Pray To Stay Dead

by Cole, Mason James

  “What happened?”

  “Same thing that happened to you,” Sally said, staring forward, lips tight. “They attacked us as soon as we got up here. They dragged my husband and my son away, screaming and crying, and I never saw them again.

  “They took me here, and I went through what you’re going through right now. I met Huff and Embeth and then the others. The kids.”

  Sally looked at Colleen, her brow creased, tight like her lips. There was strength in her eyes. Fury.

  “Embeth has been here for over thirty years. She believes everything he says. She’s no different from him. Mathilda buys it and eats it too, and so does Evie, for the most part, but she’s starting to see holes in the wall he’s built. She’s noticed…” Sally paused, thinking. She smiled. “Evie has noticed inconsistencies in the bastard’s stories. Maybe she’s starting to see the big picture.” She shrugged. “Maybe she isn’t.”

  Sally sighed. Colleen could not tell that Sally had been wound tight until she saw and felt the tension go out of the woman’s form.

  “I don’t dare tell her what I’m planning. She’d hear me, and she’d know I was right, but his fingers are in her like she was a wad of dough. She’d run to him, and I’d be dead.”

  Sally’s stomach bounced. She smiled, and looked over at Colleen, who pulled her hand away.

  “No,” Sally said. “You can touch it. Here.” She took Colleen’s hand and placed it onto her stomach. Within seconds, the little life within moved beneath her fingers.

  “Wow,” Colleen said.

  “Yeah, really, huh?” Sally said, nodding. “All of the kids here belong to Huff. All but this one.” A gentle tap upon her stomach, and the child within leapt. “I was pregnant before I got here. I was going to tell William as soon as we got to San Francisco.” She smiled at Colleen, blinking away tears. “Huff’s good, the bastard. He has a way about him. You met him, right?”

  “Yes,” Colleen said. “Once. This morning.”

  “Then you know what I mean. He soothes and he comforts, and you believe everything he says, because it’s so damn smooth, right?”

  “I guess so,” Colleen said, and she wanted to close her eyes. Her mind was still made of soup. “He seemed sincere. So sorry that—” She couldn’t finish, and Sally didn’t seem to notice.

  “You’ll see just what I mean tonight.” Her words were coming quicker now, tighter, as if she wanted to get it all out and was running out of time. “And if you’re here long enough, you’ll start to buy it. Sometimes I do. And sometimes I think it would be easier if I gave in.” She shrugged. “They seem happy.”

  She stroked her belly and gazed into it, her eyes someplace else. Her voice was jagged with anger. “He lies, and his lies are getting more and more ridiculous. I mean, they’ve been far out from the start—you’ll hear the one about the angel, I’m sure—but he’s slipping. He’s pushing it.”

  “What,” Colleen said, struggling over her words. Sally watched her, waited. “What do you mean?”

  “The whole point of this place is so that a family, his family, can survive the end of the world. He likes to say sometimes that he’s like Noah, which is funny because he doesn’t believe in God.”

  “But you said something—”

  “The angel?” Sally shook her head. “Crazy never really makes sense, does it? But that’s just it—when Evie was taken, back then? He told the angel story, only it was just about a woman who helped him when he was hurt, not an actual angel from Heaven. At least, that’s how she remembers it, and that’s why she’s having her doubts.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, my point is, since I got here, he told us that the end would come in our lifetimes. Not the end of the world, but of civilization.”

  Colleen stared at the woman’s face, a chill moving through her body.

  “Since I’ve been here, he’s told us that nuclear war was around the corner. But just this morning, he changed his tune. His kid got killed somehow, I have no idea how, and maybe that pushed him over the edge. But he spews the crap and they lap it up. They all believe him, Jesus, probably even Evie.”

  “About what?” Colleen asked, knowing what would come next.

  “He told us this morning that the dead were coming back to life. Can you believe that?” Sally’s eyes were wide. “Coming back to life and eating people.”

  “Unbelievable,” Colleen said, deciding instantly, without consideration, that she would let this woman go on believing that up was still up. “What did you mean earlier?”

