Pray To Stay Dead

by Cole, Mason James

  Reggie turned on the radio and sat there for nearly thirty minutes, listening and watching. It was happening everywhere, whatever it was. The thing outside pawed at the door, weak and ineffectual. Before Reggie threw his truck into gear and rolled out of the rest stop, four other dead bodies had joined the first. He watched their steady advance with mute and detached horror. One of them was missing a good portion of its face and all of its left hand. Reggie heard the splintered edges of its radius and ulna scraping across his paint job. Two of them were unmarred, just like the long ago dead girl sitting against the tree in that far away jungle. On the radio, news of a massive power outage on the East Coast broke. As evening approached, the newscaster reported, panic and violence were overtaking the citizens of New York City.

  President Nixon had issued an Executive Order: all military personnel, either Active or Inactive, were to report to their nearest base. All Military Service Obligations, whether expired or not, had been indefinitely extended.

  It wasn’t happening, no way. Not a chance. Uncle Sam had gotten all he was gonna get from Reggie. Getting to Nef was the only thing that mattered now. To hell with everything else.

  Again the utter senselessness, the madness, hit him. The dead did not walk, and, by virtue of the fact that they were, indeed, walking, one could only assume that somehow reality had been fractured. Soon the earth would boil blood and the sky would be sick with dragons.

  A convoy of National Guard trucks rolled southwest, toward Sacramento, and Reggie knew that no matter what was true, what was really happening: he had to dump his load and get his ass home.

  He rolled away from the dead people, out of the rest stop, and onto I-80, east-bound, away from whatever hell was happening in Sacramento. Half a mile down the road, he pulled over and got out, looked around. A speck shuffled across the interstate in the direction from which he’d come. There was no sign of anyone or anything else. No cars, no military convoys, no dead people. Sounds from somewhere: a dog barking, gunfire, sirens, the deep-bass thump of an explosion.

  It didn’t take him long to drop the straight-legs, detach the pneumatic brakes, ditch the trailer, and get a move on. He passed the aftermath of a three-vehicle accident, choking back the urge to stop and help. A man leaned against the trunk of the least-damaged car, a hand pressed to his bloodied face, a crowbar hanging from his other hand. A dead woman struggled to free herself from the wreckage.

  He passed several slow-moving vehicles, sedans and station wagons and pick-up trucks loaded down with personal belongings. He passed a stalled car. Its hood was open, steam billowed. A large collie watched from the backseat, and the car’s driver waved to him. Please help me, the wave said, and Reggie kept moving. He couldn’t afford to act a fool.

  Further along, traffic bottlenecked. Folks drove their vehicles around a five-car pile-up.

  It would be this way from here to home, if not worse. By nightfall, the interstate could be a stalled bumper-to-bumper hell, and people would leave behind their belongings and go on foot.

  Laying into his horn, Reggie eased his truck across the grass median separating the east- and west-bound lanes and onto I-80 West. The westbound lanes were all but deserted, and he wondered how long it was before those driving east decided to claim them. He pulled over and opened his road-map. He’d have no trouble getting off of the interstate near Citrus Heights. From there he’d go south to Fifty, the El Dorado Freeway, which he’d take most of the way home to Nevada.

  Nef must be scared—surely both of them were, but Reggie’s mother was strong. She would be able to comfort Nef. He took solace in the fact that he was currently in a hell of a lot more danger than they were. Carlin was a small town, and that had to count for something, if the news on the radio was to be trusted. A small town contained only so many dead bodies at any given time.

  “They’re safe,” he said, hoping he was right.

  From the east-bound side of the interstate, the man with the overheated car and the collie watched him pass.

  Seven

  Kimberly sat at one of the tables, her face pressed into her palms, shuddering. She stared at the greasily polished wood grain. Richard sat beside her and hung his arm around her neck.

  Colleen looked at Kimberly rocking, looked at Guy, looked at the television, which didn’t really have anything new to report: things were still falling apart, increasing rate, colorful variety. Just like in the poem she’d read in high school. The center had not held. It had spun, disintegrating, into oblivion, and now they were all left standing around, blasted and waiting to be eaten.

