Pray To Stay Dead (17 page)

Not far from his cruiser, a dead woman lay near an overturned shopping cart. The cart, no doubt once brimming with looted goods, was empty. A plastic gallon jug lay empty in a puddle of milk mixed with the blood surrounding the woman’s diminished head.

“
You okay, Cardo?”

“
Not really,” Cardo said, looking back at the person addressing him. Jerry Smith, a long-haired stone-freak who’d never gotten the news that the Summer of Love had actually ended. They’d shared a few grades in high school, but nothing more. Sometimes it seems like no one in Beistle was going anywhere. If this were so, then Jerry Smith was getting there a little faster than the rest of them. “You?”

“
Not really, man.” Smith had a case of beer under each arm. “I’m sorry about this,” he said, indicating the beer.

“
It’s no big deal,” Cardo said, walking over to his cruiser and cursing. The front left of the car was crumpled in. The headlight was smashed and half of the grille lay on the ground. The front wheel was both flat and twisted in such a way that told him the axle was screwed.

Good thing home was a ten minute walk.

“
I saw that happen,” Smith said. He sounded proud, eager to talk.

“
Yeah?”

“
You wanna know who did it?”

“
Not really,” Cardo said, shrugging.

“
It was Carl Perkins, from over in Harlow?”

“
This is a damn mess. Could still use the radio.”

“
He got bit,” Smith said. “He was in bad shape.”

“
You see any more pork around?”

“
Pork?” Smith asked, and the confusion in his eyes cleared. He laughed, obviously surprised to hear Cardo using a word typically reserved for folks who didn’t like the police. He shook his head. “No. Oh, yeah, wait. Tasgal. He got into his car. I was still in there, but I saw him through the window. I think Clark was with him. Clark got shot.”

“
Oh,” Cardo said. “Damn it. Where did they go?”

“
Away,” Smith said.

“
Okay. How’s your mom?”

“
She died yesterday.”

“
I’m sorry to hear that,” Cardo said, sliding behind the wheel of his cruiser and checking the closed band radio. Dead air, distant voices muttering, and no more.

“
I got no place to go, really.”

“
I’m sorry to hear that.”

Smith opened his mouth to say something, but Cardo silenced him with an upheld hand.

“
Go home and drink your beer, Jerry,” he said, walking past the man and toward Main Street. “Try not to get eaten.”

Cardo walked toward his house. Before he got there, he’d have to pass through the heart of town. From the looks of it, that’s where all of the action was.

He walked, and in his mind he saw the kid’s head open up and deflate. Eyes open or closed, it didn’t matter: the kid was right there.

What else was he supposed to have done? Well, he didn’t want to think too hard on that. He could have kicked the gun out of the kid’s hand. He was close enough to do that. Kick the gun or kick the kid in the chest. Step to the side and just pluck the gun out of his little hands.

The way the kid’s arms had quivered, it was obvious that he was having a hard time holding up the hand cannon. Did he really think the kid had been strong enough to cock the gun once more before Cardo could take two steps and close the distance between them?

After firing, did the kid even have a decent grip on the thing? Had the gun already left his small hands before Cardo opened fire?

Three shots?

“
God,” he said.

There was a large crowd gathered before the fire station. He walked through them, head low, making eye contact sparingly. Bodies parted around him like the Red Sea around the Israelites. Familiar faces turned to watch him pass, eyes wide and eyes weary. And guns, lots of guns. Rifles and shotguns; pistols hanging from hips like it was Dodge City. The folks who didn’t have guns had baseball bats and pitchforks.

“
Hey, Cardo,” someone said, and he just walked. It sounded like Mike Hanson, and this was good. He liked Mike, and was happy to know that Mike was alive, but that’s where it ended. He had no desire to hang around and swap war stories and speculate about what tomorrow would bring. He needed to be home and drunk and in his chair, and he needed the Proust kid out of his head.

They didn’t really need him around anyway. If he stopped walking and joined this band of survivors, it would be as one of them, not as the law. They were the law now. Out there, he’d just be another gun, and they had more than enough of those.

Across the street, bodies were lined up three rows deep in the BEISTLE BAKE parking lot. Their faces were covered in sheets or blankets or shirts. Sheets of paper and cardboard bearing hand-written names were pinned or taped to their chests, identifying the corpses for any relatives who wished to claim them. People sat weeping beside a few of them. A woman knelt, the rag-doll body of a toddler across her lap. The baby moved, but its movements were all wrong. A man knelt behind the woman, his face pressed into her shoulder.

Further down, a tangled and charred heap of limbs and torsos smoldered in the evening light. Not everyone had friends or family. He wondered if anyone would find the Proust kid, and what his name had been, anyway.

It wasn’t until he got past the throng that he realized what was wrong—he hadn’t seen any soldiers. The National Guard had pulled out.

Cardo lived in a two room hovel at the end of Main Street. Despite its size, the place was not an embarrassment. It was relatively new, and in very nice shape. Cardo kept it nice and neat, inside and out, and he was happy to bring women here on the rare Saturday night that found him knocking back beers at the Redwood Tavern and looking for a little love. Better than all of that, it was paid for.

The dead body standing in Cardo’s yard looked as if it had been dragged through fire and broken glass. The parts of its body that were not charred were stripped to the muscle. The corpse had a hard time walking, and he wondered who it was and where it had come from. So much was missing that he could not tell if he were looking at the remains of a man or a woman.

He stepped into his yard and looked around, pulling his gun and leveling it at the side of the thing’s head. Like the corpse trying to get into the bathroom at Proust’s, this one had not yet noticed him. It tried to turn in place and stumbled on its own twisted ankles, collapsing to the ground and lying facedown upon the grass. A belch rattled through the dead thing’s throat, and Cardo felt his stomach tighten.

