“I’ve got a surprise for you,” Ed said, grinning. “But you’ve got to let me set it up first. Can you put on some coffee while I get things ready?”
Betty nodded and padded toward the kitchen. When she squealed, Ed lunged through the doorway.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
His wife stood wearing a toothy smile in the middle of the floor.
“You got fresh water,” she said, clapping her hands to her chest. “Just what I wanted!”
“I figured you deserved something nice,” Ed said. “Now don’t come into the living room until I tell you.”
Betty nodded and turned to a cabinet to grab a can of Sterno.
A dead plant sat in one corner of the living room. Ed dragged the pot to the center of the room and removed the dead foliage. Rotating the tree’s trunk, he drilled it into the dry dirt until the evergreen stood on its own. Then, he moistened the soil with a small cup of melted snow. As the tree sat naked in the planter, Ed emptied the grocery bag on the floor. Cans of food clattered and rolled to the walls.
“What was that?” Betty gasped from the kitchen.
“Nothing,” Ed said. “Stay in there until I tell you to come out.”
“Not you,” Betty said with a tone of a disgruntled teenager. “I thought I saw something move outside.”
Ed untangled himself from a strand of tinsel and hurried to his wife’s side. She squatted in front of the sink and peered through the window above it. Someone alive in the outside world would have thought Kilroy had been there.
“Over there,” she said pointing to a stand of trees.
Ed saw nothing but the falling snow and the trees standing in the distance. Even so, he waited with his wife for fifteen minutes in front of the ever-darkening sky.
“Let me know if you see anything else,” Ed said, backing toward his surprise. “How’s that coffee coming?”
Betty turned from the window back to the glowing can of Sterno.
“Oops, I almost forgot.” She hurried to get the pot and coffee. “It’ll be done soon.”
Ed placed a small travel clock at the base of the tree. The glow from the display reflected blue pinpoints on the wavering tinsel. All the goodies he’d taken from Massey’s sat around the base of the flowerpot.
“Betty,” he said, sticking his head into the kitchen.
She stood pointing into the night through the glass pane. Ed sidled up next to her and stared into the darkness. No movement caught his eye, but he waited again until his leg cramped.
“Fat man,” Betty mumbled still gesturing toward the window.
Ed put his arm around his wife and turned her toward the kitchen door.
“You’ve had a hard day, how about we take a walk into the next room. I’ll show you what I picked up at the store.”
Betty’s head swiveled to watch the still empty window. Placing his hands on her cheeks, Ed twisted her into the living room and slid his fingers over her eyes.
“Are you ready?”
Betty tipped her head. Her brow still creased in concern and her mouth hanging slack with shock from whatever she’d seen in the yard. Ed pulled his hands away from her eyes and squeezed her shoulders.
“Merry Christmas, dear,” he whispered into her ear.
“Oh, Ed,” she said taking a single step toward the twinkling tree. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Betty dropped to her knees in front of the pile of food. The despairing look in her eyes faded in the dark boughs of the small tree. She picked a candy cane from a branch and peeled off the cellophane wrapper. A thump sounded at the door. The peppermint stick plummeted into the swaying strands of tinsel. Betty sprinted to the closet and pulled the door shut behind her. Ed picked up the hatchet from the pile of clothes he’d discarded next to the door and tiptoed to the window. Stealing a look through a small hole in the curtain, he saw a large form lit by the snow reflecting the clouded evening sky. The body shuffled from side to side on the porch. With an occasional tilt, it would bang its head on the door. A faint jingle accompanied each thud.
Ed stood watching the corpse for a few moments. A memory of his ninth Christmas flickered through his mind. He’d asked Santa for a new pair of hockey skates. Instead, Ed had unwrapped a pair of used, oversized Barbie skates. He’d worn the skates to practice and games for two years, but the nickname Barbie Boy had haunted him until he’d abandoned his hometown for college.
After unlocking the door, Ed waited to fling it open until the body’s agitated movements lessened. When he did, the red-stained, white-bearded cadaver lost its balance and jangled to the floor inside before Ed could react. Its tattered red suit glistened with pink snow. A decomposing arm flailed and knocked Ed into the tree, but the rotund, rotting carcass floundered unable to regain its footing. Glad that his wife had hidden in the closet, Ed lifted the hatchet and slammed it into Santa’s head splitting the skull in two. Dark brains oozed onto the floorboards. Extra padding and warmer clothes must have kept Mr. Claus from freezing.
Ed glanced once at the closed closet door before grabbing the jolly old man’s lifeless body by the boots and dragging it back out into the cold. Before returning to the house, Ed slid the jingle bells from around the corpse’s neck and rinsed them in a snow bank. When he relocked the front door, he heard Betty rustling among the coats.
“Don’t come out yet,” Ed called as he wiped the gore-stained floor with a damp, ragged towel.