  “What?” Sally said. She sounded a little disappointed, as if she expected Colleen to comment further on Huff’s mad claims.

  “When you said you were waiting for me.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking around, rubbing her stomach with her right hand, fingers splayed. “I’m getting out of here, and I need help. I can’t trust anyone. You’re the only one whose eyes aren’t glazed over.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Sally said. “But I do know this: I’m having my child, I’m healing. We’re going to lie low for a little while, and then we’re gone.” She looked at Colleen, eyebrows raised.

  “Okay,” Colleen said, dropping her gaze. Sally’s stomach jumped three times. They sat in silence until the sun reached the top of the sky and the clouds parted and the heat became too much to bear.

  “Come on,” Sally said, rising to her feet, bowlegged and grunting. She held each of Colleen’s hands in her own and helped her to her feet. “Let’s go inside.”

  “Jailbreak,” Colleen said.

  “Yeah,” Sally said. “Jailbreak.”

  Nineteen

  Their living quarters were clean and spacious and cool. Devoid of all but the most basic artistic touches—a few earthy rugs, thick matching curtains, and oil paintings that could have been done by anyone there, even the children—the place was nearly Spartan.

  A sofa flanked by simple wooden end tables sat across from three large bookcases brimming with hardbound books, paperbacks, and heaped, tattered magazines. There was no television. Mathilda sat on the sofa, an infant attached to her bare right breast while Little Huff sat on the rug, as deeply engaged in hammering together his blocks as before.

  “Colleen,” Mathilda said, adjusting the child at her breast.

  “Hello,” Colleen said, walking alongside Sally.

  The adjacent room was far more colorful, its walls adorned with posters depicting smiling cartoon characters. There were a few small desks in the center of the room, each of them facing a large chalkboard mounted upon the wall. Scrawled in purple chalk atop the overlapping powdery ghosts of previous lessons were the words: THE CIRCLE IS PURPLE. If there was ever a circle, it had been erased.

  They children lay on mats, motionless, down for a nap between lessons.

  In another room, Evie sat before a sewing machine, her foot pumping away, the needle punching thread into the colorful quilt taking shape before her. Again the colorful geometric patterns, hanging from the walls and draped across the furniture.

  Colleen paused, realizing why they were familiar. “I saw some of these for sale in town.”

  “Huff likes us to have a hobby,” Sally said, leading Colleen past the sewing room and into a room containing two beds, a dresser, and a window. “We all work on the quilts, and he sells them to stores all over northern California.” Her voice dropped low as she drew close to Colleen. “The patterns are more of his bullshit. Some mystical nonsense.”

  “Oh,” Colleen, said, also whispering. She stepped to the window, which looked out on a large yard with various planting beds and caged bushes, sloping up toward the thickly forested hills beyond.

  “Pretty, huh?” Sally said.

  “Yeah,” Colleen said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “That one’s mine, actually,” Sally said, then pointing to the other bed. “This one is yours.”

  “Oh, I didn’t... this isn’t the room...”

  “That’s Embet
h’s room, the one you woke up in,” Sally said, easing herself onto Colleen’s bed. “For when she’s not staying with Huff, which is rare.”

  “Oh.”

  “You should lie down a while.”

  “I’m not tired,” Colleen said.

  “Trust me, you’ll fall asleep.” With her right hand, Sally mimed sticking her left arm with a syringe.

  Colleen opened her mouth to reply.

  Sally shushed her, and her excitement from earlier was visibly drained. “Lie down a while,” she said. “I’ll wake you before Huff gets here.”

  “Okay,” Colleen said. “I’ll try.”

  “You do that,” Sally said. She stood up and waddled out of the room, closing the door behind her.

  Colleen waited a few seconds and got to her feet a little too fast, and the world rotated beneath her feet. She steadied herself against the wall and wondered when they had drugged her. When she was asleep? She’d considered the water a possibility, but it hadn’t tasted funny, and Sally had indicated that she’d gotten an injection of some kind. Still, she didn’t feel tired, or even high. Rubbery, but nothing more.

