Pray To Stay Dead

by Cole, Mason James

  They slept in and spent the next day lazing about. Kimberly and Richard walked into the woods and did not return for several hours. Colleen and Daniel argued while Guy silently watched, opening and closing his mouth at certain intervals, as if he’d had something to add but figured it just wasn’t worth it. Daniel stomped away before long, and Colleen lay in Guy’s arms staring up at the sky through the trees.

  That night, they laughed around the campfire, and when the sound of gunfire popped in the distance, Kimberly asked when deer season opened. None of them knew. Later, pressed close to one another in their tent, Colleen and Guy tried to have sex.

  “What?” Guy asked, his cock hard, pressed to her stomach.

  “I can’t sop thinking about her tonight,” Colleen said, feeling around for the flashlight.

  “Oh, jeeze,” Guy said, and Colleen wasn’t sure if he sounded sympathetic or annoyed. His dick certainly felt pissed off.

  “I was fine last night,” she said, finding the flashlight and clicking it on, illuminating the red interior of the tent. “Tonight I just keep seeing her face.”

  “Oh, hon,” he said, holding her close, any trace of annoyance gone from his voice, his cock softening between them.

  They talked for a little while and she fell asleep with the flashlight on.

  The following morning, they were on the road by nine. Daniel was in a groggy daze, and by nine-thirty he was asleep again. They didn’t tune in to the radio for several hours, by which point the world was already falling apart.

  Two

  They came upon a half-red heap on the roadside. Colleen realized it was a deer, saw the glistening red knot bulging from its mouth, and looked away.

  “Oh, God!” Kimberly said.

  “Poor thing,” Colleen replied.

  “It’s alive,” Kimberly said, twisting in her seat. Still asleep, Daniel slumped against the window, his head tipped forward, his face entirely obscured by his hair.

  “That’s not possible,” Richard said.

  “He’s right,” Colleen said. “Its guts were hanging out of its mouth.”

  “Uh, not its guts,” Daniel said, looking up and clearing his throat. He sounded amused. “That’s not really possible. Maybe its stomach or something, but not its guts.”

  “Oh, who cares?” Colleen said. “You know what I mean.”

  “Guts are probably hanging out of its ass,” he added, as if he hadn’t heard her. He looked at Kimberly. She covered her mouth with her hand and watched as the deer disappeared from sight. “Kim, forget about it.”

  “I saw its legs moving. I’m telling you, I did,” Kimberly said, looking at Colleen. “Come on, Brock, we have to do something.”

  Daniel shrugged. “Whatever.”

  Richard put his arm around her. “It looked dead to me,” he said.

  Kimberly looked like she was about to cry.

  Guy moved the van onto the side of the road and brought it to a halt. “It was pretty messed up,” he said, looking back at Kimberly. “I think it’s dead, too, but if you think you saw it moving, I’ll check it out, okay?”

  Kimberly nodded.

  Guy hopped out . He went to the back of the van, opened the doors, and, after a few seconds of rummaging, removed the tire iron from the spare tire well. They watched him walk in the direction of the fallen deer. Daniel grunted something, stirred, and went right back to sleeping.

  “Damn.” The deer was alive. God help him, he had no idea how the hell it could be, but it was.

  The large doe had surely been struck, and by something big; its midsection was crushed and twisted almost entirely around, its hindquarters mashed flat. A dozen angles of pink ribs splayed open its torso. Its guts were indeed hanging from its ass. They were strewn across the ground behind the animal’s broken hind legs, speckled with dirt. Pine needles clung to them, flies buzzed, and the air reeked of scat. The creature’s front legs worked, the hooves digging into the dirt. Its head lolled. Its jaw worked as if it were trying to swallow whatever it was that bulged from its mouth. Its eyes slowly rolled in their sockets.

  “Ugh,” he said, slamming the tire-iron into its skull until its forelegs stopped moving.

  Back at the van’s open rear, he wiped the tire-iron clean with an oil-stained rag.

  “It was alive?” Kimberly asked.

