The Undead That Saved Christmas Vol. 2 (14 page)

“Carlyle’s turbines are working,” Danny said as we drifted silently through the streets. The year before, Deena Carlyle, the mayor of Blessed Prospect, had convinced the City Council to install wind turbines to power the Christmas lights. There’d been some griping about the upkeep cost, but apparently the turbines had outlasted the town.

Danny was passing City Hall when I made him stop one last time.

“You’re kidding, right?” he said when I pointed to the small shop at the end of the row.

“It’s A.J.’s last chance for new Broadway cast albums,” I said.

“There’s no business like show business,” Belle said.

Danny rolled his eyes, but he pulled over and parked the truck.

The front door of Hear We Go Again, the local CD store, was closed but unlocked. When I pushed the door open, the bell jingled and there was a rush of warm air.

We’d worked out a little security routine at the other stores. Danny waited outside with his rifle, watching the truck and the door while Belle came with me and helped me load the supplies. This time she walked around behind the register and found a CD player, and pretty soon we had a pop diva singing
God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen
on crackly wall-mounted speakers.

I found the Broadway cast albums and started loading anything I didn’t recognize into an empty duffel bag. Belle settled on the floor in front of a Christmas display loading a duffel bag of her own.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“I dunno; somebody from
American Idol
? It was in the player.”

To save us all from Satan’s power, when we were gone astray.

“It’s nice. We should take it for A.J.”

Belle looked up from her bag. “I’m taking one of everything,” she said. “We’re gonna be begging him to stop playing this stuff in a couple of weeks.”

“Perfect,” I said. And then I felt a hand on my shoulder.

I jumped into the air, knocking over a cardboard stand-up display of Lady Gaga CDs, tripping and falling back down onto the floor where I smacked my head against the filthy linoleum. I lay there dazed, sprawled on my back in the aisle looking up into the double barrel of a shot gun.

“What the fuck?! Jesus Christ, man! You scared me to death! What the
fuck
are you doing?” I was shouting and starting to get up, my heart still thumping inside my chest.

“You might notta noticed this here firearm, boy,” said an old man in jeans and a faded Led Zeppelin sweatshirt. “And that ain’t—”

Oh tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy.
The music rose, drowning out the old man’s words.

“What?” I was startled into a moment of clarity.

“Shut up, boy,” he said.

“You’re kidding me with this, right?” I said, but I didn’t try to get up.

Belle had recovered faster than me and when I looked up she was standing with her rifle pointed at him.

 “Stay where you are boy,” the man said. “And you can put that gun down, lady.”

“Who are you?” Belle asked him.

“Who the fuck are
you
?” The old guy waved his gun in my direction. “This’s
my
place. Looters will be shot,” he said.

“This is
not
your store,” I said.

“Is now.” He shrugged, glanced down then back at me.

“Who’s the looter here?” Belle clicked off the safety and several things happened in quick succession. The old guy pointed his gun at Belle; they fired simultaneously. Her shot whizzed past his head; his slammed into her shoulder, knocking her down. He whirled around, lost his balance, fired a round in my direction, and missed. Danny came running in the front door holding his gun in both hands. Rather than shoot the guy, he slammed him in the jaw with the butt of his rifle and made a run for Belle. She was bleeding from her shoulder wound, but she was up on her feet when I heard the bell over the door jangling again. We all froze and looked in the direction of the door.

“Fear not then,” said the Angel, “let nothing you affright.”

The door slammed open under the weight of a trio of enormous zombies in orange hunting overalls, plaid shirts, and fur caps. These guys were each well over six feet tall and the smallest of them probably weighed in at more than 240 pounds. Their faces were grayish green and their wild, rheumy eyes were ringed in bloody red. Before I was able to register the angry, indecipherable moans blasting from their rotting throats I was nearly knocked over by their stench.

“Out the back!” Danny grabbed Belle around the waist and yanked her back towards the storeroom. I picked up the duffels and started to turn, but the smell overpowered me. My stomach churned, heaved and I threw up the remains of my lunch, splattering the floor, the counters and the old guy’s jeans.

