Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (44 page)

Daddy wasn’t going to protect her. That dream was not real. She was not in his arms. She would never be in his arms again.

The tears were real. Let them come. Firelight blurred by the realization that she had lived. Her hands shook. Her body heaved, expelling the tears and emotion. She cried like a baby. Nothing had ever felt so good. Nothing had ever felt so right.

Curling into the fetal position, she sobbed and sobbed.

***

Exhaustion stopped the tears. Vega gave in and lay there, her mind and body numb.

“You’re one of the toughest people I’ve ever met,” Bill said.

Out of selfishness, she had left him behind.

“There was a lot of bodies,” Bill said. “I was lucky to find you. Actually, I had help.”

Vega craned her neck and found Rook sitting next to Bill. Rook wore a gray Detroit Lions shirt with the blue lettering and logo. The shirt seemed clean.

“God is good,” Rook said.

Vega laughed. “You picked the right hero, I guess.”

“Mean Magda’s gone, isn’t she?”

“She is.”

“How’d it happen?”

“Fighting.”

“That’s pretty cool. She was tough. I’ll miss her. I miss a lot of people.”

Vega thought about Vincent. It was hard to believe anyone had actually died at the Depot; now all the zombies were just going to disappear. Except that it wasn’t true.

“We’re talking loudly right now,” Bill said. “You have trouble hearing. Your left shoulder was busted out of its socket. We tried to wipe you down, clean you up in case any of your scratches got infected. Just a regular infection, you know?”

Vega knew what he meant.

“We have to stitch you up. We were debating about how to do it.”

“You can do a field dressing?”

“I can,” Rook said. “Sutter had someone teach me. Everyone knew how to do it.”

“What was the controversy?” she asked. “You guys had your hands all over me to clean me up.”

“It’s just different,” Bill said. “Besides, we didn’t clean you up that much. Didn’t scrub too hard or anything like that. Just poured water on you, toweled you down.”

“You need to just take care of it next time,” Vega said. “You want to be a good guy, you have to clean up the mess afterward.”

“I thought you would be happy.”

“About what?”

“I learned how to drive a tank. I can cross that off the bucket list.”

“You’re a brave man,” she said, without a hint of sarcasm in her voice. Vega didn’t know she was going to say it, or even felt the sincerity, until she said it.

He seemed to be thinking about her words a long time.

“I don’t know if doing the right thing means I’m brave,” Bill said. “I was there when that doctor talked about everything. I heard what he said. We all have our sins, things we’ve done before. But that shit he was talking about means we have to do good. That’s the way I see it.”

“It’s not over for me.”

“I know.”

“I’m sure Traverse is still alive.”

“He’ll be alive as long as you’re alive.”

“Yeah. That’s true.”

As long as she lived, Traverse would never die. The undead would persist, a sort of disease that awaited the living. Entire cities were leveled, and governments squabbled over the remains.

Bullshit. All of it bullshit.

A nightmare created through Mina’s imagination had become Vega’s nightmare, and the only way out was to claw her way through the miles of corpses to get her fingers around Traverse’s throat or die trying. Even when she took him out, she would still be hunting his memory; the undead were an extension of the very thing that brought her here, and the dead were here to stay.

This was the end of the world.

Bill sat in front of the fire, hunched over, staring at the flames. He tried so hard to make things right. He would do anything to fight for others because he had fucked up so royally when he was younger. He wouldn’t be happy until he got himself killed trying to save the world. Here was the kind of guy who would have been on television advertising all kinds of charities for children; the kind of guy who would have gone over to the Middle East to shake hands with soldiers who were loyal football fans. He would have done anything to make people happy. Atonement was his entire life.

The poor bastard.

Rook cleared his throat awkwardly. “I’m going to check out that gas station we saw on the way over. We kept supplies in a few of the gas stations near the Depot because they were kind of like forts. People always tried to find help in gas stations. And more people heard about it and started coming. But there hasn’t been anyone in a while. Not out this way.”

“Thanks, Rook,” Vega said.

“Yup.”

Vega and Bill stared at the fire together. She dozed off for a few moments, and he was still there when she woke up.

“You’re one in a million,” Vega said.

“I could have killed you with that thing.”

“I’m not talking about the tank.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“You’re going to end up like me. This is what happens to you.”

“You? You’re brave. You’re a fighter. Whatever weight you’re carrying with you doesn’t matter anymore. You’re doing everything you can to fix it.”

In the firelight, she could see that his cheeks were moist.

“Not everyone can fight like you,” Bill said. “We all have our own way of fighting. Some people just try to get by. Keep their kids safe. Go to church. Raise a family. Stay married. None of that stuff is easy. I never made it that far.”

“You wanted kids?”

“Oh yeah. My mom really wanted to be a grandma. Soon as I got drafted, she said that was the next thing I oughta do.”

“A big white boy like you didn’t have a sweetheart?”

He might have blushed in the firelight. A quick smile and an awkward shift of his feet was enough to let her know he was enjoying their talk.

“I was focused. Had good grades. I talked to some ladies, but I never… I guess you know what they say about nice guys finishing last. But I never got frustrated. I was always looking ahead.”

