The Undead That Saved Christmas Vol. 2 (6 page)

He said, “Listen, there’s no need for you to go back out there. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like. I’ve got some Sterno. We could heat up some water, let you take a hot bath maybe...”

All at once the tears started. One minute she was watching him, quietly and vacantly, and the next she was crying.

Big, muddy-colored tears ran down her cheeks.

“Ah shit,” he said. “Mindy, I...I’m sorry. What did I say...I - ”

“I shouldn’t have come,” she said. “This was a mistake.”

She moved hurriedly to the door. Every impulse in him told him to go after her, hold the door closed, take her in his arms.

But he didn’t do it.

He just watched her go without a word

* * *

Mindy shuffled through the rain, her mind a blank.

Or at least she tried to make it a blank.

Right now, that wasn’t working out so well.

It was cold, windy and rainy and cold. Her clothes were little more than rags; they offered no protection whatsoever. For too long now she’d wandered, mindless, emotionless, denying all pain and shame, a true ascetic. The rain tore at her skin like icy razors and chilled her to the bone, but she did not tremble, nor did she cry. She let her arms swing limply by her side, her fingertips grazing the ice that formed on her clothes, as she kept pace with the horde of dead things brushing against her.

Thought was the enemy, not the dead. With thought came fear, and pain, and a memory of all that was gone. If she thought too long - if she thought at all - the dead would see it in her eyes, and she wouldn’t last long after that.

But the mind was like a flood. It could be contained for a while, even a long while, but it could never be truly silenced until it had run its course.

And right now her mind was turning toward shame.

But it wasn’t the shame of what had happened to her - No, strike that, she thought, of what you have allowed to happen to you. - that bothered her so.

It was that damn Kevin O’Brien.

When she was by herself, she felt no shame for what she was doing. She was surviving. And she was doing it in the face of a universe that didn’t give a rat’s ass for what happened to her. Or the rest of humanity, for that matter. She was surviving, damn it.

But so was he.

And he hadn’t given up anything. He hadn’t debased himself like this. He hadn’t sacrificed every last scrap of his self-respect just to draw another breath.

She hated him.

She hated him because he was still human.

And because his charity reminded her that she was not.

Not anymore.

So she turned off her mind and wandered. Damn him. Damn the world. Damn life. There was nothing of the world left for her anymore. Nothing but emptiness and the slow, relentless crawl of time.

One foot in front of the other.

Forever after.

* * *

The billboard came as a surprise to her.

For a moment, just a fraction of a second, she stopped.

And she stared.

She hadn’t realized where she was. But up there, up above the mindless crowd, was a message written just for her.

Hey Mindy, it’s cold. Come on up.

I’ve got a warm bed.

A memory floated up into her mind, unbidden. The two of them, finishing off their shift, her letting him walk her out to the parking lot. He had a joint in his pocket and she didn’t have anywhere to go. They went around back to the loading dock and passed it back and forth, talking about random shit, nothing either of them really cared about.

He was nice. A little dorky, but all right.

She could tell he was getting interested. It was in the way he cracked his lame jokes when he should have let the quiet grow, the way his fingers twitched when they touched whenever she took the joint from him.

She could have shut it down right then. He was the scared type. He’d back off and nothing more would ever become of it.

But she didn’t have anywhere else to go, and they both knew it.

She went back to his place.

Sitting on his couch, her hand on his thigh, he actually asked if he could kiss her. That had never happened to her before. Most guys went straight for the tits. After that it was a wrestling match to keep her pants on.

“You don’t have to ask,” she’d said.

And before she knew it, they were some sort of couple.

But he wasn’t wasting that kind of time now. The apocalypse, it seemed, had made him a little bolder.

Come on up. I’ve got a warm bed.

Yeah right, she thought, I bet you do.

But she’d been careless. She’d thought too long, dropped out of character.

