The Undead That Saved Christmas Vol. 2 (5 page)

Mindy Matheson.

Holy shit
, he thought. He stared at her for a long moment, watching her curious, clumsy movements. That really was her.
That’s Mindy Matheson.

And she’s faking it.

* * *

It had been a while since he’d seen a faker.

Most didn’t last long. Right after the outbreak Kevin and some of the other survivors he’d hung out with back then had seen one or two a week. The fakers tried to make themselves look like zombies. They smelled like zombies, moved like zombies, had flies swarming around their eyes and mouths like zombies. But they weren’t zombies, and sooner or later, they messed up. They slipped out of character for just a second.

And that was all it took.

One tiny slip, one momentary distraction, and the zombies they moved with swarmed them.

Usually, at least as far as Kevin was concerned, it wasn’t much of a loss.

The only reason a person ever decided to fake it was because they had given up on their humanity. Surviving among the ruins of what the world had once been was hard. It sucked, in fact. In order to survive, in order to stay sane, you had to work at it. Every day was a fight. Every breath was bought with tears and sweat and loneliness. And sometimes, living free didn’t seem much of a pay back.

The fakers couldn’t hack it.

But they didn’t have the courage to end it all either.

They were the real walking dead, not the zombies, and Kevin had never felt anything but disgust for them.

Until now, of course.

He and Mindy Matheson, they’d dated right after high school. She’d never said two words to him during school. Neither one of them had been all that popular, but it had been a big school, and she had her friends and he had his. But afterwards, when they found they were working at the Home Depot together, neither one of them with the foggiest notion of what they were going to do with their lives, they sort of fell together.

For about eight months.

They didn’t end on an obvious note. No cheating, no fighting, nothing like that. They just drifted apart. At the time he’d figured they just weren’t right for each other. That explained why they hadn’t noticed each other back in school. What happened while they were working together was just the natural gravity of two lonely people. And so, just as their orbits brought them together, those same orbits carried them apart. She grew distant, he grew irritable. She stopped calling, he stopped caring. Soon they were basically strangers again. The brief interlude was forgotten, and the two of them went back to their lives of uncertainty and quiet desperation.

He gave himself a self-deprecating chuckle.

For all that the world had changed, they hadn’t. The two of them were still living their half-lives, midway between life and death.

But he had laughed louder than he wanted to, and she had heard him. He saw her cock her head to one side. She turned toward the truck where he was hiding, her shifting, searching gaze the only thing that separated her from the wandering corpses nearby.

Kevin whistled faintly, just loud enough for her to hear.

She staggered forward.

For a moment, he thought of running away from there. What did he think he was doing anyway? What could he do? It wasn’t like they were going to run off together or anything. Not now. To fake it for any length of time at all, she had to go native in a mighty convincing kind of way.

And that she certainly had.

Kevin looked her up and down, from the stringy, matted mess that was her hair to her bare and blackened feet, and tried not to grimace at the stench that came off her. Her face was filthy, her lips cracked and flaking. Her clothes were so filthy and ratty he couldn’t even tell what color they had once been. Flies swarmed about her face.

But she was standing right in front of him now, watching him. She swayed drunkenly, her mouth hanging open slightly. He wanted to hate her, but her eyes were overbright, pregnant with the suggestion of pain, and despite his loathing, he felt his heart breaking out of pity.

He could, after all, still see the girl under all that grime and slathered gore. She had gotten skinny as a crack whore, but the curves were still in the right place. And she still had that cute little upturned nose that used to drive him wild when she smiled.

“Hi, Mindy,” he said.

She just stared at him, no expression on her face.

“Hey, you know why they put fences around graveyards?” he asked her. Kevin waited a beat. “Because people are just dying to get in.”

Again, he waited.

Her expression didn’t change. She just stood there, swaying.

“You heard that one, huh?”

She might have nodded, but if so, it was faint, and he couldn’t be sure.

