Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (10 page)

The smell didn’t go away. Bill shifted in his chair and tried to follow his drifting thoughts. He was used to sitting in rooms and studying game film, analyzing the strengths and weakness of his opponents, but there was always someone who had a plan, a way to confront the problem and deal with it. A way to overcome. A way to achieve.

Here there was nothing but discussion. Back and forth. Arguing.

A dog scratched at the front door.

Bill would give anything for the conversation to stop. For them to just give him something to do. Anything.

He didn’t think about all the people he saw die.

He thought about the dog scratching the door.

Mike Taylor told them about his plans. He talked to them about barricades. Social order. Keeping the system intact. Building a system on top of a system. Was anyone listening? Did they need a system? Systems were easy to understand. You could study them. Watch them on tape.

But these survivors were coaching themselves right out of the game. If only someone would take charge. Anyone.

The woman who had argued with Mike stood and walked toward the door. She opened it, and Bill could see a crowd of people standing outside. The sour smell wafted into the room, the smell of an open sewer, the smell they had all grown used to, the smell of the city.

“Oh,” the woman said.

The people outside didn’t move.

Bill stood. He felt cold, his mind frozen; he wanted to move, but this was the only thought in his head. He wanted to move.

“Get away from the door,” he said, and his lips felt heavy.

Nobody moved. Why wasn’t anyone moving? Didn’t they see? Didn’t they know?

The smell that filled the room was the smell of the dead.

A hand reached for the woman’s face. She didn’t resist. The hand was on her face. Nobody in the room moved. Fingertips pressed into her eyes. She didn’t scream. Nobody moved. The arm was thin, dark. The arm was black. The arm was bone. Nobody in the room exhaled. Everyone in the room held their breath. Nobody moved. Fingers pressed into her eye sockets. Her mouth slowly opened, lips stretching to her nose. She did not make a sound. Nobody moved. Tears of blood dropped from her eyes. Her eyes were lost beneath fingertips. Her eye sockets opened and spilled, blood squeezed from them. They were as small fruit gushing over her cheeks. Running over her neck. Down her shirt. Over her shirt. Nobody moved.

A thumb dug into her cheek. The hand slid over her face, and the face had crumpled and ripped; strands of face hung from its gory hand. The hand shoved her face into another face. A dark face. A jaw that ground over the woman’s face. A jaw that was shadowed by the night. A jaw that worked.

The woman sagged to her knees. She did not scream.

Her attacker stepped into the room.

Nobody moved.

Bill moved.

He wasn’t thinking because he didn’t have to. A chair was in his hands, and he didn’t feel its weight. Bill rushed forward and smashed the chair over the attacker’s head. A plastic chair. For a moment he thought of professional wrestling. For only a moment. A plastic folding chair upon the attacker’s head. Vibrations up his arms, his shoulders. The attacker fell.

It didn’t have eyes. Its clothes were the color of a tomb. They weren’t clothes at all, but rags. The thing was colorless. Bill knew what the attacker was. He knew what it was called. It was colorless, and its jaw was filled with meat. There were no lips bordering its teeth. Even the blood that oozed through the spaces between its teeth had become colorless, thick, oily.

The zombie tried to stand.

Two zombies knelt over the woman’s still-warm corpse and began to eat. The doorway was crowded with people Bill had never seen before. A strange thought occurred to him, a feeling he had when he was at a frat party in college: there were too many uninvited guests, and all the fun was going to be sucked out of the place.

Nobody else in the room had moved. Bill wasn’t sure if anyone had spoken or screamed. There were wet sounds coming from the people who knelt over the dead woman. They were eating her. They were eating her, and nobody was doing anything about it.

Vincent started digging through the guns in the wheelbarrow. Throwing guns onto the floor, frantically searching.

Vega looked like a statue.

Fingernails raked across the window from the outside.

Something thumped against the house’s back door.

“Goddammit!” Mike Taylor pulled a 9mm, his hand shaking, his aim shaky. Bill moved aside to watch the bullets hit the doorframe as Mike tried to shoot at the zombies. He feared he would become deaf from the loud succession of
pop–
pause—
pop—
pause—
pop.

“This isn’t supposed to be happening,” Vega said.

“What’re you looking for?” Bill asked Vincent, who didn’t look up.

They were all standing around. Watching.