  Guy pulled his eyes from the television long enough to meet her eyes. His lips were a thin tight line, his brow creased. He shook his head once and went back to the TV.

  “Something to eat, honey?” Misty asked.

  “I don’t know,” Colleen said, ill. “Maybe in a little while.”

  “Anybody?”

  There were a few shrugs. After no one answered, Guy spoke. “Probably later. Thanks.”

  “Yeah,” Richard said, barely a mumble.

  “Just let me know,” the old gal said, and when the portly guy sighed, she shot him an ugly look. “Why don’t you go home?”

  “You’re making a mistake,” he said, with an exaggerated gesture.

  “What the hell are you going on about, Charlie?” Misty asked, clearly tired of his bullshit. Unmindful of this exchange, Richard got up and went to the phone. He picked it up and dialed.

  “You need to send them on their way and lock up,” he said, nodding toward the television. On the screen, a haggard-looking scientist was pointing to a diagram of the human brain and saying something about the limbic system, whatever the hell that was. “This isn’t blowing over, and you shouldn’t be giving your food to outsiders.”

  “Shut the hell up and sit down, Charles,” Misty said, and rolled her eyes at Colleen. She turned a murderous look back to Charles. “Before I shoot you.”

  “You don’t believe in guns,” Charles said.

  “I’ll go outside and tell Crate to shoot you,” she said. “He’d be happy to. Now get out or shut up.”

  Charles walked over to one of the tables, grabbed a chair, dragged it close enough to the counter to get a view of the television, and sat down.

  The news cut from the scientist to a live shot of a reporter in the streets of Brooklyn. He was flanked by armed soldiers and behind him, a car burned. He said something about civil unrest, and then the soldier to his left opened fire. The soldier to his right followed suit, and the reporter crumpled to the ground, yelping. The camera shook. The ticker at the bottom of the screen read that President Nixon would be addressing the nation at six p.m., Atlantic time.

  “This can’t be real,” Kimberly said, on the edge of hysteria. “It can’t be.”

  Richard hung up the phone and returned to Kimberly’s side, stroked her back a bit, but wasn’t good for shit, really.

  “Oh, hon,” Colleen said, sitting across from Kimberly and taking her hand. Richard looked dazed and stupid, and Colleen wanted to punch him in the nose. “We’re going to be okay. I promise.”

  “You mean it,” Kimberly said, and she was a little girl again, all wide-eyed and hopeful.

  “Yes, Kim. I promise,” Colleen said, realizing that her words were just as empty as Richard’s, she was just a better liar, as the best liars are those who are convinced they’re being truthful. What the hell could she say? What could any of them say?

  The bell above the entrance jingled. Daniel stepped in, reeking of pot and followed by someone else, a boy of roughly his age. He was sort of handsome, this new arrival, his features even and well-placed but a little droopy, as if he were made of wax and had been left by some careless god to sit in the sun for a little too long. His close-cropped hair was nearly black. His dark brown eyes took in the place. He gave them a little smile and a little nod as he shuffled in behind Daniel.

  “Hey,” he said to Misty. A massive revolver hung from his hip, an old cowb
oy number, by the looks of it. Just like that, it was the wild, wild west.

  Misty said. “Crazy shit, huh, Samson?”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “How’s Huff?”

  “You know him. Nothing gets him down.”

  “Yeah,” Misty said, and for just a second there it seemed to Colleen that the world had been righted. They were on their road trip up to Tahoe, and they’d stopped at this rustic little dive for some Food and Gas and they were listening to two rubes talk about some third rube and how nothing ever got him down. Rube Number Three would keep on truckin, and so would they.

  “Hungry?”

  “Maybe in a little,” Samson said, turning to face Colleen. He smiled, less handsome now. His teeth were worse than Daniel’s. Tombstones. “Hey, there.”

  “Hey,” Colleen said.

  “Hey, man,” Guy said, moving forward and putting himself between Colleen and the new guy. It was an unnecessary move, but a cute one. She made a note to tease him about it later. If she got the chance.

