Snow falls softly in the midnight sky, crunching beneath my shuffling feet. The graveyard is wide and vast, with acres of headstones silently dusted by the fizzy flakes. They land on my lashes and drift into my open ear holes and coat my greasy hair and I shake them off every few steps. They may look pretty in a movie, but in real life snow is just annoying.
The gate is high and wide and locked. It takes awhile, but I read the letters overhead. It would be hard anyway, living or not, because they’re in this type of gold cursive lettering. (Okay, not real gold, but still.) “Brushy,” says the first cursive word. And then a few minutes later. “Pines.” And then, an easy one because I see it so often, “Cemetery.”
I say it out loud, my voice more a croak than anything else. “Brushy Pines Cemetery.”
I shrug, admiring the mowed lawn on either side of the gate. Most of the graveyards I see these days are gnarly and overgrown with weeds and broken headstones, bones both in and out of the graves. It’s not exactly anybody’s first priority anymore, not when it’s more important to, say, protect yourself from actual zombies.
But not this one.
There are lights blinking on either side of the gate. And around the trees in the graveyard. Soft white lights that, for some reason, make me feel warm. And familiar. And safe.
“That’s new,” I say to myself. Out loud. I say a lot of things to myself. All the time, all day, out loud. Screw it. It keeps me human, or at least as close to it as possible, and I’m way past worrying what others think of me, living or dead.
There is a chain wound tight around the doors where they meet in the middle. Hanging from the chain is a padlock. I take my backpack off and open it up. Inside is a pair of small bolt cutters, still fairly new, like the fold-up army shovel they clank against as I yank them out.
They make short work of the cheap padlock, and the sound of the chain slinking through the bars of the gate and tumbling to the ground would make me drool if I still could. For the last few years, I don’t remember how many, they’ve been the sound I associate with food.
Or, in my case, brain food.
Snow crunches under foot as I shuffle forward. It’s not a shuffle so much as a walk, scrape, limp, scrape, but the Donors like to call us Shufflers just the same. (And, in case you’re keeping score, Shufflers equals Zombies and Donors equals humans, i.e. brain donors. Cute, huh?)
I can smell the fresh grave dirt just over a small rise to the left, and reach into my backpack to replace the bolt cutters in my hand with the shovel. I unfold it until it snaps into place, a black shovel gleaming in the moonlight, new just like my boots and the baggy green army jacket scraping against the back pockets of my old black jeans.
I stopped at one of those army supply places a few towns back. There are a lot more of them than there used to be, by my count. It was locked, it was late, but I left money so don’t judge. Maybe not enough, but it’s a lot better than what most Shufflers do, which is just walk in, day or night, snatch a brain from the Donor’s head and then take what they want.
The shovel feels good in my hand and I smile softly at the lights on the trees as I walk toward the freshly-covered grave. There are a stack of white folding chairs next to a little white archway thing. It’s kind of weird, that they still have funerals for people. They must have called it quits on bringing the chairs back into the funeral home when the snow started falling.
I look closer and see footprints, small ones, dusted lightly but still crisp and clear and think, “Someone was just here.”
If it wasn’t for the scent of fresh brains wafting from six feet under, I could probably sniff out who it was, but as it is I’ve got a one-brain mind. I dig, and dig, the sharp metal of the shovel blade sliding deep into the loose, dark earth and then out again, over and over.
I get busy in my work, quickly displacing the grave dirt into a small but getting bigger pile at my side. The grave is shallower than I would expect. If anything they’ve been digging them deeper and deeper the last few years, and I reach the coffin quickly. It’s made of cheap wood, like they mostly all are now, and provides little resistance against my sharp, black shovel blade.
I ignore the body’s face, turn it to the right so I can’t see the cold, dead eyes, and go to town. The brain is lovely, firm and sweet and I wipe the juices off my chin with the sleeve of the corpse’s coat. I climb from the grave, shovel the dirt back in, stamp it down, walk over it, and unfold one of the chairs.
