Pray To Stay Dead (40 page)

Lissa was wrapped around something, wrapped around the other boy, the other giant killer, David or Jack, shielding him as Embeth, raging and screaming, sank the blade of a blood-slicked knife into her back again and again. There was so much blood, and Colleen realized what Embeth had yet to realize, that the girl was dead; that she need only throw her aside to reveal the hysterical child beneath, cringing and screaming, screaming, wailing.

Colleen raised the gun. She jumped, screamed when it roared and spit fire, when a section of the wall above the mad woman’s head burst in a powdery cloud. She squeezed the trigger again and Embeth’s head spat a runny starburst of blood and brains onto the wall. Blood jetting from her skull, the dying woman collapsed in a heap of tangled limbs, pinning the girl and the small boy beneath her.

Mathilda pulled herself from the wall and took an uneven step toward Embeth, and Colleen pushed past her, seizing Embeth’s twitching body by the shoulders and pulling her away from Lissa, who held the surviving twin in her dead arms.

“
God,” Colleen said, dropping to her knees beside the children. To her right, the other twin lay dead. The pool of blood around his head had stopped spreading. His small hand no longer moved, the fingers curled and still.

“
Blinded me,” Mathilda said, and Colleen looked at her. Mathilda’s right hand was pressed to her right eye. She sucked in air between clutched teeth. “Hurts.” Kneeling beside the dead twin, she checked his pulse with the fingers of her quivering left hand. Her face was deathly white.

“
Gah,” Colleen said, her head a mess. She placed her hands on the dead girl’s shoulders and still the small boy screamed and cried.

The knife—a kitchen knife, just a simple steak knife, there was probably a whole drawer of them—jutted from between the girl’s shoulder-blades. Her shirt clung to her back, dark and sticky, and Colleen could not tell how many times Lissa had been stabbed.

As Colleen gently pulled Lissa’s body away from the crying boy, a sigh gurgled within the dead girl’s throat. Her head jerked once, to the right. Colleen grabbed the handle of the knife and tried to pull the blade from the girl’s back. It was wedged between two ribs, and at first it didn’t want to budge. Wincing, Colleen twisted the handle a few times, yanking hard, and the knife slipped free. Blood droplets seem to hang in the air, and Colleen’s stomach clenched. She’d felt the grind of blade against bone, or heard it, or both.

She yelled something incoherent and tossed the knife aside, wiped the back of her hand across her lips, and pulled the wailing twin into her arms; pressed him to her chest. The past few days pressed in. The kids cried and screamed, and Colleen tried not to join them.

“…
alive.”

She looked up at Mathilda, tried to make sense of the woman’s words, and the boy, the little blond boy who may have been Jack and may have been David, who’d only a few seconds ago had been lying facedown in his own blood, was on his hands and knees, head hung low and dripping blood. Mathilda knelt beside him, the right side of her face covered in blood. Her hands, now on the child’s shoulders, were also covered in blood, and Colleen fought to hold it all back: the deer, the walking dead on the television and in the parking lot of Misty’s Food and Gas; Guy and Huffington Niebolt’s gurgling screams as she sawed through his larynx.

“
He’s still alive,” Mathilda said, drawing her hands away from the child and looking up at Colleen with an utterly helpless look on her face.

“
No,” Colleen said, rising to her feet with the crying child in her arms.

“
But he—”

His small fingers writhed in the pool of blood around his head, and his tiny feet kicked. His butt rose and fell. He tried to stand, slipped in his blood. His face hit the ground.

“
Get them,” Colleen said, nodding toward the cribs, and Lissa opened her eyes and stared at Colleen. The dead girl opened her mouth and frowned, worked her fingers, and sat up.

“
Get up,” Colleen said, and Mathilda stared up at her, realization dawning in her remaining eye. The boy pressed to Colleen’s chest wailed and his dead brother rolled onto its side and pawed at its own congealing blood, wriggled its small body toward Mathilda.

