The Stupidest Angel (26 page)

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 Nunez 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.

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.