He was screaming and cursing, scrambling for his gun. He tried to get up, but was slipping and sliding in the expanding pool of my vomit. And then, in a flash, the three hunters were on top of him, ripping and tearing at him like children opening packages on Christmas morning. The old guy was yelling and cursing and I was frozen watching as the trio ripped him to shreds, tearing off hunks of his flesh and stuffing it into their gaping red mouths.

Oh tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy..
.

A hand grabbed my shoulder and I screamed again. The three hunters looked up from their bloody feast.

“What are you, a freakin’ six year old girl?” Danny growled, clamping his hand over my mouth and pulling me into the storeroom. He locked the door and looked through the peephole. “They seem pretty preoccupied for the moment,” he said.

Belle was sitting on the floor inspecting her shoulder wound.

“Oh god,” I said, looking at the blood soaking through her jacket.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said. “I think there’s a hunk missing from my shoulder, but it not very big and it didn’t hit anything major. I just need to get it bandaged up—”

“But the first aid stuff is in the truck.”

“Right.”

“So, we gotta get outta here and get back around to the front of the store without those guys noticing us,” Danny said.

“It was my fault,” Belle said. “I turned on the stereo. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“It’s a new world,” Danny said. “New rules.”

He went to the back door. “The alley behind the shop looks clear. Jackie, what’re Larry, Darryl and Darryl doing up front?”

I looked through the peephole. “They’re Christmas shopping,” I said.

The most disconcerting thing about the end of the world, was the confounding sense of business as usual. It seemed like the CDC guy was right about these zombie viruses letting their hosts wander around and do things they would normally do when they weren’t running amok and tearing old hippies to pieces with their claws. The three guys in the front room had picked up red plastic shopping baskets and were rifling through the bins of CDs.

“One of them just put a Celine Dion CD in his basket,” I reported.

“This virus is worse than I thought,” Belle said.

“What are they doing?” I said. “I mean, these guys don’t look like the kind of guys who’d be buying contemporary ballads under other circumstances. I mean, what?—Clint Black or maybe Lee Greenwood—I’d kinda get, but Celine? … It just doesn’t make sense.”

“They’re zombies,” Danny said. “How much inner logic are you expecting?”

Belle groaned as she pulled herself to her feet. “I think their brains are processing some impulse to shop, but I’m not sure they’re really being selective about what’s going in the baskets. Probably taking those CDs home to the wives.”

“That’s fucked up,” I said.

“They’re zombies!” Danny said again, like that explained everything. He moved over to Belle and put her good arm over his shoulder, supporting some of her weight. “Jack, come get my gun. You gotta cover us when we go out the back.”

I eased the door open and poked my head out into an empty alley.

The three of us hustled down to the end of the building. I peered around the corner—gun ready—and stopped cold.

The town square, deserted less than half an hour earlier, was now teeming with zombies. Hundreds of bedraggled figured lurched along the sidewalks or stood in groups around the base of the towering Christmas tree.

I stood at the corner of the building for a long time, unable to form words.

“Why are you just standing there?” Danny asked.

“What’s out there, Jackie?” Belle whispered.

“Oh, the weather outside is frightful,” I said, raising my hand and letting the first wet flakes fall onto my outstretched fingers.

What I was looking at was an enraged carnival of Christmas misery. The entire population of Blessed Prospect seemed to be milling around the central square under the swaying Christmas lights and glittering snow. Some of them were dressed for the cold, bundled in mismatched coats, hats, scarves, and mittens; others staggered through the streets in tattered pajamas or naked, their bruised, bloodied gray-green bodies smeared with filth and swarming with insects. A trio of women in tattered bank uniforms sat side by side on a wooden bench, staring in silence at a swarm of children —some of them missing limbs, some of them clutching the bloody carcasses of household pets—flopping around on the snowy lawn.

“Snow angels,” Belle whispered.

She and Danny stood close to me, peering around the corner of the building and watching the townspeople in rapt fascination.

