Pray To Stay Dead

by Cole, Mason James

  “Ah, yeah? And Mattie—still in class?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, good,” he said, leaning back. “I’m going to close my eyes for a few.” He looked at Colleen, half-smiled once more and closed his eyes.

  Colleen and Sally watched one another for what felt like several minutes, at which point Colleen realized that she was holding her breath. She let it out, slowly, and permitted her body to relax. She didn’t need to look at her palms to know that her fingernails had stamped little crescents into them. She looked around and it wasn’t until she became aware of Sally slowly shaking her head left to right, left to right, that she knew what she was looking for: a weapon.

  Not now, Sally’s eyes whispered, and Colleen held her gaze. Across the couch from Colleen, Niebolt snored gently, his massive gut rising and falling in the corner of her eye. The minutes stretched into years and she found herself wondering just what this pregnant woman had in mind when she said jailbreak. Was it so common for their captor lay asleep with his throat exposed? Why were they passing this moment up?

  Colleen stared at Sally and Sally started at Colleen while big Huff and his little son slept, and eventually the door leading into the classroom opened and Mathilda stepped out, followed closely by Jack and David and the girl—once more, Colleen could not remember her name.

  One of the boys—Colleen could not tell whom, nor did she care—leapt onto Niebolt’s lap, waking him.

  “Oh, hey,” he said, laughing. “Watch the stones, boy.”

  He went through the routine, playing with each of them in turn. He bounced the girl on his knee and stroked and nuzzled her hair, and Colleen looked away, uncertain whether or not what she saw was fatherly adoration or something malignant. Soon Evie shuffled out of the back room, and from somewhere there came the sound of a crying infant. Yes, the infant—Mathilda’s child. Colleen had forgotten about it.

  “Not a lot of time, girls,” Niebolt said, snapping his fingers again. “Make it happen.”

  Mathilda led the twins and the girl outside, to the courtyard, urging them to occupy themselves until the grownups were done talking. Little Huff slept and sighed across Sally’s chest, his small legs parted over the swell of her stomach. Evie went into the back and returned with the crying infant, whom she passed off to Mathilda shortly before relieving Sally of the sleeping potato sack and sitting between Colleen and Niebolt. Colleen watched all of this, out there in faraway, her mind aflutter at the outer reaches of itself, her body little more than a hum fashioned from meat and bone.

  Then: silence. Little Huff asleep in the arms of Evie; the infant sucking at Mathilda’s breast, its tiny fists kneading pale, veined flesh, and Sally merely watching, her fingers interlaced atop her bulging stomach, interlaced like a prayer, like armor.

  “Okay,” Niebolt said, standing, looking from woman to woman to woman to woman. He scratched at his chin, and the braid hanging across his chest jerked like a dying snake. “None of this is going the way it usually does, and that’s, well, it’s inconvenient, but that’s also life, right, Sal?”

  “Yes,” Sally said, not missing a beat.

  “Yes. Damn right,” He said, pacing. “Life, by definition, is inconvenient. If it’s not, if it’s convenient it’s not life at all. It’s routine and complacency and it’s a lie. So this, this new thing, this is life.”

  He strode over to the bookcase, walking with a purpose that was, Colleen knew, all a part of the show. She looked left and right, scanning the spines, brushing his fingertips across them. Finally, he faced them, once more meeting every line of sight. He nodded.

  “The men who wrote these books knew that,” he said, and Colleen imagined Kimberly at her side, could practically hear her: men and women, you sexist piece of shit. Then again, maybe not: Colleen had not taken the time to inspect the books heaped helter-skelter upon the many shelves. “They knew that, and we know it, too. Sometime we forget it, though.

  “So we don’t get to do things how we used to, but who cares? Our family has a new member,” he said, extending one hand, palm up, fingers and thumb held tight together. “Colleen. Mama Colleen. She came to us through blood and pain, and for that I am sorry. Really, I am.”

  Again the apology. Only now it felt less real and more like a line in a play. Maybe it had always been such, and Colleen was only now able to discern the truth behind the façade.

