Saint Nicholas sat massive in the sleigh, his beard whipping in the wind. His enormous hands, fitted with equally enormous, pristine white gloves, gripped reins that guided his nine reindeer—with Rudolph’s bright, red nose leading the way—on a steady course over the Caribbean Sea. Next stop: Venezuela.

Santa squinted into the night. “What’s that, you say, faithful Barnaby?”

The North Pole’s chief executive elf hoisted himself onto Santa’s lap and gave his Boss’s beard a gentle downward tug, adjusting the ancient one’s line of sight. He pointed a stubby finger. “Flashing lights, Chief. Dead ahead.”

Leaning forward, Santa narrowed his eyes until they nearly disappeared beneath folds of fat. “I don’t—” When the faint roar of engines reached his ears, he gasped and his eyes flew open, wide as saucers. “A jet,” he exclaimed. “But our flight path is supposed to be cleared. How can this be?”

Barnaby shook his head. “The craft must have its transponder turned off.”

“Then we must radio for assistance.”

Barnaby shook his head again. “No time, Boss,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the growl of the approaching aircraft. “By my estimation we have thirty seconds—at most—to change course, or it will be a direct hit.”

Santa secured the reins. Puffing his chest, he bellowed: “Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now Prancer and—”

Barnaby slapped the Boss hard across a rosy cheek. “Chief,” the elf wailed against the deafening din of screaming jet engines. “Skip to the end.”

“Right, right,” Santa said with a nod. He inhaled, his expression overcome with grim purpose, and shouted his command. “Reindeer, dive!”

The sleigh dipped, and for a delirious instant Barnaby believed they’d cleared the oncoming plane by a razor’s edge—before the wing clipped them.

The antlers of eight giant reindeer sheared off, but they did not snap cleanly. They tore. Bone shrieked against metal, and the sound drilled into Barnaby’s skull as fragments of ivory and gore exploded outward. He ducked, but not before something warm slapped across his face, and he gagged as the taste of iron filled his mouth.

The man in the red suit, being enormous, had no room to duck and nowhere to go. His belly shook like a bowlful of jelly as a thousand shards of shattered antler turned him into a pincushion. A missile of an antler, remarkably intact, lodged deep in Santa’s eye. He screamed. His hands flew to his face as blood shot from his eye socket like a geyser, soaking into his once-pristine, white gloves and turning them a deep red. His howls were reduced to a bubbling choke as an antler punched through his cheek, tearing free half his beard in a spray of blood and teeth.

In his agony, Santa Claus had done the unthinkable. He let go of the reins. The untethered reindeer, bleeding from their poor, mangled heads, tumbled into the darkness.

Then there was no scream at all—just a heavy, wet thud, like a sack of meat dropped from a height as the wing of the aircraft severed Santa’s massive head from his massive body. The last thing Barnaby saw before his own night went black was the lettering—U.S. Air Force—on the tail of the jet.

Barnaby awoke with warm water lapping at his face. He opened his eyes to the day’s first light, and realized he was afloat. Reaching up, tentatively, relieved to see both hands still attached, he brought them to his chest. The inflatable life vest was a precaution the Boss had always insisted upon despite the protests of the elves, who had jeered, Whoever heard of Santa’s sleigh crashing? But the sleigh had crashed, and the life vest, fortunately, had deployed. As did, he assumed, his emergency parachute, another precaution by order of the Boss. To confirm this notion, Barnaby reached back over his shoulder and located the suspension lines attached to his vest. He pulled them and felt the resistance of the parachute, floating behind him, unseen.

“I’m alive,” he said aloud, jumping at the sound of his own voice.

Something brushed against his sleeve. He looked down and it was a doll, floating in the water. The sight of this child’s toy awakened his vision, and in the dawning light of day he saw toys, all around him, adrift in the vast ocean. More toys than the eye could count. Dolls and boxed electronics and—oh, God—more dolls. Millions and millions of dolls.

The dolls are important, he thought, with angry defiance. They are necessary!

Barnaby placed a hand over his face and wept. For how long, he didn’t know. But when he again opened his eyes, ahead of him he saw a flash of red. Hope surged through him, and his arms found their purpose. Hand over hand, he swam, against the current. Feeling the parachute dragging behind him, he tore away the vest and freed himself from it, and swam on. Brushing aside toys—building blocks and Etch-a-Sketches—he grabbed a box containing a LEGO Star Wars Ahsoka Tano’s T-6 Jedi Shuttle and climbed onto it, using it as a makeshift surfboard. He swam toward the blinking red light until he believed his body could take no more.