The acoustics of chaos. A window shattering. A door violently swinging open. Guns clattering to the floor. Pack animals viciously ripping open a carcass, slurping and chewing; pulling with their teeth, pawing with their hands. Food that didn’t have anywhere to go, sometimes spilling through open mouths and throats, slipping out of empty stomachs only to be scooped up again.

A zombie that didn’t have a lower jaw rubbed skin against the roof of its mouth.

It.

Not a person. Never a person. Not even a dead person.

It.

Shapes wriggled through the open window and flopped onto the floor. Shapes poured into the room. Dead shapes.

“We need—” Mike fumbled his words and fumbled with the gun in his hand, letting it drop near the pile of weapons Vincent had thrown out of the wheelbarrow.

They had to get out. The dead moved, but the living weren’t moving at all. The living watched the dead. Trained soldiers. Survivors who’d come this far.

Bill felt energy return to his limbs. He had to be a man of action now. He pushed corpses out of the doorway, clearing a path for people to follow him out. The zombies felt so frail in his hands, as if they were nothing more than empty plastic bags.

“Let’s go,” he shouted into the house. “Let’s get out of here!”

The others looked at him, but they didn’t move. Vincent still searched through the weapons. He was on his knees, sifting through them, looking at one gun, tossing it over his shoulder, picking another one up, tossing it.

Outside, Bill took a deep breath.

More corpses. Countless. All of them gathered around the house. Lingering in the street. Lazily swaying in the street, skeletal trees touched by thunderstorm wind in autumn, corpses without flesh, victims of a natural cycle and harbingers of an unnatural cycle.

They surrounded
their
house. Out of all the ones to choose. Out of all the ones that were occupied in their sanctuary.

Dogs barked.

Doors closed.

Bill was alone. Surrounded. Their stench was everywhere. He had cleaned out horse stalls when he was a kid, and he smelled those stalls again; he could smell them cooking in the sun, and they were stalls full of urine-wet hay that had been vomited and shit on.

He could smell the dead. He was alone with the dead.

Nobody did anything worthwhile in life without hard work. If you didn’t work hard, someone would overtake you.

If he didn’t work hard, he would die.

A zombie reached for him, and he grabbed its arm to wrench it toward him, but the arm dislocated from its shoulder; the corpse stumbled forward with its ankles and knees popping and cracking. Bill held a rotted, skeletal gray arm. He swung the arm like a bat against the head of another walking corpse, and the arm snapped while the corpse fell. Another corpse approached. His open hand grabbed its frail neck. He shoved the arm he had ripped from the first attacker into the back of the zombie’s throat, pushing it and pushing it.

They were everywhere.

Someone screamed. Glass shattered again.

Gunshots.

Bill had to think about football. His body and mind were trained for desperate moments.

It was the fourth quarter. Two-minute drill. The game’s on the line. Discipline. Do your job. Discipline. Do your job.

“GET TO THE CHURCH,” someone shouted.

A plan. A purpose.

Sleepy-eyed citizens wandered into the street, doped up, wondering if they were having a nightmare. Bill told them to get back into their houses. Breathlessly, sweat running into his eyes, he shouted.

His feet splashed through puddles of blood.

Those who had been saved, those who had sought refuge in this place, emerged from their houses with guns blazing. Where did they get the guns? The ammo? They fired recklessly, bullets hitting the wavering, lazy undead bodies.

The dead turned. They shambled. They surged toward their attackers.

Nobody was going to the church.

Hands upon his broad shoulders. Bill reached back and grabbed a skull; he flipped the body over his shoulder, and the head separated from the rest; a fragile skull remained in his large hands.

Bullets pinged off the concrete. People were screaming.

And then he saw
her
. A gun in each fist.

Vega. She walked through the throng with 9mm handguns. She casually walked up to the dead and popped them in their foreheads. She toyed with them, her face painted in a grimace. She pressed gun barrels against their faces, and she danced with them, turned them, let their hands grab her, bring her close, hold her. One of the dead nearly dragged her to the concrete when it dropped, tearing her shirt. Her hair came loose, becoming a black halo, a mess of darkness around her exotic face.

Empty clips slid from her guns. She stopped and casually reloaded while the dead closed in. It didn’t matter. Guns smoked. They surrounded her, and she held her hands out, inviting them to come closer, to die their second deaths. Her arms were straight. They jolted with each trigger pull.

