by Joe McKinney
By Mason James Cole
1974.
The Summer of Love is a fading memory, the Cold War rages on, Richard M. Nixon is barely holding onto the Presidency, and the dead are returning to life.
Five friends on their way to a week at Lake Tahoe, a Vietnam veteran in Sacramento trying to get home to his daughter in New Mexico, an older couple idling in a dusty shop in the hills, and a dangerous man who has spent twenty years preparing his strange family for the end of the world...
As civilization collapses, these scattered survivors cross paths, and the hungry dead are the least of the horrors unleashed.
Those who die will walk.
Those who live will hope for a quick death, and they will pray to stay dead.
"A brutally entertaining collision of zombie thriller and grindhouse action. Not for the faint of heart!"
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Patient Zero and The Dragon Factory
“Pray to Stay Dead is a revelation, one of those books that reminds you why you liked the genre in the first place… buy it, buy it, buy it.”
Alex Riviello, BADASS DIGEST
“Jesus,” he said, leaning across the counter and looking Eddie Proust in the eye. “This is a bad idea, man. You’re messing up big time.”
“This is America is what it is,” Proust said, sliding his holstered gun onto his belt. “A lot might be changing out there, but that hasn’t.”
“Damn,” Cardo said, putting the customer service desk between himself and the entrance. Proust’s boys carried shotguns in plain sight of the people pressed against the glass storefront. They’d paraded them around for the last five minutes, after Proust let them know the doors were opening in ten. He’d given the crowd time to spread the word.
“Open up,” Proust said a few minutes later, and his son did. They filed in, giving the shotgun a wide berth, looking around, eyes wide. There was a Proust family member stationed the head of every aisle, each carrying a gun.
“Hey, Troy,” Eddie Proust said as Troy Matthews walked by and picked up a can of kerosene. Proust smiled as if it were any old day. Matthews looked dazed. There was a spot of blood on his cheek.
Bodies pressed in, and Cardo backed away. Tasgal and Clark were outside. He saw flashes of them between the jostled forms pouring into the store. They wouldn’t be able to do a damned thing. Cardo looked behind him, down the empty aisle and toward the back of the store. Wouldn’t be long now before someone noticed the prices.
“Oh, come on, Eddie,” a short man with close-cropped red hair and a nose that seemed too small for his face yelled, indignant. “This is ridiculous.”
“I’m sorry, Keith, it’s just business,” Proust said, speaking to the short man in the same tough-luck tone he probably used on folks who tried to get a refund on an open box of detergent. “You know as well as I do that the trucks aren’t coming anytime soon. This is—”
Everyone yelled at once, and then the little redhead lifted his arm. There was a muffled pop, and the back of Eddie Proust’s head flapped open as if on a spring-loaded hinge. The crowd surged. By the time the air filled with the thundering chorus of gunfire, Cardo was halfway to the back of the store.
He pushed through the swinging doors and into the back hallway, his gun out and ready. He put his back to the wall and looked left, right—there was no one around. At the end of the hall, a door led to the alley behind the store. It was chained and padlocked shut. He could shoot the lock, but that might draw unwanted attention.
The door to his left was labeled WOMEN. He wasn’t sure where MEN was, considered lying low in the ladies’ room but then decided that he needed to be higher. There was a two-way mirror located at the center of the store, between the meat display and the bank of coolers containing milk and juice.
A door at the end of the hall led right. He pushed it open, revealed a staircase—eight steps leading up, a right turn, eight more steps.
He opened the door at the top of the stairs, and one of Proust’s meathead grandsons turned and lifted the large gun in his small hands. Cardo looked right town the barrel. It bobbed and weaved. There was a puff of smoke, and in the close quarters the sound was like cannon fire. The bullet thrummed past Cardo’s right ear and slammed into the wall behind him. His hands took over, squeezed three rounds into the kid’s surprised face, pummeling it into some kind of spurting cubist mess. The kid’s body hit the ground, the misshapen sack that had been his head flopping forward onto his chest.
