Pray To Stay Dead (33 page)

Panting, she stood, still clutching Huff’s braids. His severed head swung back and forth, tapped against her left leg. He lifted her arm and stared into Huff’s eyes.

She wondered if he could still see her, if the dead ever stopped seeing at all, even for a second, and then tossed his head to the floor. It bounced, gave half a roll and settled against the wall.

Dropping the knife, she looked at Sally, who stood staring at Colleen, her mouth open, her eyes wide.

Sally said half a word, pressed her hand to her mouth, and, leaning forward as much as her condition would allow, vomited onto her stomach and onto the floor between her feet.

Colleen sat on the edge of the bed, gasping and naked, her right hand gloved in Huff’s blood, her inner thighs tacky with her own blood. She pulled the blanket toward her and wiped the blood from her hands. The blanket wasn’t very absorbent, and for a second it seemed like she was just smearing the blood around.

“
It’s not over yet,” Sally said. “Max will be here soon.” She squatted, picked up the knife. Wiped the blade on her own blanket. “Be back,” she said and left.

Raking her hand back and forth across her pillowcase, Colleen stared at the body of Huffington Niebolt, lying headless upon the floor at her feet. To her left, the shattered window was a black door leading into the night, and Huff’s neck ended in a puddle of blood that looked too bright, too red, pooled there on the thick carpet. There was blood and there was blood: Huff’s blood, and her own, stamped upon his back as she rode him. His severed head lay in the corner, eyes searching, toothless mouth working.

Out front, children cried. Sally spoke and Evie yelled, and someone else—maybe Mathilda, maybe Embeth—screamed. The tumbling sound of a struggle rolled toward the bedroom. Colleen dragged her gaze from Huffington Niebolt’s impossibly alive head to the door, where Evie stood, enraged, a small lamp from one of the living room end tables in her hand. She lifted it and lashed out, and the lamp spun end over end toward Colleen, the shade striking her shoulder.

“
You killed him,” Evie screamed. “You fucking bitch,
you killed him.
”

There was motion behind Evie. She gasped, stumbling into the bedroom, reaching around and clutching at her back. Her hands came away bright red. She spun, and Sally, pregnant and massive, her lips pulled back from her teeth in an animal sneer, pressed the knife into her once, twice, again and again and again.

Evie hit the wall and slid to the floor, gasping and wheezing, sputtering and twitching and spitting crimson from five or six different holes in her back and chest. She slid to the floor, tracing thick red lines down the wall to her back.

Her lips glistening a whorish shade of red, Evie coughed once and looked up at Sally, who bent over and pressed the knife into her throat three times quick. Her hand was a blur. There was one last jet of blood, garishly bright, like a cartoon splash of red paint, and she fell facedown onto the floor, her head inches from Papa Huff’s neck stump. Their blood mingled.

“
I guess I was wrong about her,” Sally said, dropping the knife and stepping over to where Colleen sat, shaking, a bloody wad of blanket clutched to her stomach. Sally grabbed Huff’s gun and left Colleen alone with the dead.

“
Wait,” Colleen said, but Sally was gone.

“
Thilda,” Sally cried. “Just stay where you are. Stay with the kids. Everything is okay.”

Colleen stood, her body wracked with the shakes, aware only that she had to get out of this room. Her eyes drifted across the blood, Huff’s and Evie’s—God, Evie, she was just finishing up some quilts, and now she lay in a bloody rag-doll sprawl, her mouth open and her blood unfurling, her eyes wide and dead, if only for a little while.

Out front, the door opened, and a voice boomed, and at first Colleen thought it must be Huff, but that couldn’t be right, could it? Huff was right here, his severed head lying on its side and gumming the air, his headless body facedown with dark menstrual blood smeared in a line down the middle of its back.

“
What the hell is going on?”

“
Oh, God, Max,” Sally said, hysterical. “He’s dead.”

“
What?”

