Pray To Stay Dead (6 page)

She sat there, feeling the world twist and coil into something unrecognizable beneath her feet, wondering how long it would be until she saw one of the dead things with her own eyes, wondering what the hell tomorrow would bring. Wondering what it would be like to be pulled down by a group of them and eaten alive, as was apparently happening across the globe, if the horrors being coughed up by the news were to be believed.

“
Hon?”

“
Yeah.”

“
She’s out of stock.”

“
Aggh.
”

“
Yeah. She says most of the woman in town use cloth.”

“
Agh,” she said, suddenly enraged. She roared: “
Fuck you, Daniel.
”

“
He probably heard you,” Guy said, a few seconds later, sounding both light and worried.

“
Yeah,” she said. “I hope he did.” She wanted to punch her brother more than she ever had in her entire life, and that was saying something.

“
Sorry,” Guy said. Empty words—he had nothing to be sorry for—but she let them slide.

“
Okay,” she said. “I’ll manage.”

“
You sure?”

“
Do I have a choice?”

“
I guess not,” he said. “We’ll find you something.”

“
Yeah, okay,” she said, her tone telling him to get the hell away from the door. He did.

The pad in her panties had some life left. She pulled up her pants, flushed the toilet, and, washing her hands, stared at her face in the mirror until he flesh looked too white and her pores looked too large and she felt like maybe she were going crazy. Her stomach churned, at last giving up its contents, which arced out of her mouth and into the sink, spattering her hands.

“
God,” she said, crying.

Daniel stood where the gravel parking lot met the road, his back to the store. He could feel the old man’s eyes on him, wanted to turn around and tell the old bastard to find something else to look at.

No weed left. He needed to get drunk. If ever he needed to get utterly smashed and spread to the four corners of the earth, it was now.

He looked back at the store, wondering if maybe they had vodka. He hadn’t gotten a decent look around. They probably did, but you never knew with middle-of-nowhere dives like this. Maybe they were into Jesus, and would tell you to look elsewhere if you came looking for booze.

Some part of him was holding out hope that someone on the television would start making sense, hope that someone would figure out they’d been wrong and dead people could not get up and walk because they were fucking
dead
. But he’d seen the footage, and he didn’t want to see it again, and he could do without seeing Richard pawing all over Kimberly, without their glances and their hushed whispers. It was more off-putting even than seeing his sister get felt up.

He rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, pinching the soft flesh between his eyebrows. Hard, with his fingernails. It was a stupid thing to do—he was awake, dammit; this was no dream—but he did it anyway. He shook his head, turned to face the store, and saw a lone form walking down the street and toward him.

“
Fuck,” he said, taking three steps backward, and the form lifted its arm and waved.

Six

Reggie opened his eyes and sat up, blinking into the gloom and looking around. Had he actually been dreaming about Vietnam? About trudging beneath the dense jungle canopy and through the mud while insects buzzed and stung and bullets tore the foliage into green confetti?

He rubbed his face, tried to wipe away the remnants of the dream with hands that had taken many lives over the course of twelve fevered months in Vietnam. A stutter of distant gunfire opened his eyes. It sounded like a machine gun.

What the hell?

Another volley of gunfire sounded somewhere nearby. Suddenly alive, he shook off clinging exhaustion and pulled his sawed-off shotgun from beside his mattress. It was a double barrel, and it was always loaded.

He parted the thick curtains separating his sleeping hovel from the tractor’s cab.

“
Shit,” he said, squinting, sunlight pouring in. He rubbed his eyes and looked at his watch. A little after eight in the morning. He pulled on his boots and moved up to the front, keeping his head low. He pulled his sunglasses from the passenger seat and put them on, looked around. There wasn’t much to see. The rest-stop looked like any other. There was one other truck nearby—a monstrous new dark red Peterbilt emblazoned with blue flame patterns. The driver side door was open, though he saw no sign of the driver.

He waited for more gunfire. When none came, he exchanged his shotgun for his pistol, a Colt Combat Commander that had been at his side throughout his tour in ‘Nam. He tucked it into his pants, covered it with his shirt before sliding out of the truck. The last thing he needed was for a cop to drive by and see him stalking around a rest-stop with a sawed-off double-barrel clutched to his chest.

A car shot by on the interstate. It was going seventy or higher. Not long after, another car passed, weaving dangerously between lanes. More gunfire somewhere, though not nearly as close as before. Now a caravan of cars and trucks shot by, all of them heading northeast, the same as the others. Away from Sacramento.

He walked toward the interstate and looked in the direction of the Capital city.

“
What the fuck,” he whispered. The sky above Sacramento was thick with smoke and studded with helicopters. Gunfire popped, closer this time. He returned to his rig and reached for the wheel when movement at the other end of the rest-stop parking lot caught his eye. Near the bathrooms, a man walked, head hung low. His shirt was in tatters. With his right arm he clutched his left bicep, and his shirt and arm were stained with blood; it was unnaturally bright against his bone-white flesh. He was bleeding bad, and would die without help.

“
Hey,” Reggie said, peeling away his shirt and walking toward the man, whose head moved in his direction, bobbing upward. “Hey, buddy, you okay?”

It was a stupid thing to say—the man clearly was not okay—but what else could he say? The bleeding man said nothing.

“
Come on.” Reggie looked the man in the face, and something black took root in his soul. Shadows like snakes coiled in the corners of his vision, and his heart did something nasty. He felt cold, cold and afraid like a child.

The man walking toward him was dead.

Once, in ‘66, he’d come upon a South Vietnamese girl sleeping against a tree, her chin resting upon her chest. Only she hadn’t been sleeping. There had been no blood, none that he could see, anyway, and he never found out how she had died. To the casual eye she was just a girl sleeping against a tree, but there were no casual eyes in Vietnam, and that girl had not been sleeping. She’d been dead for not even an hour, but there was no mistaking the lifelessness of her face.

