Pray To Stay Dead (27 page)

“
I don’t…” Colleen said, stammering. She felt Sally’s gaze upon her face and met it. The pregnant woman’s eyes shone with the promise of tears.

“
You don’t
nothing,
” Niebolt said. “The dead walk, and the world that you knew, only days ago, crumbles and burns. Doesn’t it?”

“
Yes,” Colleen said, tears streaming down her face. “Yes.”

“
Pain and blood,” Niebolt said, triumphant. “Pain and blood.”

Mathilda’s infant cried. Colleen didn’t look up from her hands, but she didn’t have to. She knew. Sally was crying too.

Twenty

His arms and legs were sore from the night spent bound upon the forest floor, but Richard had the upper hand: he was in better shape than the man hunting him. Jacob was tall and strong, but he had the beginning of a beer belly and no stamina, no focus. Richard was a swimmer and a runner and had even gotten a few trophies wrestling in his freshman year of college. If the two met, face to face and hand to hand, Richard would easily take him out.

But Jacob had guns and knives. So Richard ran; he ran and ran, pacing himself, breathing, occasionally stopping, bent low, his breath coming and going in controlled, measured inhalations and exhalations. He ran for five minutes, ten minutes, leaping over fallen branches, smashing through low branches, small red openings forming on his hands and face and forearms. He ran and he ran, and eventually he did the only thing he could do: he stopped.

Panting, he leaned against a tree. His lungs burned. His leg muscles burned. His heart was like a hummingbird beating its wings behind his ribs. His stomach was a hot fist driving up. He was starving. His mouth was dry. The heat in his legs melted into a steady quiver.

Every direction offered the same view: trees. The clouds and the canopy diffused the late morning light, made it hard to tell east from west. He could discern the general direction from which he’d come only because he had been running downhill. The ground had leveled out some. A few hundred yards ahead of where he stood, the ground once more angled upward. He was in a bowl.

He held his breath and listened, hoping to hear an engine, something, anything that would give him an idea where the road was. He heard only forest sounds, and exhaled, scanning the trees, looking for movement. Jacob was dressed in a drab green thermal shirt and bark-brown pants. He’d blend in.

Richard’s pants were brown, too, but his shirt was blue, and the only thing worse than leaving the shirt on was taking it off. He was tanned but not so tanned that he wouldn’t stand out like a ghost against the slate-colored oaks.

He looked at the sky again, cursed the clouds. He had to get to the highway—had to get back to town, to the little store and tell them what was going on here. God, were the girls even alive? And even if they were, would anyone in town care? No doubt the local police force had problems of its own right now, and a few kidnapped kids were the least of them.

Look at it this way,
he thought,
now you won’t have to break the news to Kimberly,
and immediately wanted to punch himself in the face.

“
Goddammit,” he said, wincing at his voice in the still of the forest.

There was a
twang.
An arrow struck the tree a few feet to his left, a simple thing with a brushed silver shaft and bright orange feathered fletching.

“
Shit,” he said. His mind went blank and he hit the ground, clambered on his hands and knees to the nearest tree, rising to his feet and trying to angle himself so that the tree trunk concealed his entire body.

Twang.
Another arrow cut silently through the air to his right, sank into the skinny trunk of a sickly looking pine tree.

“
Dammit,” he said, and now he could hear the snapping of branches. His hunter was nearby and closing in.

“
Whoo,” Jacob yelled, his voice seeming to come from everywhere. A bird called out, took flight.

“
Bastard,” Richard screamed.

“
Thanks,” Jacob laughed and in a second there was another
twang
and Richard felt the arrow strike the tree to his back.

He spun, pressed his nose to the rough bark, and held his arms close to his sides. His hunter was somewhere directly in front of him. He would not be able to circle around without crossing Richard’s peripheral line of sight—and if he did, Richard would simply move along the curve of the tree. They could be here all day.

