Pray To Stay Dead

by Cole, Mason James

  “A chainsaw,” he said, and Misty winced, looking away.

  They rested for a few minutes and were in the process of carrying Baker over the threshold when they heard the car.

  “Here we go,” Crate said, dropping Baker’s feet onto the porch and grabbing his rifle from the bench. Baker’s corpse lay across the threshold in its stolen California State Trooper uniform, half of its face a gaping dark hole, the other frozen in slack-jawed surprise.

  The car pulled into the parking lot, tires crunching. Misty did not move. She watched it all, every single moment, from her place just within the entrance to her store. The car came to a stop, an old Ford rust-bucket with a rattling muffler. Leaving the engine running, the driver stepped out, arms raised, palms outward, an uncertain smile on his face.

  “Hey, there,” the black man said, standing behind the shield of the driver side door, and Misty recognized him. He lived up the road a bit, past the Niebolt property, and had been in the store on a few occasions over the past year. He worked in Beistle, at a furniture store, or something like that, and he mostly kept to himself.

  “Hey yourself,” Crate said, raising his rifle and squeezing the trigger. The window on the driver side door shattered, and the black man fell to the ground in a graceless heap. Crate stepped forward and put another shot through his head, and Misty moved before she realized she was going to move. She stepped over Baker’s corpse, across the porch, and onto the gravel, stomping toward Crate, who barely had time to turn before she was upon him, pushing him with both hands.

  He fell to the ground, dropping his rifle. Bilbo Baggins yelped and barked and circled his fallen master.

  “What the hell are you doing?” She screamed, picking up the rifle and throwing it over the burn pile. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

  “I’m protecting us, you stupid bitch.” Crate said, sitting up and wincing. He massaged his left elbow.

  “Protecting us? He didn’t even have a gun.”

  “I didn’t know what he had.”

  “He probably wanted food.”

  “Yeah,” Crate said, struggling to his knees. His fingertips were stained red with blood from his elbow. “And we’ve got an endless supply of food, right? Let’s just set up a table out here and give ham sandwiches to everyone who drives by.”

  “You didn’t have to kill him.”

  “It’s our food and there isn’t much.” He got to his feet, leaned against the dead man’s car, and eyed Misty, frowning. “We have to make it last, and we need to do whatever it takes.”

  She stared at him, gasping, her heart pounding.

  “You know I’m right,” Crate said, leaning into the car, killing the engine, and pocketing the keys. He walked over to his rifle and picked it up.

  His words rang true, and the blood on her hands suddenly felt thicker.

  “Tasgal is dead,” she said.

  “Good,” Crate said, nodding. He frowned, seemed to be thinking, and then he looked at her, his eyes wild. “He come back?”

  “Yeah,” Misty said. “Of course.”

  “Huh,” Crate said.

  “What’s going on?”

  Misty turned to see Stacy standing upon the porch, squinting, shielding her eyes from the morning light with one raised hand.

  “Everything is okay, honey,” Misty said. “Go inside.”

  “Oh, God,” Stacy said. “That’s Clarence.”

  “Ah, jeeze,” Crate muttered.

  “I know,” Misty said. “Just get inside.”

  “What happened?” Stacy said, taking a step toward them.

  “He had a gun,” Crate said. “He pointed it at us. I had no choice.”

  “God,” Stacy said, her face knotting.

  “Go inside,” Misty said.

  “God,” Stacy said once more, touching the crystal that hung from her neck. Misty wondered which God she was talking about—regular God or some weird shit that had something to do with crystals and UFOs. It probably didn’t matter anymore, one way or another, if it ever had.

  “Go,” Misty said, and Stacy went.

  “Okay,” Crate said, crouching to scratch Bilbo Baggins behind the ear.

  Misty strode right to Crate. “What if someone else shows up?” She asked low and hard. “You gonna just keep shooting people?”

  “If they look like they could be trouble?” Crate said, throwing a thoughtful glance toward the morning sky. After a few seconds, he looked at Misty, nodding. “Yeah. The rest I’ll send on their way.”

  She stared at him, unsure of what to say and deciding at last upon nothing.