“
Ur,” Lissa’s corpse said, its drifting gaze settling upon Colleen, who stepped past it and out of the room, where she placed the crying twin onto the couch. Returning to the nursery, she lifted the unnamed boy from his crib, held him to her chest, and looked down at Mathilda, who stared at the dead children before her. Lissa’s corpse was on its knees, its hands hanging uselessly at its sides, its head lolling left and right, as if it weren’t in complete control of its body. The dead twin writhed in its own blood like a worm in mud.

“
Come on,” Colleen said, and when Mathilda didn’t acknowledge her, just kept her eyes on the kids, Colleen said it again, louder. Mathilda’s head snapped in her direction. Her face dark with drying blood, she looked at the dead kids again, and then at Colleen.

“
Oh,” Mathilda said, getting to her feet. “Oh, God.” They were saying that a lot, Colleen realized, and He didn’t seem to be listening. Daniel would be pleased.

“
Come on,” Colleen said, and Mathilda lifted Little Huff from his crib. Out front, the surviving twin wailed, and so too did the unnamed child in Colleen’s arms. Little Huff, on the other hand, fell silent as soon as Mathilda pressed him to her breasts.

“
Uuurb,” one of the dead kids on the floor gurgled, and Colleen turned her back on them and left the room, plodding to the couch, where the twin sat, screaming his dissatisfaction, his face bright red, just like it was the first time she’d met him, his yellow eyebrows stark on his livid face. She sat next to him, pulled him into her arms beside the other child.

“
Shh,” she said, aware suddenly that Sally was yelling from the other room.

“
What’s happening, dammit?”

“
It’s okay,” Colleen said, and that was more nonsense, more fucking nonsense. Nothing was okay. Not even close. Also a lie, but closer to the truth: “We’re okay.”

Mathilda emerged from the nursery with Little Huff in her arms, her blind eye oozing blood, the other wide and wild. She looked back at the door, and again to Colleen, pulled the door shut behind her, locked it.

Mathilda placed Little Huff beside Colleen, and though he whimpered and scrunched his face into an ugly knot, he did not cry. Instead, he leaned against her and sighed. The unnamed child would not relent, and the twin had fallen silent. He clung to Colleen and looked around with large and probing eyes.

“
Be back,” Mathilda said, pressing her bloody hand to her wounded eye and leaving the room.

Colleen looked around for a pacifier, certain that there had been one on the table beside the couch, finding none. She slid her forefinger into the nameless child’s mouth, and soon he too was quiet.

She sat, her eyes on the locked nursery door, the children pressed close around her. Mathilda emerged from the bathroom, a white band of gauze encircling her head. There was pea-sized spec of red in the gauze above her right eye, and Colleen suspected that, before long, it would be much larger.

She sat across from Colleen, quivering and pale, her arms wrapped around her chest.

“
I’m in shock,” she said.

“
Yes,” Colleen said.

“
This is, I mean—how much—” Her confused words dissolved into broken, hitching sobs. Colleen watched the older woman cry until there were no more tears.

Moving with the measured deliberation of a drunk trying to walk a straight line, Mathilda got up, and walked toward the bedroom. Her right hand sliding across the wall, Mathilda looked at Colleen and was gone. A few seconds later, Colleen heard her talking to Sally, who was in the throes of another painful round of contractions.

She returned a short time later and helped feed the children. Little Huff and the nameless child eagerly sucked from their bottles. The twin stared into space, accepted the food that Mathilda spooned into his mouth with little resistance and no enthusiasm. When the children were fed and burped, Mathilda returned to the bedroom.

Held to her chest, the nameless child closed his eyes and fell asleep. Little Huff did the same beside her, and Colleen heard the bubbling hot sound of his diaper being filled. The twin looked at her, eyes wide, and when she smiled and asked him how he was doing he closed his eyes and lay his head against the armrest.

Something brushed against the other side of the nursery door, and the knob rattled. A short time later, Mathilda stepped into the living room. The look on her face was grave.

“
Come on,” she said. “Baby’s coming.”

