Christmas With the Dead

It was a foolish thing to
do, and Calvin had not
bothered
with it the last two years, not since the death of his wife and daughter, but
this year, this late morning, the loneliness and the monotony led him to it. He
decided quite suddenly, having kept fairly good record on the calendar, that
tomorrow was Christmas Eve, and zombies be damned. The Christmas lights and
decorations were going up.

He
went into the garage to look for the lights. He could hear the zombies sniffing
around outside the garage door. The door was down and locked tight, and on top
of that, though the zombies could grab and bite you, they weren’t terribly
strong most of the time, so the door was secure. The windows inside were
boarded over, the doors were locked, and double locked, and boarded. The back
yard the dead owned, but the windows and doors were boarded really well there,
so he was shut in tight and safe.

Prowling
through the holiday ornaments, he found immediately the large plastic Santa, and
three long strings of lights. They were the ones he had ripped down in anger
about two years back.

He
managed all of the strings of lights into his living room. He plugged the wires
into the extension cord that was hooked up to the generator he had put in the
kitchen, and discovered most of the lights were as dead as the proverbial dodo
bird. Many were broken from when he had torn them down.

He
sat for a moment, then went to the little refrigerator he had replaced the big
one with—used less energy—and pulled a bottled coffee out, twisted off the cap,
and walked over to the living room window.

Unlike
the garage on the side of the house, or the back yard, he had fenced the front
yard off with deeply buried iron bars to which he had attached chicken wire, overlapped
with barb wire. The fence rose to a height of eight feet. The gate, also eight
feet tall, was made of the same. He seldom used it. He mostly went out and back
in through the garage. There was no fence there. When he went out, they were
waiting.

More
often than not, he was able to run over and crush a few before hitting the door
device, closing the garage behind him. On the way back, he rammed a few more,
and with the touch of a button, sealed himself inside. When they were thin in
the yard, he used that time to stack the bodies in his pickup truck, haul them
somewhere to dump. It kept the stink down
that way.
Also, the rotting flesh tended to attract the hungry dead. The less he made
them feel at home, the better.

Today,
looking through the gaps between the boards nailed over the window, he could
see the zombies beyond the fence. They were pulling at the wire, but it was
firm and they were weak. He had discovered, strangely, that as it grew darker,
they grew stronger. Nothing spectacular, but enough he could notice it. They
were definitely faster then. It was as if the day made them sluggish, and the
night rejuvenated them; gave them a shot of energy, like maybe the moon was
their mistress.

He
noticed too, that though there were plenty of them, there were fewer every day.
He knew why. He had seen the results, not only around town, but right outside
his fence. From time to time they just fell apart.

It
was plain old natural disintegration. As time rolled on, their dead and rotten
bodies came apart. For some reason, not as fast as was normal, but still, they
did indeed break down. Of course, if they bit someone, they would become
zombies, fresher ones, but, after the last six months there were few if any
people left in town, besides himself. He didn’t know how it was outside of
town, but he assumed the results were similar. The zombies now, from time to
time, turned on one another, eating what flesh they could manage to bite off
each other’s rotten bones. Dogs, cats, snakes, anything they could get their
hands on, had been devastated. It was a new world, and it sucked. And sometimes
it chewed.

Back
in the garage, Calvin gathered up the six, large, plastic, snow men and the
Santa, and pulled them into the house. He plugged them in and happily
discovered they lit right up. But the strings of lights were still a problem.
He searched the garage, and only found three spare bulbs— green ones—and when
he screwed them in, only one worked. If he put up those strings they would be
patchy. It wasn’t as if anyone but himself would care, but a job worth doing
was a job worth doing right, as his dad always said.

He
smiled.

Ella,
his wife, would have said it wasn’t about doing a job
right,
it was more about fulfilling his compulsions. She would laugh at him now. Back
then a crooked picture on the wall would make him crazy. Now there was nothing
neat about the house. It was a fortress. It was a mess. It was a place to stay,
but it wasn’t a home.

Two
years ago it ended being a home when he shot his wife and daughter in the head
with the twelve
gauge
, put their bodies in the
dumpster down the street, poured gas on them, and set them on fire.

All
atmosphere of home was gone. Now, with him being the most desirable snack in
town, just going outside the fence was a dangerous endeavor. And being inside
he was as lonely as the guest of honor at a firing squad.

