Pray To Stay Dead

by Cole, Mason James

  On an empty stretch of Highway 50 some fifteen miles east of Nimbus, he pulled over to the side of the road, threw together a sandwich, and found himself thinking about Erma, his ex-wife.

  They’d met in line at the bank. Six months out of ‘Nam and he had already purchased his truck. It was his, almost fully paid for. He’d been depositing a check, and she’d been trying to get a small loan so that she could prevent her father’s house from going into foreclosure. They’d hit it off as well as one could expect: she spent the night at his place, and they didn’t waste any time. He was impressed with her body, and she was impressed with the fact that he was self-employed. “I never met a self-employed man who wasn’t a pimp,” she’d said, adding that all of her other men had been freeloaders and bums.

  Reggie had no idea how he stacked up as a parent, but if he had one ounce of wisdom to one day impart to Nef, it was this: never marry someone simply because the two of you were good at fucking. At the end of the day, that’s all he and Erma had. Before and after, they talked, sure, but if they made the mistake of talking too much, it became plain: aside from their ability to make the other one’s head explode in bed (or in the kitchen or on the living room floor or in the backyard), there was just nothing else there at all, nothing but bullshit.

  By the time he admitted this to himself, it was too late. She was pregnant, and drinking, and her claws had come out. He tried to get her to stop drinking while pregnant and she threatened to have an abortion.

  His mother asked why he didn’t tell her to go ahead, do him a damned favor. Cut his losses and move on, but no, absolutely not. People could do what they wanted to do, he really didn’t care, and what he wanted to do was be a father. He wanted to raise the child growing in Erma’s stomach, and didn’t think it should be denied a chance at life simply because he’d fucked up and married the wrong woman. Besides, he’d told himself, they’d figure out a way to make things work. Once the baby came, things would be better.

  No such luck. She put up a fight, but the judge had no trouble deciding where Nef belonged. By then, Erma had been arrested for assault and battery after mopping the floor with another woman at a pool hall, and Reggie had established himself as someone who was taking care of business. He thought maybe it had hurt some of the beady-eyed white jurors to have to side with a highway-bound black man, but what else were they going to do? Rule in favor of an abusive alcoholic who got into bar fights and actually referred to them as slave masters and crackers while on the stand?

  The last time he saw her was at his mother’s house. It was Nef’s fourth birthday. She called ahead, asked if she could come see her baby girl. She sounded sincere, so he said yes. Did it count as violating her restraining order if he told her that she could come?

  She came with her new man in tow, a real jive turkey who wore a threadbare suit and who reeked of grass. Erma was visibly drunk, and neither of them left when he told them to. Reggie ruined the party, called the police. By the time they arrived, he’d already punched out Erma’s new man, and was two inches away from popping her one in the lip, as well.

  He wondered where she was now. Not now, really, because she was either dead or huddled somewhere, afraid and waiting to die. But three days ago, before all of this—what had she been up to? She wasn’t with the joker who’d taken her to the party, her knew that much. Beyond that, he knew nothing. She could’ve been six months in the ground or selling herself on street corners, or maybe she’d pulled herself together and had been singing in Church every Sunday morning and looking for a real man and a second shot at being a mother.

  Not likely, but he sincerely hoped it were so. He never wanted to see her again, but he didn’t wish her any pain or harm. He’d done his best to protect her from both, and she’d rewarded his dedication with abuse—of herself, of Reggie, and of Nef. Amazingly, she had never struck their daughter—lucky for Erma—but drinking yourself stupid and passing out facedown in your vomit while under the same roof as your child is abuse enough, and it was heading in that direction, anyway. She would have put her hands on Nef, and Reggie would have put his hands on her, and where would any of them be now?

  Erma was either alive or dead or neither, and that did not matter. Nef was the only thing that mattered, and he would get to her. He had to get to her. Beyond that, who knew?

