The stupidest angel: a heartwarming tale of Christmas terror

you."

    Just then a brick came crashing through one of the windows and thumped into the middle of the chapel floor. Two clawlike hands caught the window ledge and a beat-up male face appeared at the window. The zombie pulled up enough so that he could hook one elbow inside the window, then shouted: "Val Riordan went down on the pimply kid who bags groceries at the Thrifty-Mart!"

    A second later, Ben Miller picked up the brick and hurled it back through the window, taking out the zombie face with a sickening squish.

    As Ben and Theo lifted the last of the buffet tables into place to be nailed over the window, Gabe Fenton stepped away from Valerie Riordan and looked at her like she'd been dipped in radioactive marmot spittle. "You said you were allergic!"

    "We were almost broken up at the time," said Val.

    "Almost! Almost! I have third-degree electrical burns on my scrotum because of you!"

    Across the room, into Lena Marquez's ear, Tucker Case whispered, "I don't feel so bad about hiding the body now, how 'bout you?" She turned and kissed him hard enough to make him forget for a second that he'd just been shot, set on fire, beaten up, and bitten.
    * * *
    For years the dead had listened, and the dead knew. They knew who was cheating with whom, who was stealing what, and where the bodies were hidden, as it were. Besides the passive listening – those sneaking out for a smoke, sideline conversations at funerals, the walking and talking in the woods, and the sex and scare-yourself activities some of the living indulged in in the graveyard – there were also those among the living who used a tombstone as some sort of confessional, sharing their deepest secrets with someone who they thought could never talk, saying things they could never say in life.
    There were some things that people thought no one else, the living or the dead, could possibly know, but they did.

    "Gabe Fenton watches squirrel porn!" screeched Bess Leander, her dead cheek pressed against the wet clapboard siding of the chapel.

    "That is not porn, that's my work," Gabe explained to his fellow partyers.

    "He doesn't wear pants! Squirrels, doing it, in slow motion. Pantsless."

    "Just that one time. Besides, you have to watch in slow motion," Gabe said. "They're squirrels." Everyone turned their flashlights on something else, like they really weren't looking at Gabe.

    "Ignacio Nuсez voted for Carter," came a call from outside. The staunch Republican nursery owner was caught like a deer in the flashlights as everyone looked at him. "I was only in this country a year. I'd just become a citizen. I didn't even speak English very well. He said he wanted to help the poor. I was poor."

    Theo Crowe reached over and patted Nacho's shoulder.

    "Ben Miller used steroids in high school. His gonads are the size of BBs!"

    "That is not true," exclaimed the track star. "My testicles are perfectly normal size."

    "Yeah, if you were seven inches tall," said Marty in the Morning, all dead, all the time.

    Ben turned to Theo. "We've got to do something about this."

    The others in the room were looking from one to the other, each with a look on his or her face that was much more horrified than when they'd been only facing the prospect of an undead mob eating their brains. These zombies had secrets.

    "Theo Crowe's wife thinks she's some kind of warrior mutant killer!" shouted a rotted woman who had once been a psych nurse at the county hospital.

    Everybody in the chapel sort of looked at one another and nodded, shrugged, let out a sigh of relief.

    "We knew that," yelled Mavis. "Everybody knows that. That's not news."

    "Oh, sorry," said the dead nurse. There was a pause; then, "Okay, then. Wally Beerbinder is addicted to painkillers."

    "Wally's not here," said Mavis. "He's spending Christmas with his daughter in L.A."

    "I got nothing," said the nurse. "Someone else go."

    "Tucker Case thinks his bat can talk," shouted Arthur Tannbeau, the dead citrus farmer.

    "Who wants to sing Christmas carols?" said Tuck. "I'll start. 'Deck the halls…"

    And so they sang, loud enough to drown out the secrets of the undead. They sang with great Christmas spirit, loud and off-key, until the battering ram hit the front doors.
    Chapter 18 – YOUR PUNY WORM GOD
    WEAPONS ARE USELESS AGAINST MY
    SUPERIOR CHRISTMAS KUNG FU
    Molly slipped out the back door of the cabin and around the outside wall until she could see the tall figure standing before her picture window. The fallen