Pray To Stay Dead (48 page)

He eased open the back door and stepped outside, looking around. Aside from the three bodies, there was no sign of the dead. He stepped across the shells and onto the grass, retrieved the hammer from where the old man had dropped it, and walked past the shed and to the ramshackle double garage.

Both doors were down, but the small side door was unlocked. There was very little light inside. The place smelled of grease and gasoline, wet earth and mold, and something else. There was an old pickup truck in front of him, jacked up on cinderblocks. Beside it, a Beistle police cruiser.

Glancing back to make sure the coast was clear, he walked to the front of the truck and lifted one of the garage doors, let in some fading evening light.

Cruiser number four—Tasgal’s car. Bloated and nearly unrecognizable, Clark’s body was slouched in the passenger seat. All four windows were up, holding back most of the stench.

Bang, bang, bang
—the shots just kept on coming, and Cardo backed out of the garage, looked around. The broken window caught his eye, and he walked toward Crate’s shack, peered into the window.

I don’t like people going in my house.

The smell hit him. Bound and gagged and visibly dead, Eric Tasgal lay upon the floor of the old man’s apartment, staining the carpet at the foot of the bed and trying to sit up.

“
God,” he said, and his dead partner looked at him. Its eyes widened. Cardo pulled his gun.

“
Oh, shit,” the old man said.

“
What?” Reggie asked, sitting on the other side of the bed, facing the hall and pressing the tip of his right forefinger into his ear, working it.

“
Two of them are on the porch.”

“
Just two?” Reggie asked, getting up. There were fewer than forty of the walking dead things left, and they were having trouble getting past the bodies heaped before the entrance to the store.

“
I think so,” Crate said. “Hard to hell.”

Checking his gun, he stood up and left the room. Misty and Stacy were at the bottom of the stairs. They looked terrified.

“
They’re at the door,” Misty said.

“
I know,” Reggie said, following Stacy’s gaze. The wounded kid had rolled onto his side and drawn his knees as close to his chest as his condition would allow. Blood spread in a dark splotch upon the surface of the bindings. “How many?”

“
Four,” Stacy said, and the back door slammed open.

“
You old fucking bitch,” Cardo said, pushing past Stacy and pinning Misty to the wall, pressing the barrel of his gun into the soft flesh of her cheek. Stacy screamed, got herself out of the way, and Reggie raised his Colt, pointed it directly at Cardo’s face.

“
Hey, man,” he said. “The
fuck
are you doing?”

“
What did you do?” Cardo growled, pressing harder.

The kid on the floor moaned, and the old man just kept shooting.

“
I don’t know what—”

“
You’re lying,” Cardo said, twisting the barrel of his pistol against Misty’s cheek, like he was trying to drill into her head.

“
Cardo,” he said, not wanting to kill this man he’d just saved. His trigger finger was slick. “Put the gun down and tell me what you think she did.”

The old lady wept, and upstairs Crate squeezed off another round. Stacy stood with her mouth open and her hand pressed to her crystal. At her feet, the wounded kid mumbled.

“
My partner,” Cardo snapped, shooting a glance at Reggie. His eyes were wild, a look Reggie had seen before, and he was no longer trying to control his volume. “Two cops are out there,
and they’re both dead.
”

“
God,” Misty said, bringing her veined and wrinkled hands to her face, mashing her cheeks and pressing deep lines into her brow. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. It was Charles. And Crate. He, he—” Her words dissolved into unintelligible sobs.

Cardo let go of her, stepped back, and she slid down the wall, silently weeping.

Reggie stared at Cardo, lowered his weapon. Out front, the door rattled in its frame. Upstairs, Crate fired two more rounds.

“
He didn’t hear us,” Cardo said, speaking once more in hushed tones, his breathing rapid. Reggie could see the hammering pulse in the man’s neck.

Reggie looked down at the old woman, unsure whether or not what he felt was anger or pity. She looked up at him, opened her mouth to say something, and Stacy screamed.

The wounded kid had seized her ankle in both hands and tried to bite her calf. She kicked his face with the other foot, lost her balance, and stumbled through the open back door and onto her ass.

Reggie shot Richard’s corpse through the head.

“
Damn it,” Cardo said, rushing past Reggie and helping Stacy to her feet. Behind her, four dead bodies crept toward the back door—a shirtless boy in swim trunks, no older than ten when we was alive, now a pale and wasted thing with a ragged and empty black hole where its stomach had been; a lipless naked woman covered in deep bite marks. A man in a hospital gown, its head bound in stained bandages, its left arm in a cast covered in sketches, names, and scrawled messages; a jawless, handless, sexless thing with a wild shock of bloodied blond hair and surprised, lidless eyes.

Conserving bullets, he shot the most able-bodied among them, slamming the door in the faces of the handless thing and the child. The lock clicked home, and one of the things threw itself against the door.

“
Should have shot them,” Cardo said. “They’re going to draw more.”

“
Dammit,” Reggie said, frozen in place, unsure of what his next movie should be. Too much was happening too fast, and it was like he was on his stomach with mud in his mouth and bullets buzzing overhead. Out front, the door rattled and rattled. Soon it would give, the bell would jingle, and however many of the things were left would get inside.

There were footfalls on the stairs, and Crate appeared, eyes wild, rifle at the ready.

“
Get upstairs,” the old man said, and then he noticed Misty sitting on the floor with her back to the wall. He bent over, helped her to her feet, and Reggie watched Cardo.

“
Upstairs,” Cardo said to Stacy, who nodded once and hammered up the stairs.

“
What’s wrong, woman?” Crate asked.

“
Oh, God, Crate. They know we—”

“
They know we’re in here,” Cardo said, taking the woman by the shoulders and gently leading her to the foot of the stairs. “Now go.”