It’s all I can do to sit down in it before I fall down on it. There is always a kind of full, electric feeling afterward, which usually makes me dizzy. Sitting down helps. My eyelids flutter and my vision grows blurry, but not for long. My hands tremble with the sudden surge of electric current and foreign chemicals to my body, the undead cells filling with the juices of the afterlife, giving me the power I need to go on. For another day, or another few days, before I can find my next fresh brain.
I sit there, calmly, hands on my knees, the snow covering my bloody knuckles, the tops of my new boots, settling in the cuffs of my black jeans. The lights on the trees glow softly and I hear music. But no, that can’t be.
In hundreds of graveyards I’ve run across a lot of things. Couples making out, husbands drinking to their long lost wives, hooligans trying to conjure the dead, pranksters in masks, but never have I heard music.
It’s kind of like an unwritten rule; leave your boom box at the graveyard fence. I turn, slowly, to hear the music coming from behind me. It’s coming closer. It sounds familiar, like a song from my past I can’t quite remember.
The chair creaks as I turn some more and the music pauses, stopping where it is. Not the song, but the sound. For a moment, there is only the music. Old style music, a piano and soft guitar. Then words, “… make the Yule tide gay, from now on our troubles will be miles away…”
My hands pause upon my knees, and I freeze where I am. That’s… that’s…
“Christmas music.”
The voice is small and appears out of nowhere. It brings the music in the form of a small, battery operated radio. It looks old, with a bent wire hanger for an antennae and random strips of duct tape holding it together probably.
He is small, in a bright red coat that contrasts with his dark skin. There is a black and red snow cap shoved down low on his head. He has big glasses with black frames that keep sliding down his nose. He pushes them back with his mittened hand, smiling awkwardly like he doesn’t know whether to stand there or brain me with his radio.
“What are you doing—” One minute his voice is all airy and light, and the next he spots me, the real me, sitting in front of him. His voice, his posture, shifts.
“Oh,” he says, but makes no blitz to move.
Then another: “Oh.”
His hands are small, even in the mittens, which are pretty bushy. He looks down on me, but only because I’m sitting. I stay sitting, because I’ve fed. Otherwise, I’d be skittish and, well, tempted to see what’s under that ski cap of his.
His eyes are kind but inquisitive, and fearful. He takes a step or two back, but not quickly, and not big steps.
“I won’t… I won’t hurt you,” I say, aware my voice is cold and hoarse and my hands, no matter how much I tried to clean them, are still dark with gore, the kind that takes more than a few dozen snowflakes to wipe clean.
He shrugs and the material of his thick jacket squeaks. “I guess, I guess it’s too late to stop you if you wanted to.”
I shake my head, hoping there aren’t any leftover bits of brain between my teeth. (How embarrassing would that be?!?) “No, you could still run.”
He sighs and unfolds one white chair, then another, directly across from me. He puts the radio on the first chair, lovingly, centering it, as if that might make the tinny sound better somehow. Now it’s playing “White Christmas,” but with no words. I just recognize the music.
“I’m tired of running,” he says, sliding onto his chair like he’s pulling himself up to the
kiddy table. His feet don’t quite touch the ground and he wriggles them, back and forth, nervously.
I cock my head, wishing my hair wasn’t so greasy. I don’t try to provoke the Donors, like some Shufflers do. I stick to the back roads, stay off them during the day, only feed at night, in graveyards, off the dead. The recently dead, so at least there’s still some juice left in their noggins.
“That’s funny,” I croak, watching him wince at the sound of my voice. “I wish I could run.”
He smirks, flashing mostly white teeth. “You could always shuffle real fast.”
He has a gentle voice, like maybe he was in the gifted program at school. Or an usher at church or in Chorus or ROTC or something.
He smells good, and not just in a potential meal kind of way. There is a soapy air about him, like maybe he just took a shower or, these days, more likely a bath.
He shifts in his seat a little and the song ends. An announcer with a deep, radio voice cuts in: