Pray To Stay Dead (3 page)

If only for the sex, he could have gone on this way for God knew how long. His general apathy toward all things carried over into his own life, and though he didn’t care for the way things had gone whenever they all got together, he could deal with feeling like an idiot around Kim and her friends if he could still go to bed with her and have those pressure-free moments together.

He’d met Tatum Morrish nearly two months ago while at a party he and Kimberly were attending, and all that had changed. He felt at ease with Tatum, never in danger of being judged or evaluated. He didn’t feel stupid when he was with her, and the sex was as good as it was with Kimberly.

Richard didn’t care about much but he had no interest in hurting anyone, least of all someone as goodhearted as Kimberly. So he had avoided the breakup, juggling both girls for as long as he could. He clued Tatum in just last week, promised her that he’d return from the trip to Tahoe free of Kimberly.

He would tell her. He would tell her soon. It would hurt, he knew, wishing there was some other way around it.

He zipped up and walked back toward the van.

“
Hey,” Kimberly said when she saw him.

“
Hey,” he said, and she leaned forward and kissed him. They were the same height, which was nice. He looked into her eyes and wondered if maybe it would be easier to just let her find out.

“
I can’t believe you threw out my pads.”

“
I didn’t,” Daniel said, looking down, hair in his face, trying and failing to suppress an idiot grin.

They stood at the back of the van, which was parked on the side of the road at the base of a densely forested hill. The van’s doors were open, revealing their heaped luggage. Colleen’s bag was opened, its contents strewn across the other bags: clothes, a hair drier, a brush, a small zipper bag containing make-up. No pads.

Guy was a few yards away, pissing onto pine needles, his back to them. Kimberly and Richard had taken a walk, down a slope and out of sight.

“
You lying asshole,” Colleen said, pushing him with both hands. She didn’t know why he bothered trying to lie to her. He wasn’t very good at it—always shuffling his feet and looking around—but even at his best, his most bald-faced, she could see through him. She could see the lie in his unblinking eyes when he finally stopped looking around and decided to make eye contact, and she could hear it in his voice, which became stripped of emotion and oddly tremulous, the voice of the seven-year-old who’d broken her porcelain ballerina and blamed it on a non-existent earthquake.

“
Hey,” he said, stepping backward and rubbing his chest. “I said I was sorry.”

Colleen laughed. “What the hell are you talking about? You didn’t say you were sorry.”

“
I was going to, okay?” He looked around. Kimberly and Richard emerged a few hundred feet behind them, gazing up into the redwoods and walking close. Kimberly looked back at them. Daniel’s voice fell to a whisper. “And then you started screaming and shit, and I just—”

“
Enough,” she said, and took a quick step toward him. He stepped back, flinching. He had a good five inches on her, but she was still his Big Sister. As a child, she hadn’t been above petty cruelty; she’d enjoyed making him cry on more than a handful of occasions. She wasn’t proud of this, not necessarily, but she’d established herself as the boss then, and it was sometimes easy to slip back into the role. Daniel enjoyed battering people with his words, but when he thought he was maybe going to get posted, he was all nervous twitches and apologies.

“
I’m sorry,” he said. He shrugged, whipping the hair from his face, and she really wanted to punch his crooked teeth in.

“
You’re such a
child,
” she said, and walked away, toward Guy, who was all zipped up and standing near the front of the van. He raised his eyebrows and opened his arms. She diplomatically sidestepped the embrace.

“
You really think he did it on purpose? Maybe they fell out.”

She looked back at Daniel, who shuffled away in search of a tree to piss on.

“
They didn’t fall out.”

“
You gotta go?” Guy asked, nodding toward the woods.

“
Yeah.”

“
You need a hand?” He smiled.

“
I’ll manage.”

She let him kiss the corner of her mouth and turned away, crossed the street and crab-walked down the slope. Twigs snapped beneath her feet. Somewhere nearby, in the direction from which they’d come, by the sound of it, an engine rumbled. Twenty or so feet down, the ground leveled out. She stopped there, dropped her pants and squatted, relieved to see that her disposable pad was spot free. They were about ninety minutes south of the nearest gas station/five and dime. They’d make it before she got messy.

Her urine pattered the ground. It smelled like her morning coffee. She stood, pulled up her pants, and took her time working her way up the incline, steadying herself, leaning forward and touching the ground before her. Some seemingly sturdy bumps in the terrain turned out to be thick rifts of gathered pine needles that fell apart under the barest pressure, sliding in a scatter down the hillside.

She reached the road and stood, wiped her hands on her jeans. The van’s driver side door was open. Guy was half in, half out, as if he’d paused on his way out or in. Completely still.

He listened to the radio. Colleen could barely hear it, the drone of news. He looked at her and slid entirely from the seat, crossing over to where she stood. He was pale. He looked frightened. She wasn’t used to seeing him that way.

“
Come here,” he said, looking around. He took her by the arm and led her to the van. Daniel approached them, a paltry joint hanging from his lips. Guy looked in the direction Kimberly and Richard had gone. “Hey, you two,” he yelled. “Get up here. Now.” He reached out and pulled the joint from Daniel’s mouth, brought it to his own, inhaled.

“
Hey,” Daniel said. “What are you—”

“
Shut up,” Guy said. Daniel shut up and took his diminished joint when Guy passed it back to him.

Colleen said: “What’s wr—”

He cut her off with a look, leaned in and turned up the volume. “Listen.”

She listened, pressing herself closer to him. He held her. A moment later, Daniel leaned closer. He looked at Colleen, frowned, started to say something but didn’t. Eventually Kimberly and Richard joined them.

“
What the hell,” Richard said, and no one responded.

“
Oh, God.” Kimberly said, looking at Colleen with tear-filled eyes. “The deer.”