  She went to the window, focusing not on the view but on the window itself. It did not appear capable of being opened. She looked around the room a few times and then sat on her bed. After a few minutes, she lay back. Staring at the ceiling and expecting not to fall asleep, she closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, Mathilda’s hand was on her shoulder. “Rise and shine,” she said.

  “Mnn,” Colleen said. “How long…?”

  “A little over two hours.”

  “God,” she said, sitting up. There was a lingering, tingling pain in her left bicep, and Colleen knew the woman in her room, formerly a nurse, had just shot her up. Her hands felt light and heavy at the same time. Stronger dose, whatever it was. Maybe they would make her into a junkie. That wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe she could even find the needle on the bitch who stuck her. That would be better.

  “Listen, honey,” Mathilda said, sitting next to her and taking her hand once more. They kept doing this, and it never felt okay or good. “You’re going to be okay here. Huff is a great man. You’ll see. Now come on.”

  Mathilda led her to the bathroom, and for the second time that day she allowed herself to be undressed and showered by another woman. Unlike Embeth, Mathilda disrobed and joined her beneath the hot spray of the shower head. She let her eyes trace the contours of Mathilda’s body, her heavy yet well shaped breasts, her thighs and stomach soft and dimpled from motherhood. The woman lathered Colleen’s body, her hands lingering upon her breasts, and Colleen could do nothing to stop any of it. Another layer peeled back, and through the cloud encircling her mind she saw where things were going. Huff had himself a nice little harem out here in the middle of nowhere, and before she fed him his balls she would be taken lower and lower still.

  It was over and then she was dressed. Same bra, new underwear and cloth pad to replace the fresh one from earlier, now heavily soaked. New red gown. She sat down as the woman dried her hair, and though Colleen expected Mathilda to attempt to weave her shoulder-length hair into a tight braid, it did not come to pass. Seated at the back of her mind and peering out, she knew that it too would come later, in the form of what Kimberly liked to call ritualized nonsense.

  Kimberly. Always talking. As ready and eager to have fun as she was to launch into a political diatribe. As incensed as she was happy. But since the deer and the news that came after, only shocked and stunned silence. And now?

  Dressed and dried and wearing soft slippers that hissed across the carpet, Colleen drifted behind Mathilda, out of the bathroom and into the living room, where she settled like a snowflake upon the couch and stared at the bookcase while the women floated in and out of her field of vision. At some point, Baby Huff hobbled over to her and, placing a small hand upon each of her knees, gazed smiling into her face. She tried to pick him up, but he darted from between her hands, his trailing squeal breaking into a giggle that followed him out of the room.

  “Doped you up pretty good, huh?” Sally said, seeming to have appeared beside Colleen.

  “Yuh,” Colleen said. She said something else, too, but forgot it the moment it came into the air. She sat and tried to remember it and when she looked to her left Sally was gone.

  The light outside changed. The day wore on. She thought of the dead. She thought of her mother and of her brother. She tried and failed to remember something about Guy other than her final bloody moments with him. The scene played out behind her eyes, again and again, a hellish snake devouring its tail, but the dope made it seem less horrible, and she was grateful for that.

  The details of her surroundings came to her. She could hear Mathilda giving the older children their lessons in the next room. Further away, the sound of the sewing machine. Sally sat at a chair to the left of the bookcases, a hardback opened before her. Colleen tried to make sense of the spine. Stamped in gold foil, the letters made little sense, and she wondered if perhaps Sally were reading a foreign language edition. She tried again, frowning, her head tilted, nearly resting upon her left shoulder.

  Mathilda stared at Colleen above the book.

  “Doing okay?”

  “Sure,” Colleen said. “Feel like a million bucks.”

  “It’s good that you can joke.” Sally set the book on her lap.

  “Good book?”

  “Eh,” Mathilda said, shrugging. “I’ve never cared that much for him.”

  “Who?” Colleen asked. She pointed to her eyes. “I can’t tell. They’re all blurry.”

  “Nietzsche.”

  “Oh,” Colleen said, thinking of her brother, the little shit. She hoped he was alive, God.

