Zombie Holiday

by C.G. Banks

a corpse’s asshole.

  I shuffled farther in, noticed off to the right a destroyed kitchen. The living room wasn’t much to pause over, just a TV face down on a rug, but right then I did seem to hear something farther back. A hall led that direction and I made my way toward the bedrooms.

  When I pushed the first door open I kind of just stood there. Everybody, I guessed, who once lived here was still here, but it was another kind of living that was going on now. It looked like mom and dad had been hit with the Change because they were milling about in the darkness, hardly taking a second to acknowledge I was even there. They were grunting and groaning over near the corner of the room and when I got a better look I had to shake my head. There was a large pile of bones over there and it appeared they were having a go at puzzle-building. It musta been their kids they were fretting over because both of em were digging through the bone pile and bringing back stuff to the bed. The sheets had been flung off to the floor. And on the bed they were arranging bones. Trying, it looked like, to fit the kids back together again. And not with much success. It was about then that all the blood sorta made sense. They’d attacked the kids and eaten them; that was pretty clear. From the pile of bones in the corner there musta been at least two, maybe more. And now it looked like the parental instinct had finally kicked in again because they were trying to put em back together. From the looks of it neither mom nor dad had been a rocket scientist because they were making minimal progress.

  I left them to their work and left the room. Made my way across the hall to another bedroom, equally destroyed and bloodied, and found a small closet. Clothes were still hanging inside and I shoved in, pushing them aside, until I was tight in the corner. Then I scrunched down near the floor and shut my eyes for a bit.

  I don’t know how much later I came around. Not feeling the least bit refreshed or tired but back to wakefulness, at least. I heard a little action out there somewhere and pushed my way through the clothes to the bedroom. I could hear good old mom and dad shuffling around. When I entered the hallway I saw it was still mostly dark outside, the gloom was just about the same as when I’d retreated to the closet. But they had quit trying to put the children together and looked ready to strike out. For where I had no idea, but being for the fact that I had nowhere to be or go, I decided to shadow them for a bit. See what was what.

  They passed me by without the faintest interest and made their way for the front door. I gave them a minute and started up behind them. Got to the front door and saw them already shambling across the front yard. Momma tripped in the ditch and went down face-first but dad continued along like he didn’t notice. She flapped around for a minute, trying to pull herself out of the mud, and then she was back on her feet and leaving muddy tracks as she followed her mudhead husband. And as I stood there on the porch I noticed there was plenty of others headed in much the same direction. The graveyard across the street was mostly empty now and just past the tree line I could make out a faint pink in the sky from the approaching day.

  A growing number of mudheads were passing by the church and heading off into the deeper gloom. I followed. Just to the back of the church was a cut in the forest that grew up tight, and it looked like every mudhead in town was making their way here. A trail snaked back into the woods and we all shambled forward, bumping into each other, some spinning off to make their way through the trees, flailing and going at it like a buncha fucking clowns.

  I stayed near the back and slowed down. Kept walking. After about ten minutes we came to it. Some sorta cave entrance, it looked like. Hundreds of mudheads streaming into the gaping hole. There was a sign hanging above but I couldn’t make out what it said. Reading was something that had passed me by ages before. When I got to the entrance I pushed inside and moved right along with the rest. I could hear a humming that seemed to come from all around and a long string of lights leading off into the distance told me the sound was from a generator. What the hell? I thought. Electricity? Who the hell had put this into motion? Most of the mudheads I was traveling with looked as capable of figuring out a generator as a toad contemplating the universe.

  But someone, or something, had.

  I thought now about those damn babies from a couple of days back. Then the look on the face of the black widow, shaking her ass at whoever might happen by. The dangerous ones, the smart ones. The chill set a little deeper in my bones.

