Pray To Stay Dead

by Cole, Mason James

  “There’s food in the back,” Reggie said, taking his time. As before, the dead seemed to figure out what was happening. Their reaction time was slow, not non-existent.

  “Okay, thanks, maybe in a bit,” the man said, leaning forward, watching the dead faces inch by.

  “You from here?”

  “Yeah,” the man said.

  “So you know them?”

  “Not by name, not all of them, but yeah. That one there,” the man tapped the glass, and Reggie couldn’t tell which of the corpses he was indicating. “That’s Hank Prescott. Over there, the one in red, that’s Maria Jameson. God, she was a nice lady. I shot as many of them as I could, the ones I could recognize.”

  “I saw that,” Reggie said.

  “I got down to one bullet, and I sat up there with the gun to my head, playing with the trigger. Then I saw a kid, I can’t even remember his name, but he’s this damned cute kid I see around town sometimes, walking with his mom. I saw him down there, looking lost. Both of his arms were gone. I missed.” He sat back, closed his eyes.

  Reggie grabbed the bottle of Jack and placed it on the man’s lap. “You got a name?”

  “Cardo,” the man said, laughing. “Short for Ricardo.”

  “You don’t look like a Ricardo,” Reggie said.

  “I know,” Cardo said. “It’s stupid. My name is Scott Ardo, but the kids at school used to call me Cardo Ricardo, like there was anything funny about it. So I became Ricardo for a little while, and then just Cardo. You know how it is.”

  “I guess so,” Reggie said. “What did you do here?”

  “Cop,” Cardo said, opening the Jack and going bottoms up. “Whoo. Thanks.”

  “No problem,” he said, stepping on the gas a little harder. A dead man carrying what appeared to be a chair leg had no interest in getting out of the way, so Reggie gunned it, slowing down only once the dead man had vanished beneath the truck. “Oh, come on—get the fuck out of the way.”

  Suddenly impatient and needing to be as far away as possible from this dead town, Reggie pulled on the horn, long and hard. Eyes wide, heads jerking left and right, hands swatting at the air, the dead peeled away from the truck.

  “That’s not a good idea,” Cardo said.

  “It’s working,” Reggie said, yanking out another long, deep bray.

  “Sure it is,” Cardo said, pointing past the corpses backing away from the truck. “See?”

  Along the street, as far as Reggie could see, dead bodies streamed out of doorways and from within alleys.

  “Aw, shit,” Reggie said, stepping on the gas, getting it up to ten miles per hour, fifteen, and now twenty. The truck rocked and bounced, and the dead vanished beneath it. His foot grew heavier on the gas, and soon the dead were slamming into his grille.

  They broke free of the thickest cluster and Reggie moved the wheel to the left and the right, weaving between smaller groups. It wasn’t easy, and he drove right over several of them, but Beistle and its teeming population of dead people fell behind them. Looking in his side-view mirror, Reggie gave his horn one final, long pull.

  The road outside of Beistle was deserted. No corpses. No survivors. No sign that anything was going on anywhere, save the occasional abandoned car. Cardo crawled into the back and made himself a sandwich with the last of an opened can of SPAM.

  “You want half?” he asked, returning to his seat.

  “It’s yours,” Reggie said. “Needs to be eaten up anyway.”

  Cardo froze in mid bite, drew the sandwich away from his mouth. “How old is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Reggie said. “It’s SPAM. It’ll keep.”

  “It smells fine.”

  “Ha!” Reggie said, slowing down as they passed another abandoned car, looking for any signs of supplies left behind. There was nothing. He looked at Cardo evenly. “Don’t worry. If you get food poisoning, I’ll shoot you. Won’t have to worry about walking around afterward.”

  “Oh,” Cardo said. “Great.” He smelled the sandwich again and took a bite. “Mm.”

  “Reggie Turner,” Reggie said, extending his right hand toward Cardo, who wiped his hand on his pants before shaking Reggie’s.

  “Pleased to meet you, Reggie,” Cardo said. “You—I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Stop with the shit,” Reggie said. “What else was I supposed to do, leave you up there?”

