"Actually, you probably couldn't tell, but that thing with the table? Just a really badly executed escape attempt."
Tuck winced as she fastened the bandage over his ribs with some tape.
"You're going to need stitches," Lena said. "Any place I missed?"
Tuck held up his right hand — there were tooth marks on the back of it welling up with blood.
"Oh my God!" Lena said.
"You're going to have to cut his head off," said Joshua Barker, who was standing by watching.
"Whose?" Tuck said. "The guy in the Santa suit, right?"
"No, I mean your head," said Josh. "They're going to have to cut off your head or you'll turn into one of them."
Most everyone in the chapel had stopped what they were doing and gathered around Tuck and Lena, seemingly grateful for a point of focus. The pounding on the walls had ceased, and with the exception of the occasional rattling of the door handles, there was only the sound of the wind and rain. The Lonesome Christmas crowd was stunned.
"Go away, kid," said Tuck. "This is no time to be a kid."
"What should we use?" asked Mavis Sand. "This okay, kid?" She held a serrated knife that they'd been using to cut garlic bread.
"That is not acceptable," Tuck said.
"If you don't cut his head off," said Joshua, "he'll turn into one of them and let them in."
"What an imagination this kid has," said Tuck, flashing a grin from face to face, looking for an ally. "It's Christmas! Ah, Christmas, the time when all good people go about not decapitating each other."
Theo Crowe came out of the back room, where he'd been looking for something they could use as a weapon. "Phone lines are down. We'll lose power any minute. Is anyone's cell phone working?"
No one answered. They were all looking at Tuck and Lena.
"We're going to cut off his head, Theo," Mavis said, holding out the bread knife, handle first. "Since you're the law, I think you should do it."
"No, no, no, no, no, no," said Tuck. "And furthermore, no."
"No," said Lena, in support of her man.
"You guys have something you want to tell me?" Theo said. He took the bread knife from Mavis and shoved it down the back of his belt.
"I think you were onto something with that killer-robot thing," Tuck said.
Lena stood up and put herself between Theo and Tuck. "It was an accident, Theo. I was digging Christmas trees like I do every year and Dale came by drunk and angry. I'm not sure how it happened. One minute he was going to shoot me and the next the shovel was sticking out of his neck. Tucker didn't have anything to do with it. He just happened along and was trying to help."
Theo looked at Tuck. "So you buried him with his gun?
Tuck climbed painfully to his feet and stood behind Lena. "I was supposed to see this coming? I was supposed to anticipate that he might come back from the grave all angry and brain hungry, so I should hide his gun from him? This is your town, Constable, you explain it. Usually when you bury a body they don't come back and try to eat your brains the next day."
"Brains! Brains! Brains!" chanted the undead from outside the chapel. The pounding on the walls started again.
"Shut up!" screamed Tucker Case, and to everyone's amazement, they did. Tuck grinned at Theo. "So, I fucked up."
"Ya think?" Theo said. "How many?"
"You should cut his head off over the sink," said Joshua Barker. "That way it won't make as big a mess."
Without a word, Theo reached down and picked Josh up by the biceps, then walked over and handed him to his mother, who looked as if she were going into the first stages of shock. Theo touched his finger to Josh's lips in a shush gesture. Theo looked more serious, more intimidating, more in control than anyone had ever seen him. The boy hid his face in his mother's breasts.
Theo turned to Tuck. "How many?" Theo repeated. "I saw maybe thirty, forty?"
"About that," Tuck said. "They're in different states of decay. Some of them just look like there's little more than bone, others look relatively fresh, and pretty well preserved. None of them seems particularly fast or strong. Dale maybe, some of the fresher ones. It's like they're learning to walk again or something."
There was a loud snap from outside and everyone jumped — one woman literally leaping into a man's arms with a shriek. They all fell into a crouch, listening to a tree falling through branches, expecting the trunk to come crashing through the ceiling beams. The lights went out and the whole church shook with the impact of the big pine hitting the forest floor.
