Pray To Stay Dead (8 page)

“
You, too, Lash La Rue.” The old man said, “You’ll get your shot before this is over.”

“
Okay, Crate,” Misty said, worried. Dead Willits was no more than three feet away from the old man, its good arm extended.

“
Humph,” Crate said. He lifted the rifle, pressed the barrel to Willits’s chest, just above the heart, and gave him a push. The dead man ambled backward, nearly losing its balance. “Nothing to worry about,” Crate yelled back, over his shoulder.

“
I never really liked you,” Crate said to Willits, nudging it once more with the rifle, nudging and poking, hard. He pressed the dead man’s stomach, and a lifeless belch rattled in the thing’s throat. “Always talking bullshit.”

“
Stop having fun and do it,” Misty said.

“
I like having fun, woman,” Crate said. He pressed the barrel to the dead man’s heart once more and pulled the trigger. The report was muffled. Nothing happened. He stepped back a few feet, steadied the rifle, and squeezed off a round into its left knee-cap.

“
Woo,” Crate said as Willits tottered and toppled and hit the ground face first, struggling like an infant to right itself. He stepped up to the fallen dead man, placed his left foot onto its back, pressed the barrel to its head, and pulled the trigger. Willits stopped moving even as everyone else jumped from the gun’s shout.

Crate looked back at them.

“
Christ,” Richard said.

Guy gasped, like he’d been holding his breath. He looked a little pale.

Daniel understood how Guy felt. His head spun. He wasn’t ill. He didn’t think he was going to throw up. But he felt wrong. Everything felt wrong.

“
Nope,” Crate said, stepping away from his kill. “I don’t think the news is making this up.”

“
Ah, crap,” Misty said. “Is that Nelli?”

Another dead person shambled up the road.

“
Looks like it,” Crate said. “Damn.”

“
Mark’s daughter,” Samson said. “Nice girl.”

Nelli was in pretty much the same shape as her father: bluish white, covered in blood and bites and moving with slow, clumsy deliberation. The dead girl’s clothes had been ripped away—all that remained were the tattered collar and sleeves of its dress, its panties. Its shoes were gone, its socks were filthy. Its bare chest was a baby’s food-crusted bib.

Crate walked toward it, taking his time. He looked back at them, yelled to Misty: “I don’t see Mark Junior anywhere.”

Misty looked down at her feet, and Daniel wondered if maybe the chunks of meat clinging to Nelli’s bloodied chest were all they’d see of Junior.

“
Okay,” Guy said beside him, his voice a dry croak. “I’ve seen enough.”

He went inside. The bell jingled. Crate leveled the rifle at the dead girl’s face, and Daniel looked away. The shot seemed louder than the others.

“
We need to get out of here,” Guy said.

Colleen looked up at him and wiped tears from her face. Kimberly wept, her head lying atop her arms, which were folded atop the table. She looked like a kid taking a nap in class. “Where will we go?”

“
I think maybe we should take that guy up on his offer.” He shrugged, shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He rubbed the fingers and thumb of his right hand and thumb together, fast—something he only did when he was nervous. “I don’t know.”

“
He’s weird.”

“
He may be,” Guy said. “But what choice do—” The door jingled, and Daniel crept in. Before the door could fully close, Samson eased it open and stepped in behind him. Guy’s voice dropped to a whisper. “We don’t have much of a choice. We need to lay low someplace for a little while, before we…”

“
You want to go home, too.” She said.

“
I do,” Guy said. “I have to.”

“
Aw, look at that,” Crate said from outside. He somehow sounded both disappointed and satisfied. “Here comes junior.”

Eight

Sam—he really didn’t like to be called Samson; Colleen could see it in his face whenever Misty called him by his complete first name—looked happy when they agreed to come back to his place.

“
Far out,” he said, smiling at them. “We’ll have a good time. My dad sells doors and windows that he pulls out of old houses set for demolition. Refinishes them and sells way marked up. He and my little brother are down in Elk Grove right now, on a salvage run, but they should be back soon.”

