Pray To Stay Dead

by Cole, Mason James

  “What do you want with my bike?”

  “I’m just going to strap it to the back of the truck. Do you know if your phone is wor—”

  “Hey,” someone shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Reggie turned, and it was too late to go for his Colt. The guy standing in the door of one of the houses that Reggie had taken to be abandoned had him in the sights of his hunting rifle.

  “I’m helping the kid, man,” Reggie said, freezing, raising his hands. “Just put the gun down and—”

  “You fucking sick bastard,” the guy said. His voice was slurred, and he was having trouble holding the rifle steady. Jesus, is that how people everywhere were reacting to this? By getting shit-faced?

  “Listen, man, I was just—”

  “You were just trying to get your dirty black hands on a little white boy, is what you were doing, you sick faggot. Get on your bike and go home, kid.”

  “Do it,” Reggie said, glancing at the kid.

  “Is that what you were…” the kid began, letting his words trail off. He looked at Reggie, fear and confusion dawning on his face.

  “Jesus Christ, no, kid, now would you—”

  The guy opened fire, squeezed off five frenzied shots. At least two of them struck Reggie’s truck.

  It was over quickly: Reggie leapt to his left, dropping and rolling and pulling his gun. His first two shots went wild, turning brick into powder and shattering a window. The last one caught the asshole in the stomach. The rifle hit the ground and the guy followed, wailing, his hands pressed to his belly.

  Reggie got to his feet, looked around. The kid lay on his side in a spreading pool of blood, gasping. Reggie dropped to his knees and inspected the damage. The bullet had missed the kid’s heart, but judging by the sound of his breathing it had collapsed one of his lungs. Reggie could not find an exit wound. The bullet had bounced around inside the kid’s ribcage.

  “Hey, Steven.” Reggie took his hand. The kid was going to be dead within minutes. “Just close your eyes and take a nap, okay? You’re going to be fine.”

  The kid’s eyes found him, and his body jerked. He tried to get away from Reggie.

  “I wasn’t going to hurt you,” Reggie said. “You have to know that.”

  The kid coughed, his lips glistening red. A line of blood ran from his right nostril. There was fear in his eyes, and then the fear was gone and there was nothing there at all. His chest heaved and rattled. There was a rush of blood and bile from his mouth, and then it was over.

  “Damn it,” Reggie said, standing up. Behind him, the asshole was on his knees, trying to grasp his rifle with blood-slick fingers.

  “Aggh,” he said, dropping the gun and falling back onto his ass. Reggie stomped toward him.

  “You no good piece of shit,” Reggie said, seizing the man by the shirt, pulling him to his feet, and slamming him into the doorframe—once, twice, again, again. The man reeked of blood and shit.

  “I was just helping him,” Reggie screamed, nose to nose with the man, who sputtered and yelped and clutched Reggie’s wrists. Reggie tossed him to the ground, glowering. He paced back and forth on the lawn and, deciding, grabbed a handful of the man’s hair and dragged him over to where the dead boy lay.

  “What are you—” the man said, and Reggie kicked him in the ribs. He thought about kicking him in the stomach but didn’t want a foot covered in shit and blood.

  “You deserve this,” he said, and crouched beside the man. He closed his right hand around the asshole’s throat. “You fucking deserve this.”

  He let go, stood, and walked back toward the man’s house. He stopped to pick up the hunting rifle, a well-kept pre-’64 Winchester. A good gun.

  “Help me,” the man said, weeping. “I’m sorry.”

  Pistol raised, Reggie entered the man’s house and closed the door behind him. He stepped into the dimly lit living room. Against the wall, a large color television displayed the image of a burning building. Reggie glanced at the television and stepped into the kitchen. Placing the Winchester onto the couch, he walked to the sink and threw up.

  Outside, the asshole screamed.

  Reggie checked every one of the rooms, yelling out that any bastards hiding in here better throw their guns down and come out or he’d murder them on the spot. The place was empty. There were no family photos on the walls. A stack of magazines with names like DUDE and SWANK sat atop the toilet tank.