  “You wouldn’t have been the only one.”

  “Huh.”

  “I was asleep, too,” Cardo said, taking another bite of his sandwich. When he’d swallowed most of it, he continued. “The sound of the engine woke me, and when I looked up, I heard you yelling at them to turn up the volume. Thought I was dreaming. Damn, man.”

  “I don’t wanna hear any more, okay?” Reggie said. “Or I’m gonna throw your ass out of this truck right now.”

  Cardo smiled and took another bite of his sandwich.

  “What happened back there?” Reggie asked, inspecting the exterior of his vehicle. Bloody little bits of meat were speckled like bugs across the front of the truck, and the grille looked as if someone had taken to it with a mallet. Both of the headlights were smashed. “How’d everyone die?”

  “A gas of some kind,” Cardo said, walking along behind Reggie. “Things were crazy. There was a riot at the grocery store. I barely got out of there, but other than that things were pretty much under control.”

  “I saw the bodies, lined up under sheets.” Reggie said, dropping to his knees and inspecting the undercarriage. There were bits of meat caked atop dirt and black oil but no damage he could see.

  “Yeah,” Cardo said, helping Reggie to his feet. “The people were doing it, man. They were pulling together and making it happen. After the riot, I went home and passed out in front of the television. The sound of the helicopter woke me.”

  “Good thing you’re a light sleeper,” Reggie said, circling his truck. It would need diesel soon, and driving at night would be a problem until he could fix the headlights, but it was fine. “What kind of helicopter?”

  “I don’t know,” Cardo said. “Army, maybe.”

  “What color was it?”

  “I couldn’t tell. It was dark, and as soon as I saw the gas cloud, I ran.”

  “Let’s go,” Reggie said, nodding toward the dead man emerging from the forest behind the truck.

  He climbed into his truck and closed the door. The passenger door opened and Cardo got in. He shut the door, frowning into the side-view mirror. The truck jerked forward, and they were off.

  “You familiar with this route?” Reggie asked.

  “Yeah,” Cardo said. “Harlow is this way, about twenty-five miles.”

  “Big town?”

  “Barely a town,” Cardo said. “I’ll bet they’re doing just fine there.”

  “Huh,” Reggie said. “Anyway. You were saying?”

  “Yeah,” Cardo said, nodding. “I ran. People were running and screaming, getting into their cars and barrel-assing out of town. My car was wrecked in the riot, so I just had my feet. I tried to flag down a few cars, but they just kept going. A lot of people came out of their houses and just watched the shit drift down.” He shook his head.

  They rounded a sharp curve and passed the site of a collision between a pick-up truck and a large sedan. Three dead people shuffled along the road. Reggie weaved to the right, but the shoulder was too narrow, and he only managed to miss two of them. The third slammed into the grille and seemed for a time to be stuck there. Black blood and strands of brain fanned out across the windshields.

  “Son of a—” Reggie said, and the dead thing dislodged, rattled beneath the truck, and was gone.

  “Can’t take too much more of that,” Cardo said.

  “No,” Reggie said, grabbed the Jack from Cardo’s lap. He took a swig and passed it back to Cardo. “Keep going.”

  “I had an idea what I was seeing,” he said. “So I ran for the department store. The windows and doors had already been smashed out. T
hey sell these thick yellow haz-mat suits, you know those?”

  “Yeah,” Reggie said.

  “I put one of those on, got a fancy respirator, the kind with replaceable filters, and put some swimming goggles on. By then the cloud was already in the street, but the wind was tearing it up pretty good. I found the back office, turned off the AC, and hunkered down all night.

  “I have no idea if the mask and all the other shit protected me or not, or if the wind just carried away all of the gas, but I made it,” Cardo said, knocking back a little more whisky. They were going to run out, at this rate. That was probably a good thing.

  “I walked out of the store a few hours later, just before dawn, and they were everywhere. I ran,” Cardo said, shrugging. “What else could I do? I ran into an alley, not really thinking. I saw the ladder and crawled up, and, well, that’s it.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Day before yesterday. You care if I put on the radio?”

  “No.”

  “Thanks,” Cardo said.

