Pray To Stay Dead (12 page)

“
The supernatural,” the hothead screamed. “The
supernatural
? Who the
hell
said anything about the supernatural?”

“
I’m sorry, Mr. Fallows, but the dead only come back to life in ghost stories, and there must be some other explan—”

Misty silenced the discussion once again.

“
I was watching that,” Charlie said.

“
And you can go out front if you want to keep watching it,” She said, walking over to the bed. He was lying on her side. She slept alone most of the time, but she still had her side of the bed. Charlie scooted over.

“
I was waiting for the crazy one to punch the other guy,” he said, and knocked back some gin.

“
There’s the door.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, drank deeply of her own bottle. When she’d had enough, she capped it, set it on the nightstand, and lay back, kicking up her feet.

“
No,” Charlie said. He set his bottle on the other nightstand and, grunting with the effort, scooted over to her side and pressed himself close. She tensed.

“
Not right now,” she said, closing her eyes and resting her forearm across her face. “Are you nuts?”

“
That’s not what I mean,” he said, rolling onto his side and placing an arm around her. “I just need to be held.”

“
Yeah,” she said, relaxing.

They were asleep within ten minutes. Less than an hour later, they were both awake.

“
Jesus,” Misty said, sitting upright, her heart hammering. Crate stood in the bedroom doorway, rifle in hand. She blinked, realizing that the sound that had awakened her had been that of Crate hammering his fist against the bedroom door.

“
Damn, Crate,” Charlie said, rubbing his chest.

“
Sorry, you two,” Crate said, not looking particularly sorry about anything. “But you really need to wake up.”

“
What is it?” Misty asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

“
Officer Tasgal is here.”

“
He—who?” she said. Her mind felt like it was made of mud. She’d been dreaming, just seconds ago, though she could not remember of what. Images and sensations faded and were lost, and now there was only the bedroom and Crate and Charlie and dim evening light sifted through the curtains and the liquor on the nightstands. “Tasgal?”

“
Yeah,” Crate said, nodding, talking to her as if she were a child. “Officer Tasgal. From Beistle. The one who looks like he’s sixteen. Ringing any bells?”

“
Yeah,” she said, and of course she knew who he was talking about. She’d closed her eyes and thought of Eric Tasgal more than once while with Charlie. “I’m a little fuzzy. I was asleep.”

“
He’s in trouble,” Crate said.

“
Mnn?” she said, standing. Her head spun. The rum had put her down, and it wasn’t through with her.

“
I think he’s been bitten.”

“
Hey, Eric,” she said, stepping from the back and into her store. Eric sat at one of the tables, picking at the frayed and stained red and white checked tablecloth with his right hand. His left rested on his .357 Magnum, which lay on the table between the salt and the pepper.

“
Miss Misty,” he said, looking up at her. Crate was wrong. Tasgal didn’t look sixteen. Typically more like eighteen, she thought, but today he looked a hard thirty. His skin, usually a healthy pink, was pasty. The flesh around his eyes was dark and puffy. The gauze bandage around his right forearm oozed blood.

“
You okay?”

“
I need a drink,” he said.

“
Some coffee?”

“
A drink.”

“
Okay” she said. “Rum or gin?”

“
Rum,” he said. He picked at the blood-soaked bandage and winced.

“
Be right back,” she said.

She stepped past Crate, who stood watching Eric Tasgal with weary eyes. As she left the room, Tasgal said something to Crate. She wasn’t sure what it was.

In the bedroom, Charlie sat rooted to the edge of the bed with booze in his hand and fear in his eyes. She grabbed her rum from the nightstand.

“
What’s going on?” Charlie asked, his eyes wide beneath a creased brow.

“
He needs a drink,” she said, and left. As she walked down the hall, Charlie turned on the television. From the sound of it, the screaming lunatic with the giant glasses was no longer on. The bell above the door rocked back and forth. Crate was gone, no doubt hunkering down on the bench with Bilbo Baggins at his feet.

“
Thanks,” Tasgal said, grasping the bottle of rum by the neck with his left hand. His right hand rested on the table. Misty twisted off the bottle cap and set it on the table. “Double thanks.”

He took a hit from the bottle, just a little one. He made a hissing sound.

“
My pleasure, Eric,” she said, touching the back of the chair before her, steadying herself. She wondered if he could tell how drunk she was. “What happened?”

“
Beistle is a madhouse,” he said, looking up at her and shaking his head, slack-jawed. “It’s just… it’s just gone.” He extended his left hand toward the chair. “Sit down.”

She pulled out the chair, sat down, and watched as he gathered his thoughts. He stared down at table, and she allowed her gaze to drop to the seeping bandage. There was blood on the tablecloth. Tasgal sighed, and the mother inside of her, the mother she never got to be, wanted to place her hand on his. The wound on his arm—the very fact that he’d probably been bitten by one of those things—dictated otherwise. She would not touch him.

She looked at her bottle of Jamaican rum with a sense of loss, wishing she’d grabbed a glass on the way into the store.

“
They’re all dead,” Tasgal said. She looked up from his arm, worried that he noticed her staring at it. He hadn’t. His eyes were on the bottle of rum, which he knocked back once more.

“
Everybody in town?”

“
God, no,” he said, looking her in the eye. “Jim, Clark, fucking Cardo. Sheriff Kosana. Every cop in Beistle.”

“
My God,” she said. She brought her hand to her mouth, mostly because it was what she was probably supposed to do. In truth, the news did not shock her. It saddened her, yes, but shocked? No. She’d watched the news for the past two days. She’d seen the mutilated dead bodies of three people who bought from her several times a week staggering through her parking lot. She was officially through being shocked.