“
Don’t go in there. It’s awful. Samson attacked him and he’s—”

“
Shut up,” Max roared, and Colleen winced. She looked around, wondering just what it was she should do. Huff’s head stared at her. Her body quivered. She couldn’t feel her fingers. It had to be shock. Maxwell Niebolt stepped into the bedroom. He looked down at his fallen father, and his face contorted. He groaned. Sally appeared behind him and pressed the barrel of the gun to the back of his head. Another deafening roar, and Maxwell Niebolt’s forehead burst. He crumpled to the floor, his face a shining and spurting red mask, his arms flopping this way and that.

The place was silent again, but for the sound of one of the kids crying somewhere. Or maybe all of them.

“
Get his gun,” Sally said. A gun identical to Huff’s lay near Max’s curled fingers. “Oh,” Sally said, pressed a hand to her stomach, and winced.

“
G-guh,” Colleen said, standing, quivering, a woman lost naked in a blizzard. She expected to see her breath churning in plumes from her mouth. She tiptoed shaking through blood and retrieved the gun. She pointed a finger at Sally’s stomach with a question dangling on her lips.

“
No,” Sally said, frowning. She gripped her large stomach in both hands. “Not now. But soon.”

Colleen leaned down to pluck her bra from the ground. It lay mere inches away from Huff’s blood, from Evie’s socked foot, which twitched.

“
Jesus,” Sally said, taking a bowlegged step toward Evie’s corpse.

Colleen offered Max’s gun to Sally.

“
I already have one,” she said, incapable of looking away from Evie’s stirring corpse.

Colleen looked up, and together they watched Evie’s corpse struggle to its knees. Its movements were labored and heavy and confused, like those of some thing moving for the first time after a life of paralysis. It didn’t look like the others Colleen had seen, hadn’t taken on the wan, waxy sheen of death. It looked alive, vital, if not for the eyes. Its pupils were massive; its irises thin blue circles.

Adrenaline shot through Colleen, burning her.

“
Jesus,” Sally said, looking from Evie’s corpse to Huff’s head and back again, her gaze settling on Colleen. “It’s real.”

Evie’s corpse looked around, mimicking something like confusion, and when it found Sally, recognition of some sort replaced confusion.

“
Ung,” it said, and tried to stand.

The final gunshot of the night. Colleen jumped and shrieked and dropped her bra, which she realized she had been twisting and kneading.

Evie slumped forward, the left side of her head misshapen, her brains spread in a thick line across her back.

“
Get dressed.” Sally said.

Twenty-Three

“
He’s dead?” Mathilda asked for the third or fourth time. In the children’s room, someone wept. “He’s really dead?”

“
Yes,” Sally said, tugging Mathilda toward the couch “Come on.”

Colleen looked around, unsure what to do with herself. The gun felt unnatural in her hand. It felt wrong. But putting it down felt worse. Leaving it behind felt like suicide. She’d gotten as dressed as she could, but dressed consisted of her bra and panties—her gown lay beneath Huff’s headless body, soaked through with blood.

Down the hall to her left, the sound of weeping reached a fever pitch. Mathilda looked back at her, but Colleen was already on it. She stepped into the nursery to find Lissa sitting on the floor in the dim glow of a Mickey Mouse nightlight, holding the wailing and nameless child to her chest and rocking him back and forth. The twins sat on a mat in the corner, looking puffy-faced and confused. One of them drank from a sippy cup; the other held a stuffed bear to his chest. Huff Junior sat behind the bars of his crib, a little convict with snot on his lip and tears on his cheeks. He wasn’t crying now, but it didn’t look like it would take much to set him off.

“
Hey,” Colleen said, placing the gun atop the diaper changing table to her left.

“
Mama Colleen,” Lissa said. “Is everything okay?”

“
We’re going to be okay,” Colleen said. “How is he?”

“
I can’t get him to stop.”

The nameless boy wailed, his angry little red hands held up before his face, rigid fingers splayed. Lissa pressed the pacifier into his mouth. He swatted it away and it bounced off of Lissa’s knee and onto the carpet.

Colleen stepped to where the girl sat and reached down for the child.

“
Oh, God,” Lissa said, pulling the child away. “Are you hurt?”

