Pray To Stay Dead

by Cole, Mason James

  “You’re hurting me,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, pulling her away and turning her around to face him. For the first time, she wondered where he’d placed his rifle. He shook her once, made eye contact. “Stop. He’ll kill you.”

  He let go of her and retrieved his rifle from the checkout counter. She took two backward steps away from him. The barrel of the rifle wavered. He was incapable of pointing it at her.

  Baker spoke in hushed tones to Stacy, who giggled once, uncomfortably. Haggarty laughed again. He’d left behind the cart and was slowly approaching Baker and looking down at Stacy, his fat head cocked to one side.

  “Dammit,” Misty said. “Just take what you want and go.”

  “Yeah,” Baker said, looking back. He held Stacy’s right hand in his left, like a man asking a lady to dance. Her other hand was pressed to the crystal resting upon her chest. “Jeff?”

  “What?” Karlatos said.

  “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “This right here,” Baker said, yanking Stacy to her feet. “I saw the way you were looking at her. So come on. You can go first.”

  Baker slid behind Stacy, who swayed on her feet, her face a pale mask of fear. He placed his hands on her hips and eased his fingers up her sides, her shirt bunching up ahead of them.

  “No, God,” Karlatos said as Baker pulled Stacy’s shirt over her head and tossed it over his shoulder. Her hands went up to cover herself. Baker pried them away with little resistance. Next Baker dropped to his knees behind her and pulled her shorts down to her ankles. She was not wearing panties.

  “Okay,” Baker said, standing up and pressing his entire body against Stacy’s back, his own hands rising up to cup her breasts. “You don’t want to go first, you don’t get to go at all.”

  “Wait,” Karlatos said, stepping forward, rubbing his dick through his pants.

  “Jesus,” Misty gasped.

  “I won’t hurt her,” Karlatos said, meeting and holding her shocked and withering gaze for less than a second. “I promise I won’t.”

  “Right here,” Haggarty said, holding up a hand. Karlatos tossed him the rifle and stepped up to Stacy, who stared down at her crystal.

  “Jesus,” Karlatos said, his voice distant and flat now, not much different from Baker’s voice. Baker slid his hands away from Stacy’s breasts and Karlatos replaced them with his own. His fingers were long and thick and clumsy, and he kneaded Stacy’s breasts in a pitiful imitation of a schoolyard tit-squeezing pantomime: honk honk.

  Some part of Misty hurt for Karlatos, for the fact that this was surely the first set of tits he’d touched, but mostly she wanted him dead. She wanted all of them dead, and she wanted to kick Crate in his old balls for sleeping through this, the bastard.

  She glanced at Charles, and she wanted him dead, too—he no longer cried. His face was red, his eyelids puffy, but the tears had dried up. His eyes were on Stacy’s naked body, taking it all in, up and down, down and up, and by the time it was over he’d probably get in line.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Karlatos said. “I mean it.”

  “Get back down there,” Baker said, kicking the cot toward Stacy. It struck her, and her knees buckled. Karlatos caught her, pressed his face into her hair, inhaling. She sat on the cot, listless, her eyes elsewhere.

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Baker said, slapping Stacy across the side of the head. She didn’t go down, as Baker had probably intended her to. Instead, he’d merely slapped on a light switch. She threw herself at Karlatos and raked four bloody lines across the soft contours of his face, knocking his glasses to the floor.

  “Nobody!” She shrieked. “Nobody!”

  Karlatos closed one of his large hands into a fist and punched her in the forehead. With a yelp, she fell onto her side. Baker grabbed her knee, wrenched open her legs, and waved a hand at the thick patch of hair between them. “Get to it.”

  Karlatos fumbled with his belt. He wiggled his pants down around his ankles and then kicked away his boxers. Baker looked at what Karlatos was packing and sniggered, just once. Haggarty said nothing, just stood there sucking on his bottom lip and rubbing his dick through his pants. It occurred to Misty that the candy bars in his pockets must have already begun to melt. Charles remained silent, his eyes locked on the scene that was unfolding before them.