* * *

Calvin picked the strapped shotgun off
the couch and flung it over his shoulder, adjusted the .38 revolver in his
belt, grabbed the old fashioned tire tool
from where it leaned in the corner, and went back to the garage.

He cranked up the truck, which he always
backed in, and using the automatic garage opener, pressed it.

He had worked hard on the mechanism so
that it would rise quickly and smoothly, and today was no exception. It yawned
wide like a mouth opening. Three zombies, one he recognized faintly as Marilyn
Paulson, a girl he had dated in high school, were standing outside. She had
been his first love, his first sexual partner, and now half of her face dangled
like a wash cloth on a clothes line. Her hair was falling out, and her eyes
were set far back in her head, like dark marbles in crawfish holes.

The two others were men. One was
reasonably fresh, but Calvin didn’t recognize him. The other was his next door
neighbor, Phil
Tooney
. Phil looked close to falling
apart. Already his face had
collapsed,
his nose was
gone, as well as both ears.

As Calvin roared the big four-
seater
pickup out of the garage, he hit Marilyn with the
bumper and she went under, the wing mirror clipped Phil and sent him winding.
He glanced in the rearview as he hit the garage mechanism, was pleased to see
the door go down before the standing zombie could get inside. From time to time
they got in when he left or returned, and he had to seal them in, get out and
fight or shoot them. It was a major annoyance, knowing you had that waiting for
you when you got back from town.

The last thing he saw as he drove away
was the remaining zombie eating a mashed Marilyn as she squirmed on
the driveway. He had shattered her legs
with the truck. She was unable to fight back. The way his teeth clamped into
her and pulled, it was as if he were trying to bite old bubble gum loose from
the side walk.

Another glance in the mirror showed him Phil
was back on his feet. He and the other zombie got into it then, fighting over
the writhing meal on the cement. And then Calvin turned the truck along
Seal Street
, out of their view, and rolled on toward
town.

* * *

Driving, he glanced at all the Christmas
decorations. The lights strung on houses, no longer lit. The yard decorations,
most of them knocked over: Baby Jesus flung south from an overturned manager, a
deflated blow-up Santa Clause in a sleigh with hooked up reindeer, now lying
like a puddle of lumpy paint spills in the high grass of a yard fronting a
house with an open door.

As he drove, Calvin glanced at the
dumpster by the side of the road.
The one where he had put
the bodies of his wife and daughter and burned them.
It was, as far as
he was concerned, their tomb.

One morning, driving into town for
supplies, a morning like this, he had seen zombies in the dumpster, chewing at
bones, strings of flesh. It had driven him crazy. He had pulled over right then
and there and
shotgunned
them
,
blowing off two heads, and crushing in two others with the butt of the twelve
gauge. Then, he had pulled the tire
tool from
his belt and beat their corpses to pieces. It had been easy, as they were
rotten and ragged and almost gone. It was the brain being destroyed that
stopped them, either that or their own timely disintegration, which with the
destruction of the brain caused the rot to accelerate. But even with them down
for the count, he kept whacking at them, screaming and crying as he did.

He swallowed as he drove by. Had he not
been napping after a hard days work, waiting on dinner, then he too would have
been like Ella and Tina. He wasn’t sure which was worse, becoming one of them,
not knowing anything or anyone anymore, being eternally hungry, or surviving,
losing his wife and daughter and having to remember them every day.

* * *

Mud Creek’s Super Savor parking lot was
full of cars and bones and wind blown shopping carts. A few zombies were
wandering about. Some were gnawing the bones of the dead. A little child was
down on her knees in the center of the lot gnawing on the head of a kitten.

As he drove up close to the Super Savor’s
side door, he got out quickly, with his key ready, the truck locked,
the
shotgun on his shoulder, and the tire tool in his belt.

He had, days after it all came down,
finished off the walking dead in the Super Market with his shotgun, and pulled
their bodies out for the ones outside to feast on. While this went on, he found
the electronic lock for the
sliding
plasti
-glass doors, and he located the common doors at side
and back, and found their keys. With the store sealed, he knew he could come in
the smaller doors whenever he wanted, shop for canned and dried goods. The
electricity was still working then, but in time, he feared it might go out. So
he decided the best way to go was to start with the meats and fresh vegetables.
They lasted for about six weeks. And then, for whatever reason, the electricity
died.