Pray To Stay Dead (47 page)

He leaned forward, slowly, and watched the congregation of walking corpses drift and sway in the street below. The burn pile smoldered and flickered. Save for the lower legs with shoe-clad feet that radiated from the circle of the burn-pile like spokes from the center of a wheel, the shapes in the pile were no longer recognizably human.

“
They’re doing it,” Misty whispered behind him. He got up and followed her into the hall. She took his place at the window and he made his way to the rear facing window near the top of the stairs. It was located directly above the back door, and offered a clean view of the little shack the old man called home and the two-car garage beyond.

The floor creaked beneath his feet, and when the shots came he did not move. Instead, he took a single step away from the window and stared, watching. Gun drawn, Cardo ran across the yard toward the little shack.

Reggie took the stairs two at a time.

Someone cried out in pain, cursed and gasped. It did not sound like the old man.

Gun raised beside his head, Cardo stood with his back to the small building, breath held, listening. The sound of hammering feet caught his attention, and Reggie appeared within the store’s back door. Cardo waved him back, brought a silencing finger to his lips. He cast a quick glance to either side of the building. From where he stood, he could not see down the right side of the building, but his view of the left side was relatively unobstructed. So far, the coast was clear.

There was another pained gasp. Cardo moved along the building, rounded the corner, and nearly bumped into Crate as the old man stepped out of his shack.

“
Jesus
fuck,
” the old man said, slamming the door behind him, the pistol in his right hand twitching toward Cardo. A cloth sack hung from the old man’s left hand.

“
Shh,” Cardo hissed, baring his teeth. “What the hell happened?”

“
Come on,” the old man said, setting down the bag and advancing along the side of the shack, toward the rear.

A man lay curled beneath a tree, both blood-slick hands pressed to his stomach. Cardo shot a quick glance back at the old man’s shack, tried to get a read on what had gone down. The lone window on this side of the building was shattered. The old man had seen movement from inside and had opened fire.

Crate took three quick steps toward the man and kicked at something. A gun spun away from the fallen man, who looked up at Crate and Cardo, his face pale and twisted.

“
The fuck you creeping around back here for, son?” Crate said, and then he stiffened. “Oh.”

“
What?” Cardo said, standing beside the old man. The kid on the ground was a filthy and battered mess. From the look of his face, Cardo figured he’d taken quite a beating. There was a hole in his left forearm, which was livid with infection.

“
He was here a few days ago,” The old man said. “He and his friends. Damn.”

“
Help her,” the wounded kid said. “They’re crazy.”

There was a footfall behind them, and Cardo whirled, raised his gun. It was Reggie.

“
We need to get inside right now,” Reggie said, looking past them and to the kid writhing on the ground. “The hell?”

“
Crate knows him.”

“
I didn’t know,” the old man said. “I saw something moving and—”

“
Save it,” Reggie said. “We got to get back.”

While Cardo hadn’t been looking, two dead men had crept along the right side of the store and now advanced toward them.

“
Take care of them,” Reggie whispered, and when the old man moved toward the two dead men Reggie slapped a hand onto his shoulder. The old man shot him an ugly glance, looked down at his large brown hand as if maybe it was a smear of shit on his shoulder.

“
No shooting,” Reggie said, and recognition drained into the old man’s eyes.

“
Oh,” Crate said. “Right.”

Crate vanished into his shack, closing the door behind him and locking it. Reggie looked at Cardo, frowning.

“
He said he doesn’t like anyone in his house.”

“
Oh,” Reggie said, dropping to his knees beside the fallen man, the smell of a fresh gut-shot filling his nostrils and threatening to drag him into the jungle.

“
You know how crazy old people can get.”

“
Hey,” Reggie said, tapping the wounded kid’s cheek.

“
Yuh,” the kid said, looking up at Reggie, pale lips quivering.

“
We’re going to move you.”

“
Christ.”

“
It’s going to hurt, and I need you to bite down on something, okay—” Reggie thought for a second, pulled his leather wallet from his pocket. “Bite down on this, okay? Don’t scream.”

“
Don’t scream,” the kid said, sucked air through clenched teeth. Tears raced across dried blood, cut clean little tracks through the dirt on his swollen cheeks.

The old man emerged from his shack wielding a hammer. He stomped over to meet the first walking corpse, and with three quick whacks the thing crumpled to the ground. The second one took only two whacks, and the old man looked back at them, gasping, the wiry thicket of his beard rising and falling upon his heaving bony chest.

Reggie squeezed the wounded kid’s hands in his own, and it was as if both of them were trying to break bones. He found his eyes darting toward the kid’s neck in search of dog-tags, and he wondered if this is where it would all come to an end.

“
What’s your name?”

“
Ruh,” the kid said.

“
Rick?”

“
Richard.”

“
Okay, Rich,” Reggie said, letting go of the kid’s hands. “It’s almost time, man.”

“
Heads up,” Cardo said, and the old man turned, watched as the third corpse—an elderly woman whose breasts hung from her ribs in a wet fold of torn flesh and yellow fat—walked toward them. He took her down with one swing.

“
Okay.” Reggie held his wallet before Richard’s face. The kid looked at it for a few seconds, as if he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. Then he opened his mouth, and Reggie slipped a corner of the wallet between his teeth. Richard bit down hard, and Reggie looked up at Cardo.

“
Let’s go.”

Thirty-Five

After the first five or six shots, Reggie found himself wishing for earplugs. By the time he got to twenty, it didn’t really matter. His ears had been pummeled, and the world was now set to the sound of a constant, muted hum.

