Pray To Stay Dead (28 page)

He stepped to the cot and sank to his knees.

“
Kim,” he said, stroked her face. Her swollen eyelids fluttered. She licked her lips and turned her head toward the sound of his voice.

“
Rich,” she said. “Oh, God, Rich.”

“
Shh,” he said, allowing his eyes to move from her face and across her naked body. There were bite marks on her breasts and stomach, livid with infection. The work of the living, not the dead, they were shallow and arranged in a way that suggested intent and intelligence—one around each nipple, and several stamped in an uneven line down her stomach, toward her crotch, which buzzed with flies.

“
He hurt me,” she said. “B... bastard. I gave up...”

“
I’m going to get you out of here, Kim,” he said, tugging at the rope binding her waist to the cot. He slid his fingers along its length, followed it beneath the cot, and found the knot. It gave with little effort. He slid the rope away from her stomach and threw it to the ground.

“
Oh my God, oh my God, are you really there?” She asked, coughing once more, spraying blood. “God, are you there?” Her hands hooked into claws. The flesh around her wrists was raw.

“
I’m here, Kim,” he said, leaning close, his left hand on her right shoulder, his right hand atop her head, stroking her hair.

“
God,” she said, turning her head and trying to look at him.

“
No, no,” he said, gently pushing her head to the cot. “I’m going to find something to cut these chains.” He stood up.

“
Don’t go,” she said, panic infusing her listless voice. “
Don’t you fucking leave me.
”

“
I’m not leaving, Kim,” he said, walking to the closed door and removing the hunter’s jacket from the hook. It was old and rotting and filthy, but it would do. He draped it across Kimberly, covering her from breasts to thighs.

“
What is that?”

“
Just a jacket,” he said. “To keep you warm.”

“
I hurt,” she said. “He hurt me.”

“
I know, honey,” he said, and the words hurt him. He’d covered her to give her a sense of comfort, yes, but that wasn’t the only reason. Guilt and lousy feeling washed over him. He didn’t want to look between her legs again.

“
Where are they?”

“
I don’t know,” he said, looking over his shoulder, through the open door and into the forest beyond. “I got away. I killed one of them.”

“
You did?” She asked, her body tensing.

“
I think so.”

“
Good,” she said, relaxing. “That’s good. They deserve to die. All of them. Where’s Brock? Have you seen her?”

“
I don’t know.”

“
She’s still alive.”

“
Is she?”

“
Yeah.” She sucked in air, quivered, her arms breaking out in goosebumps. “The one who did this to me said so. Said they were keeping her.”

“
Oh, God,” Richard said.

One of the dead bodies grunted, and Richard jumped, his heart pounding. Never mind Jacob and whether or not he was dead—there were others, and they could arrive at any moment.

Just get the fuck out of here,
he thought.
Get help. Come back. But get out now.

Kimberly coughed again. He fingers quivered above her head.

She’s just gonna slow you down. Get you killed.

“
They killed Guy, didn’t they?” Her chest heaved beneath the jacket, and tears squeezed between her swollen eyelids.

“
Hey,” he said, trying to sound as soothing as possible and succeeding only in sounding terrified. “Just calm down, okay? I’m going to find a saw, or something.”

“
Urr,” the other corpses said, watching him.

“
Okay,” she said, and he stepped away from the cot and toward the closed door. “Rich? What the hell is happening?”

“
I don’t know,” Richard said, seizing the doorknob, turning it, pushing open the door, and revealing a smaller room. Three of its walls were lined with shelves. The ground was strewn with junk—boxes, an old lamp, a bicycle without wheels. Very little light reached the small room. Richard looked up, stared in disbelief at the light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

“
Oh,” he said, reaching up and pulling the small chain that hung from the porcelain socket. The bulb flared to life and dim light filled the room. Kicking aside the bike frame, he stepped to one of the cluttered shelves and pushed things around. Spark plugs and screwdrivers and nails pattered the ground between his feet.

“
Rich,” Kimberly said.

“
I’m here,” he said, pushing a stack of warped paperbacks to the ground. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Grunting, she struggled, rattled her chains. Richard moved on to the next shelf. Behind him, the cot creaked.

“
Goddammit, Kimberly,” he said. “Just stop, okay? I’m right here. I’m looking for a fucking saw. Dammit.”

He ransacked one shelf and moved on to the next. Lightbulbs shattered at his feet. Rusty nails and screws showered the ground. He sliced open his thumb on a razor blade.

There was no saw.

He could shoot Kimberly’s chains, but he neither wanted to attract the attention of the others or waste valuable ammunition. He had six shells, and he wanted to make them count.

“
Dammit,” he said, turning around.

Jacob knelt on one knee beside Kimberly, who writhed. He’d tossed aside the old jacket. His left hand covered her mouth. His right hand clutched the knife that Richard had left behind. It was buried to the hilt in the soft flesh of her stomach. He drew it downward, toward the thick tuft of hair between her legs.

“
No,” Richard said, pulling the gun from his pocket.

Jacob looked up a second before the first of three bullets tore into his chest and throat. Spurting blood, he collapsed onto Kimberly’s gaping stomach. The dead bodies hanging from the ceiling kicked their feet, rocked and spun and dripped.

Richard dropped the gun and rushed to Kimberly’s side, nearly tripping on Jacob’s feet. He pulled Jacob away, dropped him into a gurgling heap.

“
No,” he said, kneeling beside Kimberly. Blood welled around the dark fissure in her stomach. Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell. The smell of Kimberly’s insides filled the air, mingled with the stale mildew reek of the shack and the stink of the bound dead bodies spinning in place at the ends of their chains.

“
It’s cold,” Kimberly said through clenched teeth. “It’s getting cold.”