  “Samson Niebolt,” the new kid said, a little embarrassed. “After the guy in the Bible, if you were about to ask. My mom was weird. Just call me Sam, okay?”

  “Sure,” Colleen said, a little uneasy. This Sam guy allowed his gaze to pass over all of them, but Colleen felt as if he were only really looking at her.

  Another round of introductions later, they settled down and compared notes and watched television. Aside from a few radio reports, Sam wasn’t up to date on what was happening.

  “…discuss your findings?” Asked an exhausted looking black man who Colleen remembered seeing in a report on the Watergate break-in.

  “Yes, well,” said a man identified by the text on the screen as Doctor Robert Fuller, via satellite from New Orleans. He wore a crisp white lab coat above a suit and tie and thick glasses that reduced his eyes to small shiny points of light. He looked as exhausted and dazed as everyone else. He scratched his mustache, unmindful of the camera. “The revival window seems to be five to seven days.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Revivals worldwide happened at precisely the same time,” the doctor said, looking at his watch. “I don’t remember the time of occurrence off hand because I haven’t slept since then and I really could use some coffee.” He looked off screen, annoyed, holding an invisible cup to his mouth and making drinking motions.

  “Doctor Fuller?”

  Fuller shot a give-me-a-second glance into the camera. A disembodied hand passed him a cup of coffee. He sipped it, winced. “Fuckin’ hot. Jesus.”

  “Doctor Fuller.”

  “Yes,” the doctor said, facing the camera, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. “You were saying?”

  “You were explaining what you meant by this window of reviv-”

  “Yes, the window of revival. The first corpses to revive, two days ago, had been dead for no longer than a week. The specimens we’ve seen thus far bear this out, and we’ve examined several corpses whose time of death—that is to say, o-original death—goes back a week and a half, two weeks, three weeks from the point of revival, and so on, and, well... well, there you go.”

  “Are we any closer to—”

  “That’s not to say that there isn’t some marginal brain activity in older corpses. There may very well be, and I’m pretty sure we’ll find out that there is, but this won’t matter for most people’s purposes. For whatever reason, these older intact corpses simply aren’t getting up and biting people.”

  The camera held on Doctor Fuller while the newsman spoke: “Are we any closer to knowing what’s making this happen?” The doctor tried to sip his coffee again. Shaking his head, he tossed aside the cup, stood up, and walked away, trailing his microphone wire.

  The image cut back to the frazzled newsman, who recapped what Fuller had said. Then, following yet another warning, they again rolled the montage of walking corpses, and everyone looked away. Everyone but Sam, who got up from the table and walked over to the counter for a closer look at the television.

  “Wow,” Sam said, looking back at them, mouth open. “That’s just… man. Daniel told me about it when we were out there, but Jesus, there’s nothing like seeing it with your own eyes.”

  “I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Misty said.

  “Oh, get real, Mis,” Charles said. “It won’t be long before one of them comes walking down the road.”

  “You should talk less,” Misty said.

  “Ah, jeeze,” Guy said. “Can you turn it up?”

  Misty turned up the volume. Standing in a deserted press chamber complete with empty chairs and a podium bearing the Presidential seal, a harried reporter elaborated on an earlier report that the Soviet Union had declared the use of nuclear weapons an “option” that was “on the table.”

  “Use them on who?” Richard asked, looking around at them. “What the hell, man? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense.” Daniel said, turning on the condescension.

  “A good time to live up in the hills,” said Charles, laughing and shaking his head.

  Outside, the dog barked.

  Daniel leaned close to his sister.

  “What are we doing?” He asked, his voice low, his stale breath on her ear.

  “I don’t know,” she said, picking at the tablecloth. “Waiting here?”

  “Waiting here for what? If any more people show up, this place is going to get out of hand. You know it.”

  “Yeah,” Colleen said. “But where can we—”

  “Sam said we could stay at his place. He lives right up the hill.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. He lives with his dad and brother. He says they got a few acres, and there’s only one road leading to the house. He says we could ride out the whole thing there.”