Outside, the dead fell. They fell and they fell and they fell. A few of them seemed to have some idea what was happening: they looked up, toward the sky, and backed away from their fallen brothers and sisters. Most of them simply shuffled along and fell. A few noticed Reggie and looked up at him with nothing on their dead faces. At that moment, they gained focus and moved on the building, and Reggie blasted their brains onto the faces of those standing behind them.

“
Like fish in a barrel,” the old man said, sitting on the bed beside Reggie, gaunt hands on his knobby knees. He was close, far too close. He smelled old and sour and between blasts Reggie could hear him licking his lips.

“
There,” Reggie said, finishing the first box of bullets. “Twenty rounds, and I missed once.”

“
Good. My turn,” Crate said, and Reggie handed him the rifle. While the old man reloaded, Reggie worked the crowd with his pistol. He was less accurate—a few shots went wild, tearing through shoulders and throats—but he managed to drop four of the corpses nearest the overhang before the old man was done.

“
Okay,” Crate said, settling in, raising the rifle, leaning forward.

Before going upstairs, Reggie had done what he could for the kid, cleaning his would with peroxide and packing it with gauze. He hadn’t been a medic in Vietnam, “But by the end,” he’d told Cardo, “we all knew how to push guts back into someone’s stomach.”

Crate had fired twice, but only one of his rounds had connected, entering the kid’s abdomen less than three inches above the base of his penis and blowing a portion of his lower intestine through his back. His spine was intact, but that didn’t matter—the kid was going to die. The sooner the better, for his sake.

Cardo sat beside him in the back room, holding his hand. The kid shook and wept and ground his teeth against the pain, and Cardo fed him shot after shot of rum from a paper cup.

Upstairs, Reggie and the old man rained lead down upon the walking dead, and the kid jumped every damned time gunfire pierced the silence. He’d tried to stuff wads of toilet paper into the kid’s ears, but Richard had only picked them out with quivering, bloodstained fingers.

“
Gah,” the kid said, his eyes wild and searching.

“
Hey,” Cardo said. “I’m here.”

“
Oh. The pain is fading.”

“
That’s good, man.”

“
Is it?”

“
Sure.”

He could see the distrust in the kid’s eyes, right behind the pain and the confusion.

“
I’m dying.” It was not a question.

“
You just,” Cardo began, looking for the right words and finding only the expected ones, the obvious ones: “You just need to rest, Rich. Save your strength.”

“
Cardo.”

“
Yeah?”

The kid looked down at Cardo’s belt, dragged his gaze back up to his face. “That your car out there?”

“
Shh.”

“
The cop car,” the kid said. “In the garage.”

“
What?”

“
You’ve got to go there,” Richard said, and his hand sought the bottle of rum. Cardo poured him another shot, fed it to him. He coughed, spraying most of the liquor onto Cardo’s hand. “You have to help her.”

“
Who?”

“
They’re all dead,” the kid said. “Except for Colleen. She’s still alive. One of them said she was still alive.”

The kid fell silent. Cardo tried to give him another shot of rum, but most of it ran down Richard’s swollen face. He said a few more things, none of which made much sense, and then he passed out.

Cardo sat with him for a few minutes, watching his chest rise and fall and listening to the train of gunfire from above, wondering if maybe he should put one round into the kid’s head.

The old man burned through twenty rounds and passed the rifle back to Reggie, manned the window while Reggie reloaded. Crate had been wrong: he’d had fourteen boxes of bullets in his shack—two hundred and eighty rounds. Two forty left, and there were maybe seventy walking corpses down below, give or take.

He took his place at the window and opened fire. The bodies fell, were heaped like sandbags across the parking lot.

They had this. They had it by the balls.

Cardo stepped from the back room and into the store. Stacy sat behind the counter, watching television with the volume down, and Misty stood at the door, watching through a slim opening in the blinds. She looked back at him.

“
How is he?” She whispered, and someone upstairs fired the rifle.

He waited until he was standing beside her to answer: “Dying.”

“
Poor kid,” she said, pausing as another volley of shots popped through the silence. “They were all pretty nice. I wonder what happened to them.”

“
Same thing that’s happening to everyone else.”

Bang. Bang, bang.

“
I would have though Huff’s place was safe.”

“
Who’s Huff?”

“
Huffington Niebolt,” she said. The shots were so loud here, directly beneath the room in which Crate and Reggie took turns at bat. “Not too far up the road. You can’t miss it. He sold doors and windows and things. Lots of land. Up the hill and out of the way. That’s where they all went. One of Huff’s sons took them.”

“
Oh,” Cardo said, leaning forward and gazing though the blinds in time to see one of the dead things go down face first. In places, the bodies had fallen three deep. “He said they were all dead, all except for someone named Colleen.”

“
Colleen was one of them,” Misty said, looking up at him. “She seemed nice.”

They’re insane,
he’d said, and Cardo wondered if that had just been delirium and pain talking.

“
Need anything?” He asked, and Misty shook her head. Another gun blast, and Stacy looked at Cardo. On the TV, words ticked by beneath the CBS eye.

“
Huh?” She asked, wincing in anticipation of another gunshot.

“
Get you anything?”

“
Get us out of here, maybe.”

Two shots, back to back.

He stepped into the back, crouching beside the kid. Richard looked dead but wasn’t. His chest rose and fell, and Cardo knew that he could go on this way for a long time. He touched the kid’s boiling forehead and then stood, meaning to go upstairs and take a look at the action from above. He glanced at the back door and the kid’s words stopped him.

The cop car. In the garage.