the horn at the curb and never even lasted ‘til Christmas – and says, “Please, call me Trudy.”
He smiles and I know, if he could, he’d be blushing right now.
Dad sits while Mom fusses around finishing off the last minute fussing.
I spy the frilly white gourmet bag sitting on the kitchen counter and excuse myself to join her.
“Mom,” I say, reaching for one of her fancy china plates. “FYI, Echo can’t eat, like, normal people food so I was just going to serve him this, if you don’t mind.”
“What, you mean he’s a… vegetarian?”
I look at her lined face, her Christmas sweater, her tightly wound hair bun and sputter, “No, Mom, he’s a… a—”
“I know what he IS, dear,” she snorts, reaching for a mostly empty glass of wine; I can tell by the syrupy voice it’s not her first. “I’m just kidding. Let’s get a look.”
I untie the golden, gilded bow keeping the two wicker handles of the gift bag together, then slide out a waxy white box filled with fresh brain pate from that ritzy gourmet store in the mall.
It cost me two weeks’ worth of allowance, but it was worth it; I wanted Echo to have something he could enjoy on our first Christmas together.
“Uhhm,” she says appreciatively as I slide it onto a plate. “Smells better than my boring old turkey. I wish your father would loosen up a bit and let us have something different for a change.”
I smile and pick up the plate and she grabs my shoulder.
“Here,” she says, adding a sprig of fresh holly to the pate. “Why should his plate look any different from ours?”
I smile to myself and walk into the dining room, where Dad and Echo are in the middle of a heated debate over the whole zombie “right to life” issue.
“I mean,” Dad is saying. “Why should my taxpayer dollars go toward educating a zombie like yourself when you have no hope of finishing high school or, for that matter, even getting a college degree?”
Echo, who I’ve personally seen break bad guys in half with his pinkies, to say nothing of what can happen when he uses both of his hands, has his temper in check; if only for me.
“Sir, with respect, the latest Reanimation Bill states that zombies can, indeed, go to college—”
“That’s IF they complete their high school equivalency, son,” Dad barks, knuckles white around his half-empty beer mug.
“Echo’s petitioned the school board to let him back in after Christmas break, Dad,” I say, voice pitched a little high for comfortable table talk.
“Well,” Dad grumbles. “We’ll see.”
Echo fumes a little, until Mom slides his plate under his nose.
I watch his gray nostrils flare, admiring the way his graying hair sets off his kind, black eyes.
“Yummm,” he says unconsciously as Zack leans in and whispers to me, “Phew, glad it’s not MY brain on his plate.”
I stamp his foot and then threaten him with my eyes as he opens his mouth to shriek like a little girl.
Dinner quiets the family down; it always does.
I give Echo little reassuring glances, but he doesn’t need them.
Between a dry plank of breast meat and another guzzle of beer, Dad fixes me with a look of betrayal and asks, “So, how did you two… meet… anyway?”
I sigh and say, “Dad, you know I’ve been volunteering at the Rehab Center after school three days a week.”
“How romantic,” Mom says through thin eyelids, another sure sign she didn’t just start drinking a few minutes ago.
Echo brags, “I knew her from class, but she didn’t remember me. She couldn’t believe a zombie had a better memory than she did!”
We all laugh, except Dad, that is; he just sits there and glares.
Nonstop; the entire meal.
I think about what I’d told Echo, about getting up and jetting if the ‘rents weren’t cool, but I question him with my eyes and he shrugs, giving me a “no big deal” look of reassurance.
Mom, sitting close and the holiday wine buzz going strong now, leans in and asks for a bite of his brain pate.
“You sure?” he asks, an amused smile on his face.
Zack nudges me and I watch as Echo takes her fork and hands her back a small, firm, gray square.
“Trudy!” Dad barks, but she pooh-poohs him with a finger wave and licks her lips in appreciation.
“They still haven’t determined if you can catch it through saliva, dear,” he says under his breath, as if Echo – who’s basically sitting two seats away – can’t hear.
“Gheez, Dad,” Zack says. “She used her own fork.”