Without missing a beat, Theo snapped on a flashlight he'd had in his back pocket in anticipation of a power outage. Small emergency lamps ignited above the front door, casting everyone in a deep-shadowed directional light.
"Those should last about an hour," Theo said. "There should be some flashlights in the basement, too. Go on. What else did you see, Tuck?"
"Well, they're pissed off and they're hungry. I was kind of busy trying not to get my brains eaten. They seemed pretty adamant about the brain-eating thing. Then they're going to IKEA, I guess."
"This is ridiculous," said Val Riordan, the elegantly coiffed psychiatrist, speaking up for the first time since the whole thing had started. "There's no such thing as a zombie. I don't know what you think is happening here, but you don't have a crowd of brain-eating zombies."
"I'd have to agree with Val," Gabe Fenton said, stepping up beside her. "There's no scientific basis for zombieism — except for some experiments in the Caribbean with blowfish toxins that put people in a state of near death with almost imperceptible respiration and pulse, but there was no actual, you know, raising of the dead."
"Yeah?" said Theo, giving them an eloquent deadpan stare. "Brains!" he shouted.
"Brains! Brains! Brains!" came the responding chant from outside; the pounding on the walls resumed.
"Shut up!" Tuck shouted. The dead did.
Theo looked at Val and Gabe and raised an eyebrow. Well?
"Okay," Gabe said. "We may need more data."
"No, this can't be happening," said Valerie Riordan. "This is impossible."
"Dr. Val," Theo said. "We know what's happening here. We don't know why, and we don't know how, but we haven't lived in a vacuum all our lives, have we? In this case, denial ain't just a river in Egypt, denial will kill you."
Just then a brick came crashing through one of the windows and thumped into the middle of the chapel floor. Two clawlike hands caught the window ledge and a beat-up male face appeared at the window. The zombie pulled up enough so that he could hook one elbow inside the window, then shouted: "Val Riordan went down on the pimply kid who bags groceries at the Thrifty-Mart!"
A second later, Ben Miller picked up the brick and hurled it back through the window, taking out the zombie face with a sickening squish.
As Ben and Theo lifted the last of the buffet tables into place to be nailed over the window, Gabe Fenton stepped away from Valerie Riordan and looked at her like she'd been dipped in radioactive marmot spittle. "You said you were allergic!"
"We were almost broken up at the time," said Val.
"Almost! Almost! I have third-degree electrical burns on my scrotum because of you!"
Across the room, into Lena Marquez's ear, Tucker Case whispered, "I don't feel so bad about hiding the body now, how 'bout you?" She turned and kissed him hard enough to make him forget for a second that he'd just been shot, set on fire, beaten up, and bitten.
* * *
For years the dead had listened, and the dead knew. They knew who was cheating with whom, who was stealing what, and where the bodies were hidden, as it were. Besides the passive listening — those sneaking out for a smoke, sideline conversations at funerals, the walking and talking in the woods, and the sex and scare-yourself activities some of the living indulged in in the graveyard — there were also those among the living who used a tombstone as some sort of confessional, sharing their deepest secrets with someone who they thought could never talk, saying things they
could never say in life.
There were some things that people thought no one else, the living or the dead, could possibly know, but they did.
"Gabe Fenton watches squirrel porn!" screeched Bess Leander, her dead cheek pressed against the wet clapboard siding of the chapel.
"That is not porn, that's my work," Gabe explained to his fellow partyers.
"He doesn't wear pants! Squirrels, doing it, in slow motion. Pantsless."
"Just that one time. Besides, you have to watch in slow motion," Gabe said. "They're squirrels." Everyone turned their flashlights on something else, like they really weren't looking at Gabe.
"Ignacio Nuñez voted for Carter," came a call from outside. The staunch Republican nursery owner was caught like a deer in the flashlights as everyone looked at him. "I was only in this country a year. I'd just become a citizen. I didn't even speak English very well. He said he wanted to help the poor. I was poor."
Theo Crowe reached over and patted Nacho's shoulder.
"Ben Miller used steroids in high school. His gonads are the size of BBs!"