It was her turn to smile. Talking about a life that seemed unreal. A distant dream.

“What about you?” Bill asked.

“What about me?”

“I don’t mean to pry. I don’t know… you and Vincent… I suppose you were probably a loner.”

“A drunk loner. Yeah, that was me. Angry at the world. It was easier that way. Easier than fixing myself.”

“I hear you.”

“No, you don’t. You wanted to get out of here, didn’t you? Get back to your family, make sure they’re okay. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what you’re going to do.”

He stared at the fire for a long time.

“And what’re you going to do?”

“Does it matter? You can spend your whole life bailing me out, or you can try to help the people you love. Maybe help people along the way who want to be good, people who want to do what you’re doing.”

“Preach on, preacher girl.”

“Remember when I told you to suck a dick?”

“You want me to suck yours?”

He wrung his hands together, the fire brightening his face.

“Come here, and hold me,” she said.

Bill didn’t hesitate. He sidled up next to her and wrapped his big arms around her. It was the closest she could get to capturing the feeling she had imagined; Daddy might be dead and gone, but she never forgot how safe it felt to be next to him.

The Champ held her, and together they watched the flames.

BELLA

Desjardins wouldn’t shut his mouth. As he led her to the neighborhood where Brian had supposedly seen the bodies of Desmond and Jerome, he blabbered nonsense about demons and Hell.

Finally, they made it. A row of trucks horizontally blocked a street, a semi-truck included. This was the best they could do for security, and it hadn’t served them well in the end.

“Mina lost control,” Desjardins kept talking. “That’s the only way to explain what happened. I mean, she probably got a grip on the nightmare, you know, because that’s all this is. Her nightmare. Just her bad dream. And we did it. We did this to her, and she did this to us because we wanted it. We wanted to see if Hell was real, but we didn’t know, God, oh God, we didn’t know. It was right here inside of us the entire time.”

More nonsense. Let him keep on going. It didn’t matter anymore.

“That’s why it was quiet for a long time,” he continued, as dawn’s encroachment lightened the night sky. “Mina brought them all back. The rotted, and thousands of others. From all over. She brought them to the Depot, but I can’t figure out the rest of it. I just don’t understand.”

“Is anyone still living here?”

“Hard to say. When I left, a bunch of other people wanted to leave. But Vincent probably left guns here. In his house. He had a house, you see, and I think he had some guns there.”

She nodded. More guns would be useful, but that wasn’t what she wanted. She didn’t want anything. Bella was numb, and she walked in a daze, hardly conscious of any further suffering she might endure. Brian had said Desmond and Jerome were both dead. What was the point?

Brian had become one of those things. Was that justice?

There was no justice. Karma, then? Had God made the decision? If Hell was real, then Heaven couldn’t be far behind, right? Desjardins kept rambling about Hell being an internal event, a product of the subconscious—she was able to figure out that much from his stream of bullshit.

Guns. So easy to use. With all the firepower in the world, how could this have happened?

Desmond’s voice was in her head, right where it belonged. The last time he talked to her, he was sitting in his Cadillac on the Ambassador Bridge, telling her over a cell phone to stay away from the news. Stay away from the media. Everything was going to be okay.

“There have to be guns here,” Desjardins said.

This neighborhood would have been filled with crack houses; drive-by shootings and gang violence were part of the embedded culture. The apocalypse probably didn’t do much more damage to the boarded-up houses. Brian had said Desmond tried to rescue Jerome, and that made sense. This whole scenario made sense; instead of going over the bridge to Windsor, Desmond retreated, his instincts telling him to rescue his junkie brother.

This was the place.

Quiet. Nothing stirred.

“Over here,” Desjardins pointed to a house. “They used to have meetings here. The salvage teams brought things here to inspect them. Let’s go in here.”

She hesitated, unsure if his logic made sense. Was there logic in anything?

“If there are guns, it will make the rest of our search easier,” Desjardins said.

Bella stood there and looked at the other houses. Brian had mentioned a church.

“Trust me,” Desjardins said. “I don’t know what you’re looking for out here, but I know what we need. If we’re going to get anywhere, we need something to trade.”

Something to trade.

Desjardins didn’t need to trade guns to get what he wanted. The guns were a means to an end. She had only known him for a few hours, and now she could pass judgment upon him.

A survivor, a male survivor. Destined to become a flesh trader.

Would Desmond have stooped to such a level?

Desmond was dead. The only good man she had ever known. It was true. In this desolate place, she could feel it. He was gone, along with his brother, Jerome. This place had taken him. Desmond had fought against the ghetto his entire life.

He had wanted nothing more than to help defend the weak and the helpless. To protect people like his mother, the victim of a drug addiction that was soon inflicted upon Jerome.

Whether he was devoured by zombies or murdered outright, Detroit had claimed him.

“Trust me,” Desjardins said.

Bella guffawed and wiped snot from her nose.

Desjardins extended a hand. She gazed into his dirt-smeared face, looked upon his disheveled hair.

“Come on,” he said. “It will be okay. I promise.”

It will be okay. He promised.

“Okay,” she said.

