Pray To Stay Dead (46 page)

It was a little after six. Less than two hours before dark.

“
This can wait until morning,” Mathilda said with very little conviction.

“
Maybe it can,” Colleen said, looking at the woman and shaking her head. “But I can’t. We need guns. We need ammunition.”

“
He might be dead.”

“
Yeah. Maybe so. We can hope.”

She’d gone into the bedroom, searched the pockets of both Max and his father. There’d been a small keyring in Max’s pocket, but the three keys on it matched three keys on Huff’s larger ring, which contained eleven keys. She’d pocketed the small ring, just in case, and held the larger ring in her left hand. In her right she clutched Huff’s pistol.

Three shots. She had three shots, if she ran into Samson on the way to the house. Three shots, and if those went wild and she was still alive, there was Huff’s knife, the one that she had used to slice his head from his shoulders. It was sheathed, strapped to her right ankle, atop her jeans, where it hung loosely.

“
Okay?” Mathilda asked.

“
Yeah,” Colleen said, nodding. Her stomach curled into something sharp and wounded. Her hands shook. She walked to the kitchen, chased a shot of whisky with another shot of whisky. The shots went down like fire, and Colleen wondered where Samson kept his pot. Something, anything, to make the next step easier; something to kill the edge.

You don’t need that stuff,
she could hear her mom saying, the dead woman’s words an amalgam of countless past lectures. She could see Daniel now, rolling his eyes, and the hurt on their mother’s face.
It’ll just turn you into an idiot. You just need God and the strength He gives you.

Colleen closed her eyes. “Help me,” she said, not entirely sure who she was talking to. “Please.”

Before leaving, she piled a third shot of whisky atop the other two. She needed all the help she could get.

The fourth key she tried opened the lock on the lone door leading into the courtyard. She pushed it open, saw only trees and a path where part of her expected to see walking corpses. There was the whisper of the breeze through the trees, the occasional chirp of a bird, the snap of a twig, but little else. She walked downhill, eyes darting from shadow to darkening shadow, tree to tree, but soon she realized that Samson could be anywhere, just anywhere at all, and she was wasting her time, jumping at every shadow and shape. If he were out here he’d come, and she’d face him, whatever the outcome.

She moved downhill with ease, branches snapping beneath her feet, and soon she came to place where the ground leveled out before the three small buildings, the place of the attack. The truck was gone, and though she tried for a minute to resist the urge, she could not stop herself from searching the ground. There was no sign of Guy’s severed penis. If one of their attackers had not taken it, the elements had. She froze, and it all came raging up like vomit, threatened to kick her legs out from under her and leave her crying and screaming in the dirt.

“
No,” she said. There would be time to panic and cry later, time to mourn, time to scream herself to sleep, if that’s what she needed to do. But not now.

She tried the door leading into the cabin on the right. It was locked. The door leading into the middle cabin was not. Raising the pistol, drawing back the hammer, she turned the knob and stepped into the small apartment.

She moved quickly, finding nothing save tattered pornographic magazines beside the bed, moldy smelling towels in the bathroom cabinets, and an empty bean can on the counter beside the small kitchen sink. The cold cuts in the fridge had come from Misty’s, and had long since gone bad.

Outside, she scanned her surroundings. Between the trees there were only trees. Between those, trees, and so on. The sky was gray with the threat of rain, and she could not get a handle on which way was which. She moved downhill, and though she repeatedly thought of herself as moving south, that was probably not the case. It wasn’t long before she spotted the truck, somewhere far along a winding trail that moved to her right, away from the main road in whichever direction.

She reached the truck, the same truck they’d thrown Guy against. There was nothing in the glove compartment, and the rifle rack in the back window was empty. The keys were in the ignition. She touched them, considered it for a second, shot it down. They may need the truck later, and she needed to move in silence.

She eased the driver side door closed, turned around.

“
God,” she said. She was not praying.

Guy stumbled toward her, head low. His face was a marbled bluish-grey, his hands bound behind his back and trailing a single length of rope. A smaller length of rope trailed his left foot. He wore no pants, no underwear. There was a dark round hole where his penis had been. He wore socks and shoes. His upper legs were the same bluish-grey as his face. His ankles were dark and swollen and covered in seeping black blood-blisters.

“
No,” she said. “Jesus, no.”

Her lover’s corpse lifted its head, and its sunken and faded eyes widened. It opened its mouth, closed it. It picked up its pace, nearly stumbling.

She raised her gun, got Guy’s face in her sights, weeping as the distance between them closed.

“
Guy?” She asked, though she knew there was no point, that she was doing exactly what the news had urged everyone to not do. This was not Guy.

It opened its mouth again, and its shoulders jerked left and right, left and right with its struggles to be free of its bindings, the space between them closing, closing…

Tears blurred her vision, and she brought her left hand to her face, squeezed her eyes shut. Sobs rocked her body, and when she opened her eyes her dead boyfriend’s face was inches from hers and moving in, mouth open, lips drawn back in a snarl that suggested neither anger nor hunger. There was nothing there—nothing in its face, nothing in its eyes.

Gasping, she took a step back, pressed the barrel of her gun to its forehead and pushed, hard. The dead thing stumbled away from her, opened its mouth again, moaning in silence.

She lowered the gun, looked at it. Her hands shook.

Three bullets.

“
I’m sorry, hon,” she said, pocketing her gun and stepping around and behind Guy’s corpse. It tried to spin in place, followed her movements, tottering, nearly stumbling once more. “I just can’t do it. Not now.”

Seizing the long rope that hung from its wrists, she walked to the nearest tree, gently tugging Guy’s walking remains toward her. The dead thing’s head swung from side to side, and it took a single shaky step backward.