  “What is it—” Sally began, her words cut off by the sound of the door opening. Her head whipped left, and Colleen followed her gaze, but not before seeing the look on Sally’s face change. Just like that, she went from looking like the defiant woman Colleen had met mere hours ago to wearing the mask of an adoring believer. She was good.

  “Papa Huff,” Sally said, trying to stand.

  “No, God, no,” the big man with the strong arms and the large gut said, waving for her to stay the hell where she was. “Jesus, woman.” He walked over to her, took her hand, and, bending forward, kissed her on the cheek. His braided beard swung away from his chest, and Colleen noticed that his hair also hung down his back in a single braid.

  “Oh, Papa,” Sally said, her voice spinning somewhere in deepest space. She sounded a little like Mathilda.

  “How’s my baby?” Huffington Niebolt said, dropping to one knee.

  “I’m fine, Papa,” Sally said, looking at Colleen over the top of Niebolt’s head, which rested now upon her bulbous stomach. Sally stroked his head, traced a finger along the ridges of his braid. What would he do if he knew the child in her stomach didn’t belong to him?

  “Aren’t you a funny girl?” Niebolt said, opening his eyes. They were on Colleen. He stood, grunting. One of his knees popped. Face expressionless, he assessed her. She held his gaze until she no longer could. Just as she was about to look down at her heavy hands resting upon her lap, his vacant expression pulled itself into a smile that spread up from his mouth and reached his eyes.

  “How are you?” Niebolt asked, took a tentative step toward her, his brow creased in a look of sympathy as apparently genuine as the concern in his voice.

  “Not too good,” she said. No point in lying.

  “Oh, now,” he said. “I know you’re hurting, darl—”

  Little Huff squealed, running toward his father.

  “Hey, big boy!” Niebolt said, scooping up the child and tossing him into the air.

  “Deeee,” the child cried, laughing.

  “Deeee,” Niebolt said, smiling, tossing his son into the air—once, twice, and again. Spinning in place, the braid at the back of his head nearly horizontal. Colleen watched, sure there could be no other explanation: she was in hell. A trite
response. Kimberly would have been disappointed.

  “Now, now,” Niebolt said, coming to a stop and wagging a stern finger in the child’s face, panting. “Enough of that, son. Dad’s gotta—”

  The kid’s face grew sour and red. His laughter collapsed into tears.

  “Where’s the thing,” Niebolt said, holding the child to his side with his left arm and snapping the fingers of his right hand inches from Sally’s face.

  “Oh,” she said, looking around. Not finding what she sought, she pulled herself to her feet, legs bent at the knees, her right hand pressed to the small of her back. “It’s—I’ll be right back.”

  Sally crept out of the room. Niebolt held the child to his chest now, his left hand beneath the Little Huff’s bottom, his right gently patting the child’s back, enveloping it. “Shhhh,” he said, not taking his eyes off of Colleen. Still crying, the boy rested his head upon his father’s shoulder.

  “Now, now,” Niebolt said. Sally returned, pressed a pacifier to the child’s lips, silencing his whimpers.

  “Thank you, doll,” Niebolt said, staring Colleen into the couch. He smiled, just a half smile, and this time it did not reach his eyes.

  “Can I get you anything, Papa?” Sally asked, pressing as close to Niebolt as her massive stomach allowed.

  “You can take this sack of potatoes,” he said, passing Little Huff to Sally. He walked over to the couch upon which Colleen sat, throwing himself onto the far end. A single seat cushion separated her from him, and Colleen wondered how long it would take him to glide across to her and place his hand upon her knee.

  “Agh,” he said, throwing his head back, rubbing his eyes, and staring at the ceiling. “Terrible damn day, ladies. Terrible damn day.”

  “I’m sorry, Papa,” Sally said, easing herself into her chair.

  “Mnph,” Niebolt said, pressing his thumb and forefinger into his eyes before sitting up straight and looking at Sally. “Where is everybody?”

  “Evie is sewing,” Sally said, and Colleen realized that she no longer heard the sewing machine. She hadn’t gotten a close look at the blankets, but she assumed that some of the more intricate designs were easier accomplished by hand.