The stupidest angel: a heartwarming tale of Christmas terror

first. "Since you're the law, I think you should do it."

    "No, no, no, no, no, no," said Tuck. "And furthermore, no."

    "No," said Lena, in support of her man.

    "You guys have something you want to tell me?" Theo said. He took the bread knife from Mavis and shoved it down the back of his belt.

    "I think you were onto something with that killer-robot thing," Tuck said.

    Lena stood up and put herself between Theo and Tuck. "It was an accident, Theo. I was digging Christmas trees like I do every year and Dale came by drunk and angry. I'm not sure how it happened. One minute he was going to shoot me and the next the shovel was sticking out of his neck. Tucker didn't have anything to do with it. He just happened along and was trying to help."

    Theo looked at Tuck. "So you buried him with his gun?

    Tuck climbed painfully to his feet and stood behind Lena. "I was supposed to see this coming? I was supposed to anticipate that he might come back from the grave all angry and brain hungry, so I should hide his gun from him? This is your town, Constable, you explain it. Usually when you bury a body they don't come back and try to eat your brains the next day."

    "Brains! Brains! Brains!" chanted the undead from outside the chapel. The pounding on the walls started again.

    "Shut up!" screamed Tucker Case, and to everyone's amazement, they did. Tuck grinned at Theo. "So, I fucked up."

    "Ya think?" Theo said. "How many?"

    "You should cut his head off over the sink," said Joshua Barker. "That way it won't make as big a mess."

    Without a word, Theo reached down and picked Josh up by the biceps, then walked over and handed him to his mother, who looked as if she were going into the first stages of shock. Theo touched his finger to Josh's lips in a shush gesture. Theo looked more serious, more intimidating, more in control than anyone had ever seen him. The boy hid his face in his mother's breasts.

    Theo turned to Tuck. "How many?" Theo repeated. "I saw maybe thirty, forty?"

    "About that," Tuck said. "They're in different states of decay. Some of them just look like there's little more than bone, others look relatively fresh, and pretty well preserved. None of them seems particularly fast or strong. Dale maybe, some of the fresher ones. It's like they're learning to walk again or something."

    There was a loud snap from outside and everyone jumped – one woman literally leaping into a man's arms with a shriek. They all fell into a crouch, listening to a tree falling through branches, expecting the trunk to come crashing through the ceiling beams. The lights went out and the whole church shook with the impact of the big pine hitting the forest floor.

    Without missing a beat, Theo snapped on a flashlight he'd had in his back pocket in anticipation of a power outage. Small emergency lamps ignited above the front door, casting everyone in a deep-shadowed directional light.

    "Those should last about an hour," Theo said. "There should be some flashlights in the basement, too. Go on. What else did you see, Tuck?"

    "Well, they're pissed off and they're hungry. I was kind of busy trying not to get my brains eaten. They seemed pretty adamant about the brain-eating thing. Then they're going to IKEA, I guess."

    "This is ridiculous," said Val Riordan, the elegantly coiffed psychiatrist, speaking up for the first time since the whole thing had started. "There's no such thing as a zombie. I don't know what you think is happening here, but you don't have a crowd of brain-eating zombies."

    "I'd have to agree with Val," Gabe Fenton said, stepping up beside her. "There's no scientific basis for zombieism – except for some experiments in the Caribbean with blowfish toxins that put people in a state of near death with almost imperceptible respiration and pulse, but there was no actual, you know, raising of the dead."

    "Yeah?" said Theo, giving them an eloquent deadpan stare. "Brains!" he shouted.

    "Brains! Brains! Brains!" came the responding chant from outside; the pounding on the walls resumed.

    "Shut up!" Tuck shouted. The dead did.

    Theo looked at Val and Gabe and raised an eyebrow. Well?

    "Okay," Gabe said. "We may need more data."

    "No, this can't be happening," said Valerie Riordan. "This is impossible."

    "Dr. Val," Theo said. "We know what's happening here. We don't know why, and we don't know how, but we haven't lived in a vacuum all our lives, have we? In this case, denial ain't just a river in Egypt, denial will kill