Eleven

“
We got the first call, God, was that just yesterday?” Tasgal stared at her, eyes wide, not waiting for an answer. She saw the gears of realization grinding behind his eyes. “No, yeah. Two days ago. I’d just come into the station. Was expecting another day of doing nothing, you know?”

“
I know,” she said, suddenly wanting to hear what he had to say. Needing to hear it.

“
It started at the hospital. It came through the switchboard as an assault, but by the time I got there, there was more than one report, and…”

He drank a little more rum, and then held the bottle out to her. She shook her head.

“
No. You should pace yourself.”

“
Gah,” he said, looking at the bottle as if it were a bee that had just stung him. “You’re probably right.”

“
I drink a lot of water when I drink,” she said, and just like that they were talking casual. Just shooting the shit.

“
Huh?”

“
Yeah. No hangover the next day.”

“
Huh,” he said, looking around. “There anything to eat?”

“
Of course. Cold cut sandwich okay?”

“
Perfect.”

“
Coming right up,” she said, wishing he’d said a candy bar or a bag of chips would do. Her eyes felt like they each wanted to do their own thing, and she wasn’t convinced that she could make it to the deli.

She managed to get there, taking her time, laughing once when she knocked over some canned soup. She downed a cup of water and made Tasgal a hearty sandwich, piling ham and roast beef and three different cheeses high between slices of home-baked bread. She grabbed a bag of chips from the rack, and served it all up with a cup of ice water.

He downed the first half of the sandwich in silence then looked up at her.

“
Mm,” he said, pulling a napkin from the fingerprint-stained silver dispenser and wiping his mouth. A drop of blood fell from his bandage and onto the table. He wiped it up. “God, this hurts.”

“
Oh, damn,” she said, hopping up and returning to the table with a bottle of aspirin. She shook two into his hand, and when he asked for more she tapped out three more. He downed them with ice water. He was done with the rum for now.

“
I was listening to the radio on the way over here, and let me tell you, I don’t give a shit what some of those jokers are saying. These are dead people.”

“
I know,” she said. “You probably saw the…” she nodded toward the front door.

“
Yeah.”

“
Mark Willits and his two kids.”

“
God,” he said. “I saw Connie at the hospital. She was dead. I saw Mark and Junior a little later, I think it was.” He frowned, looking around the room and blinking his eyes. He looked like he was about to pass out. She wondered if it was booze or blood loss that was taking hold.

“
Did you lose a lot of blood?” she said, nodding toward his arm.

“
No,” he said, shaking his head and looking hard at the rum. “It hurts like a bastard, but it’s not that bad. Still, you know, what the hell does this mean?”

She didn’t say anything.

“
I think it’s starting to get infected,” he said, eyeing his right hand curled atop the table like some dead thing. Were the fingertips a little bluish? “Think maybe you can cut it off for me? I’m sure you got something in the deli that could do the job fast and clean.”

She opened her mouth, and that was all. No words came. Tasgal’s smile surprised her. “Kidding,” he said. He frowned again. “I think. And look at this,” he indicated the bottle of rum. “I contaminated your rum.”

“
No,” she said, trying to sound as if the thought hadn’t crossed her mind. “It’s—”

“
I understand,” he said. “I should have asked for a glass.”

She waited for him to resume his fractured tale, and suddenly she wanted another hit from her rum. She was grateful for the other bottle in her kitchen.

“
I watched Mark Willits and Junior pull Nellie to the ground,” he said, and his chest heaved once. She thought he was going to cry. He didn’t. “I wanted to shoot them, both of them. Nellie too, because by then there was no helping her. She was still alive, but, you know?”

Misty nodded once, trying to remember what the news had said about bites. She’d heard so much over the past forty-eight hours, so many conflicting reports, so much confusion.

“
By then, I’d already gotten this,” he shook his head. “We were at Proust’s. You know Proust’s, right?”

“
Yeah,” Misty said. Proust’s was a large supermarket owned and operated by Eddie Proust and his family. Proust was a loudmouth and an asshole, and Misty wouldn’t lose any sleep if Tasgal’s tale ended with Proust getting his windpipe eaten out.

“
We answered a call there,” he said. “Clark and me. This was after the hospital, I think.” He looked confused. “Wait, yeah, of course it was after the hospital. After the hospital and the funeral home. By then the National Guard was in town. Not a lot of them, and I got the idea that they were just as confused and messed up as the rest of us. Things weren’t holding together all that much.”

The bell above the door rang. Misty jumped, and Tasgal’s hand twitched toward his gun. Crate shuffled in. He saw the looks on their faces and raised his eyebrows, amused.

“
More of them?” Misty said?

Crate shook his head, looked at her as if she were stupid. “You should drink a little more,” he said. “Me? I’m gonna smoke. Want some?”

Misty blinked at him.

“
What?” Crate asked, half grinning. “You afraid the Beaver here is going to slap on the cuffs if we break out the grass?”

Tasgal laughed once.

“
See?” Crate said, and vanished into the back.

Tasgal looked at her, his face scrunched up, trying to remember where he was.

“
Proust’s,” she said.

“
Yeah, Eddie Proust had a line of about fifty people outside of his store, and he called us out to make sure nobody went nuts and looted the place. There were two of us. Kosana was dead by that point, so things were already falling apart.”

“
How?” She asked. She’d had a short fling with Mac Kosana, back when she was young and he was a deputy.

“
Some drunk from up in the hills blew his chest out with a shotgun.”

Misty gasped. Despite her earlier feelings, real shock was setting in. Tasgal made sense, but he wasn’t telling a complete story, but what he was saying was real, it had all happened to him. She could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. It was in the air, and she suddenly found herself quite afraid. It was just outside her door, and before long it would be inside, looking for something to eat.