“Fresno,” said the portly guy, shaking his head. “You won’t be going back there any time soon. Why the hell are you way up here?”
“Charles,” the woman behind the counter said, and Colleen heard the warning in her voice, a warning laced with tired familiarity.
“Now, now, Misty,” Charles said, waving a shushing hand at the stone-faced woman behind the counter. “Just let me talk to the kids, all right?” This, Colleen had no doubt, was a routine in Misty’s Food and Gas: Charles hung around and annoyed the customers, and Misty tolerated it while tossing out idle threats.
“What are you doing up here?” Misty asked, overriding Charles, who got as far as opening his mouth.
“Well,” Guy said, and Colleen pressed close to his side and gave the woman a weak smile and a nod. “We were on the way to Tahoe. Now?” He shook his head.
Seen through an undulating haze of static, the newscaster on the small television had the same look on his face as everyone else. A map of Africa was superposed over his left shoulder.
“It’s everywhere,” Guy said.
“Seems like it.”
“They say what’s causing it?” Daniel asked, sliding up to the counter.
“Not yet,” she said. “Someone said it might be germ warfare.”
“Who’s saying?” Daniel asked.
“This guy on TV,” the woman said. “But someone else that there wasn’t any proof of that. Falwell was on earlier, talking about Revelations.”
“Revelation,” Charles said.
Misty shot him another look. “What?”
“It’s Revelation. The Revelation of Saint John. Not Revelations.” He adjusted his glasses, looked at each of them, and nodded once. “No s.”
“Whatever,” Misty said. “Falwell’s a windbag, and you’re an idiot if you buy his shit.”
Daniel laughed once.
“It apparently started all at once, at the same time everywhere, so it’s not a germ,” Misty shrugged. “At least they think it’s not. I’m Misty, by the way.”
Colleen gave a half-hearted smile and introduced herself. Nobody followed suit.
The newscaster droned on:
“…from South Africa and the Middle East confirm earlier reports that th—” Static obscured his face and dissolved his words, and Misty leaned back and slapped the side of the television. The image came back, and the man’s voice came through: “…of China is denying that the phenomenon is occurring there, despite the fact that one of the earliest confirmations the World Health Organization received came from a doctor in Beijing…”
“I don’t think he did this,” Kimberly said, sidling up to Colleen pressing close to her. Colleen was talking about Nixon again.
“No,” Colleen said. “I don’t think he did.”
Pressed between the man she loved and her best friend, Colleen felt safe; she felt as safe as she had earlier, when she was certain that all they had to do was stay in the van.
“What about here in town?” Guy asked.
“What about it?” Charles said, sounding a little too suspicious.
“Anyone see anything?”
“No, hon.” Misty said. “Connie Willits had a heart attack about three hours ago. Her husband and kids drove her out to Beistle. About twenty miles from here. There’s a police station and a hospital.”
“And more people,” Charles.
“Yeah,” Misty said, casting a tired glance at the television. “More people. And more people means more trouble, so we’re in a good place.”
“How many people live here?”
“I don’t know,” Misty said. “People around here stick to themselves, for the most part. Maybe two hundred?” She looked at Charles, eyebrows raised.
“Less than that,” Charles said, shaking his head. “About a hundred.”
“Jackass says about a hundred,” Misty said, shrugging. Richard laughed.
“God,” Charles said, disgusted. “This again.” He turned away from the television and stomped toward the tables, where he pulled out a chair and sat down, his back to them.
Following a stern warning from the network anchor, a reel showing various shots of walking corpses was played.
“Oh,” Guy said.
“My God,” Colleen said. Beside her, Kimberly gasped.
“Jesus,” Richard said. “No way, man.”
Slack jaws, dead eyes; skin like wax. Impossible wounds dry and gaping and roiling black with flies. There was the elderly woman they’d heard about on the radio, shambling naked through a morgue with her chest and stomach laid open in a clean Y-incision. There was a well-dressed man whose jaw and throat had either been ripped or blown away; the tip of his tongue rested atop the blood-soaked knot in his necktie. A man with no arms walking between stalled traffic on an interstate somewhere. A woman who held the stump of a severed arm to her eager and gnashing mouth. And so on, until the images of walking death were replaced by the grim face of the news anchor.
Colleen felt something churn in her stomach. Kimberly pulled away at some point and now wept in Richard’s embrace. Guy held Colleen’s hand too damn tight. Daniel left the store without a word, the bell jingling above his head.
“Do you have—” she began, making eye contact with the woman behind the counter.
“Bathroom’s right there, hon,” Misty said, nodding toward the back of the store, toward the kitchen. “To the left.”
That’s not what she was going to ask—not yet, anyway, that was going to be her next question, after she found out where the pads were, but suddenly she had to be someplace else, someplace away from the television, someplace away from the woman behind the counter and the round man who clearly didn’t want them there. Someplace away from her friends, even. She needed to be alone.
