The Undead That Saved Christmas Vol. 2 Read Online Free PDF Page B

days, it had become a ritual, just like keeping up his calendar, and keeping his hair trimmed, and making sure his food stores were well stocked. The rituals, in fact, were about the only things that kept his morale up.
    And God knows there was enough to feel depressed about.
    There was a sort of soul-sucking loneliness that came with being the last man left alive.
    It made him wonder if there was any reason to keep going. After all, did it matter when he died? Tomorrow, or thirty years from now, the results would be the same. After he was finished, humanity was finished. Wasn’t he just postponing the inevitable?
    Could be. But he wasn’t quite ready to throw in the towel just yet.
    For now, he had a mission.
    Kevin got down on his belly so he could squeeze between the front tandems of an 18 wheeler. From there, he watched the parking lot, figuring out a safe route over to the doors.
    It actually didn’t look like it’d be very difficult this year. The zombie hordes that had swarmed the area in years past had thinned quite a bit. He didn’t know if the majority of them had moved on or decayed away to the point they couldn’t move anymore. Maybe they’d started to eat each other. Who the hell knew?
    He supposed it didn’t really matter.
    Fewer zombies meant it was easier to stay alive, and that was all that mattered.
    There were fewer than fifty of them out there walking the parking lot now, and it didn’t take long for a wide gap to open up in the crowd. Kevin tensed, ready to run. Another few seconds and it would be wide enough for him to go.
    And that’s when he saw her.
    Mindy Matheson.
    Holy shit , he thought. He stared at her for a long moment, watching her curious, clumsy movements. That really was her. That’s Mindy Matheson.
    And she’s faking it.
     
    * * *

    It had been a while since he’d seen a faker.
    Most didn’t last long. Right after the outbreak Kevin and some of the other survivors he’d hung out with back then had seen one or two a week. The fakers tried to make themselves look like zombies. They smelled like zombies, moved like zombies, had flies swarming around their eyes and mouths like zombies. But they weren’t zombies, and sooner or later, they messed up. They slipped out of character for just a second.
    And that was all it took.
    One tiny slip, one momentary distraction, and the zombies they moved with swarmed them.
    Usually, at least as far as Kevin was concerned, it wasn’t much of a loss.
    The only reason a person ever decided to fake it was because they had given up on their humanity. Surviving among the ruins of what the world had once been was hard. It sucked, in fact. In order to survive, in order to stay sane, you had to work at it. Every day was a fight. Every breath was bought with tears and sweat and loneliness. And sometimes, living free didn’t seem much of a pay back.
    The fakers couldn’t hack it.
    But they didn’t have the courage to end it all either.
    They were the real walking dead, not the zombies, and Kevin had never felt anything but disgust for them.
    Until now, of course.
    He and Mindy Matheson, they’d dated right after high school. She’d never said two words to him during school. Neither one of them had been all that popular, but it had been a big school, and she had her friends and he had his. But afterwards, when they found they were working at the Home Depot together, neither one of them with the foggiest notion of what they were going to do with their lives, they sort of fell together.
    For about eight months.
    They didn’t end on an obvious note. No cheating, no fighting, nothing like that. They just drifted apart. At the time he’d figured they just weren’t right for each other. That explained why they hadn’t noticed each other back in school. What happened while they were working together was just the natural gravity of two lonely people. And so, just as their orbits brought them together, those same orbits carried them apart. She grew