  He did too much last night and it was catching up with him. A hangover was taking root behind his heavy eyes. He finished off his sandwich and moved on to a bag of potato chips. Against his better judgment, he washed it all down with Coke quickly followed by a long hit from the bottle of Jack.

  He ate a few more chips and knocked back a little more whisky, and soon regretted it. His movements were already slower, his eyes feeling as if they were moving around in syrup. He was warm all over, and in spite of everything that was going on, he had to sleep. Not one to mix poisons, he didn’t spend much time contemplating the bottle of Black Mollies in his glove compartment. Maybe later, but not now.

  He got out of the truck and walked to the edge of the road, where he pissed onto a smashed Budweiser can. The road was empty in both directions. A few miles back, development had given way to trees, which now rose up on either side of the road for as far as he could see. Sacramento could be an inferno and he wouldn’t know it, not from here. From here, everything looked and sounded right. It was nice out.

  Ten minutes later he rumbled past the exit to 49. A few hundred feet away, someone walked down the center of the road. As he drew closer, he saw that it was a woman covered in blood pretty much from head to toe. Closer still, and he could tell that she was dead. She moved in the same lifeless and unnatural manner as the others he’d seen. He sped up, inching the truck to the right so as to avoid her, and she lifted her head and seemed to look directly at him. Her face was a blank. Her eyes were empty.

  Further along, he brought the truck to a halt, just outside of a town called Placerville. Positioned diagonally, a trailer bed blocked both lanes. The front of the trailer was on the side facing away from him, otherwise he could have backed up, hitched it, and pulled it out of the way. Pushing it out of the way would have been an option, were it not for the cars parked three deep on the other side of the trailer.

  Placerville had pulled up the Welcome mat and locked its doors. He could see no one, but he didn’t rule out that he was being watched from the trees. In fact, his face could at that very moment be in the crosshairs of some sharp-shooter’s thirty-ought-six.

  He backed up and turned around, and once more found himself facing the blood-smeared woman. Where the hell had she come from, anyway? Pulling up alongside her, he rolled down his window and waited for her to get close enough to guarantee that he would not miss. She scratched at his door and he put a bullet between her eyes, blowing away the silence and rousing a churning cloud of birds into the air.

  Reggie rolled up the window, placed the gun on the passenger seat, and unfolded his map. 49 would take him north, back to I-80. So far, he’d encountered two roadblocks. How many similar obstacles dotted the map between here and home?

  He threw his truck into gear and headed toward the 49 North exit, feeling it happen with each passing mile marker: he was shutting down. His mind and his body were going under, fast. It had happened to him in Vietnam, not long after his first real action. He’d been in a few firefights before, yeah, but those had amounted to little more than spraying lead into the foliage and watching trees come apart in chunks. This had been real:

  Murdock had been making some kind of joke about the size and lean of his own prick—it was tailor made for the small and slanted poon he’d be slamming, come leave this weekend, and then the air was thrumming with lead, and Murdock’s face had vanished in a pink burst of skull bits, brain matter, and blossomed scalp. Bullets buzzed and buzzed and Kaufmann had taken one in the thigh and Reggie had spun and whirled and crashed through the foliage, screaming and tripping, and there, right there, not even ten feet from where he stood, the little yellow bastard who’d d
one this to them, frowning and fidgeting with his smoking machine gun, which had jammed up, or something. His gun was caked in dried dirt, just like him.

  “Motherfucker,” Reggie had said, raising his machine gun and opening fire, keeping his eyes open no matter how badly he wanted to squeeze them shut, needing to see the way the little man simply unzipped.

  Somehow they all made it back to base alive, all save Murdock, of course, who had been reduced from a self-deprecatingly hilarious mule-faced boy to a lifeless tangle of limbs with no face. That night, lying on his cot and staring up into the darkness of the tent that served as their sleeping quarters, Reggie wondered just how the fuck he was going to get to sleep. How could he, when to close his eyes was to see Murdock’s face coming apart, to see it lying there, utterly unrecognizable as anything human, save for the single brown eye glistening from the pulp, in a glued state of surprise?