Richard sucked in a deep breath, held it. Silence spinning out for what felt like forever. Another twig snapping, somewhere nearby. He could turn and run, weave madly between the trees, or he could face the bastard head on.

He exhaled, long and steady, through pursed lips.

“
To hell with this,” he whispered, pulled in another deep breath and stepped from behind the tree, screaming, roaring, his fists clenched at his sides, charging toward his unseen attacker.

He saw Jacob a split second before he heard the
twang
of the arrow’s release. Richard cut to his right, and a white-hot spike of pain pierced his left forearm. He glanced down, saw the arrow bobbing—it had entered the palm-side of his forearm halfway between his wrist and his elbow, and had gone a third of the way through before stopping. Blood flowed, but he hammered forward, his eyes on Jacob, who took two steps back and readied another arrow for launch.

Twang.
He moved left, and the arrow zipped past the right side of Richard’s head, a lover blowing into his ear. Leading with his right shoulder and ignoring the pain dancing up his left arm like a heart attack, he slammed into Jacob, drove him into a tree. Something struck Richard’s face, smashing his lips against his teeth. He tasted blood.

The bow hit the ground between them. Richard took a step back, grabbed the arrow that had gone through his arm and, screaming his way through the pain, slid it free. It was needle-point and came out clean. Jacob went for the knife at his waist and Richard quickly slid his right hand along the shaft of the arrow, stopping when he felt the feathers touch his palm. He whipped the arrow through the air, swung it like a sword—right, left, right, the tip opening a bloody Z across Jacob’s face and chest.

“
Mother
fucker,
” Richard screamed, using the arrow like a switch now—
whap whap whap
—scourging Jacob as he rolled away from the tree and crumbled to the ground, screaming, his four remaining arrows sliding from the quiver on his back, his welt-covered forearms shielding his bleeding face. Richard swung and swung, hammering lashes across Jacob’s back, the pain in his left arm long since forgotten, the scream pouring from his mouth sounding more and more like laughter. Criss-crossed lines of blood seeped through the cloth of Jacob’s shirt.

At some point Richard threw aside the arrow and kicked Jacob—he drove his foot into the bastard’s balls and into his stomach, and when Jacob’s arms fell away from his face, Richard stomped his nose into a bloody lump.

Panting, Richard stared down at the dazed and bloody mess at his feet.

“
God,” Jacob said. “Stuh-stuh…” His bloody fingers twitched atop the grass. The yawning gash on his cheek and forehead glistened. He coughed, rolled onto his side. Pawed feebly at the sheathed knife hanging from his belt.

Falling to his knees, Richard slapped away Jacob’s hand and removed the knife from its leather sheath. Rolling the dazed and bloodied man onto his back, he pressed the serrated blade to Jacob’s throat.

“
Kill you,” he said once more. The pain in his left arm returned, intensifying with each galloping beat of his heart. Black spots pulsed before his eyes, also in time to his heartbeat, just like the blood pumping from the wound in his arm.

“
Guh,” Jacob said, bringing a hand to his face and probing the gaping wound in his cheek, pressing it shut.

Richard’s hand shook. He drew it back, slowly, and the blade opened a small, shallow furrow in the flesh of Jacob’s throat. Beads of blood formed. Jacob’s pulse thrummed beneath taut, blood-slick flesh. He grunted.

Richard returned the knife to its starting position and pressed harder. Thought for a moment, and then altered his grip on the knife, brought it up, his fist tight on the hilt, the blade pointing downward. One swift plunge, and it would be over. Jacob opened his eyes, blinked away blood. Coughed once.

Richard’s hand quivered, his stomach seemed to collapse upon itself, and he leaned forward, gagging, a small line of bile flowing from his mouth and onto the ground. He heaved once more, and this time the bile contained a few small chunks of what he could only assume was all that was left of the last food he’d eaten.

