Pray To Stay Dead

by Cole, Mason James

  The ground gradually sloped upward moving away from the back of the store, and the small shack was located about one hundred feet from where Cardo stood. There was a single window on the side of the building facing him, the east facing wall. He couldn’t see the door leading into the shack, and assumed it was to the left, on the south facing wall, an assumption that proved correct: the old man reached the south side of the tiny building, there was the jangle of keys, and he slid from sight.

  Cardo held his breath, stepping from beneath the doorframe and onto the bleached shells that lined the back of the store, head cocked, listening. Waiting and watching.

  “Come on,” he said, checking his watch again. The old man had been in there for nearly two minutes. There were footsteps above and behind him. A floorboard creaked.

  Two gunshots punched through the silence.

  The unused and cluttered guestroom was perfect. Sitting on the edge of the box-covered bed, Reggie looked down through the window and at the walking corpses below.

  He dry-swallowed a single Black Molly and thumbed the safety on his Colt. It was accurate, and he was a good shot, but from this high and in this light? He was bound to miss. His shotgun was useless. If he were down there, in the thick of it, then yeah, the shotgun would come in handy. But not here.

  The old man’s rifle would do the trick, and the old man’s rifle was downstairs with the old man.

  When the shooting started, he’d have to be accurate. The noise would no doubt draw the dead people to the building. If Cardo’s descriptions were correct, it merely took one of them to recognize the front door for what it was, a door, and then they’d follow suit and swarm the place. He had to be accurate and he had to be fast, because he’d be unable to shoot any dead folks who slipped beneath the protection of the angled tin overhang that ran across the front of the store. Once they were on the boardwalk, it would not be long before they were inside.

  He leaned forward, slowly, and watched the congregation of walking corpses drift and sway in the street below. The burn pile smoldered and flickered. Save for the lower legs with shoe-clad feet that radiated from the circle of the burn-pile like spokes from the center of a wheel, the shapes in the pile were no longer recognizably human.

  “They’re doing it,” Misty whispered behind him. He got up and followed her into the hall. She took his place at the window and he made his way to the rear facing window near the top of the stairs. It was located directly above the back door, and offered a clean view of the little shack the old man called home and the two-car garage beyond.

  The floor creaked beneath his feet, and when the shots came he did not move. Instead, he took a single step away from the window and stared, watching. Gun drawn, Cardo ran across the yard toward the little shack.

  Reggie took the stairs two at a time.

  Someone cried out in pain, cursed and gasped. It did not sound like the old man.

  Gun raised beside his head, Cardo stood with his back to the small building, breath held, listening. The sound of hammering feet caught his attention, and Reggie appeared within the store’s back door. Cardo waved him back, brought a silencing finger to his lips. He cast a quick glance to either side of the building. From where he stood, he could not see down the right side of the building, but his view of the left side was relatively unobstructed. So far, the coast was clear.

  There was another pained gasp. Cardo moved along the building, rounded the corner, and nearly bumped into Crate as the old man stepped out of his shack.

  “Jesus fuck,” the old man said, slamming the door behind him, the pistol in his right hand twitching toward Cardo. A cloth sack hung from the old man’s left hand.

  “Shh,” Cardo hissed, baring his teeth. “What the hell happened?”

  “Come on,” the old man said, setting down the bag and advancing along the side of the shack, toward the rear.

  A man lay curled beneath a tree, both blood-slick hands pressed to his stomach. Cardo shot a quick glance back at the old man’s shack, tried to get a read on what had gone down. The lone window on this side of the building was shattered. The old man had seen movement from inside and had opened fire.

  Crate took three quick steps toward the man and kicked at something. A gun spun away from the fallen man, who looked up at Crate and Cardo, his face pale and twisted.

  “The fuck you creeping around back here for, son?” Crate said, and then he stiffened. “Oh.”