After burying the disgusting rag in the garbage can, he went to the kitchen sink and rinsed his face in some of the melted snow. Sterno still glowed under the coffee pot. Ed poured himself a mug full of caffeine, stirred in some sugar, and slurped. The warm liquid seemed to thaw his bones as it slid down his throat. He set his mug on the coffee table. Righting the toppled tree and draping the bells around it, he repositioned the travel clock for maximum tinsel glitter.
“You can come out now,” Ed said, dropping onto the couch.
Betty made her way to her husband and nestled next to him.
“The tree really is beautiful,” she said resting her head on his chest. “Aside from the zombies, this is the best Christmas ever.”
Ed smiled, reached for his coffee, and sipped. Leaning forward, he nodded.
“Best…Christmas…ever,” Ed said as he toasted a jingle bell with his mug.
Story Art Cover
By Chantal Boudreau
www.Writersownwords.com/chantal_boudreau
Dedication
For my wife Jess,
Who appreciated the need for a good zombie defense
Author Bio
Stephen Johnston has written numerous feature films, including OFFICER DOWN for the Lifetime Movie Network, ED GEIN, winner of the Best Screenplay award at the XXI Fantafestival, and the 2011 release DENTENTION. He currently makes his home in Los Angeles.
How I Got My Sack Back
By Stephen Johnston
1
It had been four years since the plague came, and there hadn’t been any real Christmas to speak of since. It’s hard to celebrate the birth of Christ during end times, and issues of naughty and nice seem paltry when the dead have risen and started to eat the living.
Of course, tradition is even harder to kill than the living dead, so the holiday was still observed, but with fewer people, in smaller, less formal settings, in places zombie defensible.
During this time civilization teetered on the brink of collapse, while cemeteries emptied and the world’s population was decimated. War for the future of humankind was waged, with extinction the price of defeat, but after six years the plague was contained, the bodies were burned, and it was time to remind people that life was about more than basic survival.
That’s where I entered the picture.
2
“Have you checked your list?” my wife asked, raw concern in her eyes.
“I checked it. Checked it twice, in fact,” I replied, trying to counter her concern with bravado I wasn’t re
ally feeling. As a pilot with too many missions behind me to count, I knew that unwarranted bravado in these situations got people killed, and truth be known, after four years grounded, I think I was more frightened than she was.
“Well,” she said, pulling my hat snuggly over my ears and patting the white trim of my uniform, as she leaned forward and gave me a kiss. “Just you make sure you come home to me in one piece.”
“Home in one piece, huh? All these years you’ve sent me on my way with those words, I guess they’ve never been more aptly applied until now.” I said, looking her in the eyes, and exchanging the sort of unspoken meaning that can only exist in two people who have been married for eons.
“Bring yourself home whole,” she replied, before turning and disappearing into the falling snow.
“Red Dog!”
After all that had happened. After the world had nearly fallen, my heart swelled at my love for my wife.
“Red Dog! Red Dog, your flight team is ready!”
I roused from my reverie and realized I was being addressed by my Flight Team Leader, and he was looking at me like he wasn’t sure I was ready for this mission.
“Ready. I’m ready,” I said, to convince him as much as I was trying to convince myself.
Stepping forward, he flashed a mischievous grin and presented me with something he’d been holding behind his back, and when I saw it was wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper, I couldn’t help but laugh in spite of myself. “Now I know it’s almost, like, sacrilegious to give you something like this on a night like tonight, but me and the guy’s figured it was better you had it and not need it, than need it and not have it.”
As I was tearing open the paper, I already knew what it was, and I understood why he’d felt the need to offer an apology for the gifting of it. It was a pump-action shotgun, with an expanded magazine and ballistic grips. It was like a talisman of death, and it’s purpose was the antithesis of the spirit of Christmas, but dark times call for dark measures..
Before I could respond one way or the other, my Team Leader handed me a box of shells to go with the weapon, and said, “God forbid, but you find your back to the wall, that thing will put out as much firepower as a Yeti with a bad case of the runs.”
3
As I took off, rising above the great arctic shelf, the fields of ice below reflected the light of the moon with an ethereal glow that seemed to promise the hopes and dreams of a world that was already dead.
Then we crossed meridians and found the North American continent lying dark below us like a silhouette between oceans. There appeared to be little down there except pin-pricks of light, and larger pools of brighter light in areas of denser population, and it was hard to imagine millions of people still lived down there. Of course, the activities of the living dead produced far more darkness then light.
From a logistical point of view, this represented one of the biggest problems now confronting me and my team; even with untold years of experience, and more than a little bit of magic on my side, successfully navigating a mostly dark globe and making all the stops I had ahead of me would be no simple task. Doing it while remaining uneaten by ravenous zombies would seem to raise the stakes to the level of a suicide mission.
This was but one of the thoughts troubling me as I considered how best to begin the enormous task ahead of me that night…
That’s when I first noticed it, inside the boundaries of the continental United States, somewhere within the area previously defined as Ohio back when such distinctions still mattered. It was light, but brighter than could’ve been considered normal, and it seemed to form a pattern, like a man made constellation in the darkness below. Since I had little in the way of an actual plan for the night, I decided to drop to a lower altitude and investigate.
