Pray To Stay Dead

by Cole, Mason James

  “No,” he said. “Bad dreams.” This was bullshit, the kind she wanted to hear and enough to make her uncomfortable. He didn’t dream of Vietnam. He never dreamed of Vietnam, not of the good moments, the quiet moments in which it was possible to believe that you were not a second away from eating a bullet or being obliterated by a landmine; nor did he dream of the screams of the dying or of the asshole reckless superior he and a few of his fellows had gotten away with fragging. He hadn’t had nightmares before combat, and he did not have them now. Combat, he believed, did not change a man: it magnified him. He came out a bigger, truer version of himself, for better or worse.

  No nightmares, but sometimes the images from 1965 would come to him when he was awake, and with total clarity: the sight of a cluster of VC coming apart in spurts and chunks as his M14 spat fire and tried to shake itself from his grip; the heaps of bodies, the crying children; the old man laughing and telling unintelligible yet obviously raunchy jokes on a Monday and lying waxen and still the following Wednesday, a mangy wild dog lapping clean the hollowed-out ruin of his skull.

  Reggie yawned. The Mollies were out of his system, the animal that was his heart had calmed, and the long haul was catching up with him. He sat up.

  “You heading out?”

  “I’m exhausted,” he said, his eyelids heavy. “I need sleep.”

  “You can stay parked right here,” she said. He could see the hope in her eyes, or thought he could. Maybe she wanted more dick; maybe she wanted to press him for more about the war. Maybe she just wanted to be held, but he wanted her out of his truck.

  “I know, but I need real sleep, and I bet this parking lot gets noisy.”

  “Yeah.” She gazed at his chest, and the look of hope in her eyes had turned to a look of disappointment. “You going to the rest stop?” She nodded in its general direction.

  “Yeah. Nice and quiet.”

  “Coming through town again?”

  “Probably one day.” He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Okay,” she touched his chest and leaned in for a kiss. They dressed, and it was as awkward as it ever was.

  “See you around,” she said as she walked away from his truck and toward her car. A Mac tractor rumbled through the parking lot. Good old boys with too little sense in their heads and too much beer in their bellies leaned against a pick-up truck and hooted at Maxine as she got into her car.

  Reggie got behind the wheel of his Kenworth, locked the doors, and fired her up. He drove to the rest stop, left the air running, and crawled into the back. He fell asleep to the sound of the truck’s idling diesel engine.

  Four

  The ride up the hill was long, made longer by hairpin curves. Daniel’s threat to upchuck was the only thing spoken since they started listening to the radio. Guy clutched the steering wheel, his knuckles white, his forehead creased. Kimberly looked dazed. Richard held her close. He looked confused. The radio buzzed with static, and Colleen adjusted the dial until the hiss broke.

  A few minutes into a report on the looting going on in Detroit, Daniel said, “I want to see the deer.”

  Guy said, “Why? It’s dead. I took care of it.”

  “Right,” Daniel said, amused. “I know, but don’t you see what you’re saying? It’s dead now. So… let’s see if it’s come back.”

  “They’re not saying anything about animals,” Richard said.

  “It was already dead,” Kimberly said, glancing at Richard and then looking at the back of Guy’s head. “Right?”

  “I think so,” he said. “It was in bad shape.”

  “So it was dead, and it came back, and you killed it again?” Daniel said, sneering.

  “Yeah,” said Guy. “I think so.”

  “So it’s dead again.”

  No one said anything.

  “That doesn’t make any fucking sense.” He laughed, his tone derisive and devoid of humor. “What’s going to stop it from coming back again? This is bullshit.” He threw himself back against the seat and allowed his hair to obscure his face. He pulled out more of Greg’s shitty pot and lit up without offering to share. The van filled with the smell of grass and the radio’s lone hiss.

  Kimberly squeezed Colleen’s shoulder. Richard spaced out.

  The man on the radio continued. There were more reports of attacks from assorted cities across the US, and Colleen felt her head grow light. Daniel was right about one thing: nothing made sense. They’d left home not even forty-eight hours ago. How could the world get turned inside out within two days?