“Be right back,” she said, stepping away from Guy and Kimberly, shouldering past Richard, and walking toward the deli. Through the entrance, she could see her brother loafing toward the road, his hands in his pockets, head down, dealing with things however he dealt with them. She walked down a short aisle, her eyes drifting across boxes of cereal, bags of rice, canned soup, canned fruit, and so on. She held out her right forefinger and left a trail through the road dust atop a box of Raisin Bran, and the menstrual cramps in her abdomen got together with the shocked nausea in her stomach and threatened to light fireworks.
The bathroom was small and neat. There were no obscenities scrawled upon the walls and the scent of the air freshener wasn’t struggling to conceal smells of human waste. She stared at herself in the mirror, suddenly seeing her mother’s features—her mother’s face—embedded within her own. She’d heard it all of her life, “Oh, you look just like your mother,” but it had never really meant much to her, and she wasn’t sure she ever really saw what they were talking about, anyway, or if they were just saying the kind of obligatory shit people say when they don’t really have anything of value to say.
But she did. She looked like her mother. Not just like her, of course—her jaw was not as wide as her mother’s jaw, and her nose wasn’t quite so long, but she was as close to a dead ringer as one could be, and now she was all that was left of the woman. The rest, the sad, dead thing she’d watched her mother wither into, was—
What was her mother doing right now? Was she lying dead, her arms crossed on her wasted breast, as she had been when the funeral parlor attendant had gently closed the casket? Had her mother’s overpowered body been spared the effects of whatever the hell was going on, or was she now awake somehow? Colleen hoped the cancer might stop it, as they had stopped her life, but perhaps the alien tissue would twitch to life and follow the same commands as the natural tissue, finally working in concert and giving her mother increasing strength.
Colleen splashed water on her face and when she was certain that her breakfast wasn’t going to come jetting up from her throat in an acidic gout, she turned from the mirror and lifted the toilet lid. The seat was clean, but she wiped it down anyway before sitting.
“Dammit,” she said. There was a small red spot on her pad. A drop of blood tinked into the toilet bowl, and through the V of her thighs she could see the water in the toilet bowl turning pink.
The door was within reach. She opened it, just a crack, called for Guy, and shut the door again, locking it. A few seconds later, she heard him brush against the door. “Everything okay?” He asked.
“I forgot to get pads,” she said.
“Have you asked Kim?”
“She didn’t say anything when I said I needed them, so I figure she doesn’t have any on her.”
“Okay,” he said. “You think they’ll have some?”
“It’s a store, right?” She snapped back, immediately sorry. She opened her mouth to apologize but he was already gone.
She sat there, feeling the world twist and coil into something unrecognizable beneath her feet, wondering how long it would be until she saw one of the dead things with her own eyes, wondering what the hell tomorrow would bring. Wondering what it would be like to be pulled down by a group of them and eaten alive, as was apparently happening across the globe, if the horrors being coughed up by the news were to be believed.
“Hon?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s out of stock.”
“Aggh.”
“Yeah. She says most of the woman in town use cloth.”
“Agh,” she said, suddenly enraged. She roared: “Fuck you, Daniel.”
“He probably heard you,” Guy said, a few seconds later, sounding both light and worried.
“Yeah,” she said. “I hope he did.” She wanted to punch her brother more than she ever had in her entire life, and that was saying something.
“Sorry,” Guy said. Empty words—he had nothing to be sorry for—but she let them slide.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll manage.”
“You sure?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“I guess not,” he said. “We’ll find you something.”
“Yeah, okay,” she said, her tone telling him to get the hell away from the door. He did.
The pad in her panties had some life left. She pulled up her pants, flushed the toilet, and, washing her hands, stared at her face in the mirror until he flesh looked too white and her pores looked too large and she felt like maybe she were going crazy. Her stomach churned, at last giving up its contents, which arced out of her mouth and into the sink, spattering her hands.
“God,” she said, crying.
Daniel stood where the gravel parking lot met the road, his back to the store. He could feel the old man’s eyes on him, wanted to turn around and tell the old bastard to find something else to look at.
No weed left. He needed to get drunk. If ever he needed to get utterly smashed and spread to the four corners of the earth, it was now.
He looked back at the store, wondering if maybe they had vodka. He hadn’t gotten a decent look around. They probably did, but you never knew with middle-of-nowhere dives like this. Maybe they were into Jesus, and would tell you to look elsewhere if you came looking for booze.
Some part of him was holding out hope that someone on the television would start making sense, hope that someone would figure out they’d been wrong and dead people could not get up and walk because they were fucking dead. But he’d seen the footage, and he didn’t want to see it again, and he could do without seeing Richard pawing all over Kimberly, without their glances and their hushed whispers. It was more off-putting even than seeing his sister get felt up.
He rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, pinching the soft flesh between his eyebrows. Hard, with his fingernails. It was a stupid thing to do—he was awake, dammit; this was no dream—but he did it anyway. He shook his head, turned to face the store, and saw a lone form walking down the street and toward him.
“Fuck,” he said, taking three steps backward, and the form lifted its arm and waved.
Six
Reggie opened his eyes and sat up, blinking into the gloom and looking around. Had he actually been dreaming about Vietnam? About trudging beneath the dense jungle canopy and through the mud while insects buzzed and stung and bullets tore the foliage into green confetti?