  He nodded once and tossed the rag into the ditch. “Poor thing was damned tough.”

  Kimberly watched him put the tire iron away. “Thank you,” she said.

  Guy closed the doors.

  As he slid into the van, Richard opened the side door and hopped out. “I gotta go,” he said, and walked toward the edge of the road.

  Daniel sat up, jerked his hair from his face, and blinked. “Piss break?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

  “Sure,” Guy said. They got out.

  Richard peed onto the crumbling base of a fallen redwood, making a paste of the dust. He wanted to be someplace else. He didn’t like Kimberly’s friends and they didn’t like him. They thought he was an idiot and he guessed they weren’t totally unjustified in this opinion. They talked politics and literature and movies, things about which he knew little and cared less, so there Richard sat like a sack of potatoes waiting for it to break.

  Sometimes when they were all around, Kim would ask him for his two cents, trying to make him a part of things, and if he was lucky he’d be able to parrot something she’d said to him earlier. It always seemed like they could tell. They made him feel dumb. And things weren’t much different when it was just the two of them. He tried to keep up, tried to pretend to care about the things that turned Kimberly on, statistics and movements, but he couldn’t—he just wasn’t wired that way.

  It was all made more rough by the recent realization that he didn’t love her. He loved fucking her, for sure, and he liked her company when they were just hanging out, getting high or talking small. He didn’t like having to fake it, having to play the quiet type, but he did it if he had to, and he didn’t want to do it anymore.

  If only for the sex, he could have gone on this way for God knew how long. His general apathy toward all things carried over into his own life, and though he didn’t care for the way things had gone whenever they all got together, he could deal with feeling like an idiot around Kim and her friends if he could still go to bed with her and have those pressure-free moments together.

  He’d met Tatum Morrish nearly two months ago while at a party he and Kimberly were attending, and all that had changed. He felt at ease with Tatum, never in danger of being judged or evaluated. He didn’t feel stupid when he was with her, and the sex was as good as it was with Kimberly.

  Richard didn’t care about much but he had no interest in hurting anyone, least of all someone as goodhearted as Kimberly. So he had avoided the breakup, juggling both girls for as long as he could. He clued Tatum in just last week, promised her that he’d return from the trip to Tahoe free of Kimberly.

  He would tell her. He would tell her soon. It would hurt, he knew, wishing there was some other way around it.

  He zipped up and walked back toward the van.

  “Hey,” Kimberly said when she saw him.

  “Hey,” he said, and she leaned forward and kissed him. They were the same height, which was nice. He looked into her eyes and wondered if maybe it would be easier to just let her find out.

  “I can’t believe you threw out my pads.”

  “I didn’t,” Daniel said, looking down, hair in his face, trying and failing to suppress an idiot grin.

  They stood at the back of the van, which was parked on the side of the road at the base of a densely forested hill. The van’s doors were open, revealing their heaped luggage. Colleen’s bag was opened, its contents strewn across the other bags: clothes, a hair drier, a brush, a small zipper bag containing make-up. No pads.

  Guy was a few yards away, pissing onto pine needles, his back to them. Kimberly and Richard had taken a walk, down a slope and out of sight.

  “Yo
u lying asshole,” Colleen said, pushing him with both hands. She didn’t know why he bothered trying to lie to her. He wasn’t very good at it—always shuffling his feet and looking around—but even at his best, his most bald-faced, she could see through him. She could see the lie in his unblinking eyes when he finally stopped looking around and decided to make eye contact, and she could hear it in his voice, which became stripped of emotion and oddly tremulous, the voice of the seven-year-old who’d broken her porcelain ballerina and blamed it on a non-existent earthquake.

  “Hey,” he said, stepping backward and rubbing his chest. “I said I was sorry.”

  Colleen laughed. “What the hell are you talking about? You didn’t say you were sorry.”