  Following a wrap-up of events, the other side had their say: a noted biologist from London disputed the reports that the dead were returning to life. Such a notion was preposterous, he said, and he promptly went on to blame the explosion of misinformation on the US media.

  “See?” Daniel said, looking hopeful. “I told you.”

  A little over ten minutes later, he didn’t look quite as hopeful. The radio host played an interview with a doctor in Austin, Texas. The doctor confirmed that he’d been on hand for at least four revivals over the past two hours, and no, what he’d witnessed could not have been a living person reacting to the affects of an as-yet-unidentified viral or chemical agent that lowered vital signs and created the illusion of death, because in one of the three revivals the revived had been eviscerated in a construction site accident. The good doctor in London needed to get out of his office and go into the field.

  Daniel grunted, finished his joint and mashed what was left of it against his sole. He coughed once and resumed his slump.

  The interview ended, and the man on the radio actually broke for commercials.

  “I knew it,” Kimberly said. “I knew the bastard was going to pull something like this.”

  No one had to ask who the bastard was. For several months now, Kimberly has assured them that Tricky Dick would not be leaving office, no matter what truths came to light, and no matter how ready Americans were to get the hell out of Vietnam. He was here to stay, and he’d manufacture a disaster in order to permanently lodge himself in office.

  Colleen had no love for Nixon, unlike her mother, who’d thought the man a saint—if they did something illegal at the Watergate, they probably had a very good reason for doing so—but she didn’t think Kimberly was right about this. Whatever this was.

  The commercials ended. The man on the radio cleared his throat. After a short lead-in for those just tuning in, he described video footage that was aired, only minutes ago, on CBS television affiliates across the country. The announcer didn’t sound composed any more. His voice was lower and softer and getting a little ragged.

  In the footage, he said, that he had watched himself just now, a naked woman stumbled around an unidentified morgue in Gainesville, the Y-incision running down her torso, just flapping, her internal organs sitting in a heap on the stainless steel table beside the gurney, her stomach cavity clearly empty. Just an empty black hole.

  “Oh, God,” someone said. Daniel stomped his foot once.

  A large blue pick-up truck appeared behind them, quickly closing the distance. Its grille was dented, its headlights smashed. The driver blasted the horn, and Colleen swallowed down a shriek. He would run them off the road, and the last thing she’d see would be the face of the driver, slack and dead above the steering wheel.

  Guy slowed the van and hugged the side of the road. When the stretch ahead was fairly straight, the truck shot past them, blowing its horn once more. In no time, it was gone from sight, and they were alone on the road.

  The man on the radio interrupted himself once more, this time to read a report confirming that the walking dead were eating the flesh of the living.

  “Fuck,” Guy said, and nobody added to it.

  The report was quickly followed by another. Countless law enforcement officials (not to mention armed citizens) had confirmed that the revived dead could be put down with a blow to the head or a bullet to the brain. It was, the newsman said with more than a touch of sarcasm, a morn
ing of revelations.

  Guy shot a glance back at Daniel, who continued to sulk. Colleen looked out at the world around them—just trees and blue sky, and dammit, it looked like it was supposed to look, there was nothing wrong with the world—and suddenly she never wanted to leave the van. It was safe here, and it always would be, as long as they didn’t budge. Guy’s right hand was on her shoulder, and she was crying, and she could see her mother’s heavily made-up corpse at the wake, plastic and unreal in the dim light of the funeral parlor viewing room, the smell of flowers barely concealing the stale and antiseptic reek of the place.

  Her thoughts advanced one more step and overtook her.

  “Oh, God,” she said, her chest heaving.

  “What?” Asked Guy. “Are you going to throw up?”

  “No,” she said, turning in her seat. “Daniel.”

  He didn’t respond. He was asleep again.

  “Daniel, oh my god.” She was going to pass out. Guy pulled over and the jerk was enough to shake Richard from his vacancy long enough to turn in his seat and push Daniel once, hard.