  “Don’t put your hands on me again,” Crate said. “Okay?”

  They worked without speaking, only gasping and grunting, and within minutes Baker lay beside the burn pile, his feet resting atop the back of Karlatos’s head.

  “I’m done for now,” Misty said. She went inside, where she closed herself in the customer bathroom and sat on the toilet and cried, her face in her hands. She cried for Charles and for Tasgal and for the man outside, the man Clarence, whom Stacy had known. She cried for the world and for all that had and would happen. She cried for all of these things, but mostly she cried for herself, and for the line that she had crossed.

  She’d done horrible things, and she’d seen horrible things, but the most horrible thing of all was that she was happy to be alive and that she’d do whatever it took—even more horrible things—to stay that way.

  When no more tears would come, she joined Crate outside, where the three bodies—Clarence, Karlatos, Baker—had all been placed onto the burn pile. A misshapen human teepee, they encircled the base of the charred heap, their arms spread above their heads, their feet pointing toward the sky.

  “Come on,” Misty said. “Let’s get Charles.”

  Twenty-Six

  Two miles out of Beistle, Reggie passed the first walking corpse he’d seen since shooting the blood-covered woman. He rolled by, and the dead man didn’t bother to watch his passage, merely shuffled along, head hung low, its bare purple feet scraping across the blacktop. Shortly after, he drove past a group of three corpses—two men and a child. One of the men was naked, the other was dressed in the oil-stained uniform of a mechanic. The child wore a sleeveless Scooby Doo shirt and nothing else.

  It wasn’t until he’d passed the next cluster of walking corpses—eight of them, for God’s sake, walking along like drunks bumping into one another—that Reggie realized what was wrong, aside from the obvious: only two of them had borne any wounds at all. The rest were, quite simply, unmarked. Yes, several had worn little to no clothing, their thighs dark with voided waste, but none of them appeared to have shed a drop of blood. There was not a bite wound to be seen, let alone any sign of traumatic death.

  “God,” he said, though prayer never really was an option—not when he was a child cowering in the night nor when his body was pressed to the ground and bullets chewed through the air above him. God, real or imagined, was not his concern. He’d either face God when he died or he wouldn’t. There was no point in wasting time worrying about it now.

  Ahead, a throng of walking corpses encircled a car, weakly pushing and shoving at one another. All of the car’s windows had been smashed, and the dead seemed to be searching it. Several of these dead bodies were slick with blood, though not from any visible wounds. Those corpses not interested in the car fought over a scattered skeleton. One of them brandished a long pink leg bone like a club.

  A sprawl of low buildings spread before a horizon of trees, Beistle sat in a mostly flat valley between two large hill ranges. A single double lane road bisected the town, the road that would lead Reggie to the Interstate and, he hoped, to his daughter, and it was alive with the walking dead.

  “God,” he said again, slowing down. He tried a quick head count and stopped at forty-three. They were everywhere, and like the ones he’d met on the outskirts of town, they were mostly unscathed. No doubt, with the order of things fallen into ruin, there were hundreds,
possibly thousands of people across the country dropping dead from heart attacks, but a whole damned town?

  He took it slow, allowing the truck to coast along at just around fifteen miles per hour. To his right, several dead bodies—real ones, not the walking variety—had been laid out and covered in sheets and towels. Handmade signs lay upon or beside some of the corpses. This remnant of an ordered response to the situation told the story of folks who’d had their shit together, not all that long ago. Now they were dead, all of them, dead and walking.

  Was it like this everywhere? Could whatever was causing the dead to come back now be causing the living to simply drop over? Fear surged through him, and a new thought, persuasive and reasonable: suicide.

  “No,” he said, turning on the radio. Two men debated something Nixon had said earlier that day, something having to do with Soviet troops massing near—

  He turned off the radio. Whatever had happened here had been isolated, probably accidental. Possibly intentional. Someone had gassed the town of Beistle, California.

  As he rolled along, another detail emerged: several bodies lay here and there, scattered—in the street, on the sidewalk, between abandoned cars in parking lots. Each of the bodies seemed to have been shot through the head and lay in a ragdoll sprawl, arms and legs bent this way and that. Someone hadn’t gone out without a fight.