She looked back, frozen.

“
Go,” Crate said. “I’ll be up in a little while.”

She went.

Reggie looked at Cardo, eyebrows raised, and the old man left.

“
What are we doing?” Reggie asked. It sounded like there were now more than two dead things outside the back door.

“
Go upstairs, keep shooting them,” Cardo said, looking toward the door leading into the store. “I’m going to take care of this.”

“
You need a hand?”

“
No,” he said, looking away, eyes distant. “Won’t take long.”

“
Okay.”

Cardo stepped into the store, and Reggie plodded up the stairs. The bedroom door at the end of the hall was closed, and Stacy sat on the edge of the bed in the spare room, where Reggie and Crate had launched their assault.

She looked back at him, eyes wide, and her expression of fear softened when she realized it was him.

“
She’s in her room,” Stacy said. “I heard her crying.”

Reggie walked to the window. Most of the dead folks down there were actually dead, but the crowd pressing in on the front door was large enough to break through and overwhelm them.

“
What’s happening?” She asked.

“
We’re waiting on Cardo.”

“
Then what?”

“
I really don’t know,” he said.

He checked his Colt. Three bullets remained, and the magazine in his pocket was full—he had a total of eleven shots.

Reggie tossed the four shotgun shells from his pocket onto the bed, grabbed his shotgun from where he’d left it atop the cluttered dresser, and offered it to Stacy.

“
I really don’t want that,” she said.

“
Watch.” He cracked the barrel, removed and replaced the shells, snapped it shut, and went through it once more. “And here’s the hammer. You cock it like this. Got it?”

“
I don’t want to.” She was almost crying.

“
Take it.” He said, taking his place at the window. “Wait at the top of the stairs. Don’t cock the thing until you know it’s one of them coming up.”

“
And if it’s Crate?”

“
It won’t be.”

“
God,” she said, tears welling in her eyes, and Reggie turned his back on her. He took aim, steadied his hand, and pulled the trigger.

The interior of the store was dim. What little light remained outside was blocked by the bodies pressed against the door, rattling it in its frame.

The old man grunted behind the ice cream cooler, pushing it toward the door, and Cardo crushed down the desire to shoot him on the spot. Before he did, he had to know, had to get some idea of what had happened here.

“
Hey,” the old man said, looking up. His rifle rested on the checkout counter, between the large jar of pickled eggs and the chainsaw. “Give me a hand with th—”

Cardo thrust his left hand into the old man’s beard, wrapped his fingers around Crate’s throat.

“
Gah,” Crate said, going for the pistol hanging from his hip. Cardo beat him to it, wrenching the gun from the holster and pressing the barrel to the side of Crate’s head.

“
What happened?”

The old man croaked. Spittle flew from his mouth, beaded in the wiry yellow hair of his beard. Cardo loosened his grip.

“
What the hell?”

“
You know what I’m talking about.”

The old man stared at him, and Cardo could see the indecision in his eyes, the guilt. “Oh,” he said, and Cardo tightened his grip, dug his fingers into the old man’s flesh. Crate brought his hands up and tugged at Cardo’s wrist. Failing that, he pawed Cardo’s chest.

“
Oh?” Cardo asked, and he felt himself unraveling. He’d been here before, not four years ago, when a perp had smashed a glass beer mug across his face, breaking his nose. When Cardo had gotten out of the hospital, he’d gone to the police station and confronted the man in his cell, got his hands around the bastard’s throat. Reality had set in before he’d gotten to do any lasting damage, a reality that no longer existed.

“
Huh,” the old man said, gasping. He tried to claw at Cardo’s face, and Cardo pushed him against the ice cream cooler. The door rattled and rattled, dead hands slapping at the glass. The old man’s boots kicked and skidded across the tile, and Cardo pushed him over to the door, slammed his back to the blinds, which bent and parted. Dead eyes peered through the openings.

“
What happened?” Cardo growled, and the fear and pain in the old man’s eyes did something to him, made him feel good, like what he was doing—what he was about to do—was the right thing. The only thing. “Why did you kill them?”

He loosened his grip again.

“
We didn’t kill anybody,” Crate said, his bushy eyebrows drawing together. There was fear in his eyes, yes, but there was also anger. “The one in the car was dead.”

“
Clark.”

“
Yeah. He came back. Tasgal shot him.”

“
And Eric?”

“
Clark bit him. We were scared, goddammit.” There was no apology in his voice. “We took care of him, but when he fell asleep—”

“
You tied him up.” He pulled the old man toward him, drove him into the door. The blinds came free and crashed to the floor at Crate’s ankles. The first dead man to have reached the door was pressed to the glass, its right arm pinned against its chest, its nose broken and mashed to its face. Its mouth hung open. Its lips were dark with dried blood. The glass was streaked with filth. The dead pressed in around it.

“
Yes.”

“
He came to you for help and
you tied him up and let him die?
” Cardo growled, spinning the old man around and pressing him to the glass, so that he was face to face with the dead man and those behind it.

The old man screamed, tried to push himself away from the door. Cardo let go of him, took several steps backward. Crate jerked away from the door, turned to face Cardo, massaging his throat.

He looked at the rifle on the counter to his left, and the look on his face was not one of hope but of acceptance. He was not fast enough to reach it.

Cardo put a bullet through Crate’s right leg, all but severing it at the knee. The old man screamed and collapsed to the floor, long fingers probing his ruined knee, blood spurting and pooling. Cardo’s aim was perfect—his hand was like a rock. The second bullet tore through Crate’s left shoulder.

His mouth contorting into a pained rictus, the old man squealed. It was a horrible sound, somehow infant-like in its raw simplicity. Crate collapsed onto his wounded shoulder, gasping.