Pray To Stay Dead (19 page)

“
Guh,” Guy said. The sound was little more than air passing over vocal chords grown taut in death. There was nothing behind it; it was as devoid of intent and intelligence as the sound made by the wind howling through the attic of a crumbling and abandoned house.

The ropes did their job. None of them slipped free. Night and shadow retreated. The dead man to his back repeated the same listless motions, gently rocking against Richard’s back. By the time the sunlight touched his face, he had slipped into a deep and dreamless sleep.

“
Wake up.” Someone slapped his cheek.

Richard opened his eyes, blinking. It was so much brighter now. The sun was nearly directly above them. Samson stood over him, looking down, his face blank.

“
How long’s he been dead?”

Richard stared. He wasn’t sure who Samson was talking to, nor did he care.

“
Hey,” Sam said, nudging him with his foot and pointing at Guy, eyebrows raised.

“
Don’t know,” Richard said. “A few hours.”

Sam had the same look of fascination Richard had seen on his face back at Misty’s, a million years ago. They were all there, Sam and Max and the other one, who was pale, taller and older than the brothers. If he were related to them, he didn’t look it.

The old man with the braided beard was there, too, his muscular arms folded above his gut. He was in incredible shape for a man his age. Even his round gut looked hard. He was leather and stone.

Max stood before Daniel, his arms at his side. The old man walked over to Sam, looked down at Richard. “Morning,” he said, smiling. His teeth looked too straight and too white to be anything but fake.

“
Why?” It was all Richard could manage.

“
Why?” Huffington Niebolt said, crouching. His knees popped, though he did not seem to notice. His braided beard hung between his legs. He tilted his head sideways. “I’ve seen a lot of people die, son, and the one thing they always ask in the end—the ones who get to see death coming, of course—is
why.
Why?”

He smiled again, his face beaming, and looked at each of them, in turn, except for Daniel, who was awake and alert and watching. To Richard’s back, Guy writhed, agitated.

“
Why, why, why?” Huffington Niebolt shook his head and laughed, garrulous and genuine. Once more he met Richard’s eye. The old man’s smile vanished. The humor bled from his eyes. “
Why
is all there is.
Why
is all there ever was.”

He stood up. “Jacob,” he said, his voice as devoid of humor as his face. The taller one, Jacob, stepped over to him, looking like a child in need of instruction.

“
Cut them loose,” Huffington Niebolt said, indicating Richard. “Put him over there. And don’t let that one bite off your fingers, Jacob, because I will blow your head off before the damned thing has a chance to swallow your pinky.”

“
Come on, Huff,” Jacob said. “I’m not—”

“
You’re not talking back to me, son, is what you’re not,” Niebolt said, showing Jacob the back of his hand. “I’ve seen these things at work with my own eyes. You haven’t. I watched them rip your little brother’s belly open and fight over his guts while he screamed for me to help him. So shut the fuck up and be careful, okay?”

“
Okay.”

Jacob, related to the other after all, leaned over, reached into the hollow between Richard’s and Guy’s lower backs, where their bound hands touched, and seized the ropes. They gave with little effort.

Large hands seized Richard beneath his armpits and lifted, dragged him over to a nearby tree.

“
Sit,” Jacob said, leaning Richard’s back against the tree trunk. Richard’s lower spine seemed to have fused in the night. A barbed spike of pain twisted between his shoulder blades. He stared down at his bound ankles, wriggling his toes within his shoes. They tingled.

Richard looked up. Jacob glowered, the muscles in his thick neck standing out, his jaw clamped tight, his small dark eyes fixed on Richard. Behind him, the other two looked from Daniel to Richard to Guy’s writhing corpse. Each of them held a shotgun.

“
This is not something that I ever anticipated,” Huffington Niebolt said, looming over Guy’s writhing corpse. Using one booted foot, he rolled the dead man onto its back, pinning it with a well-worn heel to the breastbone. Guy’s corpse opened its mouth and gnawed on air. Niebolt smiled once more. Like his voice, his smile was warm and inviting. “Unanticipated and terrible, but much deserved.