  Back in the living room, Reggie sat down on the chair before the television and buried his face in his hands, tried to steady his breathing, to get his hands to stop shaking.

  Why the hell had he stopped? The kid would be alive now, and the lonely son of a bitch outside would maybe be rubbing one out into the toilet right now instead of getting ripped apart.

  Reggie lifted his face. There was a small table next to the chair. On it sat a lamp, a TV GUIDE, a half-empty bottle of Jack, and a telephone.

  The lamp was off, the TV GUIDE was of no use, and the Jack lit a fire in his belly. Knowing what he’d hear, he picked up the receiver and brought it to his ear.

  There was a dial tone.

  He dialed home, cursing the slowness of the rotary dialer, pushing each number along. There was a distant-sounding click followed by the faint ghost chatter of someone else’s frenzied conversation, and then the phone rang. And rang. On the eighth ring, someone picked up. Reggie’s heart sank as quickly as his hopes had risen: a pre-recorded message informed him that all circuits were busy. He hung up.

  In the kitchen, he found paper bags in the pantry and filled four of them with provisions: canned goods—beans and soup and, God help him, SPAM—and dry cereal and potato chips. Bottled soda and a half-eaten loaf of bread. A jar of pickles from the fridge. A can opener from the drawer next to the sink. A fork, a spoon, and a knife from the drawer next to that one.

  He arranged the grocery bags beside the front door, walked into the living room, and tried the phone once more. Same story.

  Outside, the asshole was still alive, lying on his side and curled into a ball, whimpering, quivering in shock, his arms shielding his face and head. Steven gnawed on a deflated length of intestine trailing from his stomach. The dead kid with the baseball cap sat beside him, tugging something from the asshole’s stomach with his one good hand. They looked like best buddies sitting there like that, and Reggie wondered if they’d known each other.

  The naked dead man was fifteen or so feet away. The fat one wearing shorts trundled along behind it. Steven looked up at him with stupid awareness, a knot of gut-rope hanging down across his chin. The other kid dropped the glistening thing it had pulled from the asshole’s stomach, picked it up. Dropped it.

  “I wasn’t going to hurt you,” he told Steven, and blew the top of the dead kid’s head off. He put another bullet between the eyes of the one-armed kid, and then pointed the barrel of the gun at the asshole’s head.

  “Puh-puh-puh.”

  “You don’t deserve this,” Reggie said, and shot him.

  Reggie walked toward the naked dead man, put a bullet between its eyes. He climbed into this truck, started it up, and backed it into the dead man’s yard. He loaded most of the supplies he’d stolen from the man’s house into his truck and then went back inside. He rummaged around until he found the rounds for the rifle. He inspected the window he’d shattered when returning the asshole’s fire, and then he realized that the guy probably wasn’t as asshole—just scared and stupid. What was he supposed to have thought, seeing Reggie taking the kid’s bike?

  “Dammit,” Reggie said. Wanting to hit the road, to get to his daughter as quickly as possible, he instead sank into the chair before the television and brought the bottle of Jack to his lips. For now, it might be best to just lie low.

  Reggie watched television and drank himself into a stupor but he never fell asleep. He tried to—he closed his eyes and tried to push everything out of his mind, but sleep would not come. At some point during the night he got up from the
chair and went to the window, watched dead bodies shuffle by in the buzzing glow of the streetlight. Then he watched more television, tried and failed to fall asleep.

  He rose from the chair in the quiet hour before dawn, ate food from the fridge, freshened up in the dead man’s bathroom, and was on the road by sunrise.

  Ten

  “I’m locking up,” Misty said, and Crate looked up at her from his place on the bench. His rifle rested across his scrawny legs. Bilbo Baggins slept at his feet, snoring.

  “Yeah?” Crate said, looking away, squinting.

  “Yeah,” she said, lifting the neck of her shirt and covering her nose and mouth. “God. How can you stand it?”