  Daniel’s eyes sprang open. He jerked away, frightened.

  “Daniel,” Colleen said once more and wondered if maybe she was going to throw up after all.

  “What?”

  “Mom,” she said.

  Kimberly gasped.

  “Damn,” Richard said.

  “Lord,” said Guy.

  And then it just hung there for a moment.

  “I know,” was all Daniel said, slumping into himself once more.

  Colleen wept. Guy snapped off the radio and held her. After a few minutes, she pulled away, palming tears from her face. “We should keep going,” she said, turning on the radio. She felt everyone else’s gaze on them, on her.

  “I know.”

  “So let’s keep going.”

  He checked his side-view mirror and took off.

  “Where?” Daniel asked.

  “There’s a little town at the bottom of this hill,” Guy said. “And a bigger one about twenty miles east.”

  “Do we really want to go where people are?” Colleen asked.

  “What else can we do?” Guy said, giving her a reassuring smile. “We need to get to a phone. I need to talk to Chris.”

  “Oh, God,” Colleen said, punching her thigh. How had she not thought of Chris? Guy adored his little brother, a charming and hilarious six-year-old who was the spitting image of his big brother, right down to the ridiculous dimples, and she was too busy assembling fears about her dead mother for the boy to even cross her mind. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t even—”

  “He’s going to be okay,” Guy said, more to himself than to anyone in the van with him, and Colleen lost it. Her tears came fast and hard, her shoulders rocked.

  “Brock,” Kimberly said, reaching for her friend. “Come here, honey.” Colleen crawled into the back seat, sat beside Kimberly, who peeled away from Richard’s embrace and settled into hers. They held each other until they got to town.

  Five

  Harlow was little more than a mostly-straight stretch of road bounded on both sides by redwood forest and located in the dip between two large hills. There were no houses visible through the trees, though several dirt roads broke off from the main road, marked by mailboxes perched atop leaning posts.

  There was an old Baptist church that seemed to have been abandoned at some point, a small garage whose fading sign proclaimed it to be the location of Mr. Kim’s Mechanic and Towing Services, and nothing else. Nothing else and no sign of life until they drew near the end of the mostly-straight stretch of road.

  “Here,” Guy said. “Good. They’re open.”

  The parking lot was empty. A pale blue rust-spotted Crown Victoria sat on the side of the two-story building. The sign in the door was turned to OPEN.

  An old man of forty or sixty (his wild beard, unkempt hair, and densely wrinkled face made it difficult to tell) sat on a bench next to the door leading into MISTY’S FOOD AND GAS. A large brown dog of no particular breed slept near his feet. In the shade of a tin overhang, the old man watched their approach from beneath bushy eyebrows. As they crunched into the gravel parking lot and past the two pumps (they were probably older than the Crown Vic), he raised his right hand, held it there, beside his head, for just a second before allowing it to drift down to his lap.

  “I don’t think he’s dead,” Daniel said, and Richard gave a chuckle that started as a grunt and died as a sigh.

  “You see what I see?” Guy asked.

  “No,” Kimberly said. “What?”

  “He’s got a gun,” Colleen said. A rifle rested behind him on the bench, its butt and barrel visible to the left and right of the old man’s narrow hips.

  “Oh,” Daniel said.

  “Should we just keep going?” Kimberly asked.

  “We need gas,” Guy said.

  “Food and gas,” Richard said, as if it were a punch line meant to revive the chuckle.

  “I need pads,” Colleen said, and shot a hateful glance back at her brother, who looked away, his veil of hair dropping.

  “Nobody do anything,” Guy said.

  “It’s a good thing you said that,” Daniel said. “Because I was about to rush out there and beat his face in with my bare hands.”

  “Your brother’s an asshole,” Guy said to Colleen, opening the door and getting out of the van. He stood with the door between him and the man on the bench, returned the old man’s wave. “Hey, man.”

  “Hey, man.” To the old man’s right, barely seen in the gloom, something moved on the other side of the glass door leading into the place.

  “Guy,” Colleen said, her voice an inch above a whisper.