As I descended, the pattern of light on the ground below started to resolve itself and come into better focus, and there was no question it was man made. Then I was soon assailed by acrid smoke and a gruesome stench, and my eyes started to burn. If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to smell burning human flesh, you know there’s no more repugnant stink on earth; it was that stink I was smelling, and it was clear what was making the pattern of light on the ground below.
Funeral pyres were burning bright, fed by the corpses of the dead, and as I continued to descend lower and lower, the pattern they had been organized into was immediately recognizable.
It was a Christmas Tree.
At that moment I understood how important this night was, the first real Christmas in four long years, how important it was for human kind and especially the children who had forgotten what hope was, and what it meant for me and my team to be able to give it to them. I didn’t have much consideration for the walking dead, beyond hoping to avoid them.
4
Four years might’ve passed, but it all came back to me quick enough. I was reminded of feeling overwhelmed as I always did at the beginning of every Christmas night, like Sisyphus at the bottom of the hill, but after I had the first few stops under my belt, I was back in the groove and making good time.
Of course, there was the new obstacle of ravenous zombies who wanted to eat me, something I’d had little experience with.
Perhaps I should back up a bit. See, one of the things that makes where I live at the top of the world such a magical place, is its utter barren and frozen desolation. It’s a place few people not acclimated to its charms ever want to visit, and the frigid temperatures can literally freeze a man to death within minutes. Because of this, we’d never experienced a visit from even a single representative of the walking dead.
So, I went into that evening with more than the usual trepidation, but all the intelligence assembled assured me I’d be safe as long as I remained observant, kept my eyes open and kept moving. Besides, if I did find myself in a tight squeeze, my flight crew had installed my craft with a few modifications specially designed for the elimination of any unwelcome dead who might wish to interfere with my mission. In the interest of full disclosure, I was kind of wishing I’d have the chance to use them. Well, as a wise man once warned, be careful what you wish for.
5
Time for me is an abstract thing, especially on game night, so it’s hard for me to say exactly how far I was into the evening, but things were going smoothly and I’d already completed a sizable chunk of my list.
But this, normally a cause for celebration, brought with it a creeping sadness, as it was hard to ignore said list’s now severely truncated form, and many things children asked for spoke of the horror that was the new human existence, and not the carefree innocence of children. A child ought not desire a machete or hand grenades for Christmas.
Anyway, I was making good progress, and had only seen a handful of random wandering dead, and that at a comfortable distance. Checking my list, I saw my next stop was a house I was familiar enough with; two children, brother and sister, always on the nice list, who had only once flirted with the naughty list for a minor transgression before they were even old enough to know better. They could even be counted on for fresh baked cookies and milk.
Then I realized that like a heart-breaking number of cases that night, I’d be returning to the house of a family that had lost a member, for my list included the wish of only one child, the boy.
It was a family I remembered from better days, the parents Bob and Susan, the prototypical salt-of-the-earth couple, with two children Timothy and Eden.
Now, as I’ve said, within the context of the new reality that had become the depressing norm. My list had become replete with children bereft of siblings, and in some cases devoid of entire families who’d previously occupied a large part of my list.
No, this was different, and even in an age when little boys were asking for things like flame-throwers and bazookas, this boy’s wish gave me pause. He’d asked me for a doll.
Before you jump on my case, I beg you remember judgment is not part of my job description. (Apart from the whole naughty and nice thing
, I guess.) I treat a child’s wish as sacrosanct, and if it’s in my power to grant it, I have and always will deliver it with pleasure. It’s up to you bunch to decide what’s appropriate or inappropriate or gender-specific or… just thinking about it makes my head spin, and leads me to wonder why I even bother…
No, in this case the little boy’s wish gave me pause. His second wish gave me even further pause. You see, he’d sent a second letter. In that one, he’d withdrawn the request for a doll, and instead begged me not to come to his house. He’d hoped I would simply pass his house by and concentrate on making all the other children happy. He even offered to mail the cookies and milk he’d otherwise leave out for me.
Now, if there’s one thing that will guarantee I come to your house, it is a letter from a child begging me not to come to your house. Every child wants me at their house on Christmas.
6
With these thoughts in mind, I arrived over a lonely farmstead somewhere within what was previously known as Illinois. The closest neighboring home was almost a mile away. It was very dark, and there was no indication the house was even inhabited.
Landing on the roof, I took care not to make any more noise than absolutely necessary. A guy makes one too many clatters on a rooftop one night, and he never hears the end of it. In this case, I also thought stealth was especially called for.
The trickiest part of the night had always been finding egress into the house of the moment, especially in the post-industrial era when modern furnaces were more commonly used to heat people’s homes. In this case it wasn’t a problem, as it was a nice old house, with accommodating chimney.
As I descended through that chimney, the walls were still warm to the touch, and I could hear the ghostly whispers of the previously happy family that had gathered around the fireplace below.
The Undead That Saved Christmas Vol. 2 Page 2