  The air reeked of cooked meat. When she was a kid growing up in Mississippi, her grandfather roasted whole hogs on the spit after church on Sundays. Folks would come from all around town, and the smell in the air brought her back. She need only close her eyes, and it was like she was there. But the smell on the air was the smell of what was left of the Willits family, and that was wrong.

  “Eh,” Crate said, sounding a little confused. “It’s really not all that bad a smell, I’m sorry to say.” He looked at her. “Don’t you think?”

  “I’m gonna lock up now, okay?”

  “I still remember how to let myself in, woman,” the old man said, scratching his beard. “That piece of shit staying?”

  “I think so,” she said. Crate was right. Charlie was a piece of shit, but he was a well-meaning piece of shit. And he was better company than her husband had been in years. “He isn’t admitting it, but I think he’s scared.”

  “No shit,” Crate said, tapping his long fingernails on the stock of his rifle. “We’re all scared, honey. But being scared ain’t no reason to be a fucking coward, and that’s all he ever was.”

  “I’ll be in the back, Crate.”

  “I’ll try to remember to knock,” he said, looking up at her with that look in his eyes, the one that said he was about to say something hurtful. “Don’t really want to walk in on you sucking his little yellow dick.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, deciding that defending herself wasn’t worth a whole hell of a lot. She messed around with Charlie sometimes, when both of them couldn’t really take messing around by themselves any longer; she couldn’t remember the last time Crate was interested in sex. None of them were very happy about the whole thing, but beggars could not be choosers, and sometimes you just needed to sleep beside someone other than yourself. “Try not to fall asleep out here, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m serious,” she said. He slept out here all the time, sometimes so deeply that, upon discovering him, several of her customers had come into her store to inform her that the old dude on the porch had died. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Really now,” he said, and the look in his eyes was the look she used to see just before he would hit her. She saw the look at least five times a week now, but Creighton Mumsford hadn’t raised a hand in anger to her in nearly two decades, long before they’d stopped fucking. “How damned stupid do you think I am? Get your ass inside before I shoot you and burn you for one of those things. No one would know, Misty.”

  “Maybe you should just lie down and take a nap,” she said. With her shirt over her nose, she could still smell the burnt-hog aroma of Mark Willits and family, only mingled with the scent of her own body. Sweat and armpits and the burgeoning stench of old age. “You want me to get you a pillow?”

  “Run along,” he said, pursing his thin lips and miming fellatio with his knotty right hand. He belched into his mouth, his sunken cheeks puffing. He blew it out and made a face. “Whoo,” he said, waving at the air in front of his face. “That’s rotten.”

  She closed the door and locked it, wondering how long it would be before things got worse. On the television, things were getting worse everywhere, and she’d lived long enough to know that things never really got better. The bad shit merely took time off, every so often, giving you a chance to feel like things were looking up. But they weren’t. They never were. And now, well—there would probably be no more time off for the bad shit.

  She turned the sign around, letting the world know that Misty’s Food and Gas was CLOSED, by God. Not that the sign would do any good. Locals knew to come around back and bother her, and, given the current state of things, newcomers looking to stock up in preparation for the end of the world would simply let themselves in. If Crate didn’t shoot them, of course. And judging by the look in his eyes after he’d taken out the pitiful things that had, only this morning, been the Willits, he’d almost certainly enjoy it.

  After the kids from Fresno had driven away with Samson Niebolt, there had been no more dead visitors from Beistle. “Why would there?” Crate had said, an hour later, after she’d wondered aloud why that might be. “Mark and his kids were coming home. Whatever it was that they’d become, they still knew where home was, honey.”

  “That’s…” she’d said, unable to finish.

  “That’s goddamn awful is what it is,” Crate had said, his eyes haunted. He’d placed a hand on her knee.

  It had been three hours since Junior had shown up and the kids from Fresno had gone up to the Niebolt property to smoke dope and mess around. The television said the same shit, only worse, worse and worse by the hour. She stepped behind the counter and retrieved the bottle of Jamaican rum she kept on the bottom shelf. She fished around for her glass, couldn’t find it, and opted to take her poison straight from the source.