Twenty-Nine

“
Where are you headed?” Cardo asked.

“
New Mexico,” Reggie said. “Where are you headed?”

“
Nowhere, now. What’s in New Mexico?”

“
My daughter,” he said.

“
I’m sorry,” Cardo said. “So you got a daughter. Is she little?”

Reggie balked. He had to keep Nef out of his mind or it would drive him crazy. One mile at a time. “Yeah.”

“
A little girl, that’s nice. What’s her name?”

“
Listen, I don’t care to get into specifics if it’s all the same to you.”

“
Okay, man, sorry.” Cardo pulled back.

“
That’s fine.” Reggie’s shoulders softened. “Just trying to keep this shit tight, you know?”

Cardo was silent for a while. “Well, it’s good you got somebody to care about. She’s with her mom, then?”

“
She’s with my mom,” Reggie said. “I have no idea where her mother is.”

“
Oh,” Cardo said. “Because of all this?”

“
No. Long before. Bitch was crazy.”

“
Oh,” Cardo said.

Nobody said anything for a while. They passed an abandoned car and, a few hundred yards later, a walking corpse, a tottering fat woman with short dark hair and flabby pale arms cratered with bite-marks. The dead thing reached out toward the oncoming truck, and they rumbled by. Stumbling on its way, its mutilated arms once more hanging at its sides, it dwindled in the side-view mirror and was soon gone from sight.

“
Which way?” Reggie asked, bringing his truck to a stop at an intersection. The sign they’d passed less than a mile back had welcomed them to Harlow.

“
Right,” Cardo said, and Reggie turned right.

Compared to Beistle, Harlow was a ghost town. There was no one to be seen, living or dead, and Reggie had the idea that today wasn’t much different than any other day in Harlow. Empty streets, nothing happening.

“
Just about everyone who lives here works in Beistle,” Cardo said, seeming to read his mind. “The ones who work, anyway.”

“
Yeah?”

“
They don’t have a police force of their own,” Cardo said. He sounded happy to have something to talk about. “So we get to do the dirty work.”

“
Let me guess. Some domestic abuse, and some drunk and disorderly.”

“
Pretty much nothing else, but not all that often.” Cardo shrugged. “Once a month, and usually the same damned assholes.”

“
The usual suspects.”

“
Yeah,” Cardo said, leaning forward. “Oh, hey—stop here.”

The sign outside the corner store said MISTY’S FOOD AND GAS, and Reggie was certain he wasn’t the first person to feel the urge to crack a joke.

The parking lot was empty except for a burn pile.

“
You sure you want to stop here?” Reggie asked, slowing down.

“
Yeah,” Cardo said. “It looks like Crate has everything under control here. Crate’s the old dude who lives here with his wife.”

“
Misty?”

“
Yeah. They own the place. Good people.”

“
Okay,” Reggie said, turning into the parking lot and bringing his truck to a halt to the right of the burn pile. Four fresh bodies lay atop the charred ones. There was something else, too.

“
Notice anything?”

“
What?” Cardo said, leaning close and looking down at the bodies.

“
It’s hard to tell with the others, but the brother wasn’t dead when they shot him.”

“
How can you tell?”

“
He’s too fresh,” Reggie said, wondering if maybe he should get the hell out of there. “How well do you know these people?”

“
What?” Cardo said, looking uncertain. “You’re wondering if maybe—”

“
Things are different now, is all I’m saying. A brother needed to be careful where he showed his face before everything went to hell. And now? Shit, man—you know what I’m saying.”

“
I do, yeah,” Cardo said, and now he seemed either offended or defensive, maybe both. “But this isn’t Alabama, man.”

“
And neither is Phoenix. That didn’t stop the boys at the truck stop from looking at me funny when I walked in looking for a burger. I just want to be careful.”

“
I hear you,” Cardo said. “But people are different here.”

“
You’re a cop. You know better.” Reggie said. “People are the same everywhere.”

“
Misty and Crate,” Cardo said. “They’re not like that.”

“
As far as you know.”