  Dazed, Stacy pawed at her forehead. Karlatos knelt at the foot of the cot and tried to position himself between her legs. The cot creaked beneath their combined weight.

  “I don’t think that thing is going to hold me,” Haggarty said, smiling, and there was a deafening pop. His left eye vanished, the back of his head flapped open. He crashed into the shelf behind him and rolled to the floor, aspirin bottles and bandage rolls and tubes of antibiotic salve raining down around him.

  “Ho—” Baker said, and there was another loud pop. His forehead burst and he crumpled into a heap, his ruptured face jetting blood.

  “That’s right,” Crate said, stepping into the store. Bilbo Baggins was at his feet, growling. “Lousy fucking assholes.”

  Now it was Karlatos’s turn to yelp. His pants and underwear bunched around his sock-clad ankles, he took one step back and stumbled, his naked ass slamming into the ground, his skinny dick bobbing up and down.

  Bilbo Baggins growled and barked, and Crate stood over Stacy, looking at Karlatos down the length of his rifle.

  “You okay, honey?” Crate asked.

  “Yeah,” Stacy said, covering her breasts with her forearms, and Misty rushed to her side.

  “Please don’t,” Karlatos said, his wavering hands held up before his bloodied face. His small pecker retracted and was little more than a pale nubbin perched above his balls. “Don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot me. Don’t. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I—”

  Crate shot him. Lifeless, he flopped backward, his skull and the tile floor coming together with a sickly wet crunch. Blood spread in a circle around his head and urine pooled on the floor between his legs. By the smell of it, one of them had shit himself just after dying. Misty’s money was on Haggarty.

  “God, Crate,” Charles said, stumbling to his feet and then falling to his knees, his legs entangled with those of the chair upon which he had been sitting. He looked up at Crate, and the tears were back now, chasing one another down his cheeks. His bottom lip quivered. “You saved us. Thank you, oh, God, thank you.”

  “What did you do?” Crate asked.

  “What?” Charles said. He was on his hands and knees now, and he crawled toward Crate, face red and glistening.

  “Come on,” Misty said, helping Stacy to her feet and leading her away from Crate and Charles, who had come at last to a confrontation long overdue. They avoided Haggarty’s fallen bulk, skirting blood and a few curls of brain, rounding the tables. She picked up Stacy’s shirt and led her into the deli.

  “You didn’t do a fucking thing,” Crate said. “You just watched.”

  Despite the fact that she knew it was coming, Misty still jumped when Crate pulled the trigger.

  “Oh, man,” Stacy said, pulling her shirt over her head, snaking her arms through the holes, and covering her nakedness. “This wasn’t a good night.”

  “No,” Misty said.

  The fingers of her right hand bushed against her crystal and Stacy folded her arms across her breasts.

  “You all right, woman?” Crate asked.

  Misty looked at him.

  “Good,” Crate said. He walked to the door leading into the parking lot, killed the overhead fluorescents, and peeked through the blinds.

  “Anything?” Misty said, suddenly whispering, as if the darkness magnified sound.

  “No,” Crate said. “The coast is clear for now. I’m going back to bed. You’d both best come into the house and lock the door. We’ll clean up in the morning.”

  Twenty-Two

  “What’s his name?” Colleen asked. Their me
eting with Niebolt had ended in a rush. Maxwell, the spirit and image of his father and his number one fan to boot, had interrupted them, his face stony. The two of them had gone outside for a few minutes, and then Huff had returned, his face now as stony as Maxwell’s, but his eyes wet with tears barely held in.

  “We’ll finish this,” he’d said, eyeing Colleen. “Something has happened and I’ve lost another son.”

  The women had looked at one another, and there’d been no need to feign surprise. Huff left, and now, nearly three hours since his hasty departure, Colleen sat on the couch, holding the infant to her chest.