Ahead, as the morning fog lifted, a familiar shape formed around the blinking red dot.

“Rudolph!”

His strength renewed, the elf swam with all his might until Rudolph came into clear view, standing atop the overturned sleigh. When Barnaby reached the sleigh’s edge, Rudolph lowered his head. Understanding, the exhausted elf grasped the reindeer’s antlers—they were battered, but intact—and Rudolph hauled him onto the makeshift lifeboat. Barnaby embraced his friend, wrapping his diminutive arms around the reindeer’s neck. Pulling away, he met Rudolph’s gaze.

“Have you seen any of the others?”

Rudolph lowered his head again and tilted it to one side, indicating Barnaby should look in that direction. He did, and choked back a sob. A bulbous mountain of red cloth bobbed up and down in the water. The headless red mass rolled with the swell, folding in on itself. One sleeve floated free, empty, gnawed open by the sea, leaving pale flesh exposed beneath the waterline. Even from that distance, Barnaby could see Santa’s black boots, secured firmly on his feet. Blinking back fresh tears, he turned to his friend.

“Can you fly?”

The light in Rudolph’s nose faded, and it was all the answer Barnaby needed.

Overhead, off in the distance, the sky hummed. It was not the roar of a jet engine, but a smaller sound, more precise, that of approaching propellers.

Barnaby looked skyward, hope once again blooming in his chest. “Listen, Rudolph,” he said, pointing upward as the aircraft came into view. “Help is coming. We’ll tell them the mid-air collision was a terrible accident. Then we’ll find some way to gather up the toys and finish Santa’s mission. But we need to get their attention.”

Casting about, Barnaby spotted a white rag doll floating alongside the overturned sleigh. He recognized it as one he had made with his own hands. Snatching it up, he turned to Rudolph. “Can you muster one more effort?”

The reindeer nodded.

“You remember the Morse Code for HELP?”

Another nod.

“Good. Use your red nose to send up the signal, and I’ll wave this doll in the air, and soon they’ll see us and all will be better.”

As Rudolph flashed the distress code, Barnaby climbed onto the mighty reindeer’s back and waved the doll high in the air, beaming a smile of pure joy.

Then came a flash. And as the missile bore down on them, Barnaby had time for one more thought, dimly, that perhaps this was how stars were born.

Then the light erased him.

***

“What?” The commander leaned over the tech’s shoulder. “Where?”

“There,” the tech pointed. “Off the coast of Venezuela.”

The commander tapped his phone. After a short call, he said, “Missile Defense Command lost him, too. I’ll notify the Joint Chiefs.”

***

“Mr. President,” said an aide. “I think that’s an animal.”

“They’re all animals,” the president growled, shoving the gold plate smeared with ketchup and mustard at the aide. “Bring me another one of these.”

“Mr. President,” the aide persisted. “One of them is waving something, and I think that’s Morse code. They appear to be calling for help.”

“You’re fired,” the president shot back. “Get out of here. Bring me my burger before you go.”

The aide left with the platter, and the president sat back and smiled with smug satisfaction as the drone missile blasted the vessel and its occupants into oblivion.

“We got another one, Petey,” he said, laughing, his maw filled with a bolus of half-chewed meat and bun. “It will be the biggest announcement ever made on Christmas morning. Nobody ever had bigger news on Christmas Day. It will be huge. Petey?”

The president glanced over at the self-styled Secretary of War, who lay passed out on the floor, an empty bottle in one hand and a buzzing smartphone in the other.

In the Oval Office, the phone rang, and rang, and rang.

About the Author:
Jacque Day is the Carnage House founding co-editor-in-chief and a staff member of Crystal Lake Publishing. She has zigged and zagged as a magazine journalist, book and magazine editor, radio correspondent, TV producer, motion picture crew member, and writer-for-hire. Jacque has an MFA in creative writing (but please don’t hold that against her) and has shared tables of contents with many friends—and once, with Louisa May Alcott. Her fiction and nonfiction appear in publications from Little Key Press, Demagogue Books, Dark Moon Rising, Memento Mori Ink, Sunbury Press, and McFarland & Co. She lives in her home state of Pennsylvania with her childhood-sweetheart husband, Art.