Zombies dropped at her feet. They fell atop each other, stumbled over the fallen, and tripped into her. Vega’s bullets brought them down, each shot precise, each trigger pull meant to destroy.

The tried to grab her arms, her legs. She untangled herself and blew smoking holes into their skulls.

A gun dropped from her hand when a dry click replaced the bullet.

Bill pulled a zombie away from her. She needed to reload. Her second gun would go dry any second now. He tried to give her space. But there were others on the scene now, survivors who knew what to do, survivors who weren’t doped up. They carried shotguns and grouped together. They formed a phalanx. Their gunfire was the deafening storm of resistance.

Vega’s second gun dropped into the pile of dead at her feet. She stood atop a pile of dead bodies and laughed wildly into the face of a zombie that leered at her, a dead man or woman, an undead creature, a corpse without lips or face. She didn’t resist. She held it and laughed as if they were old friends who shared a drunken laugh.

Until Bill ripped it away and stood with her for a moment. Until she grabbed his throat and did everything she could to push him away; freakishly strong and deranged. Feral and out of control. Was he out of control? He wasn’t thinking at all. He might kill her as she wanted to kill him. There was no thought. There was nothing rational that could stop him from violence. There was nothing between them except the space where they weren’t killing, and the purpose their bodies and minds had programmed them with.

Discipline. Focus.

Bill wrapped his arms around Vega in a bear hug; he spoke into her ear. If she heard his voice, she would know he was alive and not one of the enemy. She had reverted to some terrible, primal state of mind, and he had to snap her out of it. Keep saying her name. Over and over again. Her fists pounding his back. Fingernails digging into his muscle. Legs kicking at his shins. She knew how to fight. She knew how to fight and she could get out of this bear hug, but she wanted something else.

She wanted to die.

The gunfire was gone.

And just as suddenly, her body turned off, shut down. She withered in his arms, and he knelt with her upon the bodies of those who had died twice. They knelt together, her face on his shoulder, his hand stroking her hair. Calming her. Petting her.

They were alive.

“I’m here with you,” he said.

She groaned until her body shivered. A surge of electric trembling, her body expelling an entire lifetime of hell. She sobbed and quivered.

It was dark outside, and people were dying. Bill glanced over his shoulder and saw the street filled with sleepwalkers. Dreamy, slow-walking people. He carried her through the street and into another house.

VEGA

Maybe she had been here before. Drifting smoke. Scattered gunfire. Instead of barking dogs or revving engines, there was scattered gunfire.

Oh, where was she? Head lying upon Bill’s lap, his fingers stroking her hair. There was no light in the room, but there was fire everywhere. There was no light in the room, but there was light from the outside. Firelight. Flashes of gunfire.

Sitting on a blanket. She remembered being a little girl sitting on a blanket in a park. Somewhere in Spain, somewhere in memory.

“Look at the fireworks,” Daddy had said.

His voice was deep and dark. A rumble. Like Isaac Hayes played at full volume in a movie theater.

Red and blue and green splashes of light against the night sky. Oooh. Aaah. Look at the fireworks. So many colors.

“Aren’t they pretty?” Daddy asked.

“Yes, Daddy. Look at that. Ooh. Look at that one.”

“That was a big one.”

The Virgin Mary was painted on her stomach now. Daddy might like the picture of Mary on her stomach if he saw it. He might think the doves on her hands were neat.

“Daddy, do you like my tattoos?”

“The body is a temple. You are a fool.”

“Look at that. Green. Yellow.”

“A big one. Very bright.”

Thick fingers touched her forehead, her cheeks.

The sound of those fireworks was everywhere. Here, in the present. Firecracker smoke smell. Gun smoke lifted through windows. The smell of oil and blood. Oil and metal. Cold metal. Her arms were cold, and her shirt was gone.

This was Detroit. Firepower singing its song outside the house, and her head rested on the Champ’s lap.

Was she drunk? A shot of whiskey before the meeting. Vincent had watched her take one shot and then another while he dry-fired a pistol at his shadow.
Click. Click.
Pouring amber liquor into a shot glass. She gulped it down.
Click. Click.
Vincent blew his shadow to smithereens.

Strength in her elbows. Sudden strength or impulse or desire. She tried to sit up.

“Vincent,” she said.

“Just lie down,” a voice said. A deep voice that was not her father’s.

“I need to find Vincent.”

“It’s too dangerous. He might be anywhere.”

