He smells of some musky, spicy cologne he must have bought when I wasn’t around (which could be any day ever since they kicked him out of school for catching “the Z disease”), and as I reach for the gourmet food bag behind my seat, I nuzzle his neck as he stands beside me.
“Stop,” he giggles, breaking his stern mask for the first time all night. “It tickles.”
“Tickles?” I gush, excited by the temperature of his freezing cold skin. “I thought you zombies couldn’t feel anything?”
“Well, I can feel that,” he growls suggestively, forcing me to step away before we start something in the backseat we can’t finish before dinner.
I blush slightly at the ridiculously expensive front lawn display Echo has never seen before, but I’ve been embarrassed about ever since it went up the first week of December.
Mom went all out (again) this year, adding Santa hats and candy canes to last year’s imported-all-the-way-from-Spain life-size nativity set.
“Wow,” says Echo un-ironically. “That is… major.”
I still can’t tell if it’s a compliment, or a diss.
I guess at this point it doesn’t really matter; meeting my parents for the first time, he’s entitled to a few sour grapes.
“So this is where you live, huh?” he asks, unable to hide the slight sense of resentment in his tone.
I shake my head and say, “Hon, you know how it is. I’ve been meaning to bring you over, introduce you to the fam. It, just, with school and volleyball and college prep, I just… where does the time go, you know?”
He nods before smirking, “Funny, you always seem to have enough time to hang out at my place.”
“Okay, you got me,” I admit, boot heels crunching on the freshly-cleared stoop as we stand in front of the front door, a fresh evergreen wreath tickling my nose. “I’m a jerk, all right? Happy?”
He smiles at my discomfort.
“Getting there,” he oozes, standing nervously next to me as I reach to ring the bell.
While the fading strains of “Jingle Bells” echo in our heads – Dad ordered the custom-made door chime special online – I hear footsteps and Jimbo’s barking in the long front hall.
The door opens and immediately the scent of fresh-baked pie and basting turkey shoots out of the house like fresh balls from a cannon.
“Yummmmmmmm,” he says instinctively as I watch the faces of my family closely.
The door wide open now, nothing to hide, my zombie boyfriend standing right by my side, Dad frowns sternly, as if I’d shown up at the front door with a tattoo-covered biker named “Booger.”
Mom, naturally, keeps her “It’s the holidays, I must maintain my composure at all costs” face plastered on, blinking rapidly and clutching tight to Dad’s bright red Christmas sweater.
My younger brother, Zack, smiles in a way that says, “Wow, this night just got a whole lot funner.”
And Jimbo, our intrepid German shepherd who’s been known to bark nonstop at our 6’ 7”, 300-pound mail carrier without ever once backing down, takes one look at Echo and promptly puts his tail between his legs, scurrying into the den.
“Mom? Dad?” I begin nervously, hating the catch in my throat. “This is Echo, my… boyfriend.”
He grins despite himself behind the tower of presents and croaks, “Merry Christmas!”
The house is alive with fireplace glow and flickering candles and the 7-foot, pre-lit tree.
Echo takes it all in; it’s quite a contrast from the two-bedroom apartment he shares with his workaholic Dad, who even seven weeks after the attack still doesn’t know his own son is one of the living dead.
“Wow,” he says while my family stands around looking speechless. “You have a great place here, Mr. and Mrs. Kersey.”
“Why, thank you… Echo,” says Mom as he sets the presents down at the border of the huge stack already under the tree. “And you’re so kind; you didn’t have to bring anything.”
Echo and I wink at each other; wait until they open the presents and see what’s inside.
But then, hopefully, we won’t have to.
I shut the door uneasily behind us, taking one last look into the street for any signs of rampant zombie infestation.
So far, so good, although I notice extra locks and plenty of high security house lights on the neighbor’s homes.
The dinner table is already set and Dad busies himself making sure everyone is in the right spot.
Old school ‘til the end, I can’t even sit next to Echo, but must face him from across the decked out table as Zack pokes his fork into my thigh under the table and whispers, “He doesn’t look that bad, for a zombie I mean!”
I shush him as Mom pours me a half-sip of champagne.
Mom pours some for Echo, too, who politely says, “Thank you, ma’am,” even though of course he can’t drink it; can’t drink anything, that is, except for the rare sip of brain juice that runs off his main dietary supplement.
“Oh please,” she blushes to hear such manners – my last boyfriend used to honk 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 chick mode, emerging from the back room in snug black yoga pants, a baggy black hoodie, short gray socks and thick black sneakers.
Around my waist is a tool belt snatched from shop class, featuring a wide array of personal-sized hammers, screwdrivers and the occasional gleaming chisel; all the better to behead you with, my zombie dear!
Mom gasps at the getup while Dad merely shakes his head.
“This is no time for games, dear,” he says, tossing another box of shotgun cartridges down the cellar stairs. “Now get in here with the rest of the family.”
“Dad,” I say, making sure all my weapons are in place. “You guys go down; I’m going to stay up here and help Echo fight off the zombies.”