“
It can’t be,” Daniel said, after the grim-voiced man reading the news looped around to the beginning of his report and began to repeat himself for the benefit of those just tuning in. “That’s not possible.”

They huddled around the driver side door and listened as the man on the radio once more announced that the CDC in Atlanta had confirmed countless reports over the last forty-eight hours that the recently dead were returning to life and attacking the living. 

Three

Reggie Turner slept through the first twelve hours of the end of the world.

He’d been in Houston, taking it easy after a sixteen hour haul from Tucson, Arizona when the job offer came: deliver a load of industrial chillers to Sacramento within forty hours. It was a thirty-hour run with no trouble and no sleep. He slept for five hours and got to Sacramento in a little over twenty-eight hours, popping Black Mollies all the way.

Reggie didn’t like the way speed made him feel—like a big rodent or a small monkey was trapped behind his ribs and was panicking, trying to tear its way out—but he did what he had to, and he got to Sacramento not long after sundown. This was a good thing, too—he hated walking around in the daylight after a long haul. Too damned bright.

He dumped his load and picked up another for a short run down to Fresno that didn’t need to be there for twenty-four hours. Still flying from the Mollies, he tried to cool his heels in Frank’s, a small, smoky bar and grill not far from the rest stop where he’d get the last good night’s sleep of his life.

Frank, whoever he was, was nowhere to be seen, but the blinds and the smoke made the waitress—her name was Maxine—look at least thirty-five. He smiled and she smiled. He ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and a beer, and he decided he needed to fuck. First things first, though.

Sliding away from the bar and letting his eyes linger over Maxine’s ass (nice for a white woman who’d already given forty a healthy push), he went to the pay phone, which was located between the bathroom doors (the combined smell of piss and urinal cakes and crap lingered here, as it did outside the bathrooms in every truck-stop bar and grill in America). No one looked at him as if he should get his black ass the fuck out the door and on the road. If they felt that way, and he was sure some of them did, then they did a better job of hiding it than the assholes in Houston.

He fed the payphone and dialed home. His mother answered on the third ring. They talked small for a few minutes and then he asked to talk to Nef. Nefertiti’s mother had been on an Africa kick when she’d gotten pregnant and she’d insisted on giving their child a name that evoked the majesty of Ancient Egypt. When he’d asked her why they couldn’t give their kid a normal name that wouldn’t get its ass kicked at school, she’d called him an Uncle Tom and then tried to gouge out his eyes. Her Africa kick came around the same time as her cheap hard liquor kick, and she was a mean ass drunk.

He didn’t miss her.

“
Hey, daddy,” Nef said.

“
Hey, baby. You have a good birthday?” She’d just turned seven.

“
Yeah,” she said, and it was such a short word, he didn’t have time to decide whether he could hear sadness in her voice.

“
You coming home soon?”

“
Soon, honey.”

“
When?”

“
I got one more job to do tomorrow, a little one, and then I’m on my way home. How’s day after tomorrow sound?”

“
Great!”

They talked and laughed. He asked her how school was, and if she’d gotten the present he’d mailed from Texas, and then she asked him how long he was going to stay home. As long as he could afford to, he told her. They wrapped it up and then he said a few more words to his mother. Yes, she’d picked up the check he’d wired her; yes, Nef was going to bed early and doing her homework and eating good. He said goodnight and when he returned to the bar his food was waiting for him.

He downed the food along with three more beers, eyeing Maxine and talking to her whenever she came by. Both of them knew the game well enough to tell that the other was playing it. He asked her what time she was getting off, and she spun it into a joke.

“
I clock out at eight.” It was fifteen after seven. “So I’m thinking maybe twenty minutes after eight?”

“
And again at eight thirty.”

She smiled, and they walked out to his truck a few minutes after eight. In the cramped sleeping quarters behind the seats, they undressed separately and got to work. She hadn’t been off in her estimation, nor had he. They went at it with something like tired desperation, and when they were done no one said anything. The smell of cigarette smoke and charred meat clung to her hair; the smell of their bodies filled the small space in which they lay, side by side, like relations.

She sat up to light a cigarette and spied his dog-tags, and he readied himself.

“
You were over there?”

“
Yes I was.”

“
What was it like?”

“
Like you heard it is.”

“
Something you don’t like to talk about?” She’d never come right out and ask, not without an opening (they never did), but it was pretty damned obvious: she wanted to know if he’d killed anyone, and if so, how many; and what did it look like, smell like, feel like? He saw her eyes crawl over his body, scavenging for overlooked scars. Everyone was a ghoul, eager to wrench the bones from the dirt and see if there was anything wet left to suck out. Everyone wanted to hear about the bad stuff, about the brains popping and the blood flying. This had once surprised and disappointed him.

“
No,” he said. “Bad dreams.” This was bullshit, the kind she wanted to hear and enough to make her uncomfortable. He didn’t dream of Vietnam. He never dreamed of Vietnam, not of the good moments, the quiet moments in which it was possible to believe that you were not a second away from eating a bullet or being obliterated by a landmine; nor did he dream of the screams of the dying or of the asshole reckless superior he and a few of his fellows had gotten away with fragging. He hadn’t had nightmares before combat, and he did not have them now. Combat, he believed, did not change a man: it magnified him. He came out a bigger, truer version of himself, for better or worse.

No nightmares, but sometimes the images from 1965 would come to him when he was awake, and with total clarity: the sight of a cluster of VC coming apart in spurts and chunks as his M14 spat fire and tried to shake itself from his grip; the heaps of bodies, the crying children; the old man laughing and telling unintelligible yet obviously raunchy jokes on a Monday and lying waxen and still the following Wednesday, a mangy wild dog lapping clean the hollowed-out ruin of his skull.