"That is not true," exclaimed the track star. "My testicles are perfectly normal size."
"Yeah, if you were seven inches tall," said Marty in the Morning, all dead, all the time.
Ben turned to Theo. "We've got to do something about this."
The others in the room were looking from one to the other, each with a look on his or her face that was much more horrified than when they'd been only facing the prospect of an undead mob eating their brains. These zombies had secrets.
"Theo Crowe's wife thinks she's some kind of warrior mutant killer!" shouted a rotted woman who had once been a psych nurse at the county hospital.
Everybody in the chapel sort of looked at one another and nodded, shrugged, let out a sigh of relief.
"We knew that," yelled Mavis. "Everybody knows that. That's not news."
"Oh, sorry," said the dead nurse. There was a pause; then, "Okay, then. Wally Beerbinder is addicted to painkillers."
"Wally's not here," said Mavis. "He's spending Christmas with his daughter in L.A."
"I got nothing," said the nurse. "Someone else go."
"Tucker Case thinks his bat can talk," shouted Arthur Tannbeau, the dead citrus farmer.
"Who wants to sing Christmas carols?" said Tuck. "I'll start. 'Deck the halls…"
And so they sang, loud enough to drown out the secrets of the undead. They sang with great Christmas spirit, loud and off-key, until the battering ram hit the front doors.
Chapter 18
YOUR PUNY WORM GOD WEAPONS ARE USELESS AGAINST MY SUPERIOR CHRISTMAS KUNG FU
Molly slipped out the back door of the cabin and around the outside wall until she could see the tall figure standing before her picture window. The fallen wires had stopped sparking out by the street and the stars and moon barely cut through the darkness at all. Strangely enough, she could clearly see the man by her front window because there was a faint glow shining around him.
Radioactive, Molly thought. He wore the long black duster favored by sand pirates. Why, though, would a desert marauder be out in a rainstorm?
She assumed the Hasso No Kamae stance, back straight, the sword held high and tilted back over her right shoulder, the sword guard at mouth level, her left foot forward. She was three steps from delivering a deathblow to the intruder. The sword balanced perfectly in her grip, so perfectly that it seemed to weigh nothing at all. She could feel the wet pine needles under her bare feet and wished that she'd put on shoes before dashing out into the night. The cold rain against her bare skin made her think that maybe a sweater would have been a good idea as well.
The glowing man looked toward the opposite corner of the cabin and Molly made her move. Three soft steps and she stood behind him; the edge of her blade lay across the side of his neck. A quick pull and she would cut him to his vertebrae.
"Move and die," Molly said.
"Nuh-uh," said the glowing man.
The tip of Molly's sword extended a foot beyond the stranger's face. He looked at the blade. "I like your sword. Want to see mine?"
"You move, you die," Molly said, thinking that it wasn't the sort of thing you should have to repeat. "Who are you?"
"I'm Raziel," said Raziel. "It's not the sword of the Lord, or anything. Not for destroying cities, just for fighting one or two enemies at a time, or slicing cold cuts. Do you like salami?"
Molly didn't quite know how to proceed. This glowing sand pirate seemed perfectly unafraid, perfectly unconcerned, in fact, that she was holding a razor-sharp blade against his carotid artery. "Why are you looking in my window in the middle of the night?"
"Because I can't see through the wooden part."
Molly snapped her wrists back and smacked Raziel in the side of the head with the flat of her blade.
"Ouch."
"Who are you and why are you here?" Molly said. She snapped her blade back to threaten another smack, and in that instant Raziel stepped away from her, spun, and drew a sword from the middle of his back.
Molly hesitated, just a second, then approached and snapped her blade down, this time in a real attack aimed at his shoulder. Raziel parried the blow and riposted. Molly swept his blade aside and came around with her blade for a cut to the left arm. Raziel got his sword around just in time to deflect her blade down his arm instead of across it. The razor-sharp tashi took a long swath of fabric from his coat, as well as a thin slice of flesh down his forearm.
"Hey," he said, looking at his now-flapping sleeve.
