The Queen of the Dead (7 page)

“Who’s gonna do it? Who can kill this woman? We’re not a bunch of animals…”

“If she becomes one of them things, we’re all fucked…”

“You do what’s best for everyone. Get out of the way!”

“Who’s gonna do it?”

“My wife! You can’t! Let us leave! We’ll just go…”

“Not in front of the children!”

“They’ve seen enough. We’ve all seen enough.”

“We’re gonna have fun with her first. Get outta the way!”

Jack was crushed in a vise of humanity, as he rubbed elbows and shared sweat with a fearful mass of flesh. He found the cowboy and pushed people aside to stand beside him.

“I can’t see anything,” Jack said. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing,” the cowboy said.

A scream caused the entire mob to surge forward toward the fight. The cowboy wrenched Jack aside before he could lose his balance and tumble headlong through the wave of chaos.

“This is the way it is,” the cowboy said. “You gotta ask yourself: do I care enough to save them from themselves? Is there something worth saving? You decide, big guy.”

“What?”

“Decide,” the cowboy repeated, “should they be saved?”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know
what
to do.”

“We’ve got seconds left. Seconds. Save them or watch them die.”

When he ended up one breath away from his own doom, he had looked up to find a hand stretched out for him. A hand he’d been waiting for all his life. The hand that should’ve been Jerry’s. What did the cowboy want? Why would he leave this decision up to him? All along, it had always been Jerry, the brother he feared, the brother he never wanted to disappoint. His paragon of power might be dead, and there were only seconds… seconds…

“Help them!” Jack said.

The cowboy pushed through the crowd. Jack felt as if a terrible burden had been lifted from his shoulders. He had to look out for himself because nobody was alive who gave a damn about him or even knew his name. Should he be sad about his brother’s death? He wasn’t sure he knew what to feel, or how. Nothing made sense anymore.

A gunshot jarred everyone into a shocked silence.

“Forget everything you ever knew about living, if you still want to breathe.”

It was the cowboy. He alone spoke, and as the crowd shifted, spaces cleared between shoulders. With a revolver in his fist, the grimy cowboy with the scarf around his neck and spurs on his tired boots stood in the center.

“There is no law save the one we make for ourselves,” the cowboy announced. “We must assume there will be no more help, or hope. The gun in my hand is the only law that matters. It’s the only rule that applies. You