“How about this one? A guy finds out he only has twelve hours to live. He goes home to his wife, determined to live it up for his last night on earth. So they have sex, and it’s great. An hour later, they do it again, and it’s even better. And then, a few hours after that, he tells her he thinks they can go at it a third time. ‘Easy for you to say,’ she tells him. ‘You don’t have to wake up in the morning.’”

He beat his index fingers on the truck tire in front of him like he was firing off a rim shot. He smiled at her, and then the smile faded. Why in the hell was he doing this? There was no reaching this girl.

And was he really so lonely that he was talking to a faker?

But then he saw a flicker at the corner of her mouth, the faintest trace of a smile, and that brought a huge grin to his face.

“Are you doing okay, Mindy?”

The smile disappeared. He saw what looked like a tear forming in her eyes.

He almost reached up for her hand then, and had one of the real zombies not let out a moan at that very moment, he might have thrown her over his shoulder and carried her away from there.

But a few more real zombies had spotted him. Several were moaning now, staggering toward him. He’d been careless, and now it was time to go.

“I’m staying in an apartment at Woodlawn and Spruce,” he said.

A zombie dropped to the pavement and started crawling under the truck toward him.

“I gotta go,” he said. “Remember, it’s the Bent Tree Apartments. Woodlawn and Spruce, number 318.”

More zombies had gotten under the truck now. The lead one held up a mangled, handless arm, the blackened tips of its ulna and radius extending from rotten flesh.

“Gotta go,” he said.

* * *

Several days later, with Christmas, by his count, less than a week away, Kevin was putting up ornaments on a fake tree. There had been a Hallmark in the Dayton Mall and he’d made good use of the Snoopy ornaments piled on the floor. Growing up, his mom had waited out front of the local Hallmark in order to scoop up whatever was new that year. At the time, he’d thought it stupid. They’re collector’s items, she’d said. Or they will be. Which, to his way of looking at it, hadn’t made it any less stupid.

But now, hanging the Snoopy with the little typewriter and Snoopy as a World War I ace ornaments on his tree, he sensed a flood of painful memories trying to surface.

Christ, he thought. He didn’t need this. Not now.

He heard moaning coming through an open window and he jumped to his feet to take a look. There was no point in it, really. The zombies keyed off of what they saw and heard. Those were about the only two senses that seemed to work, and as long as he stayed out of sight and kept quiet, his little hiding spot up in this third floor apartment was as safe as any spot on Earth.

But he crossed to the window anyway because checking out the zombies kept him from his memories.

And that’s when he saw Mindy Matheson for the second time.

Her group had wandered from the mall over to here, probably in search of the pack of wild dogs Kevin had heard baying in the night the last few days. The group wasn’t especially large. He counted about thirty, though there were almost certainly a few more somewhere out of sight. They wouldn’t be much of a threat when he needed to go out, but even still, there were enough of them that they would probably be sticking around for a few days at least. They hunted collectively, he’d discovered, so the bigger groups tended to stay in one place longer.

Just as well, Kevin thought. It would give him a chance to talk with Mindy again.

He slid out the window and into the chilly evening air. It looked like it would probably rain later. There was a ledge just below his window that led over to another building’s roof. From there, he climbed onto a billboard that looked down on the intersection, where Mindy and the others were wandering around, moaning.

He kept a can of spray paint up here, just in case.

He gave it a shake and wrote:

HEY MINDY! I’M IN 318 OVER TO YOUR RIGHT.

COME ON UP.

He’d gathered quite a crowd. At a glance, he noticed that he’d underestimated the size of the group by at least half, probably more. Their mangled, upturned faces and ruined hands were all pointed at him, their moans taking on an urgent, pulsing quality that he had come to think of as their feeding call. He saw quite a few of them down there.

But Mindy wasn’t with them. She was drifting away from the group, stepping back toward a screen of shrubs at the far side of the intersection while the others surged forward.

“Good girl,” he muttered.

Moving quickly, he went back to his apartment. The zombies wouldn’t be able to follow, and besides, he had some quick cleaning up to do.

* * *

She wouldn’t sit down.