“
No,” Colleen said, looking down at her hands. She didn’t get it all – there was dried blood beneath her fingernails and in the creases of her knuckles, the thin lines at the back of her wrists.

“
What happened?” Lissa said. “We heard a gun.”

“
Yes,” Colleen said, not knowing what to say, holding her hands to her naked stomach. “Someone shot a gun, but we’re okay.”

“
Who shot a gun?” Lissa said, hysteria gnawing at the edges of her voice. “Who got shot?”

“
Just wait, okay?” Colleen said, suddenly firm. “Just be quiet for a second and let me help.”

Lissa snapped her mouth shut and angled her body so that her shoulder, and not the infant in her arms, was facing Colleen. In his little cell of wooden bars, Huff Junior pawed around in search of something. Finding it, he plopped his pacifier into his mouth and sat watching Colleen as she returned to the changing table and searched for wet wipes.

The blood came away with ease. Colleen pressed her right foot to the lever that raised the lid of the diaper bin, letting loose the odor of baby shit. She tossed the pink-stained wads atop the old diapers and let the slid slam shut. Her hands clean, she went first to Little Huff’s crib, sliding her fingers through the child’s hair and whispering to him.

“
Everything is okay, kid,” she said, stroking his forehead. The results were instantaneous: Little Huff’s eyelids grew heavy. “Good. Now got to sleep.”

Lissa rose to her feet and held out the weeping infant, who grew silent within seconds of being held to Colleen’s chest.

“
He likes you,” Lissa said.

“
I guess so,” Colleen said, looking around. She was suddenly cold. “Can I have a blanket?”

“
Sure,” Lissa said, and walked over to the small dresser next to the changing table. One of the twins yawned. The other, the one holding the sippy cup, had fallen asleep leaning against the wall. The nightlight to his left threw his misshapen shadow across the wall in a black arc. His brother took the sippy cup from him and knocked it back. Liquid sloshed, and the kid’s fat cheeks deflated.

“
You should get back in bed,” Colleen told him.

“
I tired,” he said. “Carry me.”

“
Arms full, little man. Why don’t you—” Colleen stopped. Throughout her time in the kids’ room, she had been aware of the hushed voices of Sally and Mathilda in the next room. She could not make out what they were saying, not all of it, only that Sally was doing most of the talking, and that both of them seemed calm. A new voice had joined them, one considerably less calm.

“
Oh, damn,” Colleen said, facing Lissa, who stood with a blanket in her hands and a frown on her face. Her eyes were on the door leading into the hall. Out front, someone screamed:

“
Let me in there right now.
”

“
Stay here, okay?” Colleen said, gently placing the infant next to Huff Junior. The infant’s eyes popped open. He looked confused and terrified.

“
That’s not where he goes,” Lissa said, and someone grunted, slammed against a wall.

Colleen hissed low. “Stay here. Okay?”

“
Okay,” Lissa said, sniffing once. “You don’t have to yell.”

Colleen grabbed the gun, stepped out of the room, and closed the door behind her, locked it. On the other side, the infant wailed, but Colleen barely heard it over the sound coming from the bedroom in which she had killed Huffington Niebolt.

Sally stood near the couch, her hair a mess, her left eye swollen from Sam’s attack, a line of blood running from her nose. Mathilda stood in the bedroom doorway, looking in.

“
What happened?” Colleen asked.

Sally touched her nose, winced. “She elbowed me. No big deal.”

“
Who?” Colleen asked, but it was a stupid question. Unless there was someone she’d yet to meet, who else could it be but the bride closest to Huffington Niebolt, the one who’d been with him longest?

“
Embeth,” Sally said. There was sweat on her forehead, and she was pale.

“
Are you okay?” Colleen asked.

“
No,” Sally said. “But I’m okay for now.” She held her stomach in both hands, caressed it.

“
Sit down,” Colleen said. Sally listened.

At the bedroom door, Colleen peered past Mathilda and at the horror playing out upon the floor. Kneeling beside his headless body, Embeth clutched Huff’s severed head to her chest, rocked it like one would rock a baby, like Lissa had rocked Huff’s nameless child.