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custodian of the Earth’s children he’d never missed a Christmas.
                  This year would not be an exception.
     
     

Four
     
    Lucy’s House
     
                  Uncle Mark is bleeding , Lucy thought. Whenever one of the flashlights swept across Mark she could see the blood soaked cloths Aunt Julie had wrapped around his arm . Uncle Mark is bleeding and Daddy looks scared.
                  Fists slammed against the door shaking the frame as Eli, Maria, Mark, and Julie were racing from door to door and window to window engaging the locks and closing the curtains. Dianna was buried in the hall closet looking for the tool box Eli assured her was in there. Upstairs, Lucy stood on the top landing watching in terror as her family tried to secure the house.
                  “Are you sure it’s in here Eli?” the old woman asked. She sounded measured and calm which was in stark contrast to the chaos surrounding her. “All I see are boxes of old DVD’s.”
                  “Yeah mom it’s in there,” Eli huffed. He and Mark were moving the massive bookcase in front of the picture window. Breathing harder he added more to himself than to anyone else, “We have to move faster.”
                  Mommy’s trying the hello-phone again, Lucy thought using her old term for the telephone for the first time in more than a year.
                  “Damn it! Eli it won’t connect, it keeps saying the circuits are busy,” she cried slamming the five hundred dollar iPhone down so hard the screen cracked.
                  The moans from the things outside the house grew louder, so loud that they blotted out the storm. Lucy clutched her stuffed Eeyore and did her best to be as small and quiet as possible. She didn’t know that when her daddy and uncle went outside they’d been attacked by monsters. Monsters who were really their neighbors.
                  “Eli, I’m not feeling so good,” Mark muttered slumping against the bookcase. “I think I need to sit down.”
                  Eli turned to tell his brother he needed him to help barricade the house from the growing horde outside but he never had the chance. The sounds of the doorframe smashing in filled the room.
                  To Lucy time slowed to nearly a stop and many things happened at once. First, the door fell in and too many people for her to count flooded into the room. She knew some of them but they all looked wrong, they were covered in blood and they were moaning loudly. As this happened Uncle Mark fell to the floor and started flopping like a fish on the dock. Grandma Dianna and Aunt Julie screamed while her mommy and daddy turned and headed for the stairs.
                  “Lily, get in your room and lock the door!” Maria shrieked when one of the monster people grabbed the back of her sweater and pulled her down. “Hide baby!” she shrieked agony filling her voice.
                  Lucy never saw what happened to her family. She ran to the end of the hall, dove through the doorway, slammed and locked the door, slid under her bed, and covered her ears so she didn’t have to hear the screams. She knew what was happening to her mommy, her daddy, and the rest of her family.
                  Please, somebody help me, Lucy thought tears streaming silently down her face. Please save me, Santa Claus… HELP ME SANTA!
     
     

Five
     
    Santa’s Sleigh
     
                  “Oh this is very bad,” Santa said shaking his head in shock as his sleigh flew over the city of Detroit. “Somebody has been very naughty this year and now all of the good boys and girls are in trouble.”
                  Fires burned across vast sections of the dark metropolis and the open areas were filled with the shambling forms of the undead. Even from his altitude, Santa could hear the