She really was crazy. Germans, dead men, trees. She seemed to be conflating World War II with the Christian Church slowly taking over the pagan celebrations and making them part of the liturgy.
She made him nervous.
But Alex had to ask. “He died defending you?”
She nodded, then looked at Alex, tears in her eyes. “He had a pistol. He held the Germans off while my family and I escaped into the ghost tunnels. We were to leave, but the iron, it held us prisoner, changed us, trapped us. Like rats. That is how I first saw you, through the wall. I thought you were him.”
God, what was he to do with her? She was against the church, so he couldn’t take her to the priests there for help. And he had no idea what other place might take her in. He wasn’t even sure where the homeless shelters were—if there even were homeless shelters in this city.
She clearly had escaped from somewhere—an institution, a caregiver. Someone had to be looking for her, right?
There were several hospitals close to here, one near the Louvre itself. He wondered if he could get her there. He had never had cause to use any of the medical facilities in the city before.
“But you are not him, are you?” She brushed at his coat, as if she were removing lint. “You are not even his reincarnation. Mortals have such short lives.”
Alex couldn’t help himself. He engaged. “What are you, if not mortal?”
Her smile was sad. “We are so lost you no longer recognize us.”
She swept her hair back, then cupped his cheek. Her touch was cold.
“Lonely man,” she said. “You believe forever lonely.”
He tried not to move, not to betray anything with his expression. How had she known that? Was it that obvious?
It probably was. He was alone on Christmas Eve, after all. He was American. He clearly didn’t belong.
It didn’t take much to figure out that he was lonely, that he had no one to spend his time with.
“Because you freed me,” she said softly, “I owe you.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, “how did I free you?”
“You saw me,” she said. “As me, not as what I had become. To most, I was a creature. To others, the ghost of a woman they once loved. But to you, I was myself. You saw only me.”
She flattened her palm on his heart.
“It is because you have no woman and lost no woman that you saw me. It is your sadness that brought me back to life.”
Like the station itself, something whispered in his head. He didn’t like that thought. It made him uncomfortable. But, then, she made him uncomfortable.
“So,” she said, “a gift to you.”
She placed her red lips against his forehead. They were cold, like the rest of her.
And then, oddly, his heart lifted. Like it used to do when he was a child, when his parents were alive.
His mother used to say, Your heart has wings.
It had wings now.
“Sometimes,” the woman before him said, “hearts shatter. They must be repaired before they work again.”
Then she placed her chill forefinger under his chin, lifted his head slightly, and kissed him on the lips.
“I thank you,” she said—and disappeared.
He sat on the bench for a long time. Bells rang all over the city for midnight mass—Christmas Eve mass.
She had been an illusion, a figment of his overheated imagination.
He had himself convinced of that by the time he finished the long walk back to his apartment. A Christmas Eve hallucination. An undigested bit of beef, as Scrooge once said of Marley’s ghost.
Who turned out to be real enough.
Alex shuddered, not certain why he was so very cold. It was warmer in Paris on Christmas Eve than it usually was in Chicago on Christmas Eve. There, he would not have walked the center of the city in a coat, without a hat or gloves.
He took off the coat, and hung it on the built-in coat hanger near the door. Then he walked into the bathroom to wash the chill from his skin. He turned on the overhead light, and saw his face in the mirror, cheeks rosy from the chill, skin a bit too pale.
But that wasn’t what caught his eye.
What caught his eye was the bright red lipstick print on his forehead, with traces of the same lipstick on the side of his mouth.
She had been real.
And she had disappeared as if she had never been.
Oddly, he didn’t return to the Cluny-La Sorbonne Metro station for nearly a year. If asked, he would not say that was by design. He still used the Metro—maybe more than he had before—but he no longer wandered into the stations by himself, no longer stood waiting for midnight trains to whoosh by him on the way to something much more important.
He had important things to do now. A wife, an infant daughter, newly born. The City of Light had become a city of warmth for him.
He ended up in the Cluny-La Sorbonne by accident on the Winter Solstice, a bouquet of winter flowers in his hand, a bottle of wine under his arm. He had been distracted; he got on the wrong train, which brought him here.
He had already called his wife to apologize for being late. His wife, so lovely, so French. She had no family either, so she helped him make one. They had met on New Year’s Eve. He hadn’t planned to go out, yet he couldn’t stay in. He’d never been in a world-class city on a world-class holiday. It seemed churlish to avoid the celebrations.
And he didn’t want to seem lonelier than he already was.
He had stumbled into her. Truth be told, he worried for a half second that she was the crazy woman from the Metro, but his wife was not tiny or crazy. She was tall and blonde and sensible. She filled his arms, and somehow, she filled his heart—the heart he once thought untouchable.
Maybe it had healed. Or maybe …
That sensation of wings returned to him whenever he thought of that moment on the Pont des Arts. A gift, the strange woman had said. A gift he had told no one about.
He was the only person inside the Cluny-La Sorbonne. The birds mosaic flew overhead. The signatures glistened. And then the announcement sounded. The station had closed. Only one exit remained open.
He turned toward the wall, expecting rats.
But there were none.
His breath caught.
He wanted to believe the city had gotten rid of them.
But he had looked up old legends in the past year. Stories of Faerie. Trapped by iron, forced to change shape in their prison. Industrialization destroyed their habitat, just like the church had stolen their power.
The Germans had searched for them. Hitler believed magic would become one of the weapons of the Third Reich. If the Faerie existed, they hid.
And sometimes, all it took was something simple to destroy a curse.
Like a man, looking at a woman, and seeing her for who she was.
Alex shook his head, smiled at his fanciful nature. His wife said he was a dreamer. Perhaps he was.
Now.
He pulled one of the white roses from the bouquet. He knew the strange woman was no longer down here, just like he knew the rats were truly gone. But he needed a token anyway.
He placed the rose on the bench near where he had first seen her.
Whoever she was, she had touched him. She had made him see a future he didn’t want, one of lonely Christmas Eves that extended forever, like the Metro tunnels, midnight trains running with no one to board them.
He might have seen her, but she saw him as well.
And because she had, he saw himself more clearly.
That vision, that moment, led to this one.
“Thank you,” he whispered—and then walked to the exit, holding flowers for his wife, wine for their celebration, and a little bit of hope, in the wings of his heart.
The holiday dinner table! Piled high with platters of tender meats, savory sides, thick gravies, and rich sweets. A feast to defy the cold and dark of winter.
And a good thing, because in Jonathan Maberr
y’s harrowing tale of survival, it is so very cold outside, and so very dark, and so very dead.…
—KO
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.
A Fantastic Holiday Season Page 14