Free Pray To Stay Dead by Mason James Cole

and woo them onto his dick with nonsense whispers of the hills and the trees sheltering them from the storm?
    Kimberly looked at Sam with something like hope. Colleen faced forward. She looked at Guy and didn’t bother trying to whisper.
    “ We’re not staying long.”
    She shifted her weight, uncomfortable. She could feel her flow increasing, feel her pad, her one last pad, goddammit, growing heavy with menstrual blood.
    “ Right up here,” Sam said.
    The small handmade sign said NIEBOLT DOORS AND WINDOWS, and the narrow road was unpaved, just two well-worn wheel-ruts matted with pine needles. The van rocked and swayed up the hill. A dilapidated shed eased by on their right, and then the ground leveled out and the house came into view, a sprawling ranch-style brick structure that was easily fifteen or twenty years old. It looked completely out of place, as if it some giant had plucked it up from suburb on the outskirts of L.A. and Frisbee-tossed it up into the redwoods.
    “ It’s kind of funny,” Sam said. “My mom’s idea. She wanted a house that looked like a real house, is what my dad said she told him. I’m not quite sure what that means, but…”
    “ Is your mother…” Kimberly said, leaving her query unfinished.
    “ Yeah,” Sam said. “She died when I was five. In childbirth.”
    “ Oh, God,” Kimberly said, and Colleen knew that her friend was all but in Sam’s bed. “That’s horrible. Did the baby live?”
    “ Yeah,” Sam said, looking pleased and proud. “Connor. You’ll meet him. He’s, like, totally crazy, but I love the little bastard.”
    Kimberly laughed for the first time in what seemed like forever, and Colleen looked at Richard in an effort to find some understanding in his eyes, some knowledge of what was happening. If such knowledge existed, she could not find it.
    Guy brought the van to a halt beside the house and looked back at Sam, eyebrows raised. Sam nodded.
    They filed out of the van. The road they were on continued, past the house, past several well-kept sheds, arcing right, vanishing into the trees.
    “ Where are the windows and doors?” Daniel asked, doing his patented head-whip.
    “ Back there,” Sam said, lifting a hand toward the sheds. “His workshop is further up the road. He makes cabinets and tables, and my mom had him build his shop way up the hill so she wouldn’t have to hear him sawing and hammering.”
    There was a light breeze and the air smelled of smoke. Colleen looked in the direction from which they’d come, at the trail sloping away until the woods swallowed it, and for the third time in less than twenty-four hours she was overcome with the certainty that she was safe. She was safe and they were safe, and they would remain safe for as long as they stayed put. This time, however, her certainty did not seem desperate or irrational.
    For reasons that she or anyone else may never know, the dead were getting up and society was falling apart. By providence or blind and meaningless coincidence, they were in the middle of nowhere when the shit hit the fan, miles away from any major population center, not home in Fresno. And they were safe.
    They’d heard no news regarding their home town, but she knew it would vary only in small, inconsequential details from the news coming out of every major city on the face of the earth. She wondered if she would ever see her house, and again came the thought of her mother, not really dead and not really alive, lying in darkness six feet beneath freshly churned dirt.
     
     
     
    Sam helped unload their luggage, which he placed in the dim entry room of the squat brick house he apparently shared with his father and brother. The place looked nicer on the outside than it did inside. The tile floor was dirty. To the left, just inside the front door, an old umbrella leaned in the corner, a heap of dirt-crusted boots lying before it, their laces splayed and entangled. The walls were bare. An empty vase sat atop a