  Wasn’t much longer till we came to a big chamber and the light spread out a little here, filling the room. I moved off to the wall and stared at the mudheads. There musta been several hundred milling around down here in the gloom. And I could see that all along the sides were deeper patches of black. Rooms. And all the mudheads were moving into whichever one they were closest to. I thought of all the spaces down here, and all the dead pushing into them, tighter and tighter, just like I used to do in the closet back home. Wet drippy places packed with the dead.

  I stood against the wall and watched the crowd drift away to their holes. It didn’t take long until I was alone in the vast hall. I poked my head into a couple of holes, feeling that lovely pull of darkness and bodies. But I didn’t go inside. Because, I thought, this might not be the end of it. Another larger entrance was set into the back wall, like a continuation of the tunnel that had led us here. I made my way over. Found myself looking down a long hallway.

  Hearing the screams of the damned.

  I shuffled forward. There were cells lining the way on both sides and the people I saw inside were not mudheads. They were alive, or at least technically so, just hanging on in fact. Most looked like they hadn’t eaten in a month of Sundays and hardly any of em had on much more than rags. There were women and men, kids. All packed in and wailing. Some shrank away from the bars at my passing but many continued to wail and scream, their eyes wild.

  I was about halfway down the hall when I noticed a shadow disconnect from the wall. Red, devil eyes fixed on from about ten feet away. I stopped moving forward. Just stood there. The shadow stepped closer and took on form. A mudhead, obviously, but not one of the new Regulars. No. This one had that same look in his eyes, devilment. Plotting. I shuffled back a step and the dead thing came on. It walked right up to me and peered long and hard, straight into my eyes. I had a hard time not looking away, but there was something telling me that would definitely be the wrong thing to do. It walked around me like a bully sizing up some schoolyard pussy. Grunted a few times and then smiled. Turned its head to stare at the people it had somehow trapped down here.

  And that’s when I got real creeped out. This was not the work of one mudhead, regardless how goddamn smart that mudhead might be. This was organization on a level I hadn’t dreamed of. And all the while that malicious shade stood beside me, glancing my way and then back to the prisoners, that snake-like smile teasing the corners of its mouth. I knew what it was saying: I did this. I can do more.

  I decided it was time to get the hell outta Dodge.

  I edged away from the mudhead and started making my way back to the chamber. I could feel those demon-red eyes burning a hole in my back as I shuffled away and it took all I had not to turn around to see what was going on behind me. I just wanted to get the fuck out. I needed a little time to think about what I’d found down here.

  I made the chamber without a hand coming down on my shoulder and sped up without trying to look like it. Nothing here to see folks, just an old dumbass mudhead shuffling along. When I got all the way across I turned around and saw I was not alone. The Red Eye had followed me out and now I saw there were at least ten more of em standing around it. All staring straight across the expanse at me. I turned back to the tunnel I’d come in at and sped the fuck up. Daylight or not outside, there was no fucking way I was staying down here.

  I bumped into one straggler on the way out, knocking it backward into the rough wall. It hit the ground with a thump and I looked real quick at its eyes. Dull, black. This kinda shit was starting to be something to pay attention to. I scooted around the mudhead and
made for the shaft of light at the entrance.

  It was full day outside. The sun was already shining through a bunch of cottony-looking clouds overhead and on just about any other day it would have been something to pause and consider. But all that was not on my agenda. Where there were ten Red Eyes there could always be a hundred and from the looks I’d been recently getting from that crew I didn’t think it would pay to hang around.

  I thought about heading back to the town, maybe crawl up underneath something in the church, but the thought of that bunch back there already across the chamber and scrambling down the entrance tunnel ix-nayed all that. I didn’t need to hang around. If I did it might not be long before I was sharing cell space with some thoroughly pissed off Live-ers.

  I left the tunnel and started down the path. In the light it looked bigger than it had in the darkness and I didn’t want anything following me. I broke off into the woods about twenty, thirty feet in, and tried not to make hell-all of noise on the way through the brush and undergrowth. Just ahead was a slight hill, covered in skinny pines. I began making my way up, scrabbling in the loose soil and fighting for purchase, grabbing