Christmas With the Dead by Joe R. Lansdale

 
    It was a foolish thing to
do, and Calvin had not bothered
with it the last two years, not since the death of his wife and daughter, but
this year, this late morning, the loneliness and the monotony led him to it. He
decided quite suddenly, having kept fairly good record on the calendar, that
tomorrow was Christmas Eve, and zombies be damned. The Christmas lights and
decorations were going up.
    He
went into the garage to look for the lights. He could hear the zombies sniffing
around outside the garage door. The door was down and locked tight, and on top
of that, though the zombies could grab and bite you, they weren’t terribly
strong most of the time, so the door was secure. The windows inside were
boarded over, the doors were locked, and double locked, and boarded. The back
yard the dead owned, but the windows and doors were boarded really well there,
so he was shut in tight and safe.
    Prowling
through the holiday ornaments, he found immediately the large plastic Santa, and
three long strings of lights. They were the ones he had ripped down in anger
about two years back.
    He
managed all of the strings of lights into his living room. He plugged the wires
into the extension cord that was hooked up to the generator he had put in the
kitchen, and discovered most of the lights were as dead as the proverbial dodo
bird. Many were broken from when he had torn them down.
    He
sat for a moment, then went to the little refrigerator he had replaced the big
one with—used less energy—and pulled a bottled coffee out, twisted off the cap,
and walked over to the living room window.
    Unlike
the garage on the side of the house, or the back yard, he had fenced the front
yard off with deeply buried iron bars to which he had attached chicken wire, overlapped
with barb wire. The fence rose to a height of eight feet. The gate, also eight
feet tall, was made of the same. He seldom used it. He mostly went out and back
in through the garage. There was no fence there. When he went out, they were
waiting.
    More
often than not, he was able to run over and crush a few before hitting the door
device, closing the garage behind him. On the way back, he rammed a few more,
and with the touch of a button, sealed himself inside. When they were thin in
the yard, he used that time to stack the bodies in his pickup truck, haul them
somewhere to dump. It kept the stink down that way.
Also, the rotting flesh tended to attract the hungry dead. The less he made
them feel at home, the better.
    Today,
looking through the gaps between the boards nailed over the window, he could
see the zombies beyond the fence. They were pulling at the wire, but it was
firm and they were weak. He had discovered, strangely, that as it grew darker,
they grew stronger. Nothing spectacular, but enough he could notice it. They
were definitely faster then. It was as if the day made them sluggish, and the
night rejuvenated them; gave them a shot of energy, like maybe the moon was
their mistress.
    He
noticed too, that though there were plenty of them, there were fewer every day.
He knew why. He had seen the results, not only around town, but right outside
his fence. From time to time they just fell apart.
    It
was plain old natural disintegration. As time rolled on, their dead and rotten
bodies came apart. For some reason, not as fast as was normal, but still, they
did indeed break down. Of course, if they bit someone, they would become
zombies, fresher ones, but, after the last six months there were few if any
people left in town, besides himself. He didn’t know how it was outside of
town, but he assumed the results were similar. The zombies now, from time to
time, turned on one another, eating what flesh they could manage to bite off
each other’s rotten bones. Dogs, cats, snakes, anything they could get their
hands on, had been devastated. It was a new world, and it sucked. And sometimes
it chewed.
    Back
in the garage, Calvin gathered up the six, large, plastic, snow men and