“You most certainly are NOT,” Dad says, large nostrils flaring, forming little creases beneath the red skin of his enraged face. “Echo can do what he likes. They’re his kind, after all. But you? You belong with us.”
Echo frowns from the doorway and says, “He’s right, April, go on. I’ll be fine.”
I snort, and inch past Mom to stand between my zombie boyfriend and my uptight Dad.
While Dad fumes and Echo stands there stubbornly, Mom looks at my get-up and says, “Where did you get all that, dear?”
Zack’s the first to say what’s on everybody’s mind: “She’s obviously in the Resistance, Mom. I mean, look at the way she’s all ready and crap! I mean, sorry – ready and stuff. There are a couple kids at my school who have the same thing; they wear all black, bring their own weapons and whenever an outbreak pops up, they’re on it like flies on, well, you know…”
While Mom and Dad look at each other in stunned silence, Zack says to me, “I’m going to join as soon as I’m old enough
!”
I glare at him, but secretly smile.
Dad finally composes himself enough to say, “Son, the last thing I’ll have you do is join the ranks with these… these… rotting bags of flesh and bones and—”
Just then we hear groaning through the open front door; my mind flashes back to the last battle Echo and I had over Thanksgiving.
That same sound, those same shuffling feet, the same groaning and creaking of bones, sometimes broken, shuffling against old clothes as people flee in the street and we, the kids from the local Resistance, march forward, hammers swinging.
Echo ignores us, cracking his neck, getting his game face on.
I watch his serene face break into a growl; watch the boy I love turn into the zombie I sometimes, but not often, fear.
I creep forward, Mom’s fingers clutching weakly at my arms.
“Dear, are you… sure?”
I turn and smile.
“Mom, I know you don’t believe me but, I’m really, really good at this. You’ll all be safer with me out here, trust me.”
I hang a thumb over my shoulder at the half-naked god standing in the doorway growling and say, “Really, I learned from the best.”
She turns, grabs the electric carving knife from the still dirty dinner table and says, “Then I’m staying up here, too.”
“Trudy!” barks Dad, still clinging to the doorframe.
“Roger, the zombies almost got through those ancient basement windows over Thanksgiving and you said you were going to reinforce them before Christmas and you never did get around to it. I’m sorry, dear, but I just can’t go through that again.”
Zack creeps up beside her, clutching a carving fork between his grubby 12-year-old hands and looking more than ready to defend his dear old Mom.
“Suit yourself,” Dad grumbles, slamming the door.
I look at Mom and give her “Wtf?” eyes, but she pooh-poohs me with a dismissive, “He’ll get over it. Five minutes from now he’ll be standing next to us, complaining about the empty ornament boxes I forgot to put away down there.”
Suddenly the room feels empty as we listen to the clicking and sliding of no less than six locks and one giant 2 x 4 sliding into place behind the solid safe room door.
Those ominous sounds are quickly followed by Dad’s size-13 loafers trouncing down the stairs.
I can’t believe he’s doing this; deserting his family just because I dared bring a zombie home for Christmas dinner.
Has he learned nothing from my first 17 years on this planet?
Have my extracurricular activities, my straight-A’s, my good girl image, my adoring smile whenever he walks in the room taught him nothing about the choices I’ve made?
Apparently not.
When I turn back from the locked and bolted door, I see Zack standing protectively next to Echo.
He smiles as the boy sniffs him.
“Not to be rude, dude,” Zack says, rudely, “but you smell like six bags of onions covered in eight bags of dog doo that have been left in a dumpster for two years!”
“Zachary!” shouts Mom, but just then Echo crouches low and, over his bare white shoulder, we see three zombies pacing the front lawn.
They look hungry, and ragged, and Zack quickly jumps behind the door; suddenly not so brave.
(And who can blame him? Even with all my training, those brain suckers still freak me out!)
I grab him, and literally toss him back toward Mom so I can stand between the two.
Zack gives Mom a “when did she get so strong?” look, but is too scared to follow it through all the way to the end.
Mom regards me more closely, too busy to ask too many questions; yet, anyway.
Echo steps forward onto the stoop, keeping a steady foot on the slippery ice.
The zombies stop on the lawn and snort, sniffing the air like rabid dogs in heat.
They take a tentative step forward, frozen grass crunching beneath their feet, and I tense with my hammer at the ready, but they eventually shuffle past, leaving everyone inside breathing a sigh of relief.
But that’s not enough for Echo; he looks at me, smiles at Zack, nods at Mom and – before I can stop him – slams the front door.
There is such force behind his power that the whole front wall of the house shakes.
I run to it, desperate to join him, but he crushes the doorknob outside in his super strong hands and I can’t budge it no matter how hard I’ve been training these last few weeks.
I watch through the picture window next to the door as he trudges through the snow, down to the street now, lurking low and using the dark of our yard to follow the zombies.
“He’s quite the gentleman, dear,” Mom sighs, nibbling on a cold piece of turkey to steady her nerves. “Not like some men I could—”
Just then I hear barking from the back room; Jimbo!
We’d forgotten all about him!
Zack turns, running to protect the dog he’d raised from a pup, but too soon I hear a telltale yelp, then a squeak, then… silence.