  The news was bad. At least three sources had confirmed that a nuclear warhead had been detonated in the air above Israel, and someone pointed out that the view outside of the window behind Nixon in his most recent Oval Office address to the nation looked suspiciously artificial. Reggie weathered a wave of dizziness, and Cardo grew pale. His hands shaking, he lowered the volume.

  “It’s over,” he said, shaking his head and taking a long pull from the bottle.

  “Looks like it,” Reggie said. “Ease up on that, okay?”

  “Okay, sorry.” Cardo said, capping the bottle and tossing it into the back.

  “Nothing to be sorry about. Where we going?”

  “That way,” Cardo said, pointing forward.

  They drove in silence. Their road, for now, was empty.

  Twenty-Seven

  It took them nearly twenty minutes to get Charles onto the burn pile.

  Crate stood panting, looking down at their handiwork while Bilbo Baggins paced around his feet.

  Stacy was inside. Misty had urged her to stay in the back and to just take it easy. Mostly because she didn’t want to hear the silly bitch prattle on about karmic this, that, and the other, but also because she knew Stacy was soft and didn’t want her to see what was happening out here.

  But she had seen things, and would see more. That was the world now. Stacy would harden up.

  Misty stepped into the store to find Stacy standing beside the yellow rolling mop bucket, wrenching down the lever and wringing soapy pink water from the twisted mop. The air smelled of pine-scented cleanser.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said, surprised.

  “I want to,” Stacy said. Her voice quivered as if she were holding back tears.

  “Okay.”

  “Why did Crate shoot Charles?”

  Misty opened her mouth, unsure.

  “It was his idea,” Misty said. “While you were asleep, he told them to do what they wanted with you instead of stealing our supplies.”

  Stacy stood staring at Misty and clutching the mop handle. She didn’t bother with her crystal.

  “He deserved it,” Misty said. “They all did. You’re doing a great job. Thank you.”

  Stacy mumbled. Misty turned and left, stepped onto the porch and sat down. Crate leaned against one of the posts, his hands on his hips.

  “Good going,” he said, his voice low. “That was smart.”

  “It’s not far from the truth.”

  “Mm.” He wiped his neck with a rag from his pocket. “That fat son of a bitch in there is going to kill us if I don’t find a chainsaw,” Crate said, settling his bony ass onto the bench. His dog lay nearby, watching.

  “Want to light them up?” Misty asked. She was tired of seeing their faces, such as they were.

  “Not until Moby Dick is ready,” he said, and laughed. Misty didn’t care much for the sound of it. “Goddammit. It’s going to be a fucking grease fire.”

  A car raced by. Crate held the rifle across his lap, ready to spring into action like Jimmy Stewart in one of the old Westerns they played on Sunday afternoons. Winchester ’73 maybe.

  “First one in over three hours,” he said, as if this suggested something. Maybe it did.

  “Maybe they have the right idea.”

  “Now, we’re going to sit tight. Wait and see what happens.” He shrugged. “What else can we do? We’re going to protect what’s ours. You should learn to use a gun. We got that Ruger now, that cop’s gun?”

  That cop’s gun. As if he’d forgotten Eric Tasgal’s name.

  “We’ll see,” she said, and Crate’s eyes widened.

  “Cornwell has a chainsaw,” he said. Thomas Cornwell lived nearby, and came in every Sunday for sliced turkey and to talk about his wife, who’d been dead for seven years now. He and Crate got on well, once they got to drinking.

  “He also has a shotgun,” Crate added, shaking his head. “He’s the shoot first type. Hell, I’m surprised we haven’t seen him yet. What about your knives?”

  “What?”

  “Your deli knives? Any of them up to butchering that hog back there?”

  “God, Crate,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Eh? Need something.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, honestly. “Maybe so, but who’s going to do it? You? I sure as hell won’t.”

  “Eh,” Crate said, dismissive. His tired old arms weren’t up to the job, and he knew it. “I’ll be back then.”