There was no blood. Just a dark stripe where the flesh was gone. He started hacking, his sword describing an infinity pattern in the air before him as he drove Molly back through the pine forest toward the road. She quickstepped back, parrying some blows, dodging others, stepping around trees, kicking up wet pine straw as she moved. She could only see her glowing attacker, his sword shining now as well, the darkness around her so complete that she moved only by memory and feel. As she deflected one of the blows, her heel caught on a root and she lost her balance. She started to go over backward and spun as if to catch herself. Raziel's momentum carried him forward, his sword swinging for a target that a second before had been two feet higher, and he ran right onto Molly's blade. She was bent over forward; the blade extended back across her rib cage and through Raziel, extending another two feet out his back. They were frozen there for a moment — him bent over her back, stuck together with her sword — like two dogs who needed a bucket of water thrown on them.
From a crouch, Molly yanked the blade out, then spun, ready to deliver a coup de grace that would cut her enemy from collarbone to hip.
"Ouch," said Raziel, looking at the hole in his solar plexus. He threw his sword on the ground and prodded the wound with his fingers. "Ouch," he said again, looking up at Molly. "You don't thrust with that kind of sword. You're not supposed to thrust with that kind of sword. No fair."
"You're supposed to die now," Molly said.
"Nuh-uh," said Raziel.
"You can't say nuh-uh to death. That's sloppy debating."
"You poked me with your sword, and cut my coat." He held up his damaged arm.
"Well, you came creeping around here in the middle of the night looking in my windows, and you pulled a sword on me."
"I was just showing it to you. I don't even like it. I want to get web slingers for my next mission."
"Mission? What mission? Did Nigoth send you? He is no longer my higher power, by the way. This is not the kind of support I need."
"Fear not," said Raziel, "for I am a messenger of the Lord, come to bring a miracle for the Nativity."
"You're what?"
"Fear not!"
"I'm not afraid, you nitwit, I just kicked your ass. Are you telling me you're an angel?"
"Come to bring Christmas joy to the child."
"You're a Christmas angel?"
"I bring tidings of great joy, which shall be to all men. Well, not really. This time it's ju
st to one boy, but I memorized that speech, so I like to use it."
Molly let her guard down, the tip of her sword pointed at the ground now. "So the glowing stuff on you?"
"Glory of the Lord," said the angel.
"Oh piss," said Molly. She slapped herself in the forehead. "And I killed you."
"Nuh-uh."
"Don't start with the nuh-uh again. Should I call an ambulance or a priest or something?"
"I'm healing." He held up his forearm and Molly watched as the faintly glowing skin expanded to cover the wound.
"Why in the hell are you here?"
"I have a mission —»
"Not here on Earth, here at my house."
"We're attracted to lunatics."
Molly's first instinct was to take his head, but on second thought, she was standing in the middle of a pine forest, in freezing rain and gale-force winds, naked, holding a sword, and talking to an angel, so he wasn't exactly announcing the Advent. She was a lunatic.
"You want to come inside?" she said.
"Do you have hot chocolate?"
"With minimarshmallows," said the Warrior Babe.
"Blessed are the minimarshmallows," the angel said, swooning a little.
"Come on, then," Molly said as she walked away muttering, "I can't believe I killed a Christmas angel."
"Yep, you screwed the pooch on this one," said the Narrator.
"Nuh-uh," said the angel.
* * *
"Get that piano against the door!" Theo yelled.
The bolts on the front door had completely splintered away, and the Masonite buffet table was flexing under the blows of whatever the undead were using for a battering ram. The entire chapel shook with each impact.
Robert and Jenny Masterson, who owned Brine's Bait, Tackle, and Fine Wines, started rolling the upright piano from its spot by the Christmas tree. Both had been through some harrowing moments in Pine Cove's history, and they tended to keep their heads in an emergency.
"Anyone know how to lock these casters?" Robert called.
"We'll need to brace it just the same," Theo said. He turned to Ben Miller and Nacho Nunez, who seemed to have teamed up for the battle. "You guys look for more heavy stuff to brace the door."
The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror Page 15