  Niebolt grew silent and became occupied with his right hand. With his thumbnail he picked at dirt beneath his fingernails, starting at the pinky and working his way to the forefinger. When he was finished, he looked up, his gaze falling upon Colleen, shrinking her.

  “Blood and pain,” he said, pursing his lips. “Blood and pain have always been the common language of mankind. Always, from the very beginning, from the start. But now? Now it is so much more than language. It is everything. It is the only thing there is. Colleen?”

  Colleen sat pressing herself into the sofa. And into the back of her mind, but it was so much harder now to remain there. The shit in her blood was losing its edge, and she found herself inching forward, closer and closer still, in small measures, to the man before her and the world into which she had been delivered.

  “Colleen?”

  “Yuh,” She began, licking her lips. “Yes?”

  “You may have noticed that we have no television here.”

  Colleen blinked and nodded agreeably, thinking of the old television in the abandoned tomb of a house at the bottom of the hill.

  “Nothing even remotely associated with the truth can be found upon its screen,” Niebolt said, turning once more to face the bookcases. He waved an encompassing spiral at the shelves. “Here, there is, at least, an attempt. These men sought truth, as we seek truth. Many of them discovered only lies and, finding those lies to be sweet, allowed themselves to stumble from the path. The path that leads to truth.”

  Niebolt laughed. “Forgive me, ladies, there’s a point here, I promise. You’ll see. Now, doubt is a valuable thing, right?”

  “Right,” Sally and Evie and Mathilda each said, in unison. Colleen looked at Sally, who met her eyes but for a half-second, the time in which it took her to lift and lower her eyebrows.

  “Right, right,” Niebolt said, stepping past Sally and brushing his fingers across her stomach as he had brushed them across the books lining the shelves. “Doubt is a good thing. Doubt it a tool in the search for truth. I mean, where would we be if we believed everything everyone told us? We’d be like everyone else, right?”

  “Right,” they all said, and Colleen felt a chill ripple up and down her spine.

  “Sure. So I understand, trust me, I do,” Niebolt said, dropping the hammer. “I know that some of you have come to doubt my words.”

  Colleen looked at Sally, and Sally met Colleen’s gaze, and neither of them were fast enough to sever their connection before Niebolt noticed. He smiled, lifted an admonishing finger.

  “Stay with me now, I’m coming to my point.”

  He held out both hands, fingers splayed, made a show of balling them into fists. Bobbing and weaving, he jabbed the air with his left three times, four times, six times, fast, wrapping up his display with a solid right uppercut.

  “I was a boxer, Colleen,” he said, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand with the fingers of his left, distant eyes upon the ground at his feet, as if soaking in the unconscious sprawl of some fallen opponent. “A long time ago. A pretty good one, too. They called me The Nightmare. Huffington “The Nightmare” Niebolt. Silly, but hell did it look good up there on the marquee.”

  He beamed, gaze somewhere far beyond the room in which they gathered.

  “God, did it ever. And it made the mooks I had to fight nervous. Helped build my reputation, even if I was just knocking out bums. Who the hell wanted to get into the ring with a nightmare?”

  He shook his head.

  “A lot of guys didn’t,” he said. “And a lot of them did. One of them, this young wop called Tony ‘The Fire’ Farac
i, he wanted it bad. He was a little thing, man, I tell you…” Niebolt shook his head.

  His women kept their eyes on him, and Colleen wondered if any of them had noticed how the cadence and the rhythm of his voice had changed as he began speaking of his days in the ring. He no longer sounded like someone pretending to be wise and all-knowing: he sounded like a dumb kid from the streets looking to punch his way to happiness.

  “This little bastard, I mean, not everyone was enforcing the weight class back then, and we were fighting in some Chicago dive, so who gave a shit, right?” He paced faster now, the years carrying him away. “The point is, the guy was too small to be fighting me, and he was taking a risk getting in that ring. He was too small to be fighting The Nightmare, and he had no business almost killing my ass.”