  And then he’d shut down, just like that, and slept through into the following afternoon.

  It was happening now, and the Jack Daniels was not helping. To make matters work, compulsively, awfully, he downed even more. His hands were a blur on the steering wheel. His eyelids felt swollen.

  He drove until he encountered a flat brick building that had once been a bakery of some sort. The sign above the boarded shut front entrance was faded, and Reggie could not tell if it said BUNNY BREAD or SUNNY BREAD. He wasn’t sure if it was the sign’s fault or the fault of his eyes. He pulled the truck to the side of the road, checked the road for walking corpses, and, seeing that the coast was clear, maneuvered the large vehicle across the broken paved parking lot and around the back of the building, where four rust-colored loading doors thrust over a trash-strewn loading bay.

  Parking the truck and killing the engine, he crawled into the back of the truck with his shotgun and his pistol and his newly-acquired Winchester. Pushing aside the supplies he’d taken from the asshole’s home, he spread himself across his bed and, taking one final draft from the bottle of Jack, closed his eyes and checked out.

  When he opened his eyes, it was full dark outside, and nearly thirteen hours had passed. Thirteen hours during which, by the grace of God or by sheer godless chance, no one had stopped and broken into his truck while he slept. Thirteen hours during which his daughter could have died a thousand times.

  “I’m coming, baby,” he said, not liking the sound of his voice in the silence. The darkness outside of the truck was complete. There was no starlight, no moon. No ambient spillover from a nearby town. Just pure, primal night—an utter and perfect darkness in which anything could move, unseen, and wait.

  He sat, awake and wide-eyed, pressed toward the back of his sleeping quarters, staring out though the windshield and into the blackness, the sound of his breath and the wet sounds of his mouth the only sounds in the universe, both unnaturally loud within his head.

  Slowly the sky distinguished itself from the black obelisk of the bakery, and soon after the world emerged in shades of dark blue.

  There were no dead around. He ate breakfast—a SPAM sandwich on sliced bread, chips, and dry cereal chased with orange juice—and then took a leak and a dump in the weeds at the place where the concrete met an overgrown field littered with trash and scrawny trees.

  As he crawled into his truck, the early-morning silence was undone with the unmistakable staccato burst of machine-gun fire. Silence followed by more bullets, and had that been the sound of someone screaming in the hushed and breathless moments between bursts of gunfire?

  “Shit,” he said, looking around, dipping his head down a few inches, shoulders raised, old habits taking over. He retrieved his Colt and his shotgun and got low, waited in silence.

  Not ten minutes later, the sound of engines—lots of them—grumbled in the silence. As he waited, the growl grew louder, and soon a large convoy rumbled by. His heart raced; fear twisted and squirmed, tried to take hold, but logic won: he couldn’t see them. The bakery blocked them from his view and he from theirs. They’d be gone in a minute—he just had to wait.

  “Dammit,” he whispered, his curiosity getting the better of him. He peered around the edge of the bakery, knowing full well what he was about to see yet unable to resist. It was an Army convoy. Four Sheridans trundled by, one after another, followed by several Jeeps. He was about to ease himself out of sight when a civilian truck rolled into view, trailing the Jeeps: a panel truck followed by a pick-up truck pulling a trailer used for transporting livestock. He could not see what the livestock trailer had carried, but he had no trouble making out the huddled human forms packed into the back of the panel truck. Men and woman pressed shoulder to shoulder, and he had no idea if they were alive or dead.

  Another panel truck came into view, and Reggie moved out of sight, put the building between himself and his brothers in arms. He grabbed his tags and tossed them into his collar. The metal was cold against his bare skin.

  He sighed. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. He had no idea what the Army was up to with their commandeered civilian trucks and their strange cargo, and he did not care. All that mattered now was that they were in his road, and that they be permitted to get a good lead on him before he struck out.

  One more night. He had to stay put one more night.

  “Goddammit,” he said, kicking dust and pebbles into the air.