  “He doesn’t have a name,” Sally said, closing her book—a tattered paperback of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. Mathilda had gone to bed, leaving her child in their care. There had been no sign of Embeth at all for several hours, and Evie was in the other room, perched once more before her work. Colleen found the muffled whirring of the sewing machine somehow comforting.

  “Why not?” Colleen asked, tracing her right forefinger along the child’s forehead and down to the tip of his nose. Not for the first time, she pressed her nose into his stringy brown locks and inhaled. There was something about the smell of a baby’s scalp—as well as the breath of a kitten, God help her—that she loved. As a child, she’d loved the smell of gasoline, and she’d told her mother that someone should bottle the smell, that it would make a wonderful perfume. She wasn’t so sure about that anymore, but kitten breath and baby head? Pure bliss.

  “Why else? Huff.” Sally said, readjusting herself upon the chair. She looked like she was about to burst. Colleen wondered how she slept. “He usually names the kids right there on the spot—he’ll have two names picked out, a boy’s and a girl’s, and he’ll go with whichever one is called for. Doesn’t seem to bother him one way or another. Not this time, though.”

  “What happened?”

  “He took one look at this one and said that Ezekial was not his name,” she said. “It was a good name, but this child had no name. He’d have one before long, once he had a chance to establish his personality.”

  “Oh,” Colleen said.

  “Yeah,” Sally said. She opened her book and resumed reading.

  It was a little after ten and Colleen could see moonlit shapes outside. The trees and the hills were so black and formless they drew you forward, made you want to lean forward and peer deep into them and see if anything was there at all.

  “How is it?” Colleen asked following several minutes of silence. Sally held up her finger: give me a second. She turned a page, read on until what Colleen assumed was the end of a chapter, and, frowning slightly, looked up. “Hm?”

  “The book. How is it?” In light of all that had come, in light of all that was yet to come, it felt good—asking a mundane question. A normal question: how’s that book you’re reading?

  “It’s okay,” Sally said, staring at the cover, looking like a person who was looking for the right thing to say. “It’s a lot to think about. I picked it up thinking it was like the old movie. It’s not.”

  “No,” Colleen said. “It’s one of the books I managed to not read in college, but I picked up enough to know it’s not like the old movie.”

  “I started to put it down when I realized it wasn’t, but I decided to keep going. I guess I’m glad I did.”

  “Huh,” Colleen, said, and she felt her one normal conversation of the day wither on her tongue. She and Sally looked at one another for a moment, and then Sally looked down at the book and picked up where she’d left off.

  The child with no name stirred, grunted, its face contorting into something that looked like a smile. Colleen retrieved the pacifier from the small table beside the couch and pressed the translucent rubber nipple to the child’s lips. He took it eagerly and grew still. Looking at the child, Colleen felt something stir in her heart, a fluttering sensation that felt akin to love of some kind. Maybe it was just pity. Even before the dead had risen, the child’s world had been upside down, and the saddest part of all was that, growing up, he would never know better.

  Niebolt was smart. The children were a part of whatever twisted Noah’s Ark repopulation fantasy he was feeding, but they were also a tool, a means by which he calmed and soothed his victims. A tool for which she was, at this moment, most grateful—she had not thought of her mother, down there in the dark, or of Guy. Or of her brother, her friends.

  “Are any of them still alive?” Colleen said, repositioning the sleeping child, which belched once and briefly opened one of its eyes before settling down. Sally looked up from her book once more. The look on her face was answer enough, but she spoke anyway.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Huff lets his sons do what they want to the men. He tells them to make it fast and painless, but you know how men can be, especially in groups, feeding off each other.”

  “How do you know?” Colleen said. “That they’re dead, I mean.”

  “I don’t,” Sally said, shaking her head, her lips pressed into a thin line. “Not for certain, anyway. All I know is what Mathilda told me one night, after she had a few drinks and was actually talking about her time here, about her life before Huff. She told me that Huff lets the boys have the boys. Their job is to make them disappear, fast and clean.”

  “What about Kimberly?”

  “Kimberly?,” Sally said. “I didn’t know there was another girl. Who was she?”

