Pray To Stay Dead (16 page)

“
Do you want to talk about it?” asked the woman.

Colleen blinked. No more tears. She was all cried out. She didn’t have to close her eyes to see Guy’s dick lying in the dirt, but she could nudge the image away and to the side, and when she did that the voice urging her to lash out was louder. She’d listen to the voice. It was her only choice.

“
No,” she said. She searched for something else to say, felt that other words were in order, but her mind was buzzing and empty at the same time. She choked down the urge to scream.

“
Okay,” Embeth said. “Would you like to take a walk? The fresh air will be good for you, Colleen, and there’s really something you should see.”

“
Sure,” Colleen said, wondering where Guy’s dick actually was now. Still in the dirt, in the same spot, drawing ants and flies? Where was Guy? Could you die from blood loss that way?

More laughter, more than one child, and she stood up, wondering if she’d gone insane.

“
Good,” Embeth said. She opened the door and stepped into the morning light, and Colleen saw that her hair was pulled into a braid. It hung down past her waist. Squinting, she trailed Embeth into a fenced-in yard roughly the size of a basketball court. The façade of the building behind her was part of the enclosure. Across from her, a door led into a building that ran the entire length of the courtyard. There were picnic tables and scattered toys and a flowerbed exploding with color. A see-saw, a swing-set, a slide. The voice urging her to attack this woman was choked into silence.

Three women sat on a bench, each of them wearing the same damned amorphous red dress, their hair pulled back tight. One of them, clearly the youngest of the three, was very pregnant. They watched four laughing children chase one another around the courtyard. Embeth walked over to the other women. She looked back at Colleen, smiling.

One of the children, a plain-faced little girl no older than six, ran up to her.

“
Are you Miss Colleen?” She asked. Her front teeth were missing. She grinned. “Wanna play with me?”

Colleen’s legs gave out, and she crumpled to the ground.

Fourteen

Scott Ardo, known to everyone in Beistle as Cardo since he was nine or ten, was the first police officer to arrive at Proust’s. Ignoring the cries and the taunts of those gathered outside of the store, he shouldered his way to the entrance and rapped on the glass until Eddie Proust stopped ignoring him and came over to the glass.

“
What?” Proust yelled, red-faced.

“
You need to open up.”

“
What for? We’re closed. Come back later.”

Proust stomped away and Cardo was left staring at the ghost of his reflection in the glass door. He rubbed a hand over his stubbly head, leaned in close, looking over the top of his sunglasses. Proust reappeared, eyebrows raised.

“
You see what’s going on out here?” Cardo said. As if to accentuate his point, someone bumped into him. His nose bent against the glass, left a greasy smear.

Proust scowled. One of his meathead sons came over. He also scowled. Looked just like his dear old dad, too. If he looked around, Cardo was sure he’d see Proust’s meathead grandsons lurking about, as well, each of them scowling.

“
Looks to me like the problem is
out there,
” Proust said, pressing his forefinger to the glass once for
out
and again for
there.

“
You’re right,” Cardo said. “And you’re making it worse. These people are coming through, one way or another. The longer you keep these doors locked, the worse it’s gonna be when they come through.”

“
I’ll shoot them if they break through these doors,” Proust said. “We’ve got guns.”

“
I’m sure you do, now,” Cardo said, closing his eyes and leaning his forehead against the cool glass. He opened them and looked at Proust. “When are you gonna open for business?”

“
When we’re ready,” Proust said. He looked at his watch. “Maybe an hour.”

“
What are you doing?”

“
Getting ready.”

From what he could tell, Proust and family had moved things around. Bags of rice and beans and canned goods stood in heaps near the front of the store, and some of the aisles had been roped off. A hand-written sign declared:

“
CASH”

ONLY

!!!NO CHECKS!!!

Someone bumped into Cardo again, and this time it felt intentional. He looked back, and everyone looked everywhere but at him. He asked those nearest him to back away. They did. He didn’t expect that level of courtesy to last. He pointed to his ear and then to the door, cupped his hands around his mouth and pressed them to the glass. It took Proust a few seconds to catch his drift. He pressed his ear to the glass.

“
Listen,” Cardo said. “I understand where you’re coming from, Eddie, but you gotta help buy us some time, okay? Tasgal and Clark just radioed. They’re on the way. They’ll help control the crowd, but you at least have to let me in, make it look like we’re negotiating, buy ourselves some time.”

He pulled away from the glass. Proust regarded him with mistrust.

“
Okay?” Cardo asked, not bothering to raise his voice.

Proust looked back at his son, who stepped away and vanished from sight.

“
You leave your gun outside.”

“
No, I don’t,” Cardo said.

Proust glowered at him.

“
Open it.”

“
Okay,” Proust said, jabbing a finger at the crowd. “
Make them get back.
”

Cardo told everyone to step back and quiet down for a second, and they listened, though there were many taunts, and more than a few of the people in the crowd cried bullshit.

“
I’m going in,” Cardo yelled, palms held before him. “Just, please, everyone calm down—he’s opening the doors soon, okay? We’re going to figure this out. I can’t stop all of you from smashing these doors, but I’m asking you not to. Proust and his sons are looking for a reason to start shooting their guns. Don’t give them one, okay?”

Cardo turned away from the crowd and stared at Proust through the glass, raised his eyebrows. Proust unlocked the door and Cardo slipped into the store without incident.

“
Jesus,” he said, leaning across the counter and looking Eddie Proust in the eye. “This is a bad idea, man. You’re messing up big time.”

“
This is America is what it is,” Proust said, sliding his holstered gun onto his belt. “A lot might be changing out there, but that hasn’t.”

