The stupidest angel: a heartwarming tale of Christmas terror

ashamed.

    "You, bitch!" dead Dale Pearson shouted, pointing at her with the snub-nose.38. "You're lunch!" He started across the open pine floor.

    "Look out, Lena," came a shout from behind her. She turned just in time to sidestep as the buffet table behind her rose, spilling chafing dishes full of lasagna onto the floor. The alcohol burners beneath the pans spilled blue flame across the tabletops and onto the floor as Tucker Case stood up with the table in front of him and let out a war cry.

    Theo Crowe saw what was happening and pulled an armload of people aside as Tuck barreled through the room, the tabletop in front of him, toward the throng of undead. Dale Pearson fired at the tabletop as it approached, getting off three shots before Tuck impacted with him.

    "Crowe, get the door, get the door," Tuck shouted, driving Dale and his undead followers back out into the rain. The blue alcohol flame climbed up Dale's white beard, as well as spilling down Tuck's legs as he pushed out into the darkness. Theo loped across the room and reached outside to catch the edge of the door. A one-armed corpse in a leather jacket ducked around the edge of Tuck's buffet-table barrier and grabbed at Theo, who put a foot on the corpse's chest and drove him back down the steps. Theo pulled the door shut, then reached around and grabbed the other one. He hesitated.

    "Close the damned door!" Tuck screamed, his legs pumping, losing momentum against the undead as he reached the bottom of the steps. Theo could see decayed hands clawing at Tuck over the edge of the table; a man whose lower jaw flapped on a slip of skin was screeching at the pilot and trying to drive his upper teeth into Tuck's hand.

    The last thing Theo saw as he pulled the door shut was Tucker Case's legs burning blue and steaming in the rain.

    "Bring one of those tables over here," Theo shouted. "Brace this door. Jam the table under the handles."
    * * *
    There was a second of peace, just the sound of the wind and rain and Emily Barker, who had just seen her ex-boyfriend shot and brain-sucked, sobbing.
    "What was that?" shouted Ignacio Nuсez, a rotund Hispanic who owned the village nursery. "What in the hell was that?"

    Lena Marquez had instinctively gone to Emily Barker, and knelt with her arm around the bereft woman. She looked to Theo. "Tucker is out there. He's out there."

    Theo Crowe realized that everyone was looking at him. He was having trouble catching his breath and he could feel his pulse pounding in his ears. He really wanted to look to someone else for the answers, but as he scanned the room – some forty terrified faces – he saw all the responsibility reflected back to him.

    "Oh fuck," he said, his hand falling to his hip where his holster was usually clipped.

    "It's on the table at my house," Gabe Fenton said. Gabe was holding the buffet table that was braced sideways under the double latches of the church doors.

    "Pull the table," Theo said, thinking, I don't even like the guy. He helped Gabe pull the table aside and crouched in a sprinter's stance, ready to go, as Gabe manned the latches.

    "Close it behind me. When you hear me scream, 'Let me in,' well – "

    Just then there was a crash behind them and something came flying through one of the high, stained-glass windows – throwing glass out into the middle of the room. Tucker Case, wet, charred, and covered with blood, pushed himself up from the floor where he had landed and said, "I don't know who parked under that window, but you'd better move your car, because if those things climb on it, they'll be coming through that window behind me."
    * * *
    Theo looked at the line of stained-glass windows running down the sides of the chapel, eight on each side, each about eight feet off the ground and about two feet across. When the chapel had been built, stained glass was at a premium and the community poor, thus the small, high windows, which were going to be an asset in defending this place. There was only one large window in the whole building – behind where the altar used to stand, but where now stood Molly's thirty-foot Christmas tree – a six-by-ten-foot large cathedral-shaped stained-glass depiction of Saint Rose, patron saint of interior decorators, presenting a throw pillow to the Blessed Virgin.
    "Nacho," Theo barked to Ignacio Nuсez, "see if you can find something in the basement to board up that window."

    As if on cue, two muddy, decaying faces appeared at the opening through