  “What’s up?” Guy asked, leaning in close on her other side. She told him.

  “I don’t know,” Guy said. He sounded unconvinced. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  Colleen glanced over at Sam, who looked down at his hands, as if they were the most interesting things ever, curled as they were before the salt and pepper shakers. He’d been watching her. She opened her mouth to tell Daniel that they’d find some other way, and her words were interrupted by the sound of the bell above the entrance. The dog was frenzied.

  “Hey, there,” Crate said, standing in the doorway, holding the rifle close to his chest, the barrel pointing at the ceiling. Colleen saw that she’d been right from the start: he was old. His early seventies, easy.

  “What’s going on, Crate?” Misty asked.

  “I just—Hush, Bilbo!” The dog quieted down, and Crate faced them once more. “Any of you want to come take a look at Mark Willits before I shoot him?”

  The walking remains of Mark Willits were in bad shape. The dead man’s hair—oily black going to gray at the temples—was matted to its forehead with dirt and blood. Its face was slack, the skin pale and bluish. Its throat was ragged and bloody, as were its lips. The front of its shirt was smeared dark with blood and gristly little chunks of something. Some of the blood was its own, Daniel knew, and some was far too fresh to rightly be on such a dead man.

  The thing’s right arm had been picked clean from the bicep down. Its left arm was in slightly better shape. A few bloody crescents were stamped into the meat of its forearm, and its fingers were intact. They slowly kneaded the air.

  The corpse’s pants and underwear, also heavily bloodstained, were pooled around its right ankle. Its left shoe was gone, and the flesh above its rumpled sock was bulging and discolored with settling blood. Its genitals were gone.

  In a few seconds, Crate’s words had sunk in, and then they all leapt up and made for the door. All except for Kimberly and Colleen, who’d held hands across the table. Kimberly, with tears in her eyes and a bubble of snot on her upper lip had said, quite simply: “I don’t want to.”

  “Neither do I,” Colleen said, looking back at Daniel and Guy, w
ho’d lingered near the door. Richard was long gone.

  “I,” Guy had said, looking down for a second and then lifting his face to meet Colleen’s eyes. “I have to.”

  A brisk nod had sufficed as Colleen’s blessing.

  “Okay,” Crate said, looking back at them. Pacing near his master’s feet, the dog barked again, and dead Mark Willits reacted, its jaw dropping, its eyes shifting left and right with reptilian slowness. Though its mouth worked, it was silent. Save for the sound of its feet dragging through the gravel, the dead man made no noise.

  “Bilbo Baggins,” Crate hissed, made a face at the dog. “You shut the hell up right now.” Bilbo whined and sat on his haunches and piped down, and Crate looked at them again. “Stay put. All of you.”

  Samson took a few steps forward, his right hand resting atop the large pistol hanging from his belt.

  “You, too, Lash La Rue.” The old man said, “You’ll get your shot before this is over.”

  “Okay, Crate,” Misty said, worried. Dead Willits was no more than three feet away from the old man, its good arm extended.

  “Humph,” Crate said. He lifted the rifle, pressed the barrel to Willits’s chest, just above the heart, and gave him a push. The dead man ambled backward, nearly losing its balance. “Nothing to worry about,” Crate yelled back, over his shoulder.

  “I never really liked you,” Crate said to Willits, nudging it once more with the rifle, nudging and poking, hard. He pressed the dead man’s stomach, and a lifeless belch rattled in the thing’s throat. “Always talking bullshit.”

  “Stop having fun and do it,” Misty said.

  “I like having fun, woman,” Crate said. He pressed the barrel to the dead man’s heart once more and pulled the trigger. The report was muffled. Nothing happened. He stepped back a few feet, steadied the rifle, and squeezed off a round into its left knee-cap.

  “Woo,” Crate said as Willits tottered and toppled and hit the ground face first, struggling like an infant to right itself. He stepped up to the fallen dead man, placed his left foot onto its back, pressed the barrel to its head, and pulled the trigger. Willits stopped moving even as everyone else jumped from the gun’s shout.