The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

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 Nuñez 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!"