Then… chewing.
Lots and lots of chewing.
Oh no; not Jimbo.
I run toward the door, hammer in hand, and kick it wide open.
Jimbo lies on the floor, twisted, bloody, coat marred with bright red blood, our next door neighbor feasting on his hind leg.
“Get up, Mr. Witherspoon!” I shout, as Mom and Zack crowd the doorway behind me.
I go to slam the door, to keep them out, but Zack stops it with his foot.
He wants to see.
In a weird, way, he needs to see.
I hear grunting, and Mr. Witherspoon – the mousy guy who runs the reference desk at the public library – looks up from the dog’s hind leg and growls at me.
I lurch, and he stands, sniffing the air and then… backing away.
I follow him, through the room, out the sliding door he’s smashed, and into the back yard.
He backs away the whole while, sniffling, sniveling, clutching Jimbo’s hind leg like a drumstick in his bloody, broken hands.
I stop at the sight of several more zombies in the backyard, bloody and ragged things with bloodstained snow on their feet, expecting a mad dash for the broken slider; they, too, wrinkle their noses and keep sauntering on.
Nothing to see here, folks.
I turn, and Mom shakes her head.
“So it’s true,” says Zack, avoiding the sight of his mangled dog by focusing in on his big sister’s secret. “You can catch it from saliva!”
“Catch what?” I sneer, but only because he’s right.
When he doesn’t answer, when Mom’s eyes won’t stop begging the question, I shut the back room door behind me and follow them back into the living room.
“Okay, okay,” I confess. “I was going to tell you.”
“When?” gasps Mom, reaching for the wine.
“Tonight, at dinner.”
“Sweet!” says Zack. “My sister’s a zombie!”
“Not quite,” I say, rubbing his head. “Half-zombie.”
“But you look so normal, dear—”
A door crashes behind us, making us all crouch as if a shot’s rung out over our heads, and I’m hoping it’s the front door and Echo’s changed his mind, but instead it’s the cellar door.
The safe room door.
A door no human could crash through; ever.
“Dad!” I shout, leaping to action as bloody hands finish turning the cellar door into splinters – and my Dad into the living dead.
Dad makes it halfway into the living room, grabbing onto the Christmas tree stand frantically with bloodied hands, before the zombies get him.
Even over Dad’s screams I hear the crunching of teeth on bone as I sprint past his writhing arms and bleeding gums.
There are three zombies gnawing on Dad’s admittedly meaty calves; two of them local neighbor kids (I never did like either of them) and one a stranger in a flannel shirt and overalls.
I club them all viciously, brains splattering on the cellar steps and even up onto the ceiling, until they run – or fall – away.
Dad has managed to pull himself into the living room proper as Mom cries into his bald spot and Zach uses Christmas ribbon as tourniquets on both of Dad’s legs.
Zack is frantic, crying, wrapping like a mad man, bloody like a serial killer and I kneel to him and say, “It’s too late for that, Zack.”
He ties them anyway as we yank Dad up and turn him around, until his back is against the wall and he’s staring at us with sweat – and blood – pouring down his broad forehead.
Just then the living room picture window implodes and Echo steps calmly over the shards to step next to the fallen Christmas tree.
He sizes the scene up in seconds; the blood, the safe room door, Dad’s gnarled legs, Zack’s bloody hands, Mom’s useless tears.
“April,” he says somberly, tenderly, but I can’t run to him now.
Dad is mumbling so I lean in, his breath already foul, his eyes turning yellow, the Dad I knew becoming the monster I’ll see in my nightmares 20 years from now.
“What, Dad?” I ask, leaning in more closely. “What’s that? I can’t hear you.”
More loudly this time, he rasps two words: “Kill. Me.”
I stand, and back away; all my training failing me now as Mom clatters into a dining room chair, guzzling the rest of her wine in two large swallows as she looks away from the man she no longer knows.
Zack hides behind her, clutching to her like he did as a little tyke on the first day of kindergarten.
“Take them,” Echo orders me, reaching for the spare shotgun in the open closet. “Upstairs, out back, wherever, April; take them somewhere so they can’t hear.”
There is a low growling on the floor behind him, and when I look up Dad is sniffing Echo’s leg like a bear at a fresh campsite.
“Hurry,” he says as I gather Mom and Zack tightly to me, shuffling them past the room where Jimbo lies congealing and around the corner toward the den, where I crank up the Christmas music on Dad’s old school stereo as loud as it can go.
As Bing Crosby croons, as the snow falls, as Mom covers her ears and Zack stares out the window at a dozen dragging zombies, I hold my ear to the door.
I’ll never know what Dad said to Echo, if anything; or what Echo said to Dad.
I only know that I don’t flinch when I hear the shotgun blast, and that Echo has cleaned the blood off – all of it – when he finally comes to get us long hours after the latest infestation has come and gone.
With the sirens racing down the street, and lights flashing in their wake, we spend the rest of Christmas the only way we can these days; hunkered down, stomachs rumbling, with the ones we love.
Or, at least, the ones we trust…