The Christmas Zombie Read online

  His hand trembled. He gripped the Sig now, but he doubted he could hit them all in the head at this distance. Any closer and it would be moot. He whirled and stumbled up the remainder of the slope, heading for his cabin’s back door. The two sides of the wrap-around deck met at the door, and he had made a low firing wall back there, just off the deck steps, of railroad ties four high, with a short trench behind them and a berm facing out. He could be outflanked here, too, if the walkers split up and flowed at him from either end.

  The door fought him.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw that the leader had reached the downslope lookout perch already. These walkers were fast.

  What the hell…? Never seen that before…”

  It wasn’t the door, it was him. After frustrating wasted seconds he managed to wrestle the lock open.

  It shouldn’t have been like this. He’d expected his defense of the cabin to be almost routine, easily accomplished, as it had been the last time he had done it. If he’d taken the Weatherby with him this morning, and if he’d decided to liberate them (like in the old days, he thought), then none of this would be happening. But as time passed he’d relaxed his guard, and now made a series of wrong decisions. In his old practice, he would have asked something like, “And how does this make you feel?” and “When did you realize you had acted irresponsibly?” In his old practice, he would have asked probing questions designed to lead the patient to his or her own answers.

  None of which helped him in the least.

  He barred the door behind him, then staggered to his upstairs gun rack. The Weatherby was in the downstairs rack, but he no longer needed distance. Now he needed stopping power. He grabbed a loaded Remington shotgun and racked the pump.

  He dropped his special shutters over the window glass, then popped open the gun ports he had designed himself. The hinges were rusty. It’d been that long since he had to use the ports.

  Should have thought to oil them.

  If I survive this, he promised, I’ll remember the little things.

  Not that anyone cared.

  There would be no one to mark his end, if it came today. No one at all.

  2

  Their loud, irregular steps echoed on the deck.

  He stood behind the door, waiting.

  He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but then he did: his nerve had failed him. He could have shot them all when they were far enough away that they would not have reached him. Back when the nightmare had begun to unfold, he had expended ammunition like a man insane, over the line. He’d made himself drunk on the smell of cordite and the stench of decayed blood and bone and flesh. He had terminated dozens of the walkers, all along expecting to become one himself. He had burned corpses (were they double corpses?) in piles, and then — when the nearby town had died and he was alone — he had slowly let the memory of their burning flesh change him, though he hadn’t been aware of it until today, the day he saw this group of walkers and decided to let them pass unharmed. And then they had forced his hand and now he would have no choice.

  For deep down he still wanted to live. Deep down, if he looked, there was still pleasure to be had in a cup of coffee on a crisp day, a solitary lunch on the deck when the short summer was in full swing, a glass of wine from an unending supply tipped at a colorful sunset. Deep down, he still relished being human, even if no others like him ever found him. He wondered why none had and he knew if they did, his fortifications would again have to protect him from his fellow humans. Most days he bitterly relished the irony inherent in the possibility that humans, not walkers, would be more likely to cost his life. But he hardly relished the possibility.

  And right now, he relished the hope of surviving his own hubris.

  Outside, they began to batter the door and the windows, using their bodies as rams. Only the door seemed in danger of breaking, despite his reinforcement. And that was because the largest walker and two of the males were attacking it in unison. Their growls and grunts brought back memories he’d hoped were laid to rest.

  He selected a port, poked the shotgun barrel through it, squeezed the trigger and the blast nearly deafened him. Outside, something made a thump as whatever the pellets hit disintegrated and the walker rolled off the deck. Another blast, another hit. He would have to check them after, blow off their heads to make sure. For now he had evened the odds. Given himself some time.

  But the door continued to rattle in its frame, and he heard glass breaking in one of his shuttered windows. He lunged for it, stuck the barrel in the shutter port and fired again. The sound of flesh destruction was less, a smaller target — perhaps one of the females, or the child.

  He grimaced at the thought. He wasn’t looking forward to the clean up.

  Behind him the door started to splinter, so he pumped the Remington and put a shell through the port, satisfied at the sound of further destruction. He didn’t think of it as murder. The walkers did not scream or speak, they only grunted and growled, and it was easier to think of them as animals. Dangerous animals who could have left him alone.

  But they hadn’t…

  Suddenly the door exploded inward and he barely had time to pump the action before the large leader of the herd stumbled in and recovered his balance all too quickly, his ruined hands reaching out like talons to grab flesh.

  He made a strangled sound and shot the walker in the stomach, folding the creature in half… but only for a split-second, because then the face was up again and all its decaying skin was hanging in strips and its mouth was like a shark’s, snapping closed as it tried to grab the food it craved. Its back was a ruined mess where the pellets had exited, some of them taking half the other male’s face off in a bloody black cloud. That walker dropped like a sack, but the massively built leader somehow continued on, its attack mode fully engaged.

  A pump of the Remington and now there were only two shells left in the magazine.

  Make it count! he thought. He heard more glass tinkling as another window went.