  “My best friend,” Colleen said. “Since we were little.”

  “Oh.”

  “You said was.”

  “I did,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I never saw my husband again, Colleen, and I never saw my son again.”

  She set her book aside, rose from the chair with nearly comical slowness, and sat close beside Colleen. They held hands.

  “I never saw them again and I never will,” Sally said, her voice cracking. “You’re probably not going to see your man or your brother, and Kimberly is probably dead, too. At this point, you can only hope she is, because if Huff didn’t want her to live here, then he gave her to his boys, and that...”

  Sally didn’t have to finish. She looked like a woman who’d said too much, anyhow—embarrassed and ashamed. “I’m sorry.”

  Colleen’s anger returned. Suddenly she hated the child in her arms, this nameless bastard offspring of Huffington Niebolt—she wanted it dead as much as she wanted him dead. She stared at its face until her rage abated, aware only at the end that she was hurting Sally’s hand.

  She stared at Sally, letting go.

  “It’s okay,” Sally said.

  Colleen looked down at the child, blinking away tears and feeling her heart beneath her ribs, pumping to burst.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Sally said, dropping her voice to a whisper and leaning in close, like a lover. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “Getting out of here,” Colleen repeated, with realization unfolding like a death letter in her mind.

  “Yes,” Sally said. “We’re going to get away from this place.”

  “And go where?”

  “I, uh,” Sally said, looking around. Colleen watched the older woman’s face. She could see the light dawning there, as well.

  “There’s no place for us,” Colleen said. “Not anymore.”

  “It’s really over?” Sally said, on the verge of tears once more. “Everywhere.”

  “Seems like it,” Colleen said, touching Sally’s hand. “This is the safest place. We just need to take it.”

  “Huff’s losing his grip.” She sounded almost hopeful.

  “I’m going to kill him,” Colleen said, maybe a little too loudly, surprised by her sudden thirst for violence. She saw herself cramming the bastard’s cock into his mouth with the knife she’d used to slice it off.

  “I hope you get the chance, honey,” Sally said, letting go of Colleen’s hand and struggling once more to her feet. “And I hope I’m there when you do it.” She held out her hands, indicating the sleeping child. “Here.�
�

  Colleen passed the nameless boy to Sally, who held him to her chest and slowly shuffled out of the room, her slipper-clad feet dragging across the deep carpet. Colleen stared into space, her mind racing, the images in her head overlapping into jumbled and bloody chaos. Is this what it felt like to go crazy?

  The place where the child had been pressed to her chest felt empty and cold now, damp. She stood, felt the carpet beneath her bare feet and between her toes, and stepped over to the bookshelf. So much information, and so much of it conflicting and varied, not something she associated with cults. Not that she knew much about them, aside from what she’d heard about Manson and his bunch on the news.

  She plucked a Poe from between Steinbeck and a book about the Wright Brothers, fanned its musty pages, and returned it to the shelf. She wasn’t in the mood for death, so she opted for Steinbeck. She’d read Of Mice and Men twice already, not counting the times she’d skimmed its contents or re-read her favorite passages. She was ten pages in when Sally returned.

  “Tell me about the rabbits again,” Sally said, easing herself into the chair.

  “My brother said that Lennie represented us. That we were all looking forward to some farm that we’re probably never going to have, and that we’d all be better off if we had a George in our lives. Someone with the balls to put a bullet in our heads.”

  “Sounds like an upbeat guy,” Sally said, realizing her mistake. She frowned. “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” Colleen said. “It’s okay.”

  “Goddamn dumb of me.”

  “No, you’re right,” Colleen said, looking down at the opened book in her hands and staring through the words printed upon the pages. “He wasn’t the easiest guy to get along with sometimes.”

  “But you loved him.”

  “I did, the bastard,” she said, looking up at Sally. “What if he’s still alive, somewhere right out there?”

  “I, uh,” Sally said, stammering. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Colleen.”

  “I don’t want you to say anything. I’m just thinking aloud, is all, wondering if maybe—”