The Undead That Saved Christmas Vol. 2 by ed. Lyle Perez-Tinics Read Free Book Online Page A

she’d said.
    And before she knew it, they were some sort of couple.
    But he wasn’t wasting that kind of time now. The apocalypse, it seemed, had made him a little bolder.

    Come on up. I’ve got a warm bed.

    Yeah right, she thought, I bet you do.
    But she’d been careless. She’d thought too long, dropped out of character.
    One of the dead ones a few feet to her right had turned her way, and now his dead, vacant stare was locked on her. She tried to clear her mind, to stumble forward, but the zombie’s gaze never wavered.
    He raised his hands like he was trying to take something from her and staggered after her, a moan rising above the wind and the cutting rain.
    She pushed his hands away and looked around.
    This wasn’t going to work. Every moment she lingered more and more of them turned her way. She scanned the crowd, and in the dark the only way out seemed to lead around the corner, where she had taken the stairwell once before up to his apartment.
    A limp hand fell on her shoulder and that was enough.
    She ran for it.

    * * *

    She stopped in front of 318.
    Jesus, she thought, had she really sunk this low? Getting torn apart by the walking dead almost seemed a joy compared to coming to him like a penitent. She’d thought she was done with guilt, with shame. But it hurt now more than ever.
    Utterly demoralized, she knocked.

    * * *

    He couldn’t sleep.
    In the dark he rose and put on his boxers and went to the kitchen to light a candle.
    Enough light filled the room that he could see her sleeping in his bed. The rain had washed away a good amount of dirt and grime from her body and hair, but her breath had still been enough to turn his stomach. And even in his sleep he couldn’t quite hide his disgust. He had dreamt of a zombie forcing her face into the soft part of his neck; and when he awoke, he’d found her, pressing her cracked and ulcerous lips into the well beneath his chin.
    Half-asleep, he’d recoiled from her, almost falling out of the bed before realizing that it was only a dream.
    Now, fully awake, he watched her sleep and tried to hate her.
    But he couldn’t.
    Who in the hell was he to judge anyway? She was desperate. She was lonely. She was scared. Wasn’t he all of that, and more?
    In fact, the only thing he had on her was the appearance of normalcy.
    The truth was he was drowning. His life was an act. His jokes; the Christmas decorations; his calendar keeping; all of it was a terrible, useless, stupid joke. He drifted from one empty apartment to the next, from one false front to the next, like a ghost blown on the wind, and he called it a life.
    Were they any different, he and Mindy?
    He couldn’t answer, not truthfully anyway; and eventually, he blew out the candle and crept back to bed and reluctantly put an arm around her as he drifted off to sleep.
    When he awoke the next morning, he was alone, the only sign she had been there a muddy stain on the sheets.
    He sat on the side of the bed, asking himself why he even bothered.
    She had left him, again, and this time it was because she knew he was the one who was faking. He was the hypocrite. He was the disgusting one.
    And she had found him out.

    * * *

    Mindy stopped in the doorway as she left Kevin’s apartment building and scanned the street.
    There were no dead in sight, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. She’d seen it happen a few times over the last year. She’d be shuffling along with the others, absolutely nothing going on inside her head, and suddenly there’d be a scream. Another careless person had wandered into their midst, completely surprised by the sudden appearance of a zombie horde that, in reality, hadn’t been trying to sneak up on anybody. Most of the group’s kills were made that way, completely by accident, people caught by their own carelessness.
    Without realizing it she had assumed the awkward shuffle of the dead. Her bare feet, no longer sensitive to heat or ice or even broken glass, slid across