  “I was going to, okay?” He looked around. Kimberly and Richard emerged a few hundred feet behind them, gazing up into the redwoods and walking close. Kimberly looked back at them. Daniel’s voice fell to a whisper. “And then you started screaming and shit, and I just—”

  “Enough,” she said, and took a quick step toward him. He stepped back, flinching. He had a good five inches on her, but she was still his Big Sister. As a child, she hadn’t been above petty cruelty; she’d enjoyed making him cry on more than a handful of occasions. She wasn’t proud of this, not necessarily, but she’d established herself as the boss then, and it was sometimes easy to slip back into the role. Daniel enjoyed battering people with his words, but when he thought he was maybe going to get posted, he was all nervous twitches and apologies.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He shrugged, whipping the hair from his face, and she really wanted to punch his crooked teeth in.

  “You’re such a child,” she said, and walked away, toward Guy, who was all zipped up and standing near the front of the van. He raised his eyebrows and opened his arms. She diplomatically sidestepped the embrace.

  “You really think he did it on purpose? Maybe they fell out.”

  She looked back at Daniel, who shuffled away in search of a tree to piss on.

  “They didn’t fall out.”

  “You gotta go?” Guy asked, nodding toward the woods.

  “Yeah.”

  “You need a hand?” He smiled.

  “I’ll manage.”

  She let him kiss the corner of her mouth and turned away, crossed the street and crab-walked down the slope. Twigs snapped beneath her feet. Somewhere nearby, in the direction from which they’d come, by the sound of it, an engine rumbled. Twenty or so feet down, the ground leveled out. She stopped there, dropped her pants and squatted, relieved to see that her disposable pad was spot free. They were about ninety minutes south of the nearest gas station/five and dime. They’d make it before she got messy.

  Her urine pattered the ground. It smelled like her morning coffee. She stood, pulled up her pants, and took her time working her way up the incline, steadying herself, leaning forward and touching the ground before her. Some seemingly sturdy bumps in the terrain turned out to be thick rifts of gathered pine needles that fell apart under the barest pressure, sliding in a scatter down the hillside.

  She reached the road and stood, wiped her hands on her jeans. The van’s driver side door was open. Guy was half in, half out, as if he’d paused on his way out or in. Completely still.

  He listened to the radio. Colleen could barely hear it, the drone of news. He looked at her and slid entirely from the seat, crossing over to where she stood. He was pale. He looked frightened. She wasn’t used to seeing him that way.

  “Come here,” he said, looking around. He took her by the arm and led her to the van. Daniel approached them, a paltry joint hanging from his lips. Guy looked in the direction Kimberly and Richard had gone. “Hey, you two,” he yelled. “Get up here. Now.” He reached out and pulled the joint from Daniel’s mouth, brought it to his own, inhaled.

  “Hey,” Daniel said. “What are you—”

  “Shut up,” Guy said. Daniel shut up and took his diminished joint when Guy passed it back to him.

  Colleen said: “What’s wr—”

  He cut her off with a look, leaned in and turned up the volume. “Listen.”

  She listened, pressing herself closer to him. He held her. A moment later, Daniel leaned closer. He looked at Colleen, frowned, started to say something but didn’t. Eventually Kimberly and Richard joined them.

  “What the hell,” Richard said, and no one responded.

  “Oh, God.” Kimberly said, looking at Colleen with tear-filled eyes. “The deer.”

  “It can’t be,” Daniel said, after the grim-voiced man reading the news looped around to the beginning of his report and began to repeat himself for the benefit of those just tuning in. “That’s not possible.”

  They huddled around the driver side door and listened as the man on the radio once more announced that the CDC in Atlanta had confirmed countless reports over the last forty-eight hours that the recently dead were returning to life and attacking the living.

  Three

  Reggie Turner slept through the first twelve hours of the end of the world.

  He’d been in Houston, taking it easy after a sixteen hour haul from Tucson, Arizona when the job offer came: deliver a load of industrial chillers to Sacramento within forty hours. It was a thirty-hour run with no trouble and no sleep. He slept for five hours and got to Sacramento in a little over twenty-eight hours, popping Black Mollies all the way.