  “What?” Cardo said, standing beside the old man. The kid on the ground was a filthy and battered mess. From the look of his face, Cardo figured he’d taken quite a beating. There was a hole in his left forearm, which was livid with infection.

  “He was here a few days ago,” The old man said. “He and his friends. Damn.”

  “Help her,” the wounded kid said. “They’re crazy.”

  There was a footfall behind them, and Cardo whirled, raised his gun. It was Reggie.

  “We need to get inside right now,” Reggie said, looking past them and to the kid writhing on the ground. “The hell?”

  “Crate knows him.”

  “I didn’t know,” the old man said. “I saw something moving and—”

  “Save it,” Reggie said. “We got to get back.”

  While Cardo hadn’t been looking, two dead men had crept along the right side of the store and now advanced toward them.

  “Take care of them,” Reggie whispered, and when the old man moved toward the two dead men Reggie slapped a hand onto his shoulder. The old man shot him an ugly glance, looked down at his large brown hand as if maybe it was a smear of shit on his shoulder.

  “No shooting,” Reggie said, and recognition drained into the old man’s eyes.

  “Oh,” Crate said. “Right.”

  Crate vanished into his shack, closing the door behind him and locking it. Reggie looked at Cardo, frowning.

  “He said he doesn’t like anyone in his house.”

  “Oh,” Reggie said, dropping to his knees beside the fallen man, the smell of a fresh gut-shot filling his nostrils and threatening to drag him into the jungle.

  “You know how crazy old people can get.”

  “Hey,” Reggie said, tapping the wounded kid’s cheek.

  “Yuh,” the kid said, looking up at Reggie, pale lips quivering.

  “We’re going to move you.”

  “Christ.”

  “It’s going to hurt, and I need you to bite down on something, okay—” Reggie thought for a second, pulled his leather wallet from his pocket. “Bite down on this, okay? Don’t scream.”

  “Don’t scream,” the kid said, sucked air through clenched teeth. Tears raced across dried blood, cut clean little tracks through the dirt on his swollen cheeks.

  The old man emerged from his shack wielding a hammer. He stomped over to meet the first walking corpse, and with three quick whacks the thing crumpled to the ground. The second one took only two whacks, and the old man looked back at them, gasping, the wiry thicket of his beard rising and falling upon his heaving bony chest.

  Reggie squeezed the wounded kid’s hands in his own, and it was as if both of them were trying to break bones. He found his eyes darting toward the kid’s neck in search of dog-tags, and he wondered if this is where it would all come to an end.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ruh,” the kid said.

  “Rick?”

  “Richard.”

  “Okay, Rich,” Reggie said, letting go of the kid’s hands. “It’s almost time, man.”

  “Heads up,” Cardo said, and the old man turned, watched as the third corpse—an elderly woman whose breasts hung from her ribs in a wet fold of torn flesh and yellow fat—walked toward them. He took her down with one swing.

  “Okay.” Reggie held his wallet before Richard’s face. The kid looked at it for a few seconds, as if he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. Then he opened his mouth, and Reggie slipped a corner of the wallet between his teeth. Richard bit down hard, and Reggie looked
up at Cardo.

  “Let’s go.”

  Thirty-Five

  After the first five or six shots, Reggie found himself wishing for earplugs. By the time he got to twenty, it didn’t really matter. His ears had been pummeled, and the world was now set to the sound of a constant, muted hum.

  Outside, the dead fell. They fell and they fell and they fell. A few of them seemed to have some idea what was happening: they looked up, toward the sky, and backed away from their fallen brothers and sisters. Most of them simply shuffled along and fell. A few noticed Reggie and looked up at him with nothing on their dead faces. At that moment, they gained focus and moved on the building, and Reggie blasted their brains onto the faces of those standing behind them.

  “Like fish in a barrel,” the old man said, sitting on the bed beside Reggie, gaunt hands on his knobby knees. He was close, far too close. He smelled old and sour and between blasts Reggie could hear him licking his lips.