  While his attention had slipped, a hand grasped at his clothing and he sobbed as he felt himself dragged forward. The shotgun barked and deafened him and he felt the blast’s wind as the shot took off the walker’s arm at the shoulder, releasing him. It didn’t matter because the monster seemed barely to notice, its focus on food and nothing else.

  Almost desperate now, he backed up out of the snapping jaws’ range, lifted the shotgun barrel and put another handful of pellets into the walker’s face. The shot was devastating.

  He stepped back just in time and the wrecked body landed at his feet, twitching for few seconds then shuddering and stiffening. A quick second death.

  Satisfied, he turned to face the other breaking window, drew the Python, and two quick shots dropped the female walker to the deck.

  Breathing in shudders, he tried to both reload the Remington and also count the walkers he had neutralized. He stepped around the corpse, through his ruined door and checked the mess on the deck.

  Shit!

  The kid and two females were unaccounted for.

  And then he saw two of them, a female and the kid, lurching away from his back steps and half-rolling down the slope. Without their leader, they were no longer game for the fight. He stalked after them single-mindedly, Python in hand. He had to finish them off, or they’d be back.

  He stumbled down the snow-covered hillside, almost catching up to them.

  They were moving erratically now. This was the time. He extended his hand, the Python’s ribbed barrel swinging from larger body to smaller, the sights lining up, his finger tightening on the trigger. He brought some pressure to bear and…

  A strangled sob escaped him.

  With their backs to him as they slid through the snow, the two didn’t look like walkers, like animals who hungered for flesh.

  They looked like a woman and her child.

  He gasped and sobbed again, his eyes on their backs, knowing he could drop them both, one-two, just like that. He’d
done it a thousand times.

  Christ!

  He lowered the Colt.

  What was wrong with him?

  He just couldn’t pull the trigger.

  Then he jumped, literally jumped in his boots, and whirled around.

  Fuck.

  Three. There had been three more. He watched as the two he’d allowed to escape reached the tree line and disappeared among the pines almost as if they’d never been there.

  He stumbled and staggered back up the hill toward his cabin, wondering how he’d managed to get so soft. And now he’d made a… possibly… very fatal mistake. Two of them. Letting walkers live was one step removed from suicide. Letting one disappear on him, likely inside his own fortress, was suicide.

  The slippery snow-covered hillside hindered his progress and the cold air chilled his hands and feet as he struggled upward, his breath gasping out of his mouth and obscuring his view.

  When would the other female surprise him? Where had she hidden? How would he lure her out so he could shoot her and return his day to the peace and quiet with which it had begun?

  He holstered the Python and slipped a few rounds into the Remington’s breech.

  The cabin lay silent on his hilltop, its back door and three rear windows all ruined. There was no sign of the female.

  Carefully, quietly, he climbed the steps and avoided the black blood he’d spilled. The bodies outside were where he had felled them.

  Just inside the back door, though, something had changed.

  He stood gasping, staring, his shotgun ready.

  The large walker, the leader (father?) of the herd, was not where he’d been shot. He was gone.

  There was black and gray gore everywhere, and a trail where he could see the walker had been dragged.

  He followed the trail cautiously, edging down the steps to a slightly lower level where the corridor to the upstairs bedrooms lay. But the trail of gore led down the main stairs, an open staircase to the kitchen. He stepped carefully, avoiding the worst of it.

  His breath was ragged. His hands trembled and the cradled shotgun wobbled.

  He found her in the kitchen, in the middle of the floor, huddled over the ruined body of the walker.

  He raised the shotgun, finger tightening on the trigger. It was a fairly light trigger, for a shotgun, and it wouldn’t take much for him to follow through. But just as the pad of his index finger started to widen on the cold, ribbed hardness of the curved trigger, he blinked his eyes and his heart seemed to stop.

  The woman walker looked up at him through the filthy bird’s nest of her hair, through the blood and gore on her face. She looked up at him and he saw tears coursing down her face.

  Jesus, this isn’t possible!

  A walker, crying? Could a walker be alive enough or feel enough to cry? He didn’t think so. He’d looked into their empty eyes enough as he had killed them. There was never anything in them but raging, mindless hunger. This woman’s eyes were blank behind the tears, but…

  It was a different kind of blankness.

  Her eyes were wide and glazed, almost sightless, but they were indeed leaking tears. Real tears. Her face looked like a walker’s, covered with gore and decay, but now that he stared at her more carefully he started to notice details. Her skin wasn’t decaying, it was just covered with dirt or soot, along with the blood and whatever else — maybe from when he’d shot someone else nearby. Her head had looked deflated to him through the binoculars, or misshapen, but now it looked more as if she’d suffered some blunt force trauma and had bled, and then her other head wound had scabbed over.

  He released his pressure on the trigger. Just enough to separate the skin of his finger from the trigger itself. He half-lowered the shotgun.

  Her eyes followed the muzzle. It was the first time, really, that he saw anything other than a stare from her.

  She couldn’t be a walker.

  His career prior to God’s Wrath had been all about reading people, and treating them. The Wrath had made a killer out of him. But now he felt a tingle, a hitching of the breath, that told him to stop. Told him to evaluate.