  “Everything cool?” Guy asked the old man. Either he hadn’t heard her or he was choosing to ignore her.

  The old man sat up and leaned forward, his bushy brow knotted. His fifties, Colleen thought. He was maybe in his early fifties. “Everything sure as hell ain’t cool, my man. You haven’t heard?”

  “We’ve heard,” Guy said, stepping from behind the door, his hands held at chest height. “I mean between us, is all.”

  The big dog lifted its head and surveyed the visitors. Finding them of little to no interest, it seemed, it settled its snout onto its paws and closed its eyes.

  “Is everything cool between us, you mean?” The man laughed, and Colleen realized that he was older than fifty. “I guess so. You’re not dead and you don’t look like you want to eat me, so, yeah. We’re cool.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “You see any of them yet?” The old man asked.

  “Just a deer,” Guy said. “A few miles back. But no people. You?”

  “Nothing, except on the news.” The old man sounded disappointed. He nodded toward the door. “Food inside. Misty cooked it a few hours ago, but it’s good.”

  “Sounds good,” Guy said. He looked at Colleen. “Let’s go in.”

  They filed out of the van. Colleen looked from the road to the store and back again, expecting to simultaneously be assaulted by walking corpses from the road and gunfire from within the shadowy confines of Misty’s Food and Gas. Guy walked over to her, placed a hand on each of her shoulders.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she nodded. “Not really.”

  Nearby, Richard and Kimberly went through a similar ritual, their words hushed. Daniel shuffled along behind them, head low, hair in his face.

  A bell jangled as they entered the store. The smell of food greeted them. The woman behind the counter—sixty-ish with a head of thick, closely-cropped silver hair—regarded them with an expressionless face and unblinking eyes. She looked like the guy on the radio had sounded: completely shaken. Behind her, a small black and white TV droned and flickered, the antenna atop it a mad jumble of tinfoil and coat-hangers.

  “Hello,” Guy said, and the woman gave a curt little nod, the corners of her mouth barely twitching into the shadow of a smile. A short, portly man with
a neatly-trimmed beard, a receding hairline, and thick glasses stood near the counter, hands perched on his round hips. He’d been watching the television, and Colleen suspected he was the form she’d seen moving around within the store.

  “Can I use your phone?” Guy asked.

  The woman gave him a disappointed little head shake and pushed the phone across the counter him. “You can, but you won’t be able to reach anyone.”

  Guy took the phone, dialed, waited. He looked hopeful for a second, his eyes wide, and then his hope was washed away by disappointment. He went through the ritual once more before placing the phone onto the cradle.

  “The lines are busy,” he said, facing them.

  “Dammit,” Richard said. Kimberly lowered her head. They all had loved ones somewhere, all but Colleen. There were relatives, yes—her uncle and cousins in San Diego, her Aunt in Vermont—but relatives weren’t always family, and everyone who mattered was right here beside her.

  This was calming. This was devastating.

  “Can I use it?” Kimberly asked, giving a little shrug. “You never know.”

  While Kimberly sought out her own private disappointment, Colleen looked around, took the place in: three aisles of groceries, a cooler, red-and-white-checked tablecloths draped across three tables located on the other end of the small room, just before the glass case filled with deli meats and cheeses. Behind the deli case, a small kitchen. Aside from the woman behind the counter and the short man looking at them like they were a stain on his best shirt, there did not appear to be anyone else there.

  Kimberly placed the phone in the cradle, thanked the lady, and drifted over to Richard.

  “Where you all from?” The woman behind the counter asked. Behind her, a wall of cigarette packs and a colorful quilt, neatly folded within a clear plastic baggie and covered in a kaleidoscope of geometric designs. The hand-written sign taped to the baggie said, LOCALLY MADE HAND MADE ANGEL BLANKET.

  “Fresno,” Colleen said, her eyes moving from the woman’s grim face to the television behind her. It sat atop a file cabinet covered in magnets that held various faded and curled papers in place. A fluttering cramp closed a painful fist in her stomach.