He rubbed his face, tried to wipe away the remnants of the dream with hands that had taken many lives over the course of twelve fevered months in Vietnam. A stutter of distant gunfire opened his eyes. It sounded like a machine gun.
What the hell?
Another volley of gunfire sounded somewhere nearby. Suddenly alive, he shook off clinging exhaustion and pulled his sawed-off shotgun from beside his mattress. It was a double barrel, and it was always loaded.
He parted the thick curtains separating his sleeping hovel from the tractor’s cab.
“Shit,” he said, squinting, sunlight pouring in. He rubbed his eyes and looked at his watch. A little after eight in the morning. He pulled on his boots and moved up to the front, keeping his head low. He pulled his sunglasses from the passenger seat and put them on, looked around. There wasn’t much to see. The rest-stop looked like any other. There was one other truck nearby—a monstrous new dark red Peterbilt emblazoned with blue flame patterns. The driver side door was open, though he saw no sign of the driver.
He waited for more gunfire. When none came, he exchanged his shotgun for his pistol, a Colt Combat Commander that had been at his side throughout his tour in ‘Nam. He tucked it into his pants, covered it with his shirt before sliding out of the truck. The last thing he needed was for a cop to drive by and see him stalking around a rest-stop with a sawed-off double-barrel clutched to his chest.
A car shot by on the interstate. It was going seventy or higher. Not long after, another car passed, weaving dangerously between lanes. More gunfire somewhere, though not nearly as close as before. Now a caravan of cars and trucks shot by, all of them heading northeast, the same as the others. Away from Sacramento.
He walked toward the interstate and looked in the direction of the Capital city.
“What the fuck,” he whispered. The sky above Sacramento was thick with smoke and studded with helicopters. Gunfire popped, closer this time. He returned to his rig and reached for the wheel when movement at the other end of the rest-stop parking lot caught his eye. Near the bathrooms, a man walked, head hung low. His shirt was in tatters. With his right arm he clutched his left bicep, and his shirt and arm were stained with blood; it was unnaturally bright against his bone-white flesh. He was bleeding bad, and would die without help.
“Hey,” Reggie said, peeling away his shirt and walking toward the man, whose head moved in his direction, bobbing upward. “Hey, buddy, you okay?”
It was a stupid thing to say—the man clearly was not okay—but what else could he say? The bleeding man said nothing.
“Come on.” Reggie looked the man in the face, and something black took root in his soul. Shadows like snakes coiled in the corners of his vision, and his heart did something nasty. He felt cold, cold and afraid like a child.
The man walking toward him was dead.
Once, in ‘66, he’d come upon a South Vietnamese girl sleeping against a tree, her chin resting upon her chest. Only she hadn’t been sleeping. There had been no blood, none that he could see, anyway, and he never found out how she had died. To the casual eye she was just a girl sleeping against a tree, but there were no casual eyes in Vietnam, and that girl had not been sleeping. She’d been dead for not even an hour, but there was no mistaking the lifelessness of her face.
And there was no mistaking the lifelessness of the bloody man walking toward him. The dead man walking toward him like something out of a nightmare, the dead man walking like some abomination, some blasphemy so great that to look at it was to go a little crazy.
A noise like a frightened yelp escaped Reggie’s mouth, and he took a step backward, away from the dead man, and the ground threatened to hop up and slam into his face.
“Urrn,” the dead man said, peeling his hand away from an arm co
vered in bite marks and reaching for Reggie, who stepped backward until his back bumped into his truck. He didn’t think to pull his Colt and shoot the dead man, and he later realized that he was lucky to have backed into the truck. If he hadn’t, panic might have driven him to leave behind reason and any chance of survival and run screaming into the woods behind the rest-stop bathrooms.
The walking dead man didn’t move correctly. It didn’t move like a man. Life was movement; movement was born of life, came from within, damn it all, and this thing was not alive. Its lurches and jerks came from elsewhere, from outside, surely they did. For one deranged moment Reggie looked into the sky in search of the glimmer of strings that would lead up, through the clouds, and to the hands of some leering and godless puppeteer.
The thing tripped on its own feet and crashed to the ground. It made no effort to raise its hands and prevent its face from bouncing off the cement. A sound like a dry belch escaped its throat, and why not? Dead bodies belched all the time, especially when you hefted them onto more dead bodies, heaps of them stacked six or seven deep, bloating and changing in the heat and the moisture.
Reggie reached through the cold and smothering panic and got a hold on himself. By the time he slid behind the wheel and closed the door, the dead body was struggling to its feet. It stood, tottering, spinning in place, and it occurred to Reggie that the dead man was looking for him. It hadn’t seen him crawl up and into the truck. He looked at the shirt balled up in his fist and then slipped it on.
Reggie watched the thing until he thought it would creep away and into someone else’s nervous breakdown. He watched it until its eyes found his—there was nothing there, of course: a corpse does not look back, even when its eyes are wide and looking right at you. A labored and obscene imitation of an expression moved across the thing’s face. Having found what it was looking for, the dead body threw itself against the side of the truck and scratched at the door like a cat looking to come inside for the night.
Pray To Stay Dead Page 4