Pray To Stay Dead (39 page)

“
Got it!” He yelled, looking up at Colleen and flashing a lunatic grin.

“
Hey,” she said, “look at that,” and clapped.

The boy chortled and once more tossed the ball at his brother. It bounced off his forehead, and this time the other boy bunched his face into a red knot and screamed.

Colleen helped to calm the child, and when he returned to his blocks Colleen excused herself, said that she had to check in on Mama Sally.

“
Will you be back?” Lissa asked, and Colleen realized that she didn’t really like the girl. There was nothing specific, and Lissa certainly seemed sincere, but there was something else, a know-it-all-quality that Colleen associated with kids from her childhood, kids she hadn’t liked, for whatever reasons children have for not liking other children.

“
Yes,” she said. “I’ll come back.”

“
Good,” Lissa said, proceeding to make Colleen feel like shit: “I love you so much, Mama Colleen. I’m glad you came.”

Mama Sally was fine, drifting off to sleep with a pained look on her face. Her contractions were roughly thirty minutes apart now, and the window was easing shut.

Outside, the sky opened up, and rain pelted the window. Colleen parted the curtains and stared into the downpour, wondered where Samson was, if he’d survived the beating he’d received.

Please, God,
she thought, unmindful of whether or not she still believed in God.
Let him be dead.

“
You should close the curtains,” Mathilda said. Colleen looked at the older woman, imagined bullets smashing through the glass. She closed the curtains.

Mathilda prepared lunch for the kids just before two, and brought it in to them. Colleen sat and stared at a book she’d taken from the large bookcase, a nonsense horror story from the thirties with writing so dense that she’d taken ten minutes to work through the first three pages before giving up.

She looked up from the cover of the book to see Embeth lying there upon the floor, eyes open, staring at her.

“
Oh,” Colleen said, tossing aside the book and leaning forward. “Are you…” Her words trailed into nothing, and she struggled for something, anything, that would make some kind of sense. Finding no such thing, she closed her mouth. Embeth looked around, back to Colleen.

“
You tied me up.”

“
We did,” Colleen said, sliding from the couch and to her knees. She reached toward Embeth, froze, drew back her hand, as if the bound woman were dangerously hot to the touch. “You were upset.” She said this a little louder than she needed to, in the hope that Mathilda would hear her.

“
Huff,” said the woman, her bloodshot eyes spilling tears. Her bottom lip quivered. “He’s really dead.”

It wasn’t a question, but Colleen answered her anyway. “Yes.” She steadied herself. “Samson killed him.”

“
Oh, God,” Embeth said, and just when she seemed poised to collapse into hysterics, she composed herself, took a deep, snot-choked breath. “Samson...”

“
Yes. He killed Evie and Max, too.”

“
Where is he?”

“
Who?”

“
Samson.”

“
We don’t know,” Colleen said, glancing at Mathilda, who’d just entered the room and stood with her arms crossed. “We’re hoping…”

“
Hoping what?” Embeth said.

“
Hoping he’s dead,” Mathilda said. “Huff hurt him.”

“
He did?” The nerves in her face did a little dance, and for a second she looked immensely proud.

“
Yes. How do you feel?” Mathilda asked, walking toward them, looking down at Embeth.

“
Dizzy and hungry.” She licked her lips. “Thirsty. Why should I be tied up? Untie me.”

Mathilda walked to the kitchen, returned with a glass of water. With Colleen’s help, the bound woman sat up. Mathilda pressed the glass to Embeth’s mouth.

“
Stop that.” She jerked away. “What are you doing? Untie me!”

Mathilda drew a long breath. “You need water, come on.” Embeth still resisted, and she sighed. “We can’t have you freaking out again. We need you to keep your head together, if we’re all going to get out of this.” She paused, and Colleen wasn’t sure if she meant what she said next, or if she were just trying to calm Embeth: “Huff would want it that way.”