“
Yes,” he said, took his foot off of the living corpse, and turned to face Daniel. “Terrible, but much deserved.” He brushed a square fingertip across the scabbed cut on Daniel’s breastbone. “Who did this?”

“
Me,” Max said.

“
Hunh,” Niebolt said, picking at the cut until it glistened with fresh blood. Daniel jerked left and right, as if maybe he could wiggle all the way around to the other side of the tree. “Impatient.”

“
Whu,” Daniel said.

Niebolt looked back at Richard. “I think he was trying to ask why,” he said. Richard held his gaze until he looked away, faced Daniel. “Okay. Let’s make this happen.”

Richard sat at the base of the tree and did the only thing he could do: he watched.

Daniel kept his eyes on the ground. Somewhere inside, the child he once was, the one who believed his mother’s words to be nothing less than the gospel, the truth, cowered and prayed. Begged the God who was not there to save him, to take this cup from his lips. There or not, God’s response was as it had been when His own Son had wept for a way out of pain and torment: He didn’t do shit.

“
Why? I’ll tell you why, son,” Huffington Niebolt said, once more clutching Daniel’s hair in one large fist and pressing his head to the tree. “Open your eyes. Good.

“
Because I can, that’s why. And because it is what you deserve.” He released Daniel’s hair. Eyes closed, Daniel did not have the strength to hold up his head. It hung forward, and he became aware for the first time of the stench. He’d soiled himself in the night.

“
Let me tell you something, all of you,” Niebolt said, his voice swelling with pride. Daniel would not set eyes upon the man ever again, not if he could help it, but he saw him nonetheless, leering and prideful, his chest puffed out. “Most of you know this story. At least two of you don’t, so.

“
I was twenty-two years old,” Niebolt said, “Not much older than you, I think,” tapping a finger against Daniel’s bare chest, “I killed a man with these hands.”

Daniel did not lift his head, did not open his eyes, yet he knew: the old man’s tight fists hovered in the air between them.

“
Nineteen thirty-one, if I’m not mistaken. I killed him in the ring in a smoke-filled joint outside of New Orleans while the rabble screamed for more. Harry Cordeaux. The poor bastard called himself Harry ‘The Hammer,’ and I humiliated him in the third and took his life in the fourth.”

A hand closed around Daniel’s throat.

“
I beat a man to death with my hands, boy,” Niebolt said, his voice shot through with awe and fascination, the voice of a convert. “I beat him until he was nothing, no more. Just an empty body with a stupid look on its face.

“
I’m sixty-five years old, and I don’t feel a day over thirty, son, and I want to beat you to death against this tree. I want to snap your ribs and tear your organs. With these hands.”

Niebolt drove his fists into Daniel’s stomach three times, maybe four. Daniel gasped.

“
I want to, but I’m not. You remember me telling you about Charlie, Max?”

“
Yeah,” one of the others said. Shotgun in hand, he took a step forward. He was built like the old man, but his skin was darker, olive-skinned. His dark eyes were set wide in a round and unpleasant face.

“
His name was something Gui, but we all called him Charlie, just like our boys call the gooks over there in that useless war. Charlie Gui.”

“
Gah,” Daniel said, coughing. His stomach muscles were loose and hot. Colors swirled behind his eyes. God continued to do nothing.

“
He was a Chinaman,” Niebolt said, and Daniel could tell that he was talking directly to him once more. “An old yellow thing made of wrinkles and bones. He lived in the same building as me and my mom in San Francisco. This was a few years before I hit the road and saw the country and figured out just what it was I was supposed to be doing while the planet grinded its way toward death.

“
God, I guess I was fourteen. Charlie used to sit out in front of the building on this little folding chair, just looking off at whatever, and he and I got to talking one day.” Niebolt laughed. “He got to talking, I should say. I just listened. His English was pretty good. I understood just about everything he said, except for the times he’d launch into some lightning-fast Chinese, of course. He told me all sorts of things I really didn’t hold onto. Things about his time spent working on the train tracks or logging out near Mendocino. Things about his time in China.