One of the dead ones a few feet to her right had turned her way, and now his dead, vacant stare was locked on her. She tried to clear her mind, to stumble forward, but the zombie’s gaze never wavered.

He raised his hands like he was trying to take something from her and staggered after her, a moan rising above the wind and the cutting rain.

She pushed his hands away and looked around.

This wasn’t going to work. Every moment she lingered more and more of them turned her way. She scanned the crowd, and in the dark the only way out seemed to lead around the corner, where she had taken the stairwell once before up to his apartment.

A limp hand fell on her shoulder and that was enough.

She ran for it.

* * *

She stopped in front of 318.

Jesus, she thought, had she really sunk this low? Getting torn apart by the walking dead almost seemed a joy compared to coming to him like a penitent. She’d thought she was done with guilt, with shame. But it hurt now more than ever.

Utterly demoralized, she knocked.

* * *

He couldn’t sleep.

In the dark he rose and put on his boxers and went to the kitchen to light a candle.

Enough light filled the room that he could see her sleeping in his bed. The rain had washed away a good amount of dirt and grime from her body and hair, but her breath had still been enough to turn his stomach. And even in his sleep he couldn’t quite hide his disgust. He had dreamt of a zombie forcing her face into the soft part of his neck; and when he awoke, he’d found her, pressing her cracked and ulcerous lips into the well beneath his chin.

Half-asleep, he’d recoiled from her, almost falling out of the bed before realizing that it was only a dream.

Now, fully awake, he watched her sleep and tried to hate her.

But he couldn’t.

Who in the hell was he to judge anyway? She was desperate. She was lonely. She was scared. Wasn’t he all of that, and more?

In fact, the only thing he had on her was the appearance of normalcy.

The truth was he was drowning. His life was an act. His jokes; the Christmas decorations; his calendar keeping; all of it was a terrible, useless, stupid joke. He drifted from one empty apartment to the next, from one false front to the next, like a ghost blown on the wind, and he called it a life.

Were they any different, he and Mindy?

He couldn’t answer, not truthfully anyway; and eventually, he blew out the candle and crept back to bed and reluctantly put an arm around her as he drifted off to sleep.

When he awoke the next morning, he was alone, the only sign she had been there a muddy stain on the sheets.

He sat on the side of the bed, asking himself why he even bothered.

She had left him, again, and this time it was because she knew he was the one who was faking. He was the hypocrite. He was the disgusting one.

And she had found him out.

* * *

Mindy stopped in the doorway as she left Kevin’s apartment building and scanned the street.

There were no dead in sight, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. She’d seen it happen a few times over the last year. She’d be shuffling along with the others, absolutely nothing going on inside her head, and suddenly there’d be a scream. Another careless person had wandered into their midst, completely surprised by the sudden appearance of a zombie horde that, in reality, hadn’t been trying to sneak up on anybody. Most of the group’s kills were made that way, completely by accident, people caught by their own carelessness.

Without realizing it she had assumed the awkward shuffle of the dead. Her bare feet, no longer sensitive to heat or ice or even broken glass, slid across the cracked and weedy pavement as though on autopilot.

She tried to turn off her mind as well, but she found that much harder.

She kept thinking of Kevin.

What, exactly, had happened last night?

Not
what
. Not really. She knew
what
had happened. That had actually been quite pleasant. Better than she remembered it, anyway.

No, what she really wanted to know was
why
. And why
now
? She’d seen others before him. She knew they weren’t the only ones. She suspected - and she believed this without reservation - that there were more normal people out there than she’d seen. There had to be. The world couldn’t simply be empty. That wasn’t possible.

But none of the others had managed to arouse her pity. She’d watched them die, and in some cases rise again, and she’d felt nothing.

And then - Kevin.

He’d told her his stupid jokes. He’d offered her a place to stay, all the food he had, even a warm bath. In the few days since she’d first seen him she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him. Before him, walking around being dead was no trouble at all. She could go days at a time without a single thought passing through her mind. The world was one unending parade of nothingness.

