Pray To Stay Dead (23 page)

“
If it’s one of Uncle Sam’s home brews, it could probably smell like a burger and fries if they wanted it to.”

“
We should stay in for awhile.”

“
Wind’s still blowing east,” Crate said.

“
We should move his car,” Misty said.

Crate scratched his cheek and grunted.

“
Someone could come looking for him.”

“
Well, then, he was here for a little while today, and then he went out into the woods because someone was yelling for help.” Crate looked pleased. “Never came back.”

“
Yeah, okay,” Misty said. “That’s fine, but people see a cop car and they see help.”

Crate laughed: a brief, low rattle. “You and me, we know different people.”

It made her smile. Sometimes the old man wasn’t half bad. She stretched with a yawn. “You know what I mean. It’s like a beacon.”

“
Oh,” Crate said. “So now you want to start turning folks away.”

Her smile broke. She allowed herself to look at the TV, which showed a throng of corpses stumbling around the parking lot of what appeared to be a hospital, then back to Crate, who seemed to be expecting an answer.

She squeezed her hands together. “I don’t think we have much of a choice.”

“
Yep,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “We need to get the lights off in here, and I should go out and shoot out the big light.”

“
Fuck, Crate.”

“
What?”

“
Shoot out the big light?”

“
Yeah.”

“
You can turn it off at the breaker box, you lunatic.”

“
Oh,” he said, grinning. “Yeah. But first, we have to finish things up.”

In the bedroom, Charlie snored. Tasgal was fast asleep when they’d left him, his face pressed to the carpet. No longer clammy and cold, he burned with fever.

“
We should shoot him,” Crate said.

“
We’re not going to shoot him.”

“
We
wouldn’t be shooting him, Mis. I would.”

“
You’re not shooting him,” she said. “Not now you’re not. If you have to later, then you have to, but not now. Maybe there will be a vaccine or something.”

“
You never know,” Crate said. There was not an ounce of hope in his voice.

“
Right,” Misty said.

She dropped to her knees and bound Tasgal’s ankles with tape.

“
We should move him,” Crate said. “Get him out of here. God, we could be infected already, keeping him in here.”

“
Then there isn’t much point in moving him, is there?”

“
You know what I mean, woman,” Crate said, looking down at her, frowning. “We can’t keep untying him every time he has to take a piss, and eventually he’s gonna shit his pants. You want to deal with that?”

Misty stared at Crate.

“
I’m not wiping his ass,” he said.

“
Dammit, Crate, what do you want me to do?”

“
He’s gonna die, and then he’s going to wake up or whatever it is they do. He’s already dead. He needs to be put out of his misery.”

“
We’ll move him.”

Crate stared at her, frowning deeply, his bushy eyebrows drawing together. He clutched his rifle, the forefinger of his right hand less than an inch from the trigger, the skin over his knuckles taught. She thought he was going to do it, anyway, just pump a round into the back of Tasgal’s head and be done with it—and what could she possibly do then?

But he didn’t shoot Tasgal. He listened to her, as he always did, head down, like an old dog long broken.

“
Okay,” he said, the tension going out of his withered old frame. He seemed to melt a little. “My place?”

“
Yeah,” she said. “Your place.”

Crate’s place was a small one-room apartment out back—little more than four walls, a roof, a bed, a fridge, and a window with a rattling window unit. It had started as a shed, and Crate had gradually converted it to a more livable environment, a place where, he said, he could go when they weren’t getting along, where he could read in peace while she watched her soap operas and her game shows. Eventually the place became his place, and she slept alone.

“
Okay,” he said, following a few strained and silent moments. “How?”

“
The wheelbarrow.”

“
That’ll do it,” he said. “When?”

“
Right now.”

Sprawled on the floor with his hands bound behind his back, Tasgal grunted.

Eighteen

“
Are you okay?” The girl asked. Colleen opened her mouth and tried to speak, and if any words came out, she did not hear them. She looked down at the amorphous red dress spread around her like blood in a crime scene photo, and felt the soft moist blades of grass beneath her knees and between her fingers, like gravel and broken glass. She tried and failed to make sense of the scene before her.

It was a playground. There was grass and a concrete path and a swing set and some monkey bars. A bench and a picnic table and a barbecue pit and trees and potted plants and a sandbox, and she was being held captive by the very same people who had forced her to suck her boyfriend’s cock before they sliced it off inches away from her face.

And now there were children. A smiling girl of maybe six, cherubic twin boys with yellow hair and eyes blue like the sky, and a toddler banging together two from a vast array of brightly-colored blocks.

She opened her mouth again, and nothing came out.

“
I think she’s sick,” said the girl, looking back at the women seated side by side on the bench, and they all stood, their dresses fluttering like ghosts, it seemed to Colleen, but her eyes, sticky with tears and imbalanced with delirium, had invented the flutter. The air was still. Still because of the high wall encircling the courtyard. The wind sighed through the tress around her, around the enclosure in which she found herself, failing again and again to blink away the image of her boyfriend’s dick lying in the dirt, but it barely reached her—was little more than a whisper against her scalp.

The women approached and encircled and settled around her, their dresses pooling and mingling with her own, a crime scene photo of a massacre.

Guy screamed defiance and she took him into her mouth and the blade came down and the blood was so damned bright and hot. It spilled in a hot gush across her hands, where it cooled in a heartbeat and dried and flaked away.

She blinked, and it wasn’t all of the women before her, just the girl and the first woman, the one the man had called… what had he called her? The other women watched. So too did the twins, who approached Colleen. One of the women on the bench called to them, told them to step back, and they did.