“
But there’s one thing I never forgot: When he was a child, I think he said ten or twelve, he attended a public execution. His father made him do it, told him that he had to know what happened to those who spoke out against the dynasty. You know anything about
Ling Chi?
”

Daniel lifted his head, opened his eyes, looked at the old man despite his vow to himself. His eyes were dry, and his vision was blurred. He found the old man’s face and held it.

“
Just kill me,” he gasped.

“
Oh, look at you, educated boy,” Niebolt said. His cruelty notwithstanding, Huffington Niebolt was an honest man. He was impressed.

The last of his strength depleted, Daniel could no longer hold his head up. It swung forward. He licked his lips with a tongue that seemed to have been fashioned from sand. His mind turned away from those two words, Jesus, God,
Ling Chi,
the Death of a Thousand Cuts, the Slow Slicing, and retreated into the darkness, far, far into the darkness, but not so far that the old man’s words did not reach him. And not so far that he could escape the pain that would soon define his final moments alive.

“
Charlie told me he kept his eyes closed for most of the execution. He said it was bad. I saw some pictures of the act, once. From just before I was born, actually. Right before it was banned. Charlie was right—it
was
bad. And I saw it again, with my own eyes, in a Chicago basement in 1942. That was worse than those black and white photos. You can see the pain in the photos, but you can’t hear it—the sound of blade slicing through flesh. The whimper coming from the poor bastard’s throat. Like a baby.”

“
Jesus,” someone shouted. “Stop this!”

It took Daniel a moment to realize it was Richard, the asshole who was fucking Kimberly.

“
Shut up,” someone else yelled. Richard gasped, the wind crushed from his lungs.

“
So last night,” Niebolt said, “after I came out here and introduced myself to you, I went back to my home and fell asleep wondering how I was going to kill you. On the one hand, I’ve got these.”

Another volley of fists to Daniel’s stomach. He gagged and felt his bowels empty down his thighs in a hot liquid rush.

“
And I’ve got this.”

Cold steel pressed to the flesh above Daniel’s right nipple, just beneath the rope. Daniel tensed, preparing himself for the pain, struggling to retreat deeper into the darkness. He’d reached the wall—he could go no further. He waited, eyes clenched, lips drawn back from his teeth, far too weak to struggle. There was no pain. The blade withdrew.

“
The world you and your friends come from is not the real world, and you are not human beings. Not as history defines them, anyway. Humanity, like life, is cruel. Nothing is true but pain and blood, and your flowers and your happenings and your protests and peace marches flail in opposition to that truth. And one does not oppose truth.”

For an immeasurable moment, Daniel thought that maybe Niebolt had splashed ice water onto his chest. Then the pain hit and he opened his mouth and screamed.

Samson Niebolt’s words washed over Richard. In one ear and out the other, as his and everyone else’s mom used to say. His words did not matter. What did was the fillet knife in his hand, and the way he waved it so close to Daniel’s bare chest, brandished it inches from his face. The way he punctuated his sentences with it and described arcs in the air while speaking to Daniel, slicing deeply into nothing, inching closer and closer to Daniel until—

The strip of flesh curled away from Daniel’s chest with shocking ease. It hung from his stomach like an elongated and bleeding tongue. Daniel screamed. Richard screamed, too, and Samson muttered something while the one named Max laughed.

Richard closed his eyes, squeezed them shut and begged for death, just a quick death, please God, a heart attack or a stroke, and Daniel’s screams soon disintegrated into wet, choking gasps.

“
Come here, you,” the old man said. “Hold his head.”

Daniel no longer sounded human.

Richard opened his eyes. He didn’t want to but he did. He opened his eyes and he screamed and he screamed and Daniel wheezed and gurgled and choked on his own blood.