“Gah,” Cardo said, backing out of the small office and sliding down the wall, watching a sticky wad of what must have been brain matter roll slowly down the fabric of the boy’s Superman t-shirt. The dead boy’s hands twitched in his lap, and he pissed his pants.
Cardo leaned sideways and vomited onto the top step, and continued to stare into the ruin of the kid’s head until the sight of it ceased to make sense.
“Stupid bastard,” Cardo screamed, looking at the gun in his hand and throwing it onto the floor as if it were something hot. He wasn’t sure who he was cursing—Proust, Proust’s dumb grandson, or himself.
Downstairs, there were more gunshots. Someone screamed in pain, and the place sounded as if it were being ransacked. It quieted down eventually. He waited for the sound of people—alive or dead—finding their way into the hall and onto the stairs, but it never came.
Cardo stood up, took off his uniform shirt, stepped into the small office, and used the shirt to cover the dead boy’s obliterated head. He picked up his gun, holstered it. The massive gun that Proust had left in the care of his twelve-year-old grandson lay on the floor between the boy’s splayed legs. Crouching, Cardo lifted it, wiped a spot of blood from the barrel onto his pants, and set the gun atop the desk placed before the window that looked down on the interior of the store.
He dragged the kid’s remains into the hall, careful to not upset the placement of the shirt that concealed the damage that he’d done. He stepped into the small office, shut and locked the door.
For two hours, he watched as a steady stream of Beistle residents filed into Proust’s Supermarket and picked the shelves clean. There were dead bodies everywhere, and not the walking kind. As far as he could tell, all of them were in about the same shape as the kid out on the landing.
He reached for his radio and found that he had lost it somewhere along the way. He picked up the phone to confirm it was dead, and it was. There was a small television on the floor beneath the desk. He picked it up, set it atop the blotter, and plugged it in. The picture was a fuzzy mess, and no amount of adjusting the antenna made a difference, so he turned it off and sat staring into the store.
By the third hour, the place was empty. A dead body wandered in, seemed to take the place in, and then backed out and dragged itself someplace else.
There were bullets for Proust’s gun in one of the desk drawers. He stood up, replaced the bullet the kid had fired, pocketed the others. Sliding his new gun into his belt, Cardo opened the door and left.
Downstairs, a dead man stood before the bathroom door, tugging at the knob. A large piece of broken glass jutted from its throat. Smaller shards glistened like jewels across its forehead. Its cheeks hung in tatters revealing the musculature of its jaw. Cardo was past the dead thing before it realized he was even there.
His shoes crunched across broken glass. The acrid reek of blood and pine oil and bleach hung in the air. He nearly slipped on blood. It pooled on the tile, mingled with soft drinks and beer. Behind him, someone gasped—a raspy exhalation that could have come from either the living or the dead. Unseen feet shuffled across something that crinkled and crunched, and Cardo was certain—absolutely certain—that it was a bag of Lay’s potato chips.
There was life in the parking lot, actual living life. People rummaged through the products strewn across the ground. They stopped what they were doing long enough to give him a once-over and promptly got back to their work.
Not far from his cruiser, a dead woman lay nea
r an overturned shopping cart. The cart, no doubt once brimming with looted goods, was empty. A plastic gallon jug lay empty in a puddle of milk mixed with the blood surrounding the woman’s diminished head.
“You okay, Cardo?”
“Not really,” Cardo said, looking back at the person addressing him. Jerry Smith, a long-haired stone-freak who’d never gotten the news that the Summer of Love had actually ended. They’d shared a few grades in high school, but nothing more. Sometimes it seemed like no one in Beistle was going anywhere. If this were so, then Jerry Smith was getting there a little faster than the rest of them. “You?”
“Not really, man.” Smith had a case of beer under each arm. “I’m sorry about this,” he said, indicating the beer.