  Niebolt bobbed and weaved, unleashed another flurry of punches upon his unseen and long gone opponent, and stopped, just like that, his hands limp at his sides, his head down. Then he looked at Colleen, and it was as if no one else were there. The other women had heard this story—God knew how many times. Some of them had even heard different versions, if Sally was to be believed, but this—this was just for her.

  “He knocked me out in the third,” Niebolt said. “He was fast and strong, and I was full of myself. I knew he was strong, and I knew he could take a punch. His face was messed up enough to testify to that truth, Colleen.”

  Niebolt mashed his grizzled features together between his large hands, smiling, and curiously enough it was only at this moment that Colleen was slammed with the certainty that he was insane.

  “I expected to pound his face into something uglier than it already was, maybe over the course of seven or eight rounds, before laying his ass out,” Niebolt said. “Instead his fucking hands worked my head like a hundred little bees, and I almost died. Between the ring and the hospital, that’s when I saw the angel.”

  He looked from woman to woman, and Colleen knew that she was seeing something else, a remnant, something unfinished.

  “I don’t really want to get into how I can believe in angels and not believe in God, Colleen, despite what some of these ladies would like,” he said, holding out his hands. They were perfectly still, like stone. “Her hair was yellow and orange, like fire, and it was in a braid.” He fingered the braid hanging from his chin, looking a little embarrassed. “And she held me in her arms and told me that I was going to live forever. She said I was going to live forever, and that I would see much pain and blood, and that it would be up to me to go into the wild and to start a family, one that would escape the pain and the blood.”

  He smiled once more, revealed his white mouthful of fake choppers, rubbing his hands together. “And that brings us to the end of this little digression: the angel was real, and the pain and the blood are upon us.”

  He let the silence drag out, watched his women, the expression on his face a dare to all of them: say something right now and see what happens.

  “Doubt,” he shouted. Little Huff jerked in his sleep, whimpered. The sermon was back on. “Some of you have the seed of doubt in your hearts.”

  The women made faces that said otherwise, but Niebolt wasn’t having it. He waved them away. “No, no,” he said, the boxer gone. “It’s okay. Doubt is natural. I encourage you to doubt, but in this there can be no doubt. Its time is passed. Colleen?”

  “What?” She asked. Her blood was cold and her body was not elsewhere. It was right here and it was made of stone.

  “Blood and pain.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve seen it, out there.” He thrust an accusing finger toward the front door. Again Little Huff stirred. Sated and asleep, the infant resting in Mathilda’s arms jerked, its small arms rigid and quivering.

  “Yes,” Colleen said. Niebolt wasn’t talking about the attack on her, her brother, and their friends. Colleen glanced at Sally, saw fear in her eyes, and once more looked down at her hands. They shook.

  “The time is upon us. The dead walk the earth and eat the flesh of the living. I’ve seen them,” Niebolt said, walking over to Colleen, dropping to his knees, folding her hands into his own. “You have, too. Haven’t you, Colleen?”

  “I don’t…” Colleen said, stammering. She felt Sally’s gaze upon her face and met it. The pregnant woman’s eyes shone with the promise of tears.

  “You don’t nothing,” Niebolt said. “The dead walk, and the world that you knew, only days ago, crumbles and burns. Doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Colleen said, tears streaming down her face. “Yes.”

  “Pain and blood,” Niebolt said, triumphant. “Pain and blood.”

  Mathilda’s infant cried. Colleen didn’t look up from her hands, but she didn’t have to. She knew. Sally was crying too.

  Twenty

  His arms and legs were sore from the night spent bound upon the forest floor, but Richard had the upper hand: he was in better shape than the man hunting him. Jacob was tall and strong, but he had the beginning of a beer belly and no stamina, no focus. Richard was a swimmer and a runner and had even gotten a few trophies wrestling in his freshman year of college. If the two met, face to face and hand to hand, Richard would easily take him out.

  But Jacob had guns and knives. So Richard ran; he ran and ran, pacing himself, breathing, occasionally stopping, bent low, his breath coming and going in controlled, measured inhalations and exhalations. He ran for five minutes, ten minutes, leaping over fallen branches, smashing through low branches, small red openings forming on his hands and face and forearms. He ran and he ran, and eventually he did the only thing he could do: he stopped.

