Pray To Stay Dead (31 page)

“
Yeah,” Sally said. She opened her book and resumed reading.

It was a little after ten and Colleen could see moonlit shapes outside. The trees and the hills were so black and formless they drew you forward, made you want to lean forward and peer deep into them and see if anything was there at all.

“
How is it?” Colleen asked following several minutes of silence. Sally held up her finger:
give me a second.
She turned a page, read on until what Colleen assumed was the end of a chapter, and, frowning slightly, looked up. “Hm?”

“
The book. How is it?” In light of all that had come, in light of all that was yet to come, it felt good—asking a mundane question. A normal question:
how’s that book you’re reading?

“
It’s okay,” Sally said, staring at the cover, looking like a person who was looking for the right thing to say. “It’s a lot to think about. I picked it up thinking it was like the old movie. It’s not.”

“
No,” Colleen said. “It’s one of the books I managed to not read in college, but I picked up enough to know it’s not like the old movie.”

“
I started to put it down when I realized it wasn’t, but I decided to keep going. I guess I’m glad I did.”

“
Huh,” Colleen, said, and she felt her one normal conversation of the day wither on her tongue. She and Sally looked at one another for a moment, and then Sally looked down at the book and picked up where she’d left off.

The child with no name stirred, grunted, its face contorting into something that looked like a smile. Colleen retrieved the pacifier from the small table beside the couch and pressed the translucent rubber nipple to the child’s lips. He took it eagerly and grew still. Looking at the child, Colleen felt something stir in her heart, a fluttering sensation that felt akin to love of some kind. Maybe it was just pity. Even before the dead had risen, the child’s world had been upside down, and the saddest part of all was that, growing up, he would never know better.

Niebolt was smart. The children were a part of whatever twisted Noah’s Ark repopulation fantasy he was feeding, but they were also a tool, a means by which he calmed and soothed his victims. A tool for which she was, at this moment, most grateful—she had not thought of her mother, down there in the dark, or of Guy. Or of her brother, her friends.

“
Are any of them still alive?” Colleen said, repositioning the sleeping child, which belched once and briefly opened one of its eyes before settling down. Sally looked up from her book once more. The look on her face was answer enough, but she spoke anyway.

“
I don’t think so,” she said. “Huff lets his sons do what they want to the men. He tells them to make it fast and painless, but you know how men can be, especially in groups, feeding off each other.”

“
How do you know?” Colleen said. “That they’re dead, I mean.”

“
I don’t,” Sally said, shaking her head, her lips pressed into a thin line. “Not for certain, anyway. All I know is what Mathilda told me one night, after she had a few drinks and was actually talking about her time here, about her life before Huff. She told me that Huff lets the boys have the boys. Their job is to make them disappear, fast and clean.”

“
What about Kimberly?”

“
Kimberly?,” Sally said. “I didn’t know there was another girl. Who was she?”

“
My best friend,” Colleen said. “Since we were little.”

“
Oh.”

“
You said
was.
”

“
I did,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I never saw my husband again, Colleen, and I never saw my son again.”

She set her book aside, rose from the chair with nearly comical slowness, and sat close beside Colleen. They held hands.

“
I never saw them again and I never will,” Sally said, her voice cracking. “You’re probably not going to see your man or your brother, and Kimberly is probably dead, too. At this point, you can only hope she is, because if Huff didn’t want her to live here, then he gave her to his boys, and that...”

Sally didn’t have to finish. She looked like a woman who’d said too much, anyhow—embarrassed and ashamed. “I’m sorry.”

Colleen’s anger returned. Suddenly she hated the child in her arms, this nameless bastard offspring of Huffington Niebolt—she wanted it dead as much as she wanted him dead. She stared at its face until her rage abated, aware only at the end that she was hurting Sally’s hand.

She stared at Sally, letting go.

“
It’s okay,” Sally said.

Colleen looked down at the child, blinking away tears and feeling her heart beneath her ribs, pumping to burst.

“
It’s going to be okay,” Sally said, dropping her voice to a whisper and leaning in close, like a lover. “We’re getting out of here.”

“
Getting out of here,” Colleen repeated, with realization unfolding like a death letter in her mind.

“
Yes,” Sally said. “We’re going to get away from this place.”

“
And go where?”

“
I, uh,” Sally said, looking around. Colleen watched the older woman’s face. She could see the light dawning there, as well.

“
There’s no place for us,” Colleen said. “Not anymore.”

“
It’s really over?” Sally said, on the verge of tears once more. “Everywhere.”

“
Seems like it,” Colleen said, touching Sally’s hand. “This is the safest place. We just need to take it.”

“
Huff’s losing his grip.” She sounded almost hopeful.

“
I’m going to kill him,” Colleen said, maybe a little too loudly, surprised by her sudden thirst for violence. She saw herself cramming the bastard’s cock into his mouth with the knife she’d used to slice it off.

“
I hope you get the chance, honey,” Sally said, letting go of Colleen’s hand and struggling once more to her feet. “And I hope I’m there when you do it.” She held out her hands, indicating the sleeping child. “Here.”

Colleen passed the nameless boy to Sally, who held him to her chest and slowly shuffled out of the room, her slipper-clad feet dragging across the deep carpet. Colleen stared into space, her mind racing, the images in her head overlapping into jumbled and bloody chaos. Is this what it felt like to go crazy?

The place where the child had been pressed to her chest felt empty and cold now, damp. She stood, felt the carpet beneath her bare feet and between her toes, and stepped over to the bookshelf. So much information, and so much of it conflicting and varied, not something she associated with cults. Not that she knew much about them, aside from what she’d heard about Manson and his bunch on the news.