“It’s no big deal,” Cardo said, walking over to his cruiser and cursing. The front left fender of the car was crumpled in. The headlight was smashed and half of the grille lay on the ground. The front wheel was both flat and twisted in such a way that told him the axle was screwed.
Good thing home was a ten-minute walk.
“I saw that happen,” Smith said. He sounded proud, eager to talk.
“Yeah?”
“You wanna know who did it?”
“Not really,” Cardo said, shrugging.
“It was Carl Perkins, from over in Harlow?”
“This is a damn mess. Could still use the radio.”
“He got bit,” Smith said. “He was in bad shape.”
“You see any more pork around?”
“Pork?” Smith asked, and the confusion in his eyes cleared. He laughed, obviously surprised to hear Cardo using a word typically reserved for folks who didn’t like the police. He shook his head. “No. Oh, yeah, wait. Tasgal. He got into his car. I was still in there, but I saw him through the window. I think Clark was with him. Clark got shot.”
“Oh,” Cardo said. “Damn it. Where did they go?”
“Away,” Smith said.
“Okay. How’s your mom?”
“She died yesterday.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Cardo said, sliding behind the wheel of his cruiser and checking the closed band radio. Dead air, distant voices muttering, and no more.
“I got no place to go, really.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Smith opened his mouth to say something, but Cardo silenced him with an upheld hand.
“Go home and drink your beer, Jerry,” he said, walking past the man and toward Main Street. “Try not to get eaten.”
Cardo walked toward his house. Before he got there, he’d have to pass through the heart of town. From the looks of it, that’s where all of the action was.
He walked, and in his mind he saw the kid’s head open up and deflate. Eyes open or closed, it didn’t matter: the kid was right there.
What else was he supposed to have done? Well, he didn’t want to think too hard on that. He could have kicked the gun out of the kid’s hand. He was close enough to do that. Kick the gun or kick the kid in the chest. Step to the side and just pluck the gun out of his little hands.
The way the kid’s arms had quivered, it was obvious that he was having a hard time holding up the cannon. Did he really think the kid had been strong enough to cock the gun once more before Cardo could take two steps and close the distance between them?
After firing, did the kid even have a decent grip on the thing? Had the gun already left his small hands before Cardo opened fire?
Three shots?
“God,” he said.
There was a large crowd gathered before the fire station. He walked through them, head low, making eye contact sparingly. Bodies parted around him. Familiar faces turned to watch him pass, eyes wide and eyes weary. And guns; lots of guns. Rifles and shotguns; pistols hanging from hips like it was Dodge City. The folks who didn’t have guns had baseball bats and pitchforks.
“Hey, Cardo,” someone said, and he just walked. It sounded like Mike Hanson, and this was good. He liked Mike, and was happy to know that Mike was alive, but that’s where it ended. He had no desire to hang around and swap war stories and speculate about what tomorrow would bring. He needed to be home and drunk and in his chair, and he needed the Proust kid out of his head.
They didn’t really need him around anyway. If he stopped walking and joined this band of survivors, it would be as one of them, not as the law. They were the law now. Out there, he’d just be another gun, and they had more than enough of those.
Across the street, bodies were lined up three rows deep in the BEISTLE BAKE parking lot. Their faces were covered in sheets or blankets or shirts. Sheets of paper and cardboard bearing handwritten names were pinned or taped to their chests, identifying the corpses for any relatives who wished to claim them. People sat weeping beside a few of them. A woman knelt, the rag-doll body of a toddler across her lap. The baby moved, but its movements were all wrong. A man knelt behind the woman, his face pressed into her shoulder.
Further down, a tangled and charred heap of limbs and torsos smoldered in the evening light. Not everyone had friends or family. He wondered if anyone would find the Proust kid, and what his name had been, anyway.
It wasn’t until he got past the throng that he realized what was wrong—he hadn’t seen any soldiers. The National Guard had pulled out.