“
Is your dad going to mind us being there?” Colleen asked.

“
Oh, no way.” Sam said, shaking his head and looking solemn. “He’s cool, man. We bring friends home all the time. Dad likes to party.”

No one said anything, and Sam’s smile relaxed. It really wasn’t party time. Colleen glanced at Guy, hoping to silently communicate what she’d told him not long ago: she didn’t like this kid. He was weird. Guy’s barely perceptible shrug was a reiteration of his previously-stated response to the matter: what choice did they have? Any port in a storm, and the dead were only going to keep coming to Misty’s.

The group talked idly, their conversation shifting back and forth from what was happening in the world to what they’d do once they got to Sam’s house, and Colleen tried to tune them out. Daniel mostly listened and watched. Kimberly, no longer crying but still watery-eyed and pale, sat close to Richard, whose eyes shifted over to the front door as if he expected a dead body to come stumbling through it at any second, and he wasn’t exactly crazy to suspect that.

Crate was outside cleaning his mess and keeping watch, Charles sat behind the counter, watching television, and Misty was in the kitchen, making a bit of a racket and filling the air with the scent of flame-broiled beef. Lunch was on her.

They ate their burgers and fries with little comment, aside from the obligatory restrained moans of satisfaction.

“
Thank you,” Colleen said, despite the fact that her burger was too greasy, the fries were over-cooked, the bun was stale, and she was trying to be a vegetarian. “You didn’t have to do this for us.”

“
She’s right,” Charles said from behind the counter, and Misty’s gentle expression crumbled into one of annoyance bordering on rage. “Get your ass from behind my counter and get out.”

“
All I’m trying to say is—”

“
Out
,” Misty snapped. Charles winced, and Colleen realized that he and Misty were in some way involved with one another. Or had been. The casual hostility with which Misty spoke to him could come only from familiarity, from intimacy.

Charles took his time leaving. They finished their food, gathered and threw away their trash, and thanked Misty for her hospitality.

“
It was nothing,” she said. “But I think I’m going to close up after you leave.”

“
Yep, you should,” Sam said.

“
I’ll be here if you need anything, though.” She spoke to all of them, flipping a thumb toward the back of the room. “Just go around back and knock.” She looked at Colleen, lowered her voice and leaned close. “Sorry about not having the napkins, honey.”

“
It’s okay. I’ll make it,” Colleen said, glancing at the television screen. A live shot showed the Tel Aviv skyline. Fire churned, spitting black smoke into the night. “I hope so.”

Outside, Crate had piled what was left of the Willits family into an ugly heap and was dousing them with gasoline. Colleen got the briefest glimpse of Junior before looking away, and her impression was of an armless flayed thing, its face frozen in an expression of wide-eyed surprise, and of a madly grinning blood-shiny mouth, the lips either pulled back in a startled death-throe-rictus or simply chewed away.

Bilbo Baggins sniffed at a small pile of what must have been brain-matter, and Crate threatened to shoot him on the spot if he did a stupid fuck thing like eating that dead thing’s diseased brains. His tail between his legs, Bilbo padded into the shade beneath the awning and threw himself onto the weather-worn boards.

“
Take it easy, Crate,” Sam said, crawling into the van behind Daniel.

“
You, too.” He squinted at them, fluffing his beard with one boney hand. He lifted his rifle and gave it a little shake. “First line of defense right here. They’ll come from that way, if they come. You all should be safe up the hill. I’ll hold them off.”

“
How many bullets you got,” Richard asked, walking past Crate, leading Kimberly along as if she were blind.

“
Enough for every man, woman, and child in town.” He smiled. “About three or four times over.”

“
Jesus,” Richard said.

“
Him too.”

Daniel was the last of them to climb into the van. He slid the door shut and sank into the seat next to Sam. Crate returned to his kills, tossing on a little more fuel.

Guy backed the van into the road and looked into his rearview mirror. There were no dead people. A gush of fire engulfed the Willits heap, and Harlow fell behind them. The trees pressed in, and the road twisted, angling upward.