Two heavy forearms pushed her back down. Bill refused to let her go.

“Goddammit,” she said.

“You can’t go back out there.”

“Let me go mother fucker!”

“We’re surrounded. I won’t let you go.”

There was a man sitting in a chair, a bandanna on his head, a machine gun resting between his thighs. He was smoking a cigar. There was smoke everywhere; flame smoke, gun smoke, cigar smoke. Someone smoked marijuana. 

There was banging on the door.

Let them all in. Let them flood this house with their putrid stench, their desperate hunger. Let them come for her. Everyone else could run. Everyone else could get out while she gave the dead what they wanted so badly.

“They’re coming,” she said. “Gimme a gun.”

The door was shaking on its frame. The smoker in the rocking chair smiled, nodded to himself as if listening to a song that got his blood pumping. There were other people in the dark house, shouting obscenities at the dead, sharing prayers, racking bullets, lighting up crack pipes.

Bill’s thick arms felt strong and warm, but the lure of the cold gun was better for her. She wanted it. She wanted the violence in her hands, and she wanted to stand in that hallway by herself and drop every single dead person on the face of this godforsaken planet. She wanted them to come for her, and she would give them what they wanted.

“You have to let me fight them,” she said. “I can do it. Just let me fight them and you can get the hell out.”

She couldn’t see through the haze of smoke. There was smoke from a thousand different sources, everything originating from flame. People were coughing inside the house, and the door shook.

Fireworks everywhere.
Boom. Boom. Pop. Fizzle.

“You’re no good to us dead,” the Champ said.

Vega looked into his face and saw him. Blue eyes. Square jaw. Thick neck.

“We need you,” he said. “We need everyone alive. We need everyone who gives a damn.
I
need you.”

His voice did not shake. His lips did not quiver. His eyes were not wide. Bill had his shit together.

A door slammed open. The Champ lifted her to her feet, and she stood against his chest. A person filled the doorway, and there were more heads behind it.

A flash of bright light. Fireworks?

Daddy, look at how bright.

She could see
them
. Charred flesh, as if they had walked through a valley of flame. Blank eyes. Decomposing bodies. They poured through the door, filling the house. But there was something different about their movements, something unfamiliar.

The corpses charged down the hall, their movements deliberate and purposeful. They moved like they weren’t dead at all; their bones cracked as they raced toward their food.

Nobody was prepared; guns fired wildly, missing the vulnerable zombie skulls as the undead quickly seized throats and arms. Vega watched as one man’s jugular was ripped out, shredded by a skeleton-thin hand, the fingernails inserted into the man’s throat like tiny needles, and the blood was let out when the creature pulled its hand back. The man clutched at his wound, falling to his knees with wide, surprised eyes as his blood flooded over his neck and leaked onto the floor. Another zombie sat on his back and tilted his head up, allowing blood to shower the floor. One man slipped in the gore-puddle, and two corpses fell upon him, teeth chattering in lipless mouths.

Agonized screams had replaced the sound of gunfire in a matter of seconds. All the bravado had been murdered. Time to retreat. 

Vega’s mouth was open, and she could feel the scream rise through her throat, but if it erupted through her mouth, she didn’t know; remnants of close-quarters gunfire drowned out her voice.

A gun. She needed a gun to make this a fair fight.

Bill carried her down a hallway and out a back door, away from the fight. She needed to get back into the house, help these people, pick up a gun and lay down the law of natural selection through bullets.

Outside, the war was in full swing.

Colorless shapes gathered around a cadaver, blood leaking into the sun-browned grass. The bright lights of flashing guns were everywhere.

Bill held her close and tight. She did not resist him, but held onto his thick arms.

She was carried past a man who wrestled a zombie against a wood fence. A dog had snagged the zombie’s sleeve and ripped the fabric from bone. Another corpse approached. Then another, and another. The dog had disappeared. The man had been pushed through the fence, wood splintering, cracking, snapping.

The old cop, Taylor, ran toward them, his face smeared with red; the gray in his hair had turned pink from blood. “We’re getting people on the roofs,” he said. “Get your asses up, and hold your position.”

Taylor had his shit together. Vega could see people scrambling onto roofs, guns blazing, barrel-flashes popping into the night sky. The old cop patted Bill on the back and took off in another direction, but the Champ wasn’t about to let her go.