He offered her a place on his couch, at his table, on the floor. She just shook her head every time he offered.

Kevin tried small talk, but she wouldn’t answer any of his questions, and after a while, he began to feel foolish and stupid, like he was wasting both their time. He jammed his hands into his pockets and looked around the room for some glimmer of inspiration.

Nothing.

“So,” he said. “You know what they call a fast-moving zombie?” He waited a beat, hoping for another of her half smiles. “A zoombie.”

She just stared at him, and the cold, lifeless emptiness there sent a chill through him.

“How about a hockey playing zombie?” he said, forcing a grin. “A zombonie. What do you think, huh? I got a million of them. How about this? A zombie, an Irish priest and a rabbi walk into a bar - ”

“This was a mistake,” she said. “Coming here. I’m sorry.”

She spoke quietly, her voice cracked and hoarse, as though she’d almost forgotten how to use it.

“I’m going, Kevin.”

“What? No.”

He took a step toward her, but stopped when the smell hit him.

He tried not to let his surprise and his disgust show on his face, though it probably did anyway.

“Please, Mindy, don’t. It’s Christmas.”

She didn’t answer. But she didn’t turn to leave either.

“I’ve got some food. Are you hungry?”

She nodded immediately.

He went into the little kitchenette and slid a cube of Spam out of a can. He cut it into four big slices, then handed her the plate.

“I’m sorry I don’t have - ”

Mindy snatched it from his hands.

She ate with her fingers, jamming the meat into her mouth, barely chewing. Several times she nearly choked. Bits and pieces fell from the corners of her mouth.

She stopped eating only once, long enough to look at him over her plate.

“Don’t look at me while I eat,” she said, her words about as close to a snarl as any he’d ever heard a girl make. And then, more quietly: “Please. Don’t look at me.”

He nodded. “Sure. Okay.”

Kevin went to the cupboards and took down some more cans. He had Vienna sausages, some fruit cocktail, applesauce, a jar of sauerkraut. Better take this stuff out of the can, he thought, remembering the way she’d jammed her fingers into the pile of Spam. Last thing he wanted was for her to cut up her fingers on the sharp edges of the cans.

He went to work putting the meal onto paper plates and then setting the plates onto the table.

When he turned around, she was standing right behind him, watching his neck. Seeing her made him jump.

“Shit,” he said. “You scared me.”

The look in her bloodshot eyes was inscrutable, and he didn’t like it.

Her gaze drifted down to the food on the table.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I have tea and water, whichever you’d prefer.”

She fell on the food without answering, without bothering to sit in the chair he pulled over for her, so he got her a cup of water and set it down next to her plates.

She had asked him not to watch her eat, which was okay with Kevin. The wet, slurping noises she made were enough for him to know he didn’t want to watch. He went over to his couch and looked at some of the magazines he’d left there. A bunch of old
Playboys
he’d found at the used bookstore over by the mall. He gathered them up and hurriedly stuffed them under the couch, but not before catching a glimpse of the sleepy-eyed brunette on the cover of the top magazine. So much had changed, he thought sadly. So much had been lost. The good and the bad.

Eventually, Mindy’s eating noises stopped.

Kevin walked over to the kitchen. Mindy was still at the table, looking around at the cupboards with a bovine-like vacuity.

“Are you still hungry?” he asked. “I have more. You can have anything I have.”

She shook her head.

“More water, maybe? I can make you that tea I promised.”

Again she shook her head.

A joke about Little Johnny, a bucket of nails and a zombie hooker came to mind, but for once his internal filter was working and he cut it off before it had a chance to get out.

Instead, he let the silence linger.

She had turned to face him, and now she was swaying drunkenly, same as she had done in the mall parking lot. It occurred to him that she had probably internalized so much zombie behavior that, even now, when she was completely safe, she was unable to turn it off.

But the silence was murder. He had never dealt well with uncomfortable silences. It was the main reason he told so many bad jokes. Better to fill up the void with inane nonsense than let a painful silence grow.