  “No way, man,” Reggie said, bringing the truck to a halt before BEISTLE TV AND APPLIANCE. “No fucking way.”

  A crowd of twenty or so corpses had gathered before the large window in which several color televisions, as well as a few small black and white models, were displayed. The window had been smashed, and one of the televisions lay on its side in the road, but the power was still on and each of the television screens depicted the same thing: the grim face of Walter Cronkite, who was droning on about something dire.

  The gathered dead swayed, but with their backs to Reggie they could almost have passed for living men and women. He rolled down his window and listened.

  “…ports that the phenomenon is not taking place in Australia and New Zealand are, in fact, no true,” Cronkite said, continuing to speak over footage that depicted walking corpses on the streets of Sydney.

  “Hey,” Reggie yelled to them. He cupped a hand behind his ear. “Can you turn up the volume?”

  Some of the tv-watchers drifted over to him, joined the others surrounding the truck, arms raised, hands clutching. Hands splayed toward him in a mosaic of decay—gray, or bluish and purple and bruised, or livid and bloated, or stained with blood. Some were missing fingers. Wedding rings tinked against the windshield. The faces of the dead were rigid and waxy. Reggie tried to ignore them.

  It was harder to ignore the smell, meat just starting to turn. And gas. The dead were quiet, very quiet in a bad way, but the sounds of escaping gas were all over. Reggie was surrounded by belching and farting corpses who wanted to eat him. If it wasn’t so fucking horrible, it would be funny.

  Cronkite was talking about the Middle East. All order was gone. Tel Aviv had gone black less than two hours ago, and there were several unconfirmed reports of a massive explosion of some sort and of a mushroom cloud rising above the Gaza Strip.

  “Dammit,” he said.

  One of the corpses jostled the passenger door handle, and the truck rocked. It was time to move on. Reggie gave Cronkite and his audience one last look and began to roll up his window.

  “Hey,” someone yelled. “Hey!”

  Reggie rolled down the window and leaned out, looking around. Gray hands clutched the air beneath his face, just out of reach. Flies buzzed. A few of the dead people had makeshift weapons—sticks and bottles and rocks—which they hammered against the truck. A nearby corpse ripped a long wet fart. They were really pressing in now. Even the television generation was catching on—only five of them remained glued to the tubes.

  “You in the truck,” the voice said, and Reggie saw the form of a man several buildings back standing upon a roof, arms in the air, his hands moving in blurred arcs above his head. “Hey!”

  “Hey yourself,” Reggie yelled.

  “I need help, God,” the man yelled. He sounded frantic. “Don’t leave.”

  “Dammit,” Reggie said, looking forward, past the gathering sea of corpses and down the road, his road. The guy on the roof was behind him, and he was moving forward.

  “Come on, please. I’m gonna die up here,” the man yelled. “I don’t want to die up here!”

  Reggie rolled up the window and threw he truck into gear, inching it forward through the crowd. The man on the roof screamed and cursed. Reggie turned up the radio.

  He wanted to step on the gas, to plow right through the dead—just get the hell out of here as quickly as possible—but he couldn’t. Running one or two bodies down at full speed might not be a problem, but plowing through scores of them? It could be dangerous. He’d lose control of the vehicle or wind up with one of them in his lap.

  The dead were not entirely stupid. They seemed to get the idea. This large thing was moving toward them, and getting out of the way was probably the best course of action. They parted, slowly, and he allowed his foot to grow a little heavier on the gas.

  The guy on the roof had sounded just like Taylor Lincoln. Not his voice, but the desperation in his voice—Reggie had heard it before.

  Lincoln was an ox of a black man that Reggie had known in ‘Nam. They hadn’t been friends, not really, but Reggie had liked him well enough. Lincoln was meaner than he needed to be, and he enjoyed combat more than any man ever should, and he had died screaming and crying like a little girl. Reggie hadn’t seen it happen, but he had heard it. Crouched behind a tree and waiting for a Viet Cong bullet to drill through his thoughts, Reggie had listened as Lincoln cried out—I been shot, God, I been shot.

