Christmas With the Dead Read Online Free

bowl out of the shelf and filled
it with water.
    “From now on, that’s your bowl, girl.
Tomorrow... Maybe the next day, I’ll find you some canned dog food at the
store.”
    He got another bowl and opened a can of
chili and poured it into the bowl. He was most likely over feeding her. She’d
probably throw it up. But that was all right. He would clean it up, and
tomorrow they’d start over, more carefully. But tonight, Buffy had earned a
special treat.
    He went out and got the tree out of the
truck and put it up and put ornaments on it from two years back. Ornaments he
had left on the floor after throwing the old dead and dried tree over the
fence. This plastic one was smaller, but it would last, year after year.
    He sat down under the tree and found the
presents he had for his wife and child. He pushed them aside, leaving them
wrapped. He opened those they had given him two Christmas’s ago. He liked all
of them. The socks. The underwear. The ties he would never wear. DVD’s of movies he loved, and would watch,
sitting on the couch with Buffy, who he would soon make fat.
    He sat for a long time and looked at his
presents and cried.
     
    * * *
     
    Using the porch light for illumination,
inside the fenced-in yard, he set about putting up the decorations. Outside the
fence the zombies grabbed at it, and rattled it, and tugged, but it held. It
was a good fence. A damn good fence. He believed in
that tediously built fence. And the zombies weren’t good climbers. They got off
the ground, it was like some of whatever made them animated slid out of them in
invisible floods. It was as if they gained their living dead status from the
earth itself.
    It was a long job, and when he finished
climbing the ladder, stapling up the lights, making sure the Santa and snow men
were in their places, he went inside and plugged it all in.
    When he came outside, the yard was lit in
colors of red and blue and green. The Santa and the snowmen glowed as if they
had swallowed lightning.
    Buffy stood beside him, wagging her tail
as they examined the handy work.
    Then Calvin realized something. It had
grown very quiet. The fence was no longer being shaken or pulled. He turned
quickly toward where the zombies stood outside the fence. They weren’t holding
onto the wire anymore. They weren’t moaning. They weren’t doing anything except
looking, heads lifted toward the lights.
    Out there in the shadows, the lights
barely touching them with a fringe of color, they looked like happy and
surprised children.
    “They like it,” Calvin said, and looked
down at Buffy.
    She looked up at him, wagging her tail.
    “Merry Christmas, dog.”
    When he glanced up, he saw a strange
thing. One of the zombies, a woman, a barefoot woman wearing shorts and a
tee-shirt, a young woman, maybe even a nice looking woman not so long ago,
lifted her arm and pointed at the lights and smiled with dark, rotting teeth.
Then their came a sound from all of them, like a contented sigh.
    “I’ll be damn,” Calvin said. “They like
it.”
    He thought: I will win. I will wait them
out. They will all fall apart someday soon. But tonight, they are here with us,
to share the lights. They are our company. He got a beer from inside, came back
out and pulled up a lawn chair and sat down. Buffy lay down beside him. He was
tempted to give those poor sonofabitches outside the wire a few strips of jerky. Instead, he sipped his beer.
    A tear ran down his face as he yelled
toward the dead. “Merry Christmas, you monsters. Merry Christmas to all of you, and to all a good night.”