“
Come on.” Another tug, more forceful this time, and the thing seemed to listen. It took a second step backward, a third, and Colleen wound the rope around the trunk of a young but sturdy pine, tied it off, three times for good measure. As she finished the final knot, Guy’s corpse moved in, leaning forward, mouth open and eager, the same nothing look on its face.

“
I’ll come back,” she said, looking into its oddly sunken eyes, wondering what—if anything—remained of Guy. Was there a soul in there somewhere? Had there ever been? “I promise I won’t let you stay like this.”

A few minutes later, she found another living corpse. It had been scalped. Its nose was gone, as were its lips and ears. Its grinning face was a cracked mask of dried blood.

It was naked, bound upright to a tree, its skin mottled and jaundiced, deeply bruised where the rope had worn into the flesh. Its feet were black and swollen. There was a massive oval-shaped wound on its chest, and its throat had been torn out. It looked at her, leaning forward and opening its mouth, snapping like a weak and dying animal.

“
Daniel,” she said, and her dead brother stared at her. She saw him as he’d been just a few days ago, sitting on the couch and smoking a joint, flipping the hair out of his face, always flipping the fucking hair out of his face.

She raised the gun and shot him between the eyes, and that was it. He was just a dead kid tied to a tree now.

“
Come on!
” she roared, and the forest spun around her. “
Come out, you mother fucker. Come on!
”

No one came. Down the trail, Guy’s corpse turned toward her. She walked back to the main road, head low. Her dead boyfriend’s head turned to follow her.

THIRTY-FOUR

The plan was simple enough: go upstairs and shoot every last walking corpse from one of the windows. They had enough guns and enough bullets within the store to get started, but not enough bullets to finish the job. Reggie had several cases of bullets and shells in the back of his truck, but there would be no going out front to retrieve them—too risky. The old man claimed to have enough bullets for his rifle in his apartment out back, and for now, none of the dead things had found their way back there.

Cardo sat at one of the tables, sipping tepid Coke from a can and watching the old man pace. He’d taken a revolver that had belonged to one of the men who’d tried to rape Stacy, and Reggie had seemed happy to have his Colt back. Misty stood by the blinds, silently watching as the crowd of walking corpses grew. Stacy—God help him, Cardo actually thought Starshine was a pretty name for her—sat across from Cardo, staring at him with worried eyes and going back and forth between chewing her thumbnail and plucking at the crystal hanging from the twine around her neck.

He looked her in the eyes, gave her a half-hearted smile, which she mirrored before looking down. His gaze crept to her breasts, to the cloth above her nipples, and he thought that maybe he’d do just about anything to make sure she made it through this with him.

“
We’re going to be okay,” he said, whispering.

“
You think so?” Her voice was so low it was as if she were mouthing the words.

“
I do.”

Crate walked over to the door. Misty drifted away, and the old man gently parted the blinds and stared through the opening. Then he walked over to where Cardo and Stacy sat and looked down at them.

“
Well,” he said, a little too loud. Cardo winced. “Let’s do it.”

“
Okay,” Cardo said, standing.

As planned, Misty and Stacy retreated upstairs, where some medical supplies, drinks and canned goods had been carried. If the dead got into the building, they’d move the fight to the narrow staircase. Cardo hoped it would not come to that, despite the fact that it could make things easier.

He followed Crate into the back room, past the door leading into the walk-in freezer and to the door leading into the back yard. The old man unlocked the door, moving slowly. Easing it open, he looked back at Cardo.

“
Wait right here,” he said.

“
I know,” Cardo said, annoyed. When Reggie had said that he’d be willing to go out to Crate’s house and retrieve the bullets, the old man had insisted upon doing it himself. When Cardo offered to accompany him, he’d refused. “I don’t like people in my house,” he’d said, glancing at the old lady. Nothing more had been said.

The old man crept into the trash-strewn back yard, looking left and right and creeping away from the store. They had a little less than three hours of daylight left, but dusk seemed to have come early. In the shadowy clearing behind the store, the air was cool and damp and reeked of charred wood and burnt flesh.

The ground gradually sloped upward moving away from the back of the store, and the small shack was located about one hundred feet from where Cardo stood. There was a single window on the side of the building facing him, the east facing wall. He couldn’t see the door leading into the shack, and assumed it was to the left, on the south facing wall, an assumption that proved correct: the old man reached the south side of the tiny building, there was the jangle of keys, and he slid from sight.

Cardo held his breath, stepping from beneath the doorframe and onto the bleached shells that lined the back of the store, head cocked, listening. Waiting and watching.

“
Come on,” he said, checking his watch again. The old man had been in there for nearly two minutes. There were footsteps above and behind him. A floorboard creaked.

Two gunshots punched through the silence.

The unused and cluttered guestroom was perfect. Sitting on the edge of the box-covered bed, Reggie looked down through the window and at the walking corpses below.

He dry-swallowed a single Black Molly and thumbed the safety on his Colt. It was accurate, and he was a good shot, but from this high and in this light? He was bound to miss. His shotgun was useless. If he were down there, in the thick of it, then yeah, the shotgun would come in handy. But not here.

The old man’s rifle would do the trick, and the old man’s rifle was downstairs with the old man.

When the shooting started, he’d have to be accurate. The noise would no doubt draw the dead people to the building. If Cardo’s descriptions were correct, it merely took one of them to recognize the front door for what it was, a door, and then they’d follow suit and swarm the place. He had to be accurate and he had to be fast, because he’d be unable to shoot any dead folks who slipped beneath the protection of the angled tin overhang that ran across the front of the store. Once they were on the boardwalk, it would not be long before they were inside.