The girl said her name was Lissa. Colleen tried to hold onto that, saying the name over and over in her head, like a mantra, holding it to her heart like a talisman. Lissa, Lissa, Lissa, and the dead are coming to life and eating the living and the last time she saw Guy he was sitting with his back to the truck and packing his groin with dirt and grass. Blood pumped through his fingers like water from a hose on a hot summer day.

Lissa said something and then Beth or Embeth or whatever her name was spoke and Colleen looked from one to the other, one to the other. She struggled to make sense of their faces and words. Lissa was six years old, and she spoke with the intelligence and maturity of someone much older. She found her brothers to be terribly annoying, and was thrilled to have Colleen around. Lissa took her by the hand, and Embeth asked the girl if she’d keep an eye on Colleen for a second.

“
Sure,” Lissa said, and Colleen wondered how many times her mind could cave in upon itself before she was screaming at the sky and ripping out her own eyes. She wondered if her mom was blinking into the darkness of her casket, and if the old man with the gun, Crate, was still enjoying himself. She thought of Daniel and Kimberly and Richard and the corpses heaped upon the gravel outside of MISTY’S FOOD AND GAS. Or had it been GAS AND FOOD? She couldn’t remember, just as she couldn’t remember when the last time things had been normal.

Her mouth was open. She had no idea how long it had been open, and she closed it. The woman—Embeth, her name was Embeth, though the old guy with the beard had called her Beth—floated away on her dress like a ghost, and the girl talked and talked and talked. She must have been six, with her sexless body and her little boy’s face and her missing teeth. Her hair was in a braid down her back. Smiling, she asked if Colleen wanted to play Pat-a-Cake. Colleen said nothing and lifted her hands. She barely felt the girl’s little hands upon hers.

The boys watched.

“
You’re my new best friend,” Lissa said, nearly whispering. “I like Sally but she’s quiet and doesn’t like to play. Do you know some games?”

Colleen blinked, her head spinning. She tried to focus on the girl’s face, but she just kept seeing the shot they were playing on the TV at Misty’s. The woman stumbling around the morgue with her chest splayed open, her breasts peeled away in symmetrical folds from her ribcage.

“
It’s going to be okay,” the girl said, and Colleen tried to smile. It felt like a wound on her face and she choked back the impulse to throttle the girl, to sink her thumbs into her windpipe. To listen to it crunch beneath her hand. “You’re safe here. We’re all safe here.”

Safe here. Safe here. Did the girl know what was going on outside? Colleen closed her eyes, and there was Guy’s dick again. Guy’s dick, and Daniel’s face framed against the fabric of the couch in her mother’s house, head jerking, hair dancing. Pot churning in the air. And Kimberly.

She tried to remember the last time she’d seen Kimberly, Kimberly who had been coming apart since the deer; her best friend since childhood, a sweet and honest girl, a friend, was not here in this strange place of women and children. Why was this, and where was Kimberly right now?

Was she alive? Were any of them alive?

Her heart hurt, her stomach tore at itself, and still the girl talked and talked, holding Colleen’s hand and stroking it and assuring her that she was just a little sick and that she’d be better in no time.

Colleen stared at the girl, trying not to want to kill her. Her mother was dead and her friends were gone and the dead were walking around, but this girl, this not-very-pretty girl had done nothing wrong. Colleen put her hands on the girl’s shoulders, a gesture of intimacy, and stared harder. Colleen stared and told herself not to hurt the girl, she was innocent, even as she felt the tips of her thumbs come to rest on the girl’s collarbones and then give a slight little crush, like testing a pear for ripeness. She intended for it to be harder but couldn’t get her fingers to obey.

The girl seemed surprised and Colleen let her back away.

The twins were running in circles and babbling. The women on the bench went on sitting, kept on watching her. There was a second bench nearby, totally empty, but they were packed together on the other bench. Embeth loomed over them, watching Colleen. The little boy with the blocks could not be bothered to do anything other than bang them together upon his colorful blanket. Colleen wasn’t sure, but she thought Sally was the youngest one, the pregnant one who looked like she was about to burst. And there was something about the blanket, dammit, with its candy-colored geometric patterns.

Lissa prattled on, talking about her brothers and the time her father took her down to the river to fish and she fell in and almost drowned. Colleen tried not to vomit, tried to keep the image of the heap of corpses in the parking lot. She waited and waited for the next horror, and all that came was the girl’s smile and the laughter of the twins. The
thok thok thok
of the toddler banging his blocks together.

“
Papa Huff made those for him,” Lissa said.

Colleen stared at her.

“
The blocks. He makes the neatest things.”

The twins raced by, screaming laughter. They looked no older than four, straddling the line between toddler and big boy, their faces big-cheeked and baby-like, their bodies beginning to elongate. Identically dressed and chasing one another in endless figure-eights, they looked like some kind of optical illusion.

They ran up to Colleen and stood watching her, panting. One of them had his small hands splayed on his knees. Their eyebrows were so blond they were nearly invisible, standing out only because their faces were nearly purple with exertion.

“
Hey,” one of them said.

“
Hey,” said the other, smiling.

“
Are you Miss Colleen?” The first one said.

“
You’re our new mommy,” the second one said.

Colleen felt her face go numb and wanted to ask what they meant but her tongue was made of… she couldn’t really tell, but it wasn’t made of tongue, that much was certain. “No,” she finally made the non-tongue say.

“
You’re not?” They both asked, just out of sync with one another.

“
Sure she is, you dummies,” Lissa said, beaming.

“
I’m Jack,” the first one said, jabbing a small thumb into his chest.

“
I’m David,” said the other, showing her a mouth full of little white baby teeth. “We kill giants.”