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.
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.
Foreve
r 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.
The Undead That Saved Christmas Vol. 2 Page 4