She plucked a Poe from between Steinbeck and a book about the Wright Brothers, fanned its musty pages, and returned it to the shelf. She wasn’t in the mood for death, so she opted for Steinbeck. She’d read
Of Mice and Men
twice already, not counting the times she’d skimmed its contents or re-read her favorite passages. She was ten pages in when Sally returned.

“
Tell me about the rabbits again,” Sally said, easing herself into the chair.

“
My brother said that Lennie represented us. That we were all looking forward to some farm that we’re probably never going to have, and that we’d all be better off if we had a George in our lives. Someone with the balls to put a bullet in our heads.”

“
Sounds like an upbeat guy,” Sally said, realizing her mistake. She frowned. “I’m sorry.”

“
No,” Colleen said. “It’s okay.”

“
Goddamn dumb of me.”

“
No, you’re right,” Colleen said, looking down at the opened book in her hands and staring through the words printed upon the pages. “He wasn’t the easiest guy to get along with sometimes.”

“
But you loved him.”

“
I did, the bastard,” she said, looking up at Sally. “What if he’s still alive, somewhere right out there?”

“
I, uh,” Sally said, stammering. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Colleen.”

“
I don’t want you to say anything. I’m just thinking aloud, is all, wondering if maybe—”

She stopped, looked around. The sound of the sewing machine had stopped. Evie appeared, met Colleen’s eyes for a second, and then vanished into the kitchen. Colleen heard a cabinet open and close, heard the kitchen tap go on and then off, and Evie stepped into the living room with a glass of water in her hand.

“
Can I get you two anything?” she asked, fidgeting, not making eye contact with either of them.

“
No, thanks,” Sally said. “You finish up?”

“
Yeah,” Evie said. “I finished those four I had going. They came out nice.”

“
I bet.”

“
Are we going to be okay?” Evie asked, and it took Colleen a few seconds to realize that Evie was talking to her, looking right at her.

“
What, uh,” Colleen said, stumbling over her words. “What?”

“
The things Huff said, are they true? You really saw them?”

“
I saw them,” Colleen said.

“
What’s making it happen?” Evie asked.

“
I don’t know,” Colleen said. “The people on the radio and the television didn’t know. They didn’t know anything.”

“
It doesn’t mean anything, Evie,” Sally said. “It doesn’t mean Huff is anything other than what he is.”

“
And what is that?” Evie asked, somehow managing to sound both hopeful and accusatory.

“
He’s just a man,” Sally said.

“
Just a man,” Evie said, staring past them and through the window for a few seconds. “Yeah, okay. I’m going to bed.”

“
We are too,” Sally said, holding up her book. “Just want to get a little more reading done.”

Evie nodded, looked down at her feet, and loafed out of the room.

“
She knows,” Sally said. “She’s been here forever. When we bash in the bastard’s skull, she might cry a little, but you won’t get any resistance from her.”

“
What about Mathilda and Embeth?”

Sally made a face. “They’re going to be a problem.”

They read for nearly an hour without speaking to one another. Colleen wasn’t sure how Sally was making out, but she was struggling. She’d read three or four sentences, and then the words stopped being words, really. Would she get another shot at Niebolt as perfect as the one she had today? And if she did, and if she was successful, what then?

They went to bed.

Wondering if, when, and how her chance would come—wondering if her brother was alive somewhere nearby or already rotting in a shallow grave or in the new and horrifying state that existed between life and death—Colleen fell asleep.

“
Wake the fuck up,” a man said.

Nearby: muffled keening, and the creak of bedsprings.

Colleen opened her eyes, blinked. The bedside lamp was on. She tried to sit up and someone pressed her head into her pillow.

“
Sally?” Colleen said. “What’s—”

“
She can’t help you,” someone said, and a second later she realized who it was. Not a man, not by any reasonable standards, anyhow—just a boy no older than her brother. Samson’s breath was hot on her cheek; his hand slid away from her face, down her neck, and across her shoulder. “No one can.”

Fear burned away the fog of sleep.

“
Samson,” she said.

She tried once more to sit up. A cold ring of steel pressed into her cheek.

“
I’ll kill you,” he said. “I will. Just test me and see if I don’t, you dirty cunt.”

He rolled her onto her back and stood up, the enormous barrel of the cowboy revolver in his right hand pointed directly at her face. He wore the same shirt he’d had on when they first met him at Misty’s, and little more. His left knee rested on the foot of the bed, near her feet. His pale legs were covered in dark hair, and his massive erection pointed to the ceiling, bobbing, its thick head like a shaking fist.

“
No,” she said, her mind tearing itself apart at the edges. She sucked in air, fuel for a scream that would awaken everyone in the house, consequences be damned, and it was the cold ring of steel against her cheek that pulled her back from the edge: if she screamed, she would die: if she died, she would not be able to kill Samson Niebolt or his goddamned father.

“
No,” Samson said through clenched teeth, but she had already fallen silent.

Motion caught her eye, and she pulled her gaze from Samson’s cock to Sally, who writhed upon her bed, her lips stretched around the gag in her mouth, her left eye swelling shut, her hands bound behind her back.

“
You too,” Samson said, swinging the gun toward Sally’s tear-streaked face. “I’ll shoot you in the stomach. You know I will.”

Again the barrel of the gun was in Colleen’s face, and it was such a small thing, really, such a small little empty circle. How could such a tiny thing be so terrifying, so all-encompassing? She yelped once, unable to stop herself, and then squeezed her eyes shut expecting to be blown into nothing.

“
Open your eyes,” Samson said, and she listened. Sally wept around her gag, and Samson Niebolt spit into his left hand and worked his cock while leveling the gun at Colleen’s face with the other. “Take it off.”