“
I’m okay. I just want to see my babies,” Embeth said, and Colleen realized for the first time that she had no idea who’d given birth to each of the children, with the exception the unnamed boy, who was Mathilda’s.

“
Sally is in labor.”

“
Now?” Embeth asked, eyes wide, and Colleen feared that something was wrong. The woman was off-kilter. By now, they were all a little off-kilter, but Embeth was the only one who’d sat clutching the severed head of her kidnapper, her husband of nearly two decades, the man she loved—or had been brainwashed into loving—cradling it to her chest.

We shouldn’t,
Colleen thought, wanted to say, but she couldn’t, because maybe she was just being paranoid. And maybe they’d need help soon, and they were short on hands. Besides, it just wasn’t right, keeping her tied up like that. How long could they keep it up?

“
I’ll need your help,” Mathilda said. “Colleen and I can’t do this alone. She hasn’t delivered a child.” She looked up at Colleen. “Have you?”

“
No. Puppies.”

“
You have,” Mathilda told Embeth. Her face hardened. “Where are his guns?”

“
Whose guns?”

“
Huff’s.” She looked away.

“
I don’t,” Embeth began, frowning, considering what she could and couldn’t say, should or shouldn’t. “I don’t know—”

“
You do,” Mathilda said, leaning in close, a crease forming between her eyebrows. “I’m not untying you unless you tell me.”

“
But this—”

“
We’re in trouble, Beth,” Mathilda said. In the back room, Sally yelled something about pain, dammit—it was really starting to hurt. Mathilda looked over her shoulder, toward the back, and yelled, “Be there in a minute.” She looked back at Embeth. “Even if Samson is dead, we’re going to need those guns eventually. With all that’s happening out there.”

“
Okay,” Embeth said, swallowing. She licked her lips again and looked around. “You’re right. They’re in the house. He keeps them locked up.”

As far as Colleen knew, there was only one house on the property—the deserted ranch-style house they’d gone into shortly after arriving. She remembered the locked door at the end of the hall.

“
Okay,” Mathilda said. “The keys?”

Embeth looked toward the bedroom in which Huff’s body and head lay, and once more Colleen was certain the woman was about to crack. She said, “He has them,” and that was all.

They untied her, and Embeth moved from the floor to the couch, and let herself break down. She wept, her shoulders hitching, tears streaming down her face. Mathilda wiped tears from her own eyes, sat beside Embeth and held her and stroked her hair.

Colleen left them, drifted past the door to the room containing the bodies. The keys—she had to search Huff’s body for a key-ring, but she wasn’t ready.

“
What’s going on?” Sally asked as Colleen entered the room in which she lay waiting to give birth.

“
We untied Embeth. Can I get you anything?”

“
How is she?”

“
They’re both crying,” Colleen said, shrugging.

“
They loved him,” Sally said. “They’ve been here so long.”

“
It kind of worries me. I don’t know what we should do.”

“
Do?”

“
What if they, I don’t know—freak out?” Colleen said.

“
We keep an eye on them. We do what we have to do,” Sally said, and Colleen didn’t like the look on her face. “We take care of them if we have to.”

Colleen’s shoulders fell a half inch and she nodded.

“
Do you think you’ll be able to, if it comes to that?”

“
Yes,” Colleen said, and the word was out before the realization had an opportunity to make itself at home. She may die soon, and in some horrible way, but she would no longer be a victim of Huffington Niebolt’s insanity. “I’ll do what I have to do. You know I will.”

Sally assessed her, and Colleen wondered just how long the woman had been this way. Had her time here hardened her, or did it go back to her life before? “We need Mathilda. I won’t get through this without her.”

“
She’s taking it okay. Embeth?” Colleen shook her head. “I’m not so sure about her.”

“
We’ll take it as it, oh—” Mathilda scrunched up her face, eyes squeezed shut, fists clutching the thin blanket draped over her stomach. When the contraction passed, she looked Colleen in the eyes. “Getting shorter. What? What’s that look on your face?”