“
Damn,” Cardo said, putting the customer service desk between himself and the entrance. Proust’s boys carried shotguns in plain sight of the people pressed against the glass storefront. They’d paraded them around for the last five minutes, after Proust let them know the doors were opening in ten. He’d given the crowd time to spread the word.

“
Open up,” Proust said a few minutes later, and his son did. They filed in, giving the shotgun a wide berth, looking around, eyes wide. There was a Proust family member stationed the head of every aisle, each carrying a gun.

“
Hey, Troy,” Eddie Proust said as Troy Matthews walked by and picked up a can of kerosene. Proust smiled as if it were any old day. Matthews looked dazed. There was a spot of blood on his cheek.

Bodies pressed in, and Cardo backed away. Tasgal and Clark were outside. He saw flashes of them between jostled throng pouring into the store. They wouldn’t be able to do a damned thing. Cardo looked behind him, down the empty aisle and toward the back of the store. Wouldn’t be long now before someone noticed the prices.

“
Oh, come on, Eddie,” a short man with close-cropped red hair and a nose that seemed too small for his face yelled, indignant. “This is ridiculous.”

“
I’m sorry, Keith, it’s just business,” Proust said, speaking to the short man in the same tough-luck tone he probably used on folks who tried to get a refund on an open box of detergent. “You know as well as I do that the trucks aren’t coming anytime soon. This is—”

Everyone yelled at once, and then the little red-head lifted his arm. There was a muffled pop, and the back of Eddie Proust’s head flapped open as if on a spring-loaded hinge. The crowd surged. By the time the air filled with the thundering chorus of gunfire, Cardo was halfway to the back of the store.

He pushed through the swinging doors and into the back hallway, his gun out and ready. He put his back to the wall and looked left, right—there was no one around. At the end of the hall, a door led to the alley behind the store. It was chained and padlocked shut. He could shoot the lock, but that might draw unwanted attention.

The door to his left was labeled WOMEN. He wasn’t sure where MEN was, but considered lying low in the ladies room but then decided that he needed to be higher. There was a two way mirror located at the center of the store, between the meat display and the bank of coolers containing milk and juice.

A door at the end of the hall led right. He pushed it open, revealed a staircase—eight steps leading up, a right turn, eight more steps.

He opened the door at the top of the stairs, and one of Proust’s meathead grandsons turned and lifted the large gun in his small hands. Cardo looked right town the barrel. It bobbed and weaved. There was a puff of smoke, and in the close quarters the sound was like cannon fire. The bullet thrummed past Cardo’s right ear and slammed into the wall behind him. His hands took over, squeezed three rounds into the kid’s surprised face, pummeling it into some kind of spurting cubist mess. The kid’s body hit the ground, the misshapen sack that had been his head flopping forward onto his chest.

“
Gah,” Cardo said, backing out of the small office and sliding down the wall, watching a sticky wad of what must have been brain matter roll slowly down the fabric of the boy’s Superman t-shirt. The dead boy’s hands twitched in his lap, and he pissed his pants.

Cardo leaned sideways and vomited onto the top step, and continued to stare into the ruin of the kid’s head until the sight of it ceased to make sense.

“
Stupid bastard,” Cardo screamed, looking at the gun in his hand and throwing it onto the floor as if it were something hot. He wasn’t sure he was cursing—Proust, Proust’s dumb grandson, or himself.

Downstairs, there were more gunshots. Someone screamed in pain, and the place sounded as if it were being ransacked. It quieted down eventually. He waited for the sound of people—alive or dead—finding their way into the hall and onto the stairs, but it never came.

Cardo stood up, took off his uniform shirt, stepped into the small office, and used the shirt to cover the dead boy’s obliterated head. He picked up his gun, holstered it. The massive gun that Proust had left in the care of his twelve-year-old grandson lay on the floor between the boy’s splayed legs. Crouching, Cardo lifted it, wiped a spot of blood from the barrel onto his pants, and set the gun atop the desk placed before the window that looked down upon the interior of the store.

He dragged the kid’s remains into the hall, careful to not upset the placement of the shirt that concealed the damage that he’d done. He stepped into the small office; shut and locked the door.

For two hours, he watched as a steady stream of Beistle residents filed into Proust’s Supermarket and picked the shelves clean. There were dead bodies everywhere, and not the walking kind. As far as he could tell, all of them were in about the same shape as the kid out on the landing.

He reached for his radio and found that he had lost it somewhere along the way. He picked up the phone to confirm it was dead, and it was. There was a small television on the floor beneath the desk. He picked it up, set it atop the blotter, and plugged it in. The picture was a fuzzy mess, and no amount adjusting the antenna made a difference, so he turned it off and sat staring into the store.

By the third hour, the place was empty. A dead body wandered in, seemed to take the place in, and then backed out and dragged itself someplace else.

There were bullets for Proust’s gun in one of the desk drawers. He stood up, replaced the bullet the kid had fired, pocketed the others. Sliding his new gun into his belt, Cardo opened the door and left.

Downstairs, a dead man stood before the bathroom door, tugging at the knob. A large piece of broken glass jutted from its throat. Smaller shards glistened like jewels across its forehead. Its cheeks hung in tatters, revealing the musculature of its jaw. Cardo was past the dead thing before it realized he was even there.

His shoes crunched across broken glass. The acrid reek of blood and pine oil and bleach hung in the air. He nearly slipped on blood. It pooled on the tile, mingled with soft drinks and beer. Behind him, someone gasped—a raspy exhalation that could have come from either the living or the dead. Unseen feet shuffled across something that crinkled and crunched, and Cardo was certain-absolutely certain—that it was a bag of Lays potato chips.

There was life in the parking lot, actual living life. People rummaged through the products strewn across the ground. They stopped what they were doing long enough to give him a once over and promptly got back to their work.