END OF PREVIEW
PREVIEW
WORLD IN RED: A ZOMBIE NOVEL
By John Sebastian Gorumba
THERE IS NO EXPLANATION
Across the world, the recently dead rise and attack the living. Within forty-eight hours, civilization has collapsed.
THERE ARE NO RULES
The dead behave erratically-some are mindless, ranting animals. Some are slow and stupid, while others are swift and cunning. Sometimes, it is impossible to tell the living from the dead.
THERE IS NO HOPE
There is no place to run, nowhere to hide, and the living soon become far more dangerous than the undead.
As New Orleans burns, a father struggles to save his newborn son from any of a hundred unimaginable fates, all the while fighting to hold on to what is left of his own humanity.
World in Red is an unflinching and unpredictable excursion into horror, a terrifying journey that honors the conventions of the zombie genre while turning them upside down and ripping out their guts.
YOU ARE NOT READY FOR WORLD IN RED
"Almost unbearably bleak, World in Red is a can't-miss debut from newcomer John Gorumba. Harrowing and unapologetically brutal, this is a hardcore zombie book for hardcore horror fans."
Blu Gilliand, October Country
"If, at the end of the first chapter, you think you know how this story is going to play out, you're wrong. If, after you finish the last page you haven't found yourself shaken to the core, check to make sure you still have a heartbeat. This is how it's done, folks. This is how you tell a horror story in the 21st century. John Sebastian Gorumba's World in Red is savagely cruel, but beneath the violence is a profound understanding of how easy it is to lose one's humanity in our modern world. I can't wait to see where Gorumba goes from here, because this guy knows how to deliver the scares. World in Red is a can't-miss debut from newcomer John Gorumba."
Joe McKinney, author of Dead City and Apocalypse of the Dead
The hallway was empty. Maurice cupped one hand under Alexander to reassure himself that the newborn was still there. He walked a few steps down the hall before realizing that he was going the wrong way.
He turned back in time to see a figure lumber around the corner at the other end of the hall. The man was naked and doused in blood. Leads dangled from his chest, having pulled free of a monitor. The chords trailed behind him like tails. His chest was sprinkled with bullet holes and what only a few minutes earlier Maurice wouldn’t have recognized as bite marks.
He spotted Maurice and staggered slowly down the hall. His mouth worked. He groaned gibberish. Maurice moved back to the door.
“Open the door,” he said. The man could
n’t walk straight. He staggered, stamping red impressionist marks wherever he hit the wall. Maurice wondered if this was the guy the cops had been chasing.
He panicked when he heard nothing behind the door. Leslie wasn’t going to let him in. It hit him that the first request might have sounded louder in his head, that he might have just whispered it. He tried again, much louder.
The thing grew excited. It plodded toward him in a shaky toddler-stomp. Its head was misshapen; the left side seemed dented, sunken. Its arms reached out for Maurice even though it was too far away to touch him. He heard the nursery door begin to open and he reached his hand out to help it, unable to look away from the naked man. He saw Leslie in the corner of his eye and then something slammed into his back.
“Maauuriiiice.”
He spun, his back striking the wall, and he crashed onto his ass. Cassie stomped toward him, arms outstretched, heavy breasts swaying. She leapt onto him, and he threw his arms up to protect Alexander, scrambled backward, driving his foot into her face.
He heard an excited groan from the naked man, much closer now. He was almost free when Cassie frog-hopped forward, tangling his legs with her body. He felt her breasts against his legs, and again felt embarrassed by her.
She buried her face into his crotch and bit his inner thigh. He shrieked. The scalpel was on the ground again, completely out of reach. Alexander was motionless against his chest.
He thought about Shawnda, about how Leslie had said that he had killed her, how Shawnda said a bite got you sick. He thrashed, his knee connected with Cassie’s jaw, and her head rocked backward. There was a muffled squeal from the sling.