Pray To Stay Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

said, looking hopeful. “I told you.”
    A little over ten minutes later, he didn’t look quite as hopeful. The radio host played an interview with a doctor in Austin, Texas. The doctor confirmed that he’d been on hand for at least four revivals over the past two hours, and no, what he’d witnessed could not have been a living person reacting to the affects of an as-yet-unidentified viral or chemical agent that lowered vital signs and created the illusion of death, because in one of the three revivals the revived had been eviscerated in a construction site accident. The good doctor in London needed to get out of his office and go into the field.
    Daniel grunted, finished his joint and mashed what was left of it against his sole. He coughed once and resumed his slump.
    The interview ended, and the man on the radio actually broke for commercials.
    “ I knew it,” Kimberly said. “I knew the bastard was going to pull something like this.”
    No one had to ask who the bastard was. For several months now, Kimberly has assured them that Tricky Dick would not be leaving office, no matter what truths came to light, and no matter how ready Americans were to get the hell out of Vietnam. He was here to stay, and he’d manufacture a disaster in order to permanently lodge himself in office.
    Colleen had no love for Nixon, unlike her mother, who’d thought the man a saint—if they did something illegal at the Watergate, they probably had a very good reason for doing so—but she didn’t think Kimberly was right about this. Whatever this was.
    The commercials ended. The man on the radio cleared his throat. After a short lead-in for those just tuning in, he described video footage that was aired, only minutes ago, on CBS television affiliates across the country. The announcer didn’t sound composed any more. His voice was lower and softer and getting a little ragged.
    In the footage, he said, that he had watched himself just now, a naked woman stumbled around an unidentified morgue in Gainesville, the Y-incision running down her torso, just flapping, her internal organs sitting in a heap on the stainless steel table beside the gurney, her stomach cavity clearly empty. Just an empty black hole.
    “ Oh, God,” someone said. Daniel stomped his foot once.
    A large blue pick-up truck appeared behind them, quickly closing the distance. Its grille was dented, its headlights smashed. The driver blasted the horn, and Colleen swallowed down a shriek. He would run them off the road, and the last thing she’d see would be the face of the driver, slack and dead above the steering wheel.
    Guy slowed the van and hugged the side of the road. When the stretch ahead was fairly straight, the truck shot past them, blowing its horn once more. In no time, it was gone from sight, and they were alone on the road.
    The man on the radio interrupted himself once more, this time to read a report confirming that the walking dead were eating the flesh of the living.
    “ Fuck,” Guy said, and nobody added to it.
    The report was quickly followed by another. Countless law enforcement officials (not to mention armed citizens) had confirmed that the revived dead could be put down with a blow to the head or a bullet to the brain. It was, the newsman said with more than a touch of sarcasm, a morning of revelations.
    Guy shot a glance back at Daniel, who continued to sulk. Colleen looked out at the world around them—just trees and blue sky, and dammit, it looked like it was supposed to look, there was nothing wrong with the world—and suddenly she never wanted to leave the van. It was safe here, and it always would be, as long as they didn’t budge. Guy’s right hand was on her shoulder, and she was crying, and she could see her mother’s heavily made-up corpse at the wake, plastic and unreal in the dim light of the funeral parlor viewing room, the smell of flowers barely concealing the stale and antiseptic reek of the place.
    Her thoughts advanced one