“
I don’t think Samson is dead.”

“
What makes you say that?”

“
I’ve been thinking. The dead ones I saw in town, at the little store, they’d come from the other town.”

“
Beistle?”

“
Yeah, they came from Beistle but they were from right there in Harlow.”

“
They came home.”

“
Seems like it.”

“
If he were dead, you think he’d have come right back here?”

“
Maybe,” Colleen said. “I don’t know.”

“
You might be right,” Sally said. “But this isn’t his home. It’s ours. He’s rarely here.”

“
He’s got his own apartment, right?”

“
Yes,” Sally said. Colleen thought of the three small apartments they’d encountered following the exhausting uphill walk with Samson, the trap he’d led them to, the attack that followed.

“
Then he’s probably there,” Colleen said. “We need to get to the guns before he does. I need to find him. I need to kill him.”

“
You’re right,” Mathilda said, appearing beside her. She no longer cried, but her moist eyes were red, the skin around them puffy. “But this comes first.” She looked at Sally. “How are you?”

“
About twenty minutes apart.”

“
Good,” Mathilda said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “The sooner we get this one out of there the better.”

“
How is she doing?” Colleen asked.

“
She’s having a drink,” Mathilda said, “She can’t believe he’s dead,” and now her eyes were on Colleen, pinning her in place. Mathilda looked old and tired. “I can’t either.”

The seconds ticked by without response, and Colleen suspected that Sally’s reasons for silence were much the same as her own—so as to not say anything that had the potential to set off Mathilda.

“
He was insane,” Mathilda said. “I know that. You know that, Colleen—you just got here. Sally, too. But me and Beth and Evie, we’ve been here so long. Evie suspected it was all a farce, but Embeth? She fell for it a long time ago. She was his, pure and simple. She was his.”

“
And you?” Colleen said.

“
Sometimes it made it easier to believe. I loved him, yeah, as sick as that is, and as much as it hurts me to admit it, but I did,” Mathilda said, and then she laughed without humor. “I loved the son of a bitch. He was good to me. And some part of me, the part that remembers when he took me—that part of me wishes I’d been there to see him die.

“
So,” she looked at Sally. “You popping soon?”

“
Soon enough.”

“
Okay,” Mathilda said, placing a hand on Colleen’s shoulder, squeezing once. “I’m gonna check on her.”

Sally waited until Mathilda was gone to speak in hushed tones: “She can’t know what we did. Not ever.”

“
She doesn’t have to.”

They talked nonsense for a little while, mostly about the book that Sally was reading, and whether or not it was genuinely sexy, whether or not it was right to find it sexy. Mathilda held up her right forefinger in a
just-you-wait
gesture, and fanned through the pages. Finding what she was looking for, she read aloud. A few words into the passage, somebody screamed.

The scream went on, like a siren, and Colleen bolted from the room, down the hall, and into the living room, where she spun in place, tried to get a fix on the sound of the scream. Looking at the nursery door, she realized with complete clarity and utter lucidity that the sound was not one scream but several, overlapping and weaving into one another.

She burst through the nursery door, gun raised, and her scream joined the chorus. The horrors of the past several days were behind her, but she was not done with horror, nor it with her:

Little Huff and the unnamed child screamed in their cribs, screamed and screamed and screamed, their faces red and quivering, little Huff standing at the wooden bars and looking like a deranged lifer. The nameless boy lay on his back, kicking like a turtle baking in the sun.

One of the twins—she was not sure which and would not learn which for several hours, long after it was all over—lay facedown in a pool of blood, his fat little pink hand twitching like a dying spider.

Mathilda leaned with her hack to the wall, between the cribs containing the wailing children. One of her arms was held before her, fingers splayed and gloved in blood. The other hand was pressed to her face. Blood oozed through her fingers.