  A spray of gunfire had turned his thick right thigh into pulp, and he’d sat alone against the side of a jeep for probably forty minutes. Bullets zipped by, and no one could get to him.

  “I’m dying,” he’d screamed. “God, I’m dying. I don’t want to fucking die.”

  “Shit,” Reggie said, and brought the truck to a halt, threw it into reverse. The path he’d opened had begun to close. Bodies fell. The truck rocked. Meat and bone scraped across the undercarriage. He pulled his eyes away from the side-view mirror and looked through the windshield in time to see the first of the fallen bodies come into view. Some of them lay motionless, skulls crushed. Others writhed, their mouths and eyes wide, their fingers clutching the air, guts spreading between their broken legs.

  He cut an uneven and bloody path two blocks long, stopping when the building on which the man stood was to his left. The sign over the tattered green awning read: AUBREY’S FURNITURE. Reggie rolled down the window and looked up at the man, who stood slump-shouldered and slack-jawed. He looked dead.

  “How do you want to do this?” Reggie said. A fat dead man carrying a length of pipe shuffled toward the truck. Reggie pulled his Colt and blew away the right half of the thing’s head. The pipe clattered to the ground, and the fat man fell, knocking down three stumbling corpses in the process.

  “Jesus, man,” said the guy on the roof. “I thought you were leaving. I thought—”

  “How you wanna do this, man?”

  “Yeah,” the man said, looking left and right, his hands on his knees. “If you can pull close enough, I can jump down onto the top of the truck.”

  “If you fall off and break your leg, I’m not getting out to help you. I’ll shoot you between the eyes and leave.”

  “I understand.”

  “Okay.”

  Reggie rolled up the window, threw the truck into reverse once more, and backed up another twenty or so feet before moving forward and driving onto the sidewalk. Moving slowly, he took out two parking meters and crushed the pipe framework supporting the green awning, which crashed to the ground. To Reggie’s left, seen through the large windows fronting the store, dead bodies moved within the dim interior of Aub
rey’s Furniture. One of them stood before a dresser and pawed at its reflection in a large, oval mirror. A dead child sat before a ceramic statue of a leopard, tracing its fingers along the indented spots. A naked woman drifted between plush chairs and couches, its discolored hands modestly covering its breasts.

  “Okay,” the man shouted. Reggie stepped on the brakes. A second later, the man landed atop Reggie’s truck, buckling the ceiling above his head with a hollow metallic thump.

  Reggie leaned over and rolled down the passenger side window. Two scuffed dress-shoe-clad feet fell into view, and the man on the roof, a skinny white man with a thin face and close-cropped blond hair, snaked through the window and into the passenger seat, panting. He wore a sleeveless white shirt, black slacks, and a policeman’s belt, its holster empty. Reggie reached into the back, grabbed a can of Coke, and handed it to the man, who took it from Reggie and stared at it as if it were some strange thing he’d never seen until now.

  “You’re supposed to drink it,” Reggie said.

  The man looked up, dazed. He shook his head. “Thanks. Thank you. I thought I was going to die up there.”

  “You probably were,” Reggie said. Several dead hands came into view, just behind the man. “You wanna roll up the window?”

  “Huh?” The man asked, following Reggie’s line of sight. “Oh, shit.” He rolled up the window, looked at Reggie, then opened his Coke and downed it in a series of noisy gulps. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he let loose a thunderous belch.

  “You sound like our friends out there,” Reggie said.

  “Haha, well,” he cleared his throat. “I excuse myself.”

  “Good enough,” Reggie said, easing his foot off the brake and inching the truck back onto the road. By now, the path he’d cut had healed, and the dead stood shoulder to shoulder twenty deep around the truck.

  “We going?” The man asked, nervous.

  “Yeah,” Reggie said, strangling the steering wheel, “Trying to figure this shit. The last thing we need is to break down out here.”

  “Yeah,” the man said, looking at the empty Coke can in his hand. He rolled the window down, just enough to accommodate the can, which he crushed and tossed out.