  In the truck, Reggie listened to the radio for a while, learned that there was nothing new to learn. The hours passed slowly. He read a three-week-old issue of Time for a little while, found that he could not focus, and swapped Time for Penthouse and tried to jerk off and failed. Ready to bust out of his skin, he downed some more Jack and passed out for a little while, opening his eyes a little before three in the morning.

  Just before dawn, he opened the glove compartment and fished out a single white-capped amber pill bottle. Twisted off the cap and poured the little red and black bitches into his large palm. Twelve left. He returned the pills to the bottle and twisted the cap until it clicked several times. Placed the bottle onto the passenger seat. There were a lot of miles between himself and his daughter, and his ass was done with sleep.

  Sixteen

  Guy died just after dawn. Following hours of unresponsive silence interspersed with incoherent mumbles, his breathing had become labored and thick. Phlegm rattled in his throat, a weak quiver passed through his body, and that was it.

  “Guy,” Richard said, jabbing his right elbow into Guy’s back. “Hey, man, you okay?”

  Daniel hung from the tree, his legs rigid beneath the thick ropes that had scoured his flesh raw in the night. His head hung forward, his hair stubbornly shrouding his face, and for a moment Richard was certain that he was utterly alone in the swelling light of morning. Daniel had died, as well, suffocated by the ropes encircling his naked chest.

  No: his chest rose and fell beneath the ropes.

  “Daniel.” Barely a croak. He cleared his throat and managed to yell this time.

  “Hn,” Daniel said, lifting his head.

  “He’s dead,” Richard said.

  Daniel made a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a dismissive grunt, allowed his head to drop forward once again.

  “We need…” Richard said, allowing his words to wither in his mouth. We need to do something is what he’d meant to say, and no words had ever tasted more false crossing his tongue. If they were lucky, they’d die quickly today. There was little hope for much else.

  Less than five minutes after dying, Guy tugged at the ropes binding his hands behind his back and to Richard’s wrists. For a small and fleeting and pitiful moment, Richard assumed that he was wrong, that Guy had not died, that he’d merely passed out once more. Maybe he was going down for the count, but he was not out yet.

  Then the other half of the nightmare asserted itself. Its warmth rapidly fading, the dead body to his back struggled against its restraints.

  “God,” Daniel said, his voice little more than a whisper. He made a half-hearted attempt against the ropes, gav
e up.

  Richard screamed and struggled and the ropes holding him to the writhing corpse gave no quarter, seemed, in fact, to tighten.

  “Guh,” Guy said. The sound was little more than air passing over vocal chords grown taut in death. There was nothing behind it; it was as devoid of intent and intelligence as the sound made by the wind howling through the attic of a crumbling and abandoned house.

  The ropes did their job. None of them slipped free. Night and shadow retreated. The dead man to his back repeated the same listless motions, gently rocking against Richard’s back. By the time the sunlight touched his face, he had slipped into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  “Wake up.” Someone slapped his cheek.

  Richard opened his eyes, blinking. It was so much brighter now. The sun was nearly directly above them. Samson stood over him, looking down, his face blank.

  “How long’s he been dead?”

  Richard stared. He wasn’t sure who Samson was talking to, nor did he care.

  “Hey,” Sam said, nudging him with his foot and pointing at Guy, eyebrows raised.

  “Don’t know,” Richard said. “A few hours.”

  Sam had the same look of fascination Richard had seen on his face back at Misty’s, a million years ago. They were all there, Sam and Max and the other one, who was pale, taller and older than the brothers. If he were related to them, he didn’t look it.

  The old man with the braided beard was there, too, his muscular arms folded above his gut. He was in incredible shape for a man his age. Even his round gut looked hard. He was leather and stone.

  Max stood before Daniel, his arms at his side. The old man walked over to Sam, looked down at Richard. “Morning,” he said, smiling. His teeth looked too straight and too white to be anything but fake.

  “Why?” It was all Richard could manage.