“
How far up?” Guy asked.

“
About two miles, I think,” Sam said. “Not far. I’ll let you know.”

Colleen turned on the radio. A weary-sounding black man with the vocal affectations of an evangelical preacher was urging people to work together, to stop fighting, and to face the crisis at hand with faith and solidarity. She pressed a tape into the player, listened to about five seconds of Black Sabbath before turning off the radio.

“
Everything is going to be okay,” Sam said, sounding a little too happy. Colleen turned around to face him, and she wondered if she was able to conceal her dislike for their new friend. His smile faltered, and she knew she had not been successful.

She did not care.

“
Why do you say that?” She asked.

“
I just do,” he said, shrugging. “Because I feel it. We’re going to be okay. You’re going to relax, and we’re going to be okay. And that—” he wagged a hand in the direction of the radio “—is all going to pass us by, just like every other horrible thing in the world has come and gone.”

“
You really think so?” Kimberly asked.

“
I do,” he said, holding his gaze on Colleen a little longer than he needed to before turning to face Kimberly. “We have the advantage. We’re up here, away from the cities and the hatred and the desperation.”

There was a joyous calm to his voice, the kind she imagined she’d hear in the confident tones of the pussy-hunting campus guru, or in the hushed proclamations of a religious zealot. Is that where they were going? To some oddball religious commune? Was Samson Niebolt going to try and woo them onto his dick with nonsense whispers of the hills and the trees sheltering them from the storm?

Kimberly looked at Sam with something like hope. Colleen faced forward. She looked at Guy and didn’t bother trying to whisper.

“
We’re not staying long.”

She shifted her weight, uncomfortable. She could feel her flow increasing, feel her pad, her one last pad, goddammit, growing heavy with menstrual blood.

“
Right up here,” Sam said.

The small handmade sign said NIEBOLT DOORS AND WINDOWS, and the narrow road was unpaved, just two well-worn wheel-ruts matted with pine needles. The van rocked and swayed up the hill. A dilapidated shed eased by on their right, and then the ground leveled out and the house came into view, a sprawling ranch-style brick structure that was easily fifteen or twenty years old. It looked completely out of place, as if it some giant had plucked it up from suburb on the outskirts of L.A. and Frisbee-tossed it up into the redwoods.

“
It’s kind of funny,” Sam said. “My mom’s idea. She wanted a house that looked like a real house, is what my dad said she told him. I’m not quite sure what that means, but…”

“
Is your mother…” Kimberly said, leaving her query unfinished.

“
Yeah,” Sam said. “She died when I was five. In childbirth.”

“
Oh, God,” Kimberly said, and Colleen knew that her friend was all but in Sam’s bed. “That’s horrible. Did the baby live?”

“
Yeah,” Sam said, looking pleased and proud. “Connor. You’ll meet him. He’s, like, totally crazy, but I love the little bastard.”

Kimberly laughed for the first time in what seemed like forever, and Colleen looked at Richard in an effort to find some understanding in his eyes, some knowledge of what was happening. If such knowledge existed, she could not find it.

Guy brought the van to a halt beside the house and looked back at Sam, eyebrows raised. Sam nodded.

They filed out of the van. The road they were on continued, past the house, past several well-kept sheds, arcing right, vanishing into the trees.

“
Where are the windows and doors?” Daniel asked, doing his patented head-whip.

“
Back there,” Sam said, lifting a hand toward the sheds. “His workshop is further up the road. He makes cabinets and tables, and my mom had him build his shop way up the hill so she wouldn’t have to hear him sawing and hammering.”

There was a light breeze and the air smelled of smoke. Colleen looked in the direction from which they’d come, at the trail sloping away until the woods swallowed it, and for the third time in less than twenty-four hours she was overcome with the certainty that she was safe. She was safe and they were safe, and they would remain safe for as long as they stayed put. This time, however, her certainty did not seem desperate or irrational.