And then he came along, and she couldn’t take three steps without falling out of character, without thinking of the life they’d once shared.

That’s what it was, she told herself. He was a window to the world that used to be, a shipwreck from her past that had mysteriously surfaced to haunt her mind. There was nothing more to it than that. He was nothing but a ghost, and she was merely lonely.

But a voice at the back of her mind kept prodding, questioning.

What if this was more?

What if this was...love?

Maybe, she thought. It was Christmas day, after all. She’d seen the calendar - the days gone by dutifully crossed out with a big red X - right before she’d walked out of his apartment. Christmas had a way of warming even the coldest heart.

Wasn’t that the secret to Scrooge’s redemption? She’d never paid much attention to books in school, but she thought she remembered that much. For Scrooge, it hadn’t been fear of the grave, but fear that the heart would no longer love again, that made it possible for him to accept the spirit of Christmas into his life.

She stopped then, a sudden alarm causing her pulse to quicken.

She had fallen out of character again. She’d stopped walking like the dead. Like her mind, her feet had started to wander. If she’d happened upon one of the dead while walking like that, they’d have torn her to ribbons.

But, for now, she was alone on the street.

Turning, she happened to see her reflection in a shop window. And at first, that one quick glance threatened to send her over the edge of reason. She looked horrible. In a word, she looked dead. And she played the part well. Her hair was stiff with mud and probably blood too. Her face, which hadn’t been that bad back in the day, was discolored with God knows what; attractive, it seemed, only to flies. Her body was a bony jangle of sticks. She looked like a crack whore, though she imagined that even the crack whores of the world gone by had more self-respect than she did at that moment.

She had nothing.

But then her gaze shifted beyond the window, to the Sexy Elf costume in the display. For a moment she experienced an odd sense of displacement. It was her face, her gaunt, exhausted face, but her body was draped in the red velvety finery of the elf costume. Her fingers reached for, and could almost feel, the cotton candy fringe at the edge of the playfully short skirt.

She smiled.

Kevin O’Brien, you wonderful bastard. I’m gonna blow your mind.

* * *

It was Christmas morning.

He had hoped to wake up late and spend the day with her, hopefully draw her out little by little. The two of them had been pretty good, he thought, back in the day. And they were certainly good last night. When they were good, it seemed, they was really good. He’d hoped it could be that way again.

But she’d left him sometime in the night.

His attempts to draw her into his world weren’t fair, he supposed. Why would she want to join him anyway? Hadn’t she found him out? She knew he was faking it. He knew he was faking it.

And he was tired of faking it.

The choice, once he’d given it voice, was surprisingly easy to make. The only hard part had been accepting
that
as an option. But once he opened his mind to it, it actually made a lot of sense.

He went to the billboard and spray painted a message for her.

Then he went down to the street and climbed on top of a brick wall and waited for one of the dead to come along.

He thought he’d be scared, but for the first time in a long time, he felt relaxed, at ease with himself and the world in which he lived. You can settle in quite comfortably to even the most horrific of circumstances, given enough exposure to it. All horrors lose their immediacy, their nastiness, sooner or later. The nerves can only be slashed and cut and shredded so many times before they deaden to the pain.

No, he was past horror. What he was feeling now was worse than that. In the time before he met her, his world had been filled with zombies. The horror they represented was a shallow, fast moving river that beat him down and cut him on its jagged rocks.

He had gone beyond that now.

Here the waters ran far slower, but they were deep, endlessly deep, and what lurked down there was something he could not fight.

For what lurked down there was love.

A zombie was at the base of the wall, its hands clumsily racking at the bricks just below Kevin. Kevin stared into the thing’s eyes and saw the emptiness he’d fought against for so long, but had never truly understood. That would all change now. He had tried to get Mindy to live in his world, and that had failed. So now, he would live in hers.