He gives Echo a kind of “we’re cool, bro” smirk and the two dig in.
I smile, not all that hungry myself, and watch the familiar Yule log crackling on the local TV station that runs it, nonstop, from Thanksgiving Day until just after midnight on New Year’s Eve.
All of a sudden the crackling is interrupted by a high-pitched squealing sound; one I wasn’t hoping to hear tonight – or ever again.
“We interrupt this regularly scheduled programming of our annual holiday Yule log for the following announcement,” comes the generic voice of your typical emergency broadcast dude as the Yule log turns into a black and white test pattern on the big screen TV.
“The governor reports that the blockade at Cumberland Junction has been overrun by zombies, and that reinforcements from the National Guard have been unable to contain it. Local officials have issued a curfew for Christmas Eve, and instruct all citizens within five miles of the Junction to retreat to their safe rooms for the remainder of the—”
Table legs clatter, cutting off the rest of the announcement.
It’s not like we need to hear it, anyway.
Been there, survived that; barely.
Mom clears the bulk of the food off the table – any kind of meat attracts the zombies, kind of like bears around a campsite – while Zack goes around dimming the lights and Dad pours his beer on the smoldering fire.
It sizzles with a faintly sour smell, and Mom gives him one of her patented, “Oh Roger, you didn’t douse the fire with beer again, did you…” frown-smiles.
Echo is up, too, turning off lamps, sliding the curtains shut in front of the tree, yanking open the presents we’d brought and handing me my satchel full of black gloves and my tool belt and my black yoga pants.
Zack watches the presents slowly disappearing as Echo slides his baseball bat into a corner by the window and his machete in the opposite corner and whines, “Were there any ‘actual’ presents in there, April? I mean, what if we hadn’t had a zombie invasion tonight? Were you going to give me a machete? Or was that for Mom?”
Dad is yanking one of his shotguns out of the closet and propping it in the open door of the safe room, which is really our basement with some reinforced locks on the door.
I duck around the kitchen into the back room, where I can still see the front door from the lobby, but the whole family – especially Zack – can’t watch my transformation from vaguely cute suburban Christmas chick to kick-butt zombie killing babe.
Meanwhile, in full view of the whole family – zombies aren’t quite as shy as the rest of us – Echo strips down on the front stoop, tossing his thick, beautiful turtleneck and snugly fitting chords behind a Santa-hatted wise man in the yard before carefully hiding his new shoes and the watch I gave him as an early present under the neon baby Jesus.
Then, clad only in black socks and black boxer-length jockeys that are way too tight for me to ignore, he hoses himself down.
Va va voom!
It’s like some surreal underwear ad or something, this moonlight pale boy with nothing but muscles and scars hosing himself down as water bathes his marble biceps and slithers across his six-pack abs and – careful, girl!
The water’s so cold it hisses steam as it rushes from the hose, but to a dead head like Echo it must be like a sauna bath; meanwhile the runoff coats our stairs with a thin patch of ice that dribbles,
and eventually freezes, all the way to the street.
All the better to slip up zombies with, my dear!
He stands there in the doorway, dripping like a Playgirl pinup, as Mom gasps, “Oh my!”
“What are you doing, son?” barks Dad, chambering rounds in his shotgun as he tosses canned hams and candy canes down the stairs into the safe house; last-minute provisions in case this siege lasts as long as the one over Thanksgiving did.
(These breakouts; why do they always happen around a perfectly good holiday!?!?)
“Dad,” I shout, unwrapping the present that has my double-reinforced hammer inside. “It’s the smell; he’s washing off the deodorant and cologne that makes him, well, presentable to… mortals.”
“What for?” gasps Zack, already catching a whiff of my naturally gamy boyfriend.
Echo merely smiles, steam rising off of him from the open doorway. “The other zombies won’t come near here if they get a whiff of the… real… me.”
“Whoa!” smiles Zack, still covering his nose. “Kind of like when a cat pees on its territory, huh?”
“Zachary!” shouts Mom, finally untying her apron for the long siege ahead.
By now I’ve completely changed into full-on zombie fighting