  “There,” Reggie said, finishing the first box of bullets. “Twenty rounds, and I missed once.”

  “Good. My turn,” Crate said, and Reggie handed him the rifle. While the old man reloaded, Reggie worked the crowd with his pistol. He was less accurate—a few shots went wild, tearing through shoulders and throats—but he managed to drop four of the corpses nearest the overhang before the old man was done.

  “Okay,” Crate said, settling in, raising the rifle, leaning forward.

  Before going upstairs, Reggie had done what he could for the kid, cleaning his would with peroxide and packing it with gauze. He hadn’t been a medic in Vietnam, “But by the end,” he’d told Cardo, “we all knew how to push guts back into someone’s stomach.”

  Crate had fired twice, but only one of his rounds had connected, entering the kid’s abdomen less than three inches above the base of his penis and blowing a portion of his lower intestine through his back. His spine was intact, but that didn’t matter—the kid was going to die. The sooner the better, for his sake.

  Cardo sat beside him in the back room, holding his hand. The kid shook and wept and ground his teeth against the pain, and Cardo fed him shot after shot of rum from a paper cup.

  Upstairs, Reggie and the old man rained lead down upon the walking dead, and the kid jumped every damned time gunfire pierced the silence. He’d tried to stuff wads of toilet paper into the kid’s ears, but Richard had only picked them out with quivering, bloodstained fingers.

  “Gah,” the kid said, his eyes wild and searching.

  “Hey,” Cardo said. “I’m here.”

  “Oh. The pain is fading.”

  “That’s good, man.”

  “Is it?”

  “Sure.”

  He could see the distrust in the kid’s eyes, right behind the pain and the confusion.

  “I’m dying.” It was not a question.

  “You just,” Cardo began, looking for the right words and finding only the expected ones, the obvious ones: “You just need to rest, Rich. Save your strength.”

  “Cardo.”

  “Yeah?”

  The kid looked down at Cardo’s belt, dragged his gaze back up to his face. “That your car out there?”

  “Shh.”

  “The cop car,” the kid said. “In the garage.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got to go there,” Richard said, and his hand sought the bottle of rum. Cardo poured him another shot, fed it to him. He coughed, spraying most of the liquor onto Cardo’s hand. “You have to help her.”

  “Who?”

  “They’re all dead,” the kid said. “Except for Colleen. She’s still alive. One of them said she was still alive.”

  The kid fell silent. Cardo tried to give him another shot of rum, but most of it ran down Richard’s swollen face. He said a few more things, none of which made much sense, and then he passed out.

  Cardo sat with him for a few minutes, watching his chest rise and fall and listening to the train of gunfire from above, wondering if maybe he should put one round into the kid’s head.

  The old man burned through twenty rounds and passed the rifle back to Reggie, manned the window while Reggie reloaded. Crate had been wrong: he’d had fourteen boxes of bullets in his shack—two hundred and eighty rounds. Two forty left, and there were maybe seventy walking corpses down below, give or take.

  He took his place at the window and opened fire. The bodies fell, were heaped like sandbags across the parking lot.

  They had this. They had it by the balls.

  Cardo stepped from the back room and into the store. Stacy sat behind the counter, watching television with the volume down, and Misty stood at the door, watching through a slim opening in the blinds. She looked back at him.

  “How is he?” She whispered, and someone upstairs fired the rifle.

  He waited until he was standing beside her to answer: “Dying.”

  “Poor kid,” she said, pausing as another volley of shots popped through the silence. “They were all pretty nice. I wonder what happened to them.”

  “Same thing that’s happening to everyone else.”

  Bang. Bang, bang.

  “I would have though Huff’s place was safe.”

  “Who’s Huff?”

  “Huffington Niebolt,” she said. The shots were so loud here, directly beneath the room in which Crate and Reggie took turns at bat. “Not too far up the road. You can’t miss it. He sold doors and windows and things. Lots of land. Up the hill and out of the way. That’s where they all went. One of Huff’s sons took them.”

