A Fantastic Holiday Season: The Gift of Stories (16 page)

A Christmas Feast

A Story of the Rot & Ruin

Jonathan Maberry

1

The living moved like ghosts through the fog.

The dead waited in the swirling mist.

There were screams in the air. A few shouts and gunshots.

And the moans.

Always the moans.

Long, and low and plaintive. Uttered by mouths that hung slack, rising from chests that drew breath only to moan—never again to breathe. The moans spoke of a hunger so old, so deep, so endless that nothing, not even the red gluttony of a screaming feast, could satisfy it.

The hunger existed.

Like
they
existed.

Without purpose and without end.

The mists were as thick as milk, white, featureless, hiding everything until far too late. Figures moved through the fog.

And the dead waited for them.

2

The man and the boy heard those moans and huddled together, biting the rags they wore as scarves to keep from screaming.

They were beyond tired. Beyond weary.

Both of them were thin as scarecrows. Barely enough meat on them to allow their bodies to shiver. Clothing was torn; patched with duct tape and rope.

Most of the time the man carried the boy. Sometimes—like now—he was too weak, too starved to manage it. The boy stumbled behind him, clutching his hand, too weary to cry. That’s when they moved the slowest. That’s when they were the most vulnerable.

The boy, Mason, was six. A lean phantom of the chubby child he’d been when they’d run away in August. It was only four months, but weight had fallen from them like leaves from an autumn tree. There were dead things out there that had more flesh on their bones.

The man—Mason’s older brother, Dan—stuffed the boy’s clothes with wadded up pieces of old newspaper. It helped some, trapping little bits of warmth.

Dan wore three sets of longjohns and he still looked skinny.

“I’m hungry.…” said Mason. Not for the first time. Or the hundredth.

“I know,” said Dan.

“I’m
tired
!”

“I know.”

“I want my mommy!”

The man squeezed his eyes shut but the tears found their way out anyway. “I know,” he whispered. “Me, too.”

3

Almost the worst thing for Dan was how much he envied the dead.

They were always hungry, sure, same as he and Mason. Hunger was everywhere. But the dead didn’t seem to mind it. They never wept for the want of food. They hunted, sure. That’s all they did. But once Dan and Mason had slept in a church tower and all day Dan watched the dead ones walk around or stand or sometimes kill and eat. When they feasted, they did it like dogs. Like jackals. They tore it apart and consumed everything as fast as they could. Like they were starving. As Dan and Mason were starving.

But when there was no meat. When there was no one to kill, they just …
were.
They didn’t fall down from hunger. They didn’t scream with the pain of needing food.

They just kept being …

Being what?

What were they?

The newspapers threw a lot of words around before it all went silent. Walkers. Rooters. Flesh-eaters. Ghouls.

Zombies.

Them.

Whatever they were, they never seemed to actually mind being hungry.

Like they never minded the cold. Or the rain. Or the wind.

They just were.

Dan hated the thought of envying them.

He hated himself for feeling that envy.

He hated himself.

He hated.

And he hungered.

4

They’d left the highway four hours ago.

That was the route most of the refugees had used even though none of the cars worked anymore. Something had happened to them. There had been big explosions, high up and far away and all of the cars died. Cell phones, too. Everything electric.

The two of them had been following a highway for days. The highways were straight routes. The cars offered some protection when the dead found them. You could hide in cars. At least for a while. Some of the dead could pick up rocks and smash the glass. If you were still, if you were quiet, you could wait out the night and in the stillness of the morning you could steal away.

But then there was a spot where hundreds and hundreds of the dead crowded the road. Everyone ran. Dan tossed Mason over the guardrail into the thick grass, leaped the rail himself with half a second to spare, scooped up his brother, and ran.

And ran.

And ran.

The people who ran down into the valleys didn’t make it. There were rumors about that. It was worse in the lowlands. When the dead weren’t following prey they followed the path of least resistance. They crowded the lowlands because gravity pulled with subtle insistence on stumbling feet. Fewer of them fought that pull to walk up hill. Not unless there was meat to find. A handful of travelers out scavenging shared this new lore with Dan. When the highways became impossible, Dan took his brother up the slopes, into the foothills of the mountains.

