true, A.J.,” I said. “And it’s a terrible thing, but we’re gonna be strong right now. Okay?”

He took an enormous, ragged breath and nodded his head.

“And when they have the funeral, then you can cry all that out.”

He looked at me with round, terrified eyes.

“Okay?” I said.

“Okay, Jackie.” And he put out a chubby hand to Miss Alyson and let her lead him back to his class.

Sometimes A.J. still talks about that day, obliquely, as if the memory is now disconnected from the overwhelming wellspring of grief that engulfed him that day. “It sure was sad when them people in the shuttle got killed.” And I nod and say, “It sure was sad.”

On September 11, 2001 A.J. was living in an upscale group home a few blocks from the Palm Beach house where I was living on and off with our globe-trotting parents. I awoke late, stumbling through a hangover towards the television and watching the second plane rocket into the South Tower. I picked up the phone and called the group home. The house manager said he was sobbing and running up and down the hallways calling my name. By the time I got there, he was choking on his sobs and whispering, “the people, the people” over and over again. It took me a while to talk him down. When he finally stopped sobbing and hiccoughing, he whispered, “There are giants in the sky, Jackie.”

Some generations end up carrying more baggage than others.

And the worst days always seem to descend through blue, cloudless skies.

Thanksgiving 2011 was like that: cold, but clear and beautiful. It had stopped snowing and the wind turbines on the mountain were running at full capacity, giving us enough electricity to power the compound and store some for later. We were getting a clear satellite feed of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which A.J. had been anticipating for weeks.

Only a few people were left at Shangri La: Uncle Danny, who was overseeing the construction; Aunt Holly and her partner Belle; Anna, my mother’s housekeeper, who had pretty much raised me and A.J. during my parents’ frequent absences; Bo and his wife Tamika, who ran the stables and the greenhouses; A.J. and me. My mother and her P.A. Clover were in Cairo filming the latest Bond movie and my father and his P.A. Mitchell were in Munich making a corporate training film for Siemens.

I awoke to the sound of A.J. singing along with the cast of a Broadway show called
Memphis
. He has always collected cast albums and he knows every lyric from every song from every show ever recorded. He’s not technically a savant, but he’s definitely got his areas of expertise. Sadly, he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

“Dude, you’re killing me with that wailing,” I said, walking into the living room with a mug of coffee and dropping onto the sofa beside him.

He laughed and said, “You always say that.”

“Maybe,” I said, blowing on the coffee and watching the dancers struggle against the wind.

Holly was sitting in an overstuffed armchair reading a paperback mystery. She glanced up over the top of her half-frame readers and winked at me.

Thanksgiving smells wafted in from the kitchen: cinnamon, apples, cranberries, bacon, maple, and coffee. I was pretty sure I was in heaven.

The parade meandered past as I downed one, then another cup of coffee. I was starting to feel the fog of morning lift when I heard A.J. say, “I don’t like this one.”

I glanced up at the screen. It took me a minute to process what I was seeing.

On the street in front of Macy’s the cast of
American Idiot
was being physically attacked by about three dozen onlookers. Was it a political thing? Tea Partiers attacking a bunch of grungy, artsy hippies? I moved closer to get a better look. The camera zoomed in on a gray-faced female attacker biting into the neck of a screaming dark-haired boy, ripping and tearing his flesh with her teeth, snapping tendons and splashing blood on the pavement.

“Oh, my god.” Anna was standing in the doorway wiping her hands on her
Sweeney Todd
apron. Belle stepped up behind her and her face grew pale and slack.

A.J. still thought it was part of the show, which was a momentary blessing. “That blood doesn’t look real,” he said. “’Sides, this is Halloween things when today is Thanksgiving.”

“Go get the others,” I said to Belle.

The carnage continued on the television, narrated by remote anchors—those on the scene having fled for cover—and filmed by cameramen standing on raised scaffolding around Harold Square. News copters provided overhead footage of the human wave of stampeding panic, which had a fascinatingly geometric quality to it. Undulating waves radiated out from a series of blood-soaked points, as if a dozen red stones had been tossed simultaneously into a still pond. The producers kept cutting from one close up to another of angry looking people in shabby clothes biting and clawing at actors, musicians, cheerleaders, band geeks, and minor celebrities.