  Carrying his rifle, he got up and walked to the dead black man’s car. He whistled once, and his dog followed him.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To borrow Cornwell’s chainsaw,” he said, sliding behind the wheel of the old Ford. Bilbo Baggins hopped across his lap and into the passenger seat. “Go inside and lock that door.”

  He started the engine, backed out of the parking lot, and was gone.

  After a few minutes sitting alone, she went inside and locked up.

  “Can I use the Lysol on the shelf? It would help.” Stacy asked, holding the mop handle. The floor looked significantly better.

  Misty shrugged and flapped her hands. “Sure. Don’t finish up yet, though. The mess is about to get messier.”

  “Huh?”

  “Crate’s gone off to borrow someone’s chainsaw.” Misty said, and when she saw the confused look on Stacy’s face, she nodded to Haggarty’s massive form lying by the candy rack.

  “Oh,” Stacy said, and Misty wasn’t sure it had really sunk in. Then Stacy’s eyes widened, and her mouth twisted into a sour knot. “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” Misty said. She left Stacy, walked into the back, into her bedroom, where she stood looking down at Tasgal’s gun. It lay on the bedside table, where Crate had left it. She picked it up. Not liking the feel of it, she put it down.

  She got halfway to the bedroom door before she stopped, walked back to the bedside table, and picked up the gun once more.

  Misty didn’t like the feel of it at all, not one damned bit, but she liked the idea of getting into trouble without it even less.

  Twenty-Eight

  Colleen sat up, instantly awake, heart racing; clutching the gun, her finger on the trigger. She stood up, and her brain spun behind her eyes.

  The curtains were drawn, and the light coming in through them wasn’t very bright, though she felt as if she’d slept for hours.

  Embeth lay on her back. Her bound hands rested upon her stomach, and there was a pillow beneath her head. There was no sign of Sally, who’d fallen asleep beside Colleen some six hours ago.

  Gun raised, Colleen was halfway to the kitchen when the sound of laughter fluttered within the nursery. The door opened and Mathilda stepped out.

  “Whoa,” she said, raising her hands, motioning for Colleen to lower her weapon.

  “I’m sorry,” Colleen said, pointing her gun at the floor. “What’s going on? What time is it?”

  “It’s a little after noon.”

>   Colleen looked at the curtains again.

  “It’s cloudy,” Mathilda said. “Been raining off and on all morning.”

  “Oh,” Colleen said, suddenly eager to get rid of the gun growing sweaty in her hand. She set it on the kitchen counter and dried her hand on her shirt.

  “Sally is in labor.”

  “Oh.” It was no real surprise—the woman was immense, clearly ready to pop—but the reality of it nearly stung: there would soon be another baby in this house, in this world. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “For Sally? Not at the moment,” Mathilda said. “I’ll need you soon enough. For now, you can go say hi to the kids. Lissa is taking good care of them all. She’s a good girl.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “One thing at a time.”

  “She waking up soon?” Colleen asked, looking at Embeth, who hadn’t moved since Colleen had risen from the couch.

  “Any time now, I think,” Mathilda said, eying the unconscious woman. “I hope she doesn’t give us trouble.”

  From somewhere in the back, Sally spoke, though Colleen could not make out her words.

  “Go see her,” Mathilda said.

  Sally lay propped up on pillows in what must have been the bedroom that Mathilda had shared with Evie, a bedroom much like the one meant for Colleen and Sally—two beds, a simple dresser, and a single window. A few books on the dresser, no rhyme or reason: A Bible, a book on advanced trig, a dog-eared paperback of something seedy titled Lust Slum.

  “Hey,” Sally said, smiling. An open book lay on the swell of her massive stomach. Her gun—Huff’s gun—was within reach.

  “Hey,” Colleen said. She glanced at the book on Sally’s stomach. “What are you reading?” It was a perfectly normal question, the kind you asked when everything in the world was as it should be.

  Sally held up the book so that Colleen could see the title on the cover: Lolita.

  “I’ve never read it,” Colleen said.

  “It’s my fourth time,” the pregnant woman said, closing the book. “I think it might be my favorite book. I asked Huff to get this for me on one of his trips to San Francisco.” She smiled and shook her head, handed the book to Colleen. “Look at the title page.