He shot the thing through the back of the head. This close, he noticed an ornate jade earring nearly lost in the blackened remains of the thing’s left ear.

“
Oh.” It was Kora Wareheim. She lived three blocks down the road, worked at the bowling alley on weekdays, told fortunes on the weekend, and was the single mother of two small girls.

He went inside and looked around for a sheet of paper. Not finding one, he ripped the front from a Raisin Bran box and, using a black marker that he found in a cluttered drawer to the right of the kitchen sink, scrawled her name upon it.

Outside, he placed it upon the dead woman’s back. He looked around, frowned at the stone frog that sat in the flower-free flowerbed to the right of the front door. It had belonged to the previous owner, and he’d seen no reason to get rid of it. He placed it atop the placard on the dead woman’s back and went inside, locking the door.

Five minutes later, Cardo sat in his recliner, two guns resting on the tray next to his chair and a fifth of good whisky tipped bottoms up. For some reason, the local CBS affiliate was playing an episode of
The Honeymooners.
He didn’t bother changing the channel. There was news on the other channels, but the news made him remember the sight of the stupid, scared Proust kid’s face turning inside out. Ralph and Ed Norton and the whisky burning its way down his throat helped him to forget.

The events of the last two days caught up to him. He closed his eyes and slept for nearly eight hours. The news was on when he opened his eyes, and he’d spilled half of the whisky between his legs. The sun was down. It was nearly nine.

He got up and went to the bathroom, returned to the living room and ate stale Rice Krispies dry from the box. On the television, an obviously tired and annoyed doctor was explaining that life had simply been redefined, that these things could not be considered dead because dead bodies could not possibly walk or see or do any of the things that these creatures were doing.

Cardo nodded off again, opened his eyes four hours later to the whupping sound of a helicopter. He stood up, legs tingly and stiff, and stumbled toward the door, opened it. Kora’s body made him jump. He’d forgotten about it. He’d forgotten his guns, too, but that was okay—aside from Kora, there were no dead bodies within sight, walking or otherwise.

A large low-flying helicopter circled the town. It was military, he knew that much. Beyond that, he had no idea what he was looking at. It had two rotors, and it looked a lot like the choppers he’d seen in news footage from ‘Nam, dropping down from the sky and extracting injured soldiers, dumping off fresh ones.

He watched, expected the chopper to set down across town, on the Beistle High football field, or to maybe fill the night sky with parachutes. Neither happened. Instead, the chopper looped around, away from where he stood, toward the highway. It spun around once more and headed back toward Beistle. At first he thought something was wrong, that the helicopter had caught fire: a white plume trailed from the underbelly of the helicopter, billowing out and descending upon the town.

“
Oh, God,” he said. He ran into his house, grabbed his guns, and was out the door. He didn’t bother closing it behind him.

Fifteen

The bridges were not a problem. On the first one there was a burning car. A black thing stumbled in the middle of the road, clutching at the air with hands that had no fingers. Reggie ran it down, wincing at the sound it made coming apart beneath his truck, but that was it. No Army blockade, no blown out bridge, no road choked bumper to bumper with abandoned vehicles.

On an empty stretch of Highway 50 some fifteen miles east of Nimbus, he pulled over to the side of the road, threw together a sandwich, and found himself thinking about Erma, his ex-wife.

They’d met in line at the bank. Six months out of ‘Nam and he had already purchased his truck. It was his, almost fully paid for. He’d been depositing a check, and she’d been trying to get a small loan so that she could prevent her father’s house from going into foreclosure. They’d hit it off as well as one could expect: she spent the night at his place, and they didn’t waste any time. He was impressed with her body, and she was impressed with the fact that he was self-employed. “I never met a self-employed man who wasn’t a pimp,” she’d said, adding that all of her other men had been freeloaders and bums.

Reggie had no idea how he stacked up as a parent, but if he had one ounce of wisdom to one day impart to Nef, it was this: never marry someone simply because the two of you were good at fucking. At the end of the day, that’s all he and Erma had. Before and after, they talked, sure, but if they made the mistake of talking too much, it became plain: aside from their ability to make the other one’s head explode in bed (or in the kitchen or on the living room floor or in the backyard), there was just nothing else there at all, nothing but bullshit.

By the time he admitted this to himself, it was too late. She was pregnant, and drinking, and her claws had come out. He tried to get her to stop drinking while pregnant and she threatened to have an abortion.

His mother asked why he didn’t tell her to go ahead, do him a damned favor. Cut his losses and move on, but no, absolutely not. People could do what they wanted to do, he really didn’t care, and what he wanted to do was be a father. He wanted to raise the child growing in Erma’s stomach, and didn’t think it should be denied a chance at life simply because he’d fucked up and married the wrong woman. Besides, he’d told himself, they’d figure out a way to make things work. Once the baby came, things would be better.

No such luck. She put up a fight, but the judge had no trouble deciding where Nef belonged. By then, Erma had been arrested for assault and battery after mopping the floor with another woman at a pool hall, and Reggie had established himself as someone who was taking care of business. He thought maybe it had hurt some of the beady-eyed white jurors to have to side with a highway-bound black man, but what else were they going to do? Rule in favor of an abusive alcoholic who got into bar fights and actually referred to them as
slave masters
and
crackers
while on the stand?

The last time he saw her was at his mother’s house. It was Nef’s fourth birthday. She called ahead, asked if she could come see her baby girl. She sounded sincere, so he said yes. Did it count as violating her restraining order if he told her that she could come?

She came with her new man in tow, a real jive turkey who wore a threadbare suit and who reeked of grass. Erma was visibly drunk, and neither of them left when he told them to. Reggie ruined the party, called the police. By the time they arrived, he’d already punched out Erma’s new man, and was two inches away from popping her one in the lip, as well.