  Reggie didn’t like the way speed made him feel—like a big rodent or a small monkey was trapped behind his ribs and was panicking, trying to tear its way out—but he did what he had to, and he got to Sacramento not long after sundown. This was a good thing, too—he hated walking around in the daylight after a long haul. Too damned bright.

  He dumped his load and picked up another for a short run down to Fresno that didn’t need to be there for twenty-four hours. Still flying from the Mollies, he tried to cool his heels in Frank’s, a small, smoky bar and grill not far from the rest stop where he’d get the last good night’s sleep of his life.

  Frank, whoever he was, was nowhere to be seen, but the blinds and the smoke made the waitress—her name was Maxine—look at least thirty-five. He smiled and she smiled. He ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and a beer, and he decided he needed to fuck. First things first, though.

  Sliding away from the bar and letting his eyes linger over Maxine’s ass (nice for a white woman who’d already given forty a healthy push), he went to the pay phone, which was located between the bathroom doors (the combined smell of piss and urinal cakes and crap lingered here, as it did outside the bathrooms in every truck-stop bar and grill in America). No one looked at him as if he should get his black ass the fuck out the door and on the road. If they felt that way, and he was sure some of them did, then they did a better job of hiding it than the assholes in Houston.

  He fed the payphone and dialed home. His mother answered on the third ring. They talked small for a few minutes and then he asked to talk to Nef. Nefertiti’s mother had been on an Africa kick when she’d gotten pregnant and she’d insisted on giving their child a name that evoked the majesty of Ancient Egypt. When he’d asked her why they couldn’t give their kid a normal name that wouldn’t get its ass kicked at school, she’d called him an Uncle Tom and then tried to gouge out his eyes. Her Africa kick came around the same time as her cheap hard liquor kick, and she was a mean ass drunk.

  He didn’t miss her.

  “Hey, daddy,” Nef said.

  “Hey, baby. You have a good birthday?” She’d just turned seven.

  “Yeah,” she said, and it was such a short word, he didn’t have time to decide whether he could hear sadness in her voice.

  “You coming home soon?”

  “Soon, honey.”

  “When?”

  “I got one more job to do tomorrow, a little one, and then I’m on my way home. How’s day after tomorrow sound?”

  “Great!”

  They talked and laughed. He asked her how school was, and if she’d gotten the present he’
d mailed from Texas, and then she asked him how long he was going to stay home. As long as he could afford to, he told her. They wrapped it up and then he said a few more words to his mother. Yes, she’d picked up the check he’d wired her; yes, Nef was going to bed early and doing her homework and eating good. He said goodnight and when he returned to the bar his food was waiting for him.

  He downed the food along with three more beers, eyeing Maxine and talking to her whenever she came by. Both of them knew the game well enough to tell that the other was playing it. He asked her what time she was getting off, and she spun it into a joke.

  “I clock out at eight.” It was fifteen after seven. “So I’m thinking maybe twenty minutes after eight?”

  “And again at eight thirty.”

  She smiled, and they walked out to his truck a few minutes after eight. In the cramped sleeping quarters behind the seats, they undressed separately and got to work. She hadn’t been off in her estimation, nor had he. They went at it with something like tired desperation, and when they were done no one said anything. The smell of cigarette smoke and charred meat clung to her hair; the smell of their bodies filled the small space in which they lay, side by side, like relations.

  She sat up to light a cigarette and spied his dog-tags, and he readied himself.

  “You were over there?”

  “Yes I was.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Like you heard it is.”

  “Something you don’t like to talk about?” She’d never come right out and ask, not without an opening (they never did), but it was pretty damned obvious: she wanted to know if he’d killed anyone, and if so, how many; and what did it look like, smell like, feel like? He saw her eyes crawl over his body, scavenging for overlooked scars. Everyone was a ghoul, eager to wrench the bones from the dirt and see if there was anything wet left to suck out. Everyone wanted to hear about the bad stuff, about the brains popping and the blood flying. This had once surprised and disappointed him.