He placed the knife on the ground between his knees and inspected the wound on his arm. It was clean—two simple holes like the wounds of Christ in some painting. Blood welled in each of the holes but it did not flow.

He slid Jacob’s gun from its holster.

Drawing back the hammer with his thumb, he pressed the barrel of the gun to Jacob’s temple.

“
Guh,” Jacob said again, drawing himself into a ball and trying to push away the barrel with trembling fingers. A bloody snot bubble swelled from his right nostril and burst. Richard closed his eyes, opened them. Gently pulled the trigger and, using his thumb, guided the hammer to its original position. If they hadn’t already heard the screaming lunatic laughter of his assault upon their brother, they’d hear this. If he pulled the trigger, the others would hear him, and any chance he had of getting away would be lost.

He could smother Jacob or slit his throat.

Richard stared at the shallow cut he’d opened across Jacob’s throat, at the throbbing pulse beneath the dirt and the blood. Jacob coughed once more, and that was all Richard needed—he stood, looking around, sliding the gun into his pocket and trying to decide upon a path. He’d hurt the bastard, hurt him badly. He was dying, and it would take a long time. He didn’t deserve the mercy of a quick kill.

He walked, eyes forward, his left arm curled to his stomach, the gun hanging like an unfulfilled promise from his right hand. The tress flowed past him and over him, unchanging.

Less than ten minutes after leaving Jacob to his fate, Richard came across the shack. It sat in a clearing like something organic and ancient, its tin roof peppered with orange rust blossoms and covered in patches of thick green moss—a squat, oblong building covered on all sides by doors. Simple pre-fab bedroom doors; heavy wooden doors; rust-streaked metal doors stenciled numbers beneath wire-mesh inlaid windows. Door after door after door.

He stepped up to the building and tried one of the doors. It would not open, and this close he could tell that it had been bolted to the side of the building. A stench hung in the air, something heavy and sour—the reek of sun-baked roadkill.

He moved down the line, trying door after door, rounding the corner, until he came upon a wooden outhouse door. It was set a little deeper into the building than the other doors, and he slid his fingers beneath the black metal loop, placed his thumb upon the latch. He leaned close, peered into the crescent-shaped hole that had been cut into the wooden slats, and the smell punched him in the face. He recoiled.

There was something dead inside the shack, and dead was dangerous. He stepped back, looked around for something, for anything, and that’s when he heard it. Someone inside the shack coughed. He listened. The seconds ticked by, and when the cough came once more, terror and hope surged through Richard’s core. He wrenched open the door.

Framed in the light cast through the open door, Kimberly lay naked and bloody, roped and chained to a thin soiled mattress that sat atop the metal frame of a small folding cot.

“
God,” he said, stepping into the dim confines of the shack, into the reek of death and human waste. There were flies, so many little buzzing wings that it sounded as if he were in a beehive.

Kimberly’s blackened eyes were closed. Her nose was crooked. Her lips were swollen, split, and bloodied. Her hands were cuffed above her head, the cuffs bound with twine to the wire mesh upon which the mattress lay. Also bound to the cot frame, a rope encircled her waist. Her legs were spread wide and bent at the knees. Her toes touched the ground. Twine bound her ankles to the legs of the cot.

His eyes adjusting to the gloom, Richard looked around: to the left of the cot, two dead bodies hung writhing from chains, buzzing with flies, their stiff fingers silently working, their cloudy and shriveled eyes rolling slowly in their sockets. They were naked, their flesh sallow, jaundiced, their feet and ankles bloated and bruised and leaking dark fluids onto ground.

To the right of the cot, a deep bloodstained sink hung from the wall, which was lined with warped shelves bearing paint cans, tools, and other assorted garage items. A pencil-thin line of water ran from the faucet.

There was another door directly across from the door leading into the shack. It was shut but did not appear to be locked. A filthy orange hunting jacket hung from a hook on the door. The wall to the right of the door was covered with warped and tattered pornographic images.