  “…can’t stress this enough, people.” An angry-looking man with a shiny bald head, thick glasses that seemed to catch and hold the studio lights, and a ratty salt-and-pepper beard yelled on the television screen. “These are dead people. How and why the dead are returning to some reduced form of life is something we haven’t figured out yet, but it’s a fact, despite what this godforsaken imbecile sitting across from me is saying. I know it—”

  The godforsaken imbecile tried to cut in, but the bald guy ran him down with words.

  “I don’t know why it’s so hard for some of you to believe this,” he said, looking into the camera. “I mean, how many people in this country believe that a Jew who died two thousand years ago is still alive and planning his big comeback special. Come on, people, let’s just look at the facts—”

  Misty turned off the television. Bottle in hand, she went into the back.

  Charlie lay across the bed. He’d taken off his shoes, and the bottoms of his socks were dirty. His shirt was tight against his large belly. The fingers of his right hand were closed around the neck of a bottle of gin. On the television, the guy she’d silenced out front continued his personal crusade against stupidity.

  “...I am calm, you brick-headed son of a bitch,” he said, his upper lip curled back in disgust. “I just can’t believe what I’m hearing. With all you’ve seen, with all each and every one of us has seen, you’re going to tell me that—”

  “I’m just saying that we don’t have the facts yet, is all.” His opponent said, leaning forward. “There’s no reason to be so damned belligerent. And there’s no reason to start blaming this on the supernatural. We can-”

  “The supernatural,” the hothead screamed. “The supernatural? Who the hell said anything about the supernatural?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Fallows, but the dead only come back to life in ghost stories, and there must be some other explan—”

  Misty silenced the discussion once again.

  “I was watching that,” Charlie said.

  “And you can go out front if you want to keep watching it,” She said, walking over to the bed. He was lying on her side. She slept alone most of the time, but she still had her side of the bed. Charlie scooted over.

  “I was waiting for the crazy one to punch the other guy,” he said, and knocked back some gin.

  “There’s the door.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, drank deeply of her own bottle. When she’d had enough, she capped it, set it on the
nightstand, and lay back, kicking up her feet.

  “No,” Charlie said. He set his bottle on the other nightstand and, grunting with the effort, scooted over to her side and pressed himself close. She tensed.

  “Not right now,” she said, closing her eyes and resting her forearm across her face. “Are you nuts?”

  “That’s not what I mean,” he said, rolling onto his side and placing an arm around her. “I just need to be held.”

  “Yeah,” she said, relaxing.

  They were asleep within ten minutes. Less than an hour later, they were both awake.

  “Jesus,” Misty said, sitting upright, her heart hammering. Crate stood in the bedroom doorway, rifle in hand. She blinked, realizing that the sound that had awakened her had been that of Crate hammering his fist against the bedroom door.

  “Damn, Crate,” Charlie said, rubbing his chest.

  “Sorry, you two,” Crate said, not looking particularly sorry about anything. “But you really need to wake up.”

  “What is it?” Misty asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

  “Officer Tasgal is here.”

  “He—who?” she said. Her mind felt like it was made of mud. She’d been dreaming, just seconds ago, though she could not remember of what. Images and sensations faded and were lost, and now there was only the bedroom and Crate and Charlie and dim evening light sifted through the curtains and the liquor on the nightstands. “Tasgal?”

  “Yeah,” Crate said, nodding, talking to her as if she were a child. “Officer Tasgal. From Beistle. The one who looks like he’s sixteen. Ringing any bells?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and of course she knew who he was talking about. She’d closed her eyes and thought of Eric Tasgal more than once while with Charlie. “I’m a little fuzzy. I was asleep.”

  “He’s in trouble,” Crate said.

  “Mnn?” she said, standing. Her head spun. The rum had put her down, and it wasn’t through with her.