The Last Christmas Gift: A Heartwarming Holiday Tale of the Living Dead

By Nathan Shumate

In the Tradition of The Christmas Box and The Return of the Living Dead...

Malcolm’s grandfather is his best friend.

So when Granpap dies on Christmas Eve, Malcolm desperately tries to bring him back by using the cursed fetish doll that Malcolm’s father sent him before disappearing in Vietnam.

But he does something wrong. Granpap revives—but so does everyone in the cemetery across the street...

“Excellent. Laughs, action, and the most unusual Christmas Eve ever experienced. Great characters meet a great story for fantastic fun.”
-Michaelbrent Collings, #1 Amazon bestselling author of This Darkness Light and The Ridealong

A great zombie story that teaches us all that the dead are to be rightly feared, Christmas is a dark and foreboding holiday, and gifts from our parents are to be treated with the utmost suspicion. It should also be noted that if you live next to a cemetery... you should move.”
-Carter Reid, Hugo-nominated creator of TheZombieNation.com

“The awesome never takes the foot off the gas.”
-D.J. Butler, author of City of the Saints

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nathan Shumate
• Release date: Jul 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311752925

Book preview

The Last Christmas Gift

A Heartwarming Holiday Tale of the Living Dead

Nathan Shumate

http://www.coldfusionmedia.us

© 2015 by Nathan Shumate

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Cover design by Nathan Shumate

Published in print and ebook by Cold Fusion Media

http://www.coldfusionmedia.us

Chapter One

I saw in the newspaper that they’re tearing down Granpap’s house, along with the other old houses around it on the hillside, to put in a complex of senior apartments and condominiums instead. It’s just as well. It was never a good place for single-family dwellings. No child could ever pedal a bike or push a skateboard up that steep hill to his home; I spent too many afternoons huffing and puffing my way home from school.

The story in the paper didn’t mention any plans concerning the old Federal Gardens cemetery across the street. I doubt the reporter even thought of it. Everyone’s done such a good job forgetting about it, and what happened there four decades ago, that they probably couldn’t notice it if they tried. It’s almost become invisible to the eye, too; when I drove by on a whim a few years ago, trees had grown up just inside the cast iron fence all around, and bushes camouflaged the sign at the chained front gate. When nobody wants to remember, nobody has to.

The house will be gone, the cemetery is forgotten. And since I am the only person who really knew what happened that Christmas Eve—the only person alive now, and the only person alive at the time—I can go on being the only person who remembers.

Chapter Two

My father was called up for Vietnam when I was three, and since Mom’s family was all back east and really hadn’t wanted her to marry Dad anyway, she didn’t feel comfortable going back to them with me in tow. Granpap was Dad’s father, a widower tired of rattling around in his big old house alone, and invited us to move in while Dad was deployed. Insisted, really, which was as close to an invitation as Granpap ever got. So Granpap’s house was the only home I knew.

Just like I don’t remember living anywhere before Granpap’s house, I don’t remember Dad before he left. I saw pictures, but they were mostly of a stiff man in a uniform, and I don’t have any living, breathing memories of such a figure. A few times I thought I had a glimpsed recollection of a tall, skinny figure who loomed over me, strong and gentle at the same time, but whenever I examine those ghost memories in the full light of thought, they either evaporate like a dream that melts when you try to recount it, or they turn out to be memories of Granpap after all. They were supposed to look a lot alike, Dad and Granpap. Both were tall, thin, narrow-shouldered, soft-jawed. Both had bony noses, although Mom told me that Granpap’s dominated his face a lot more. Both had ruddy Irish complexions, but Dad had had none of the faint lilt to his voice that Granpap had picked up from immigrant parents. Mom also said that Dad smiled more. Smiled all the time, really. I tried to tell Mom that Granpap smiled all the time too, it’s just that his smile turned the corners of his mouth down like a frown. I don’t think she ever got that.

Dad wasn’t drafted; he had been in the Army before Vietnam. They let him stay home to finish college, but right after that they called him overseas. We got letters now and then; all had been opened, and sometimes there were black marks obscuring words. Mom said that he was doing important work. When she called it intelligence, I thought she meant that he was being the brains of the Army because he was so smart. I told that to Granpap once, and he shook his head. That’ll be the day, he said, wearing his upside-down smile. The U.S. Army being smart enough to listen to an Irishman for a change.

After I started school, Granpap came to my school events whenever we were supposed to bring our fathers. Back then, just about everybody had their own father and mother at home. Most of the soldiers in Vietnam were unmarried, so I was the only one in my class whose dad was overseas. Granpap would always say his name very slow and very Irish for my teachers when they first met him: Alphonse Dunlavy, grandfather and general factotum to Malcolm Dunlavy. The teachers always thought that was funny. When I asked Granpap what a factotum was, he said it meant bottle-washer. I didn’t bother asking him further; his upside-down smile told me that he was having fun telling me jokes he knew I wouldn’t get.

Mom worked in an accounting office but she always went to work after I left for school and was already home when I returned up the hill. Granpap was retired by then; he built furniture in his workshop at the back of the garage when he didn’t have to be doing anything else. That was our little family, as far back as I could remember.

So when they told me Dad was dead, I probably didn’t take it as hard as they thought I should.

Chapter Three

It was the middle of summer when the officer came to the door. I always remember that because he was wearing a full dark uniform and hat and there was sweat trickling down behind his ear into his collar. I was in shorts and a T-shirt when I answered the door, and couldn’t believe that anyone could survive outside in that heat wearing what he was wearing. I called for Mom when he asked for her by name, and then I went outside and around to the backyard to play in the sprinkler. I was seven that summer.

I never saw the officer leave. I stayed outside until Granpap called me in for supper. Mom was the one who usually did that, but I didn’t notice that anything was wrong until I got to the kitchen. Mom was sitting at the table with her hands in her lap and her head bowed, like she was looking at her fingers. On the table, beside the empty plates, was a sheet of paper, refolded and placed neatly on the envelope it had come in.Granpap put his hands on my shoulders when I came in the kitchen and stood behind me. Mom took a deep breath and raised her face to look me in the eye.

The man who came earlier, she said.

The officer, I said. I had almost forgotten about him.

She nodded. He brought us the news... She shrugged toward the paper on the table, not taking her hands out of her lap. Your father has been killed.

This was too big a shift from a summer’s day of sun and sprinklers, and it took me an uncomfortably long time to think of something to say. In Vietnam, I clarified.

She shook her head, and her eyes dropped to her motionless fingers again. Well, maybe, she said, contradicting herself. What he was doing for the Army... they won’t tell me where he was. She started crying then, as if the refusal on the part