“
Dammit, dammit, dammit,” he said loudly in an attempt to drown out the voice in his head, the one that told him that this was too bad, sure, but at least he had a chance of getting away now.

“
You fucking Tatum?” Kimberly said.

Mouth open, Richard stared at her, certain that he was hearing things. She wouldn’t be. No, not now.

“
Tatum?” she gasped, her head lolling, her rolling eyes mere slivers of light and dark beneath swollen eyelids. He allowed them to find him.

He stared at her, blinking, unable to answer, and it was answer enough.

“
Asshole,” she said, convulsing. Dark fluid arced from her mouth and her final breath rattled into silence. Her back arched, relaxed. Gas escaped her body and the flies gathered between her legs took flight. And that was it.

Shaking, he stared at her until Jacob pawed at his ankles, startling him. He yelped, hopping away. Jacob sat up, head lolling, eyes wide and vacant. He kicked Jacob in the face.

Jacob’s corpse tried to crawl to its hands and knees. Richard kicked it again, looked around. A hammer lay on the floor in the corner beneath one of the hanging corpses. Its head was sheathed in rust, but a hammer was a hammer.

It was heavy in his hands. The handle was filthy but solid.

He picked up the orange jacket and kicked Jacob’s struggling corpse onto its back, draped the jacket across Jacob’s head. Kneeling beside the living corpse, he swung the hammer until the dead man’s skull became lumpy beneath the jacket and the loud orange cloth was chilled with red blood.

The cot creaked. Kimberly’s fingers worked the air. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. Her head moved from side to side. Her swollen eyelids quivered but did not part. Her dead gaze did not find him.

He peeled the jacket from Jacob’s ruined head and draped it across Kimberly’s face.

“
I’m sorry,” he said.

When it was finished, he stepped outside and, his hands on his knees, vomited. He took a few steps away from the shack when he remembered the gun. When he stepped into the stinking building, the dead bodies hanging from the ceiling jerked and swayed and followed his passage with listless eyes. He picked up the gun.

Three bullets.

Ten minutes later, he looked back. There was no sign of the shack. The clouds had burned away. The sun’s position in the sky told him that it was going on two o’clock. The shadows told him that he was moving west.

He moved downhill, in the direction in which he was certain he would find the highway, but after nearly two hours of moving he accepted the fact that he was lost. He backtracked for a while, veering south, and within thirty minutes he came to accept the very real possibility that he’d gotten himself completely turned around.

He came across a steep drop, one far too steep for him to attempt alone with no gear and no help. A sloped jumble of rocks, tree trunks, and fallen branches large enough to crush a car, with no way to tell what was solid and what was delicately balanced.

He worked his way along the edge, hoping the ground would level out and the shack would come into view again, or something, anything at all aside from this edgeless, featureless hilly country. The clouds were gone and so were the shadows. The sun was headed down. No way to keep track of time now. He walked as long as he could but if he walked in the dark, he would fall in the dark. He settled against a redwood towering from a particularly steep incline. His back to the ground, the tree beneath his feet, he lay watching, the gun held to his chest, as the last of the light bled away.

He swatted bugs and saw shapes that weren’t there. He may have cried. He tried to keep his eyes open, but in the end he was like any tired living thing. He fell asleep.

Twenty-One

It was a little after three in the morning. The overhead fluorescents were off, and inside, Misty’s was lit just by the glow of the signs above the beer coolers and the green electric face of the 7-UP clock hanging upon the wall at the back of the deli. The hands stopped working at 4:17 a long time ago, but the bulb had worked fine a long time and wasn’t going to quit now just on account of the end of the world.

Misty could hear one of the things moving around outside, its dead feet whispering across the wooden boards of the porch that ran along the front of the store. She wondered who it was, who it had been, and her heart did something fast and funny behind her pendulous old breasts. She stared at the door, expecting at any moment for it to rattle in its frame and swing inward. The bell would jingle and sway, and the dead would spill in with outstretched arms and blood-smeared lips.

Crate was asleep in her bed. After another long day spent sitting on the porch and guarding the store, he’d come inside with Bilbo Baggins at his heel, locked the door, and informed her that he was going to sleep and that she had better not wake him unless the dead bastards were in the store and stepping on the Rice Krispies. Not long after, Charles had staggered from the back and thrown himself grunting onto the chair across from Stacy, who sat fingering the crystal that hung from her neck. Neither of them seemed to have noticed one another. Stacy’s gaze had been on the television, and Charles—palms pressed to his temples, clutching fingers splayed—looked like a man trying to hold something broken together.

Now both were asleep, Stacy on a cot that Misty had retrieved from the bedroom closet, Charles on the three large seat cushions he’d removed from the sofa and arranged on the ground before the coolers. “I don’t want to be away from you,” he’d told Misty, voice slurred and stifling a belch, placing the cushions on the floor with slow determination, his face grim.

After Stacy and Charles had sailed into drunken oblivion, Misty had turned off the television and sat alone in silence, her ass hurting from sitting in the same chair all damned day, her eyelids growing heavy with exhaustion. She wanted to go into the back and crawl into bed next to Crate and sleep until this was over, or, at the very least, until tomorrow. Let Charles and Stacy Starshine serve as their frontline defense—there was a sturdy lock on the door leading from the store and into her house.

Even though she’d reminded him that the large light over the parking lot could be shut off at the breaker box, or perhaps because she’d done so, Crate had taken it out with one well-placed shot from his rifle. The place sat in darkness. The store would not be a beacon to the dead. The living, on the other hand, well. A lot of people knew where it was.

She turned on the television and clicked through the channels, hopeful that some programmer would be merciful enough to give them a break from the endless stream of horror. Was an
Andy Griffith
rerun at three in the morning too much to ask for, even one with a ticker at the bottom of the screen letting visitors to Mayberry know just how much closer they were to drowning in their own blood?