  Christ…

  He hitched up the barrel when she twitched and almost let go the blast, but held off and it was just a huge body-length sigh and shudder that wracked her entire body.

  It wasn’t hard for him to spot the possible signs of post-traumatic stress, perhaps in concert with actual trauma of having her head bashed in by something like a two-by-four or baseball bat. Maybe a steel pipe. His training, though rusty, helped with that.

  But the other part, the part that made him suddenly realize she had been with the walkers and hadn’t been dead, or a walker herself, and… she hadn’t been turned into food, either… that part created more questions than it answered.

  The male walker was definitely down for good. The shotgun blasts had blown out his chest cavity as well as his arm and all but decapitated his corpse. He was done.

  The woman, on the other hand, was alive.

  Alive… The old fashioned way. Really alive, as in breathing. He could see it now, shallow breathing along the visible portions of her neck.

  If the large walker was her father, perhaps that explained why she was still grieving. But all other such cases he had witnessed ended when the walker in the family had attacked his or her own. This one had not?

  He felt the world shift a little under his feet. His world.

  He lowered the gun, making a decision. “Friend?” he said.

  Idiot! He’d just killed her father again. As far as she had to be concerned, he hadn’t proven much friendship.

  She looked at him with blank eyes that somehow displayed a little less blankness at the outer edges.

  “Friend?” he repeated. The gun was now almost too low to help him if she lunged as he had seen them do.

  She inclined her head and continued crying, dripping tears on the body she still cradled.

  He watched her as he lay down the shotgun. She stared back, sniffling almost imperceptively.

  Jesus. He’d killed non-walkers, but they were actively attacking him, rogue human scum. This woman was not, and had not. Not really. She’d followed the pack leader, whoever he was.

  “Are you hungry?” he said. Her eyes and nostrils widened, almost like those of an animal teased with a tidbit. He took her answer as a yes.

  As she stared, he swiped an open package of saltines from the counter. He offered it to her, but she shrank back.

  Okay, he thought. He lay it down on the messy linoleum. She would have to walk around the body, but he would wait.

  His brain buzzed.

  He studied her as she looked at the saltines longingly. She was maybe mid-twenties, square-jawed. Large, limpid eyes. Straight nose. Her lips were thin and scabbed, but her lower lip was larger and it now trembled. She looked wild, but that was because she’d been dragged over the countryside by her walker family. Was that even possible? Apparently it was…

  He backed out of the kitchen after scooping up the shotgun again. She barely flinched, so enrapt had she become by the food lying within reach.

  He stepped back upstairs and made sure he could close what was left of the partly splintered door. He looked at the human remains spread throughout the back hall and set about cleaning up as well as he could. Now that he’d wound down a bit he saw his breath as the outside cold had encroached on his cozy fortress.

  Yeah, not much of a fortress anymore. He dug out bleach and a mop and a bucket he filled from the well pump, then cocked an ear. He heard her unwrapping the saltines downstairs. He kept the shotgun near, but got some of the mess cleaned up. Superficially, at least.

  The body downstairs he would tackle tomorrow. Christmas Eve.

  He spent the rest of the day in a chair facing the stairs. The shotgun was on his lap. He heard the woman moving around downstairs, but he’d barred the french doors and windows that opened onto the front of the deck. She couldn’t leave without passing him. The guns were racked a
nd chained, unloaded, trigger-locked. He had taken every precaution but the obvious one.

  Now what?

  The thoughts swirled as he sat. The sight of her face hovered in his memory. His old instinct, that of a helper, started to manifest. He’d killed for so long, it was a strange feeling. How had this happened, and why? The question went beyond how and why this woman was alive, but how and why she hadn’t been attacked and killed by her family members who had turned. Could the walkers feel love? Could they continue to love even after death? The woman clearly still grieved for her father, if that’s who the large walker had been. Perhaps his attack had been based on doing the best for his family, not mere hunger. But even thinking this was disturbing. And if this one whose corpse lay downstairs was doing just that, were there others? What did this mean for the end of the world? Maybe the end was a kind of beginning.

  Here he was, delving into philosophy again.

  Hours — and an endless stream of thoughts — later, he heard shuffling on the steps and soon she appeared, her eyes downcast. She stood at the top of the stairs. She wouldn’t look at him directly.

  He pointed to a blanket and pillow on his sofa. “If you want it,” he said. Now she was looking at the shotgun, so he slowly placed it on the floor. And then she looked at him, her eyes large in the darkening room. The tears had dried, but she still seemed shell-shocked. “The couch is warm,” he added.

  They remained in their places for a while, neither talking or moving. He didn’t know what to say — how do you apologize for shooting someone’s family? He wasn’t sure how to deal with this situation, and he wasn’t sure letting her in his house was any sort of solution.

  Still…

  It seemed like hours later, but it probably wasn’t, that he made a decision. He went to bed.

  By now she was shivering, waves of all-over shivers wracking her body.

  Shock. Or the cold air that whistled through the house. Or both.