At the base of the towering Christmas tree, a filthy bearded man in blood-spattered overalls sat in a throne and, as we watched, a child staggered from the head of a winding, irregular queue to climb onto the man’s lap. He laid a hand on her shoulder and without warning, he ripped the girl’s arm from its socket, pushing her body to the ground at his feet and gnawing on the end of the still bleeding appendage.

“Holy shit!” I felt Danny’s hand clamp violently over my mouth, but not before the words had escaped and were echoing across the square. Heads raised in unison, turning in puzzlement as rotten, damaged ears attempted to triangulate the origin of the sound.

We froze.

The truck was at least thirty feet away and there were currently half a dozen zombies between it and our hiding place. There were another ten or twenty close enough to reach the truck before we did.

The silence in the square was so complete we could hear the flapping of banners, the shuffle of unsteady feet, the unearthly cries of a distant, enraged infant, and the buzzing of the halogen street lights.

Less than two yards from where we stood, a little girl—maybe six or seven years old with long blond braids that hung askew from her torn, filthy scalp—looked up from her headless white kitten, sniffed the air, and growled.

The sound was too low for a child, something barely within the range of human hearing, but it invoked my body’s panicked genetic response. All the hairs on my body stood at attention and I felt the adrenaline flowing like gasoline flooding a cold engine.

Behind me Danny shifted, his rifle rising beside me and pointing irrevocably at the child.

“Get ready to run,” he whispered, his lips close to my neck. “When I say ‘go’ you take Belle and get to the truck.” He pressed the key into my hand and edged across the alley, deliberately distancing himself from the two of us.

The explosive crack of his rifle echoed through the square. The girl dropped unceremoniously to the pavement. All over the square, heads swiveled, chasing the echoes from building to building, but none of them seemed to know where we were.

“What do we do now?” I whispered.

“It’s the smell,” Belle whispered.

“What?”

“Their hearing is too damaged for them to triangulate sound; they react to smell. It’s why the goons in the shop didn’t chase us and it’s why nobody seemed to notice when Danny shot the girl. And the snow’s damping our scent.”

“So what the fuck are they doing now?” Danny whispered, pointing.

All across the square, zombies were staggering in the direction of the tree, stumbling, falling over each other leaving trails of putrid blood and debris in the snow. The zombies closest to us moved away; a toddler in a diaper and Spiderman T-shirt dropped onto his filthy diaper and took the fallen girl’s hand in his.

“Family memory?” Belle asked.

“White meat,” Danny, who had come back across the alley, said as the toddler began gumming and tearing the girl’s flesh with his inadequate teeth.

That is when we heard the singing.

Across the square a mass of zombies had gathered around the base of the tree. The tree glowed with twinkling lights, casting an eerie radiance on hundreds of gray-green faces turned skyward, their mouths moving in a terrifying parody of a Christmas choir. The snow, coming down heavier now, fell on upturned faces, filling empty eye sockets and obscuring the contours of sloped foreheads. The sounds that emerged from the broken jaws, ripped vocal cords, and wheezing punctured lungs were chaotic, high, and reedy at first, but eventually they seemed to grow and merge, and a melody emerged. I recognized the words.

Long lay the world in sin and error pining, till he appeared and the soul felt its worth
.

“Oh, holy shit,” Danny whispered.

A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

The zombies closest to the truck had ambled off to join the singing herd, but we were too transfixed by the horrifically beautiful spectacle to move.

The zombies sang on, voices that alone were coarse or broken sounded together like an angelic choir. A short one-armed woman in a tattered windbreaker stood away from the others on the steps of the town hall, her voice rising above those around her, soaring heavenward in a booming, triumphant solo that made me feel weak in the knees.

Danny was the first of us to come to his senses. He grabbed my shoulder and pushed me towards the truck, throwing his arm around Belle’s waist and hustling her across sidewalk.

Sweet hymns of joy, in grateful chorus raise we, let all within us praise his holy name
.

The soloist’s voice boomed out the next verse, the ragged chorus chasing her through the lyrics.