  Panting, he leaned against a tree. His lungs burned. His leg muscles burned. His heart was like a hummingbird beating its wings behind his ribs. His stomach was a hot fist driving up. He was starving. His mouth was dry. The heat in his legs melted into a steady quiver.

  Every direction offered the same view: trees. The clouds and the canopy diffused the late morning light, made it hard to tell east from west. He could discern the general direction from which he’d come only because he had been running downhill. The ground had leveled out some. A few hundred yards ahead of where he stood, the ground once more angled upward. He was in a bowl.

  He held his breath and listened, hoping to hear an engine, something, anything that would give him an idea where the road was. He heard only forest sounds, and exhaled, scanning the trees, looking for movement. Jacob was dressed in a drab green thermal shirt and bark-brown pants. He’d blend in.

  Richard’s pants were brown, too, but his shirt was blue, and the only thing worse than leaving the shirt on was taking it off. He was tanned but not so tanned that he wouldn’t stand out like a ghost against the slate-colored oaks.

  He looked at the sky again, cursed the clouds. He had to get to the highway—had to get back to town, to the little store and tell them what was going on here. God, were the girls even alive? And even if they were, would anyone in town care? No doubt the local police force had problems of its own right now, and a few kidnapped kids were the least of them.

  Look at it this way, he thought, now you won’t have to break the news to Kimberly, and immediately wanted to punch himself in the face.

  “Goddammit,” he said, wincing at his voice in the still of the forest.

  There was a twang. An arrow struck the tree a few feet to his left, a simple thing with a brushed silver shaft and bright orange feathered fletching.

  “Shit,” he said. His mind went blank and he hit the ground, clambered on his hands and knees to the nearest tree, rising to his feet and trying to angle himself so that the tree trunk concealed his entire body.

  Twang. Another arrow cut silently through the air to his right, sank into the skinny trunk of a sickly looking pine tree.

  “Dammit,” he said, and now he could hear the snapping of branches. His hunter was nearby and closing in.

  “Whoo,” Jacob yelled, his voice seeming to come from everywhere. A bird called out, took flight.

>   “Bastard,” Richard screamed.

  “Thanks,” Jacob laughed and in a second there was another twang and Richard felt the arrow strike the tree to his back.

  He spun, pressed his nose to the rough bark, and held his arms close to his sides. His hunter was somewhere directly in front of him. He would not be able to circle around without crossing Richard’s peripheral line of sight—and if he did, Richard would simply move along the curve of the tree. They could be here all day.

  Richard sucked in a deep breath, held it. Silence spinning out for what felt like forever. Another twig snapping, somewhere nearby. He could turn and run, weave madly between the trees, or he could face the bastard head on.

  He exhaled, long and steady, through pursed lips.

  “To hell with this,” he whispered, pulled in another deep breath and stepped from behind the tree, screaming, roaring, his fists clenched at his sides, charging toward his unseen attacker.

  He saw Jacob a split second before he heard the twang of the arrow’s release. Richard cut to his right, and a white-hot spike of pain pierced his left forearm. He glanced down, saw the arrow bobbing—it had entered the palm-side of his forearm halfway between his wrist and his elbow, and had gone a third of the way through before stopping. Blood flowed, but he hammered forward, his eyes on Jacob, who took two steps back and readied another arrow for launch.

  Twang. He moved left, and the arrow zipped past the right side of Richard’s head, a lover blowing into his ear. Leading with his right shoulder and ignoring the pain dancing up his left arm like a heart attack, he slammed into Jacob, drove him into a tree. Something struck Richard’s face, smashing his lips against his teeth. He tasted blood.

  The bow hit the ground between them. Richard took a step back, grabbed the arrow that had gone through his arm and, screaming his way through the pain, slid it free. It was needle-point and came out clean. Jacob went for the knife at his waist and Richard quickly slid his right hand along the shaft of the arrow, stopping when he felt the feathers touch his palm. He whipped the arrow through the air, swung it like a sword—right, left, right, the tip opening a bloody Z across Jacob’s face and chest.