  “Oh,” Cardo said, leaning forward and gazing though the blinds in time to see one of the dead things go down face first. In places, the bodies had fallen three deep. “He said they were all dead, all except for someone named Colleen.”

  “Colleen was one of them,” Misty said, looking up at him. “She seemed nice.”

  They’re insane, he’d said, and Cardo wondered if that had just been delirium and pain talking.

  “Need anything?” He asked, and Misty shook her head. Another gun blast, and Stacy looked at Cardo. On the TV, words ticked by beneath the CBS eye.

  “Huh?” She asked, wincing in anticipation of another gunshot.

  “Get you anything?”

  “Get us out of here, maybe.”

  Two shots, back to back.

  He stepped into the back, crouching beside the kid. Richard looked dead but wasn’t. His chest rose and fell, and Cardo knew that he could go on this way for a long time. He touched the kid’s boiling forehead and then stood, meaning to go upstairs and take a look at the action from above. He glanced at the back door and the kid’s words stopped him.

  The cop car. In the garage.

  He eased open the back door and stepped outside, looking around. Aside from the three bodies, there was no sign of the dead. He stepped across the shells and onto the grass, retrieved the hammer from where the old man had dropped it, and walked past the shed and to the ramshackle double garage.

  Both doors were down, but the small side door was unlocked. There was very little light inside. The place smelled of grease and gasoline, wet earth and mold, and something else. There was an old pickup truck in front of him, jacked up on cinderblocks. Beside it, a Beistle police cruiser.

  Glancing back to make sure the coast was clear, he walked to the front of the truck and lifted one of the garage doors, let in some fading evening light.

  Cruiser number four—Tasgal’s car. Bloated and nearly unrecognizable, Clark’s body was slouched in the passenger seat. All four windows were up, holding back most of the stench.

  Bang, bang, bang—the shots just kept on coming, and Cardo backed out of the garage, looked around. The broken window caught his eye, and he walked toward Crate’s shack, peered into the window.

  I don’t like people going in my house.

  The smell hit him. Bound and gagged and visibly dead, Eric Tasgal lay upon the floor of the old man’s apartment, staining the carpet at the foot of the bed and trying to sit up.
>
  “God,” he said, and his dead partner looked at him. Its eyes widened. Cardo pulled his gun.

  “Oh, shit,” the old man said.

  “What?” Reggie asked, sitting on the other side of the bed, facing the hall and pressing the tip of his right forefinger into his ear, working it.

  “Two of them are on the porch.”

  “Just two?” Reggie asked, getting up. There were fewer than forty of the walking dead things left, and they were having trouble getting past the bodies heaped before the entrance to the store.

  “I think so,” Crate said. “Hard to hell.”

  Checking his gun, he stood up and left the room. Misty and Stacy were at the bottom of the stairs. They looked terrified.

  “They’re at the door,” Misty said.

  “I know,” Reggie said, following Stacy’s gaze. The wounded kid had rolled onto his side and drawn his knees as close to his chest as his condition would allow. Blood spread in a dark splotch upon the surface of the bindings. “How many?”

  “Four,” Stacy said, and the back door slammed open.

  “You old fucking bitch,” Cardo said, pushing past Stacy and pinning Misty to the wall, pressing the barrel of his gun into the soft flesh of her cheek. Stacy screamed, got herself out of the way, and Reggie raised his Colt, pointed it directly at Cardo’s face.

  “Hey, man,” he said. “The fuck are you doing?”

  “What did you do?” Cardo growled, pressing harder.

  The kid on the floor moaned, and the old man just kept shooting.

  “I don’t know what—”

  “You’re lying,” Cardo said, twisting the barrel of his pistol against Misty’s cheek, like he was trying to drill into her head.

  “Cardo,” he said, not wanting to kill this man he’d just saved. His trigger finger was slick. “Put the gun down and tell me what you think she did.”