Desjardins dropped his hand when she didn’t take it. He walked to the salvage team house, and Bella followed. Desjardins didn’t completely turn his back to her, but instead kept looking over his shoulder to keep up whatever rambling confession needed to spill from his lips.

“I had a family of my own,” he said. “Everything got out of hand. I lost track of what I was involved in. When you spend so much of your time on work you think is important, and that work pays for the house your wife lives in, it’s just… you just don’t think about any philosophy or anything that goes along with it. You just work.”

Nice of him to invent an excuse for helping spawn a terrible evil.

“You do as your told when you’re on the job,” he said, opening the door to the house for her.

“Your wife must have had a lot of nice things,” Bella said.

“Everything she could ever want. She’s in Hawaii now with my daughter. I was supposed to get out of here with Sutter, but that fat bastard couldn’t keep it together. Went insane.”

There was nothing remarkable about the house. Broken windows and shattered doors. A wheelbarrow filled with cell phones sat against a wall near a table and chairs. There was no other furniture in the room.

Desjardins walked to the wheelbarrow and began sifting through it. “They had guns in here. I know they did.”

The wind was much cooler in the house. Bella could taste a more temperate day approaching with the sunrise, the air easier to breathe, less stifling.

Bella picked up a wooden leg that had been snapped off one of the overturned chairs. The end of it was sharp enough for her needs.

“We get a few guns, head north,” Desjardins said, phones tumbling from his fingers like grains of sand. “I’d say we should head for the U.P., but the Mackinac Bridge is gone. If we go north and wait for the water to freeze, we can walk across the ice.”

He was looking up at the ceiling, pondering the wisdom behind his amazing idea, when the chair leg was shoved into his backside, right where Bella supposed the kidneys to be. Desjardins turned around, his face confused by the sharp pain he felt as she dug into his back. The chair leg wouldn’t puncture, wouldn’t go through, but there was blood—it dripped into his pant legs and over his beltline.

Desjardins shoved her aside and pulled the stake from his back with a grunt. Bella was on her haunches, already scrambling for another weapon.

“What the fuck?” he said to the bloody chair leg in his hand. He didn’t see the chair that crashed over his head.

Why didn’t he look up?

Bella wasn’t strong enough to kill him with one blow. Her arms were rubbery, and it was difficult to lift the chair a second time; she watched Desjardins stagger into a wall, blood dripping from his face while he muttered obscenities. He circled around, hunched over like a wounded dog until he finally dropped at her feet, facedown.

Bella couldn’t lift the chair again.

“Why?” Desjardins moaned.

And now, at last, with the bleeding man in front of her, she began to sob.

“God, please,” Desjardins said, his voice barely audible as he spoke into the floor. “Help. Me. Help.”

Bella’s body quivered through the sobs. Her brain was fogged with images that collided with each other, impressions from violent moments in which Angelica had died. A man on a rooftop, a flesh trader, killed because of her. Brian and the people who chose to follow him. Desmond. Jerome.

“Help.”

The scientist’s body convulsed, and his hands had stopped trying to dig into the threadbare carpet.

An object caught her eye. A device that had been discarded out of the wheelbarrow so casually by Desjardins. A cell phone.

It looked a lot like Desmond’s.

For some reason, she felt compelled to grab it, to try and turn it on. Grabbing it, she pushed the power button and watched it come to life.

The battery icon indicated there was only one bar of life left, and the picture on the screensaver was Coltrane, Desmond’s favorite musician.

Bella tried to go through his text messages to see if any of her last, desperate attempts to reach him made it through. How much she loved him. Worried about him. Cried over him. Begged him to come home. Begged him to return her calls.

After all this time. 

Immersed in his world, she browsed through the contents of the phone until she found a video; the preview depicted a woman with wild, red hair, with bright blue eyes staring back at the camera.

Bella played the video.

The redhead was beneath someone, her body moving against the ground as if someone was having sex with her. A moment of jealous rage awakened her emotions. Desmond? Why would he…?

A voice inside of her head. A desperate voice, although maybe it came from the phone’s audio. She wasn’t sure.

A woman was talking.

Patrick. I will always love you, Patrick.

And then, another voice, this one dark and dripping with dangerous intent.

You can join us. Be with us, Bella. Feel with us. Feast with us. Open your soul to us. Yes. Open your soul.

Bella wanted to drop the phone.

A woman’s voice rang out in her head.
No! Get away! Run!

Bella’s nose bled, droplets falling onto the phone.

In the video, the redhead had sex with an older white man, strands of hair slicked back over his head, his gaunt face filled with madness. The woman lay as if drugged, allowing whomever it was to have his way with her.

A thousand voices in Bella’s head drowned out her own, and the dull roar in the sky might have been a dull roar in her head. She couldn’t be sure of anything, except that she wanted to say Desmond’s name and could not.

When the redhead was atop the man, Bella could hear his moans of pleasure. The woman leaned forward, and it looked like Kool-Aid washed over the screen.

Bella couldn’t tell where the blood was coming from; if it dripped from her peeling forehead, or if it accompanied the man’s agonizing scream.

The pain Bella felt was incredible.