And there was no mistaking the lifelessness of the bloody man walking toward him. The dead man walking toward him like something out of a nightmare, the dead man walking like some abomination, some blasphemy so great that to look at it was to go a little crazy.

A noise like a frightened yelp escaped Reggie’s mouth, and he took a step backward, away from the dead man, and the ground threatened to hop up and slam into his face.

“
Urrn,” the dead man said, peeling his hand away from an arm covered in bite marks and reaching for Reggie, who stepped backward until his back bumped into his truck. He didn’t think to pull his Colt and shoot the dead man, and he later realized that he was lucky to have backed into the truck. If he hadn’t, panic might have driven him to leave behind reason and any chance of survival and run screaming into the woods behind the rest-stop bathrooms.

The walking dead man didn’t move correctly. It didn’t move like a man. Life was movement; movement was born of life, came from within, damn it all, and this thing was not alive. Its lurches and jerks came from elsewhere, from outside, surely they did. For one deranged moment Reggie looked into the sky in search of the glimmer of strings that would lead up, through the clouds, and to the hands of some leering and godless puppeteer.

The thing tripped on its own feet and crashed to the ground. It made no effort to raise its hands and prevent its face from bouncing off the cement. A sound like a dry belch escaped its throat, and why not? Dead bodies belched all the time, especially when you hefted them onto more dead bodies, heaps of them stacked six or seven deep, bloating and changing in the heat and the moisture.

Reggie reached through the cold and smothering panic and got a hold on himself. By the time he slid behind the wheel and closed the door, the dead body was struggling to its feet. It stood, tottering, spinning in place, and it occurred to Reggie that the dead man was looking for him. It hadn’t seen him crawl up and into the truck. He looked at the shirt balled up in his fist and then slipped it on.

Reggie watched the thing until he thought it would creep away and into someone else’s nervous breakdown. He watched it until its eyes found his—there was nothing there, of course: a corpse does not look back, even when its eyes are wide and looking right at you. A labored and obscene imitation of an expression moved across the thing’s face. Having found what it was looking for, the dead body threw itself against the side of the truck and scratched at the door like a cat looking to come inside for the night.

Reggie turned on the radio and sat there for nearly thirty minutes, listening and watching. It was happening everywhere, whatever it was. The thing outside pawed at the door, weak and ineffectual. Before Reggie threw his truck into gear and rolled out of the rest stop, four other dead bodies had joined the first. He watched their steady advance with mute and detached horror. One of them was missing a good portion of its face and all of its left hand. Reggie heard the splintered edges of its radius and ulna scraping across his paint job. Two of them were unmarred, just like the long ago dead girl sitting against the tree in that far away jungle. On the radio, news of a massive power outage on the East Coast broke. As evening approached, the newscaster reported, panic and violence were overtaking the citizens of New York City.

President Nixon had issued an Executive Order: all military personnel, either Active or Inactive, were to report to their nearest base. All Military Service Obligations, whether expired or not, had been indefinitely extended.

It wasn’t happening, no way. Not a chance. Uncle Sam had gotten all he was gonna get from Reggie. Getting to Nef was the only thing that mattered now. To hell with everything else.

Again the utter senselessness, the madness, hit him. The dead did not walk, and, by virtue of the fact that they were, indeed, walking, one could only assume that somehow reality had been fractured. Soon the earth would boil blood and the sky would be sick with dragons.

A convoy of National Guard trucks rolled southwest, toward Sacramento, and Reggie knew that no matter what was true, what was really happening: he had to dump his load and get his ass home.

He rolled away from the dead people, out of the rest stop, and onto I-80, east-bound, away from whatever hell was happening in Sacramento. Half a mile down the road, he pulled over and got out, looked around. A speck shuffled across the interstate in the direction from which he’d come. There was no sign of anyone or anything else. No cars, no military convoys, no dead people. Sounds from somewhere: a dog barking, gunfire, sirens, the deep-bass
thump
of an explosion.

It didn’t take him long to drop the straight-legs, detach the pneumatic brakes, ditch the trailer, and get a move on. He passed the aftermath of a three-vehicle accident, choking back the urge to stop and help. A man leaned against the trunk of the least-damaged car, a hand pressed to his bloodied face, a crowbar hanging from his other hand. A dead woman struggled to free herself from the wreckage.

He passed several slow-moving vehicles, sedans and station wagons and pick-up trucks loaded down with personal belongings. He passed a stalled car. Its hood was open, steam billowed. A large collie watched from the backseat, and the car’s driver waved to him.
Please help me
, the wave said, and Reggie kept moving. He couldn’t afford to act a fool.

Further along, traffic bottlenecked. Folks drove their vehicles around a five-car pile-up.

It would be this way from here to home, if not worse. By nightfall, the interstate could be a stalled bumper-to-bumper hell, and people would leave behind their belongings and go on foot.

Laying into his horn, Reggie eased his truck across the grass median separating the east- and west-bound lanes and onto I-80 West. The westbound lanes were all but deserted, and he wondered how long it was before those driving east decided to claim them. He pulled over and opened his road-map. He’d have no trouble getting off of the interstate near Citrus Heights. From there he’d go south to Fifty, the El Dorado Freeway, which he’d take most of the way home to Nevada.

Nef must be scared—surely both of them were, but Reggie’s mother was strong. She would be able to comfort Nef. He took solace in the fact that he was currently in a hell of a lot more danger than they were. Carlin was a small town, and that had to count for something, if the news on the radio was to be trusted. A small town contained only so many dead bodies at any given time.