Bill found another house and shouldered through the front door; a house untouched by the fog of war. He dropped her onto a couch and closed the door behind them. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell.

Her body didn’t want to move. She stared at Bill’s outlined body, flickering firelight burning through shadows as if their haven were an altar lined with candles, an altar in a dark church.

There had been candles at her father’s funeral.

“Check the house,” Vega said.

Her voice was calm and she wasn’t breathing heavily. Sweating, heart fluttering, but hardly breathing.

In an urban war zone, every dwelling, upon entering, must be secured.

Bill didn’t move from the door. He looked like he wanted to collapse and was doing his best to appear strong. He had risked his life to keep her alive when so many others tried to help themselves and died.

She couldn’t figure out why the dead were attacking after remaining inert for so long. With Vincent and Father Joe, they had stopped Traverse at Selfridge; even though they didn’t get the former serial killer, they prevented Traverse from taking Mina with him. Mina had stopped all the corpses that hadn’t been spawned through Traverse’s video-apocalypse.

Vincent might be dead now.

In the flickering shadows she could see the graffiti that was sprayed all over the inside of the house. A house that did not have anything except for dust and cobwebs, a place that had been ransacked and turned inside out a long time ago.

TRU LOV

WERE YOU AT G-D?

Did the artist intend to write “where”?

“Let’s just stay quiet,” Bill said.

He was trying to say something else, anything, but it was all that made sense. Now, there would be time to realize fear. Men like him would exist in a state of denial that would preclude fear and desperation.

“You didn’t do me any favors,” Vega said. “I’m supposed to be fighting.”

“You can fight later.”

“I can fight now. People are getting killed out there.”

“You don’t care about that.”

“I’m nothing special,” Vega said, “and neither are you. If you want to be a hero, go back out there and save the children who’re watching their junkie mothers open their doors to let the dead in.”

“You…”

“Want to protect people? Want to save the world?”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“No?”

“You can’t just give up.”

“That’s all you can say? Get away from the door.”

Here was another man used to being in charge, used to wielding power over others because of his size. He felt helpless against the undead, and this was his way of regaining some confidence in himself. Bill was well over six foot tall, and his size dwarfed her. Vega was nothing more than a dirty, sweaty rat compared to his mountain of muscle.

But he was afraid, like all men were afraid when they saw their power stripped away. Triceps bulged beneath his shirt and his forearms quivered.

“I just do what…” he struggled to find the words. “… I just… I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. No more than you know.”

“I know what I’m doing. Out of my way.”

“No.”

“Because it would have been a waste? Because you know you could have saved someone who wanted to be saved?”

“We’re getting this thing back together.” His voiced dropped, becoming sullen. “This place is safe. This city is coming back. We’re all coming back.” He shrugged, and shame reddened his cheeks.

“You’re not the philosophical type,” Vega said.

Vega knew he was distracted by his attempt to obtain pity from her; she feinted left and tried to use her speed to get past him. His hands grabbed her wrists, and his foot stomped down on her shin, preventing her from kicking his balls into his throat. When he pushed her, the sudden shock of force sent her sprawling backward into the dust and onto the couch again.

Just too slow. Too old. Worn out.

“You don’t get to decide this,” he said. Fireglow from beyond the windows revealed the shine of his perspiration-coated jawline. He looked like a plastic man about to melt in a bonfire.

“Who are
you
?” she asked. “Who are you to tell me? Who the fuck are you to save someone’s life? Who the fuck are you to live when everyone else is dead? Get your ass back out there, and die for those people if you care about them so much. If that’s what you want—die for them, you goddamn blockhead.”

Vega was up again, and he was still faster. He pushed her onto the couch again. She kicked him in the chin, but his strong fists had her arms.

“Hit me,” she said. “Hit me, you gutless coward.”

Her shoulders were pinned down.

The couch was overturned, their bodies with it. Dust filled her mouth and nose. It tasted like blood.

“You don’t get to decide!” she said.

“Stop it.”

“Let me die. Let me die.”

“No. Stop it.”

“Hit me then. Stop me.”

She was pinned against the floor.

Hips pushed against his body, upward, into him, against him. Bill’s fists clutched her thin arms. She could not hear the gunfire outside, but she could hear him breathing; his breath smelled like blood, like everything smelled like blood.

“You son of a bitch,” she said.

“What makes me so bad?” He slammed her against the floor. “I’m trying to help you, and you keep fighting me.”