The Undead That Saved Christmas Vol. 2 by ed. Lyle Perez-Tinics

really good. He’d hoped it could be that way again.
    But she’d left him sometime in the night.
    His attempts to draw her into his world weren’t fair, he supposed. Why would she want to join him anyway? Hadn’t she found him out? She knew he was faking it. He knew he was faking it.
    And he was tired of faking it.
    The choice, once he’d given it voice, was surprisingly easy to make. The only hard part had been accepting that as an option. But once he opened his mind to it, it actually made a lot of sense.
    He went to the billboard and spray painted a message for her.
    Then he went down to the street and climbed on top of a brick wall and waited for one of the dead to come along.
    He thought he’d be scared, but for the first time in a long time, he felt relaxed, at ease with himself and the world in which he lived. You can settle in quite comfortably to even the most horrific of circumstances, given enough exposure to it. All horrors lose their immediacy, their nastiness, sooner or later. The nerves can only be slashed and cut and shredded so many times before they deaden to the pain.
    No, he was past horror. What he was feeling now was worse than that. In the time before he met her, his world had been filled with zombies. The horror they represented was a shallow, fast moving river that beat him down and cut him on its jagged rocks.
    He had gone beyond that now.
    Here the waters ran far slower, but they were deep, endlessly deep, and what lurked down there was something he could not fight.
    For what lurked down there was love.
    A zombie was at the base of the wall, its hands clumsily racking at the bricks just below Kevin. Kevin stared into the thing’s eyes and saw the emptiness he’d fought against for so long, but had never truly understood. That would all change now. He had tried to get Mindy to live in his world, and that had failed. So now, he would live in hers.
    And only love could allow him to do this.
    He jammed his left hand down into the zombie’s face. It shook its head, as though to shoo away an insect, and then realized what was in front of it.
    The zombie grabbed Kevin’s forearm and clamped its teeth down on his wrist.
    “Mother fu - ”
    Kevin pulled his hand away, holding his wounded wrist in his right hand while blood oozed between his fingers. It hurt so badly he nearly rolled off the top of the wall. Already he could feel the virus creeping through his blood stream, racing for his heart. It felt like somebody was jamming a red hot copper wire up his veins.
    He didn’t have much time. Maybe thirty minutes, but probably less.
    Kevin rolled off the wall and trotted back to his apartment. Once inside, he washed the wound with hot water and wrapped it in a towel. It was already starting to smell like death. His head was soupy and walking to the chair in the center of the room was hard.
    But he made it.
    He dropped down into the chair and turned it to face the door and waited for the pain to stop.

    * * *

    This felt absolutely glorious.
    Mindy had spent the day cleaning herself up, scouring off the stain of more than a year of living down among the dead. Now, her hair was washed and brushed. Her legs were shaved, her skin soft and fragrant from cocoa butter, still a little pink from her bath. The Sexy Elf costume showed a lot of leg, and a lot of bruises and cuts, but those would heal. If her heart could heal, her legs certainly would.
    She felt better than she had felt in a very long time. She couldn’t remember a time she’d felt this good, even before the world died. Mindy Matheson had come back from the dead, and love had done it for her.
    And it was glorious.
    Now, she picked her way carefully through the rubble-strewn streets. The dead were out - the dead were always out - but there weren’t many of them around at the moment.
    Then she saw the sign, and she smiled.

    It’s all for you, Mindy Matheson.
    I love you.
    I want to be with you forever.

    She couldn’t hold herself back any