At first there were just as many of the dead. Hungry, tireless. Awful.

But soon there were fewer. The higher they climbed, there were fewer.

Fewer.

Never none.

They passed places where people had fought and died. Some of them were still there, but these were not the staggering dead. These bodies had terrible head wounds. Gunshots, blows from blunt weapons.

“Don’t look at them,” Dan warned his brother.

But the boy looked. Of course he looked. His eyes were filled with …

Nothing.

When it all went bad, Mason had been too young to understand much of what was happening when the plague swept out of the TV news and into their lives. Since then there had been no chance to give him a sense of what the world was like. What the world should have been like. Horror was everyday. Horror was everywhere. So, how could his brother, how could little Mason, have any understanding of how bad things were? For him—for both of then—every moment was built around moving forward, staying safe, scavenging food, finding water. Finding warmth.

Beyond where the bodies lay a small lane spurred off from the main road. A wrecked car blocked the entrance, but when the man leaned over the crumpled hood he saw that the lane was clear.

Dan nodded, accepting it as a gift. Believing it to be so.

He picked Mason up, kissed him on the forehead, set him down on the hood of the car, and pushed him gently to the other side. Then he climbed up and over to help him down onto the ground again. A signpost wrapped in withered creeper vines read: SULLIVAN LANE.

He didn’t know where it went, but any road was good as long as it wasn’t the one they were on. Besides, the lane was lined on both sides by heavy pine trees that blocked the fierce winds. It was still here, and without the wind the temperature was bearable. The snow was piled in long drifts against the trees, but the center of the lane was barely dusted.

“Come on,” he said again, though this time there was less urgency in his voice. Mason tried to walk, and he made it for a quarter mile before his stumbling feet failed. Dan scooped him up before he could fall, and though his own strength was flagging, he carried his brother into the wintry night.

Snow fell the way snow does. Soft, quiet, quilting the world with whiteness, hiding the truth of what lay beneath. It dampened down the sounds from farther down the road. The moans. The cries. The gunfire. All of it was distant anyway, and the snow shushed it to silence.

It was powdery and dry, and it blew it slow drifts across the road. The air was frigid and the temperature was dropping. Rags and newspaper were not enough.

Dan saw the uneven lumps in the road ahead and knew it for what it was. A fight that had ended the way these fights do.

Badly.

He kept going, though. What else was there to do? Keep moving or lay down here and wait for either the teeth of the wind or the teeth of the dead to do their work.

The only grace, and it was small, was that the wind blew at his back rather than in his face. It pushed him, ever so subtly, uphill.

So it was uphill he walked, clutching his brother in his arms, feeling the ten tons of the little boy turn to twenty tons, to thirty. Dan never once let go, though. No, sir, he did not do that.

Hours passed. The night deepened with the snow.

Dan tried not to count the bodies in the snow. He knew that was the kind of thing a madman would do. Counting the dead as a way of passing the time. That wasn’t right.

Then after a time he realized that there were no more dead to count. The road stretched ahead, pale despite the darkness of night. Smooth and unbroken.

Dan stopped for a moment and set Mason down. The kid was out of his feet and he sagged against Dan, leaning on his thighs, fingers hooked into his pants pockets, eyes closed.

“It’s okay,” whispered Dan, smoothing the boy’s matted hair. “We’re safe.”

Saying that was dangerous. Believing it was dangerous.

So dangerous.

There was hope in that concept, and hope was like a backstabbing friend. You could trust it sometimes, and then it would turn and drive its blade deep.

They had to be careful. They had to learn to live without trust. To live without assumption or expectation.

To live without.

That made the road so hard, so long, so lonely. And the man and his little brother were too far-gone to be company to each other.

Dan never stopped watching. He never let his attention slacken.

“I’m cold,” said Mason, and the way he said it jolted Dan. It was in a sleepy, dreamy, resigned voice.

Dan knelt, feeling his brother’s face and fingers. They were like ice. The temperature was plummeting and the fog was turning to crystals in the air. It was so humid he knew that it would start snowing soon.

Panic flared in his chest. He rubbed Mason’s cheeks and arms, trying to coax the circulation, fighting to keep alive the spark of heat in the boy’s limbs. He took Mason’s icy fingers and put them in his own mouth, breathing his own heat onto them.

Mason’s eyelids fluttered, but his eyes didn’t open.

“Please,” begged Dan, feeling tears break from his eyes and run like boiling water down his cheeks. “Please. God … please.”

He was aware, as everyone was aware, that prayers were not being answered anymore. If they ever had been. While on the road, Dan had a lot of time to think about all of the desperate and needy ones who had begged for God’s mercy in times of war and famine, in wretched hospitals and on sinking ships. If there was a plan in God’s mercy, or His lack of mercy, Dan couldn’t see it. He still believed, but the structure of his belief had collapsed with the world. Those nights hiding in a church had not restored his confidence that grace would be afforded to him. He was pretty sure he didn’t deserve any anyway. But Mason was a kid.

Four years old.

Dan did not believe in the concept of original sin. That seemed like bullshit to him. Sin was earned. Babies don’t have any. They can’t or God is an asshole. Dan didn’t think God was an asshole. A merciless fuck, maybe, but not an asshole.

So where was mercy?

Where, in the endless dark of this night, was His grace?

“Please,” he prayed as he tried to rub life back into his brother’s flesh. “Please.”

5

“Danny—?”

Mason’s voice was so pale, so empty.

But it was there.

The dead don’t speak. They can’t.

Only the living can do that.

Dan hugged his brother to him. He pulled the ends of his coat around the boy. Maybe together their heat would be enough.

Maybe.

Sobbing, Dan picked Mason up and squinted into the darkness. The snow clouds must have been thinner than he thought because he could see light. Moonlight? Was it a full moon? Or a gibbous moon?

He didn’t know. He’d come to learn the phases of the moon during his months on the run, but it had been cloudy for days.

Still, there was light.

Cold and …

Yellow.

Yellow?

Dan frowned at it. Moonlight was white. Moonlight on snow was blue.

This was yellow.

And it was wrong. It seemed to reach up to paint the undersides of the trees. It wasn’t coming down from the clouds.

Yellow light.

Not sunlight yellow. There were hours of darkness left to go.

Yellow.

Like …

He was running before he knew it.

Aching, weary legs pumped as if he’d been resting for hours. He could feel his heart hammering inside his chest. Like fists beating on a door.

Like hope pounding to be let out of Pandora’s Box.

The road snaked and whipsawed as it climbed the mountain. There were houses on either side. Doors smashed open or boarded up. Blood streaks and spatters. Bullet holes. Nowhere he dared go.

The light was ahead. Up the hill. Near the top.

No.

At the top.

His legs were trembling so badly that he knew he couldn’t go on much more. He needed to set Mason down. He needed to rest.

But not out here in the cold. In the snow.

Not in any of those houses where death had come calling.

The light was stronger.

Closer.

Brighter.

Dan rounded another bend. Another. Another.

And then there was a long space of nothing. Just trees and empty fields on either side of the road. The snow was unbroken up here. Nothing and no one had come this way in hours.

There was a huge stand of old trees. Oaks and pines and maples. So heavy they blocked the view of the top of the hill.

But through them …

Through them.

The yellow light.

He could see it shining on the ice, glimmering on each snowflake.

So close.

“Hold on,” he whispered to Mason, but the boy did not respond. He was limp in Dan’s arms. “Hold on.”

Dan kept going along the road, up the road, to wherever this road led. If it led to a pack of the dead, then he knew he would drop to his knees and try to hide Mason with his own body. Or maybe he’d just smother the boy. Choke him out and leave him to come back as one of them. They never wept for hunger.