SHORT STORY: Zombie Santa Must Die! Part 5

ZOMBIE SANTA MUST DIE!

PART FIVE: THE PIT AND THE SNOWMAN

A terrible darkness swept over a globe of rolling hills. The hills, once a blissful paradise of life and achievement, now wept at the sight of the oncoming storm. Clear ooze poured out between cracks and valleys, perhaps as a defense from the ancient evil that flooded it or perhaps because it knew the end was near and all that there was left to do was cry. Electrical charges connected the porous membrane and the thick black sludge that enveloped it. Deep below the surface, where life, what little of it there was, still remained was being consumed. Eaten. It’s color changed swiftly from a welcoming pink to a disturbing gray.

Bewilderment consumed Fay’s face as the gate to Santa’s fortress split at the seams then creaked open. The doors opened wide and stopped at a ninety degree angle to the gate.

      The moment the doors stopped, Fay’s eyes began to rapidly move left, then right, then left again, like a waking REM sleep. She collapsed to her knees and bent forward, ready to discard the contents of her stomach onto the snowy floor. Her hands clenched her pounding head. She pushed tightly on either side of her skull, holding it as if it was going to explode. She felt her brain swell, pushing hard against the outer wall of her skull. She would have screamed if it were possible but this pain was beyond the human capacity for screaming so her mouth hung open allowing streams of saliva to drip to the ground like a leaky faucet.

      Thirty seconds went by, the longest thirty seconds of Fay’s life, and the pain released. She fell onto her back, facing the sky. Her limbs spread out like she was preparing to make a snow angel.

      A few more minutes passed and she sat up. “What was that?” She spoke softly. Shaking her head, she got back to her feet, rocking back slightly. She planted a foot behind her to regain her balance.

      At that moment, the doors to Santa’s fortress began to close.

      Fay saw this out of the corner of a blurry eye and took a shaky step forward. Then two steps, three. After a fourth step she regained most of her cognitive abilities and started to pace quickly into Santa’s fortress. The gate doors were nearly to their closed position as Fay dove between them. Her landing was soft and cold.

      Ca-click. The doors locked.

      Fay rolled over onto her back and looked up at the giant golden doors, admiring their beauty. Her eyes followed the posts down to the ground. Once there her vision saw beyond the gate and back to the spot where she had collapsed.

      “My guns! No, no, no, NO! My GUNS!” Fay quickly got to her feet and ran to the gate, her arms outstretched beyond them in a hopeless attempt to retrieve the guns that had fallen off her shoulder during her episode.

      “Son of a bitch.”

      She heard cackling from behind her. She turned. Sitting not more than six feet away stood a miniature man, no more than two feet tall. He wore a tall green pointy hat, a green pilgrim outfit, and curly tip shoes to match. His face was dark grey and scabby. He didn’t speak but giggled like a child while looking at her through deep obsidian eyes.

      She knelt down attempting to look like she wanted to reason with the creature but really she wanted to grab the knife that was strapped to her ankle.  Her hand moved slowly down the side of her body, tracing her leg from the hip to her ankle.

      What she failed to see were the half a dozen other miniature zombie men. They got the jump on her from both sides, like a velociraptor attack. The last thing she saw before she was seeing stars was a wooden bat flying towards her face at a dangerous speed. The side read “Santa’s plaything.”

When she awoke she inhaled a lungful of dust. She rolled over, coughed, and took in a lungful of fresh air. She was no longer on snow but on gravel. It made her muscles stiff and achy. But that could have been other things too. She sat up and looked around. She wasn’t outside anymore, she was inside a gigantic domed arena. The floor of it was a little smaller than the floor of a football stadium and the walls surrounding it were thirty feet high. At the top of the wall surrounding the arena were thousands of seats and in each of those seats were green clothed, grey skinned, scabby elfin zombies. They cackled maniacally as they all saw Fay begin to move.

      To them, it meant that the show was about to begin.

      Fay got up and looked around. She didn’t have much time to get the full picture until the crowd of undead elves’ chatter came to an abrupt silence.

      “Hoh Hoh Hoh! Welcome to my home, Fay”

      Fay turned around one hundred and eighty degrees. “What the…” In front of her was a door that stood fifty feet tall. Above the door was a balcony, and in the balcony was a silhouette of a man. It enlarged as it came into the light. Zombie Santa.

      “YOU!” She shouted.

      “Yes, me. Santa Claus.”

      “YOU are not Santa Claus, the Santa Claus I know would never do the things you have done!”

      “I AM SANTA CLAUS!” His hoarse voice rumbled across the amphitheatre. Several elves dove under their seats in fear of his voice.

      Fay shot an accusing finger at him, “Where is my brother?”

      Santa’s sizzling red cheeks calmed to a mellow pink. “He’s safe…for now.”

      “I want him back and I want him back RIGHT NOW!”

      “I’ll give you your brother but first I have a present for you.” Santa flipped his arm in a slick fluid motion downwards in a diagonal direction, pointing towards the door below him. From behind the door was a massive thud, like the sound of a Tyrannosaurus Rex…only bigger. The door began to open.

      “You see Fay, I’ve been experimenting with the zombie gene.”

      Fay heard only his words, her eyes were glued to the door and the horror that laid beyond it.

      “I found that not only does it have the capability to transform humans and animals into zombies-”

      The door was nearly wide open but all Fay could see was pitch black darkness.

      “-but when mixed with the proper chemicals, it can also create life out of nothing.”

      The shadowy darkness moved. The darkness that Fay had seen was but a shadow of something bigger, something worse than anything she could have ever imagined. The giant creature escaped it lair much like the Rancor from Return of the Jedi. It moved into the arena giving Fay a better look into the very essence that was the word, terror.

      It stood nearly fifty feet tall. Its body was a smooth as ice, lumpy from the bottom to the top. It’s arms were as big as tree trunks and just as rough. Its nose was a tender orange, its eyes as black as coal. And sitting on top of its head was a stove top hat.

      “I call him Frosty.”

      The giant white creature reared back and let out a tremendous roar.

      “You want your brother Fay,” Santa said pointing up, towards the top of the tower, “Come get him.” Santa escaped into darkness once again, leaving Fay to deal with this titanic sized albino sculpture of man.

      With no time for a game plan, Fay ran. The towering snowman rolled towards her. It had no legs but the bottom section of its hulky frame served well enough to make it move.

      Fay looked to her left and her right. Nothing of use. Some fire would be really good right about now.

      The snowman was gaining ground, it was impossible for her to outrun it. She stopped near the edge of the arena and turned to her right, running along the outer wall, shouts of bloodthirsty elves ringing through her ears. The momentum of Frosty was too much for it to turn on a dime and it crashed into the wall, crushing hundreds of elves.  The rest of the elf crowd was divided between screeches of excitement and laughter.

      Frosty backed from the hole in the wall and surveyed the arena. A predator searching for its prey. It locked its coals on Fay and rolled after her again. This time it kept its pace, rolling fast enough to catch her but not fast enough to hurt itself again.

      Fay was doomed. She ran as hard as she could but already her legs were getting tired. She took another hard right and ran for the center of the arena, the colossal Frosty the Snowman closing in on her.

      Frosty bent down and scooped Fay in one of its branch ridden hands. She struggled to free herself but its strength far exceeded her own. Frosty tossed Fay into the air, her body tumbling as if she were being tossed around in an invisible drying machine. Frosty’s mouth opened wide, rows of stumpy teeth lining the walls of its icy cavern. Fay fell into oblivion.

      She was gone.

The crowd of onlooking elves cheered wildly. Some of them pouted in disappointment, hoping for something a little more bloody. Frosty raised one trunk high in the sky, nodding in approval of their cheers.

      Then the smile faded from its face and its arm went limp. The crowd of elves stopped as well. Silence engulfed the arena.

      Frosty’s head began to jingle and jangle. If you were to play Jingle Bells right at that moment, the beat would match this action precisely. Finally, it stopped. The monumental creature was as white as snow but in that moment it went even a lighter shade of white. Ultra white.

      One of its coal eyes began to jiggle and then popped from its socket, crashing to the arena floor. It cracked in half, each side shooting into opposite directions. The other chunk of eye coal followed suit with the first. From the creature’s socket emerged a being. Fay! She stepped out of Frosty’s skull and stood upon his cheek.

      Frosty went ballistic. It thrashed wildly and roared in pain. The blinded Frosty searched frantically for its eyes. Fay slid down the side of Frosty’s curvy body all the way to the ground. She ran away from the insane snowman and headed for the open door where Frosty had entered the arena.

      There she would find her way into Santa’s Tower while Frosty fumbled about the arena searching for its missing eyes. The massive would unintentionally kill every zombie elf in the process.

Author's Notes:

This is the part I was most excited to write. I got the idea of the giant Frosty the Snowman from the editor of the Undead That Saved Christmas. He was complaining about nobody using zombie snowmen. So that sparked this creation and for the most part I liked it. It's pretty ridiculous but thats ok...I like that kind of thing.


I hope you understood the opening paragraph. I was going for symbolism there of the zombie virus infecting Fay's brain...her life slowly being ripped away from here...her life dissolving. It's kinda confusing but I figured I'd give it a try.


And yet again...here's another part that suffered because of the word limit I was up against. So Fay was going to fight an army on the way up Death Mountain and at the top she was going to go through a maze of booby traps to Santa's tower...at which point she'd be kidnapped and pitted against Frosty. But I had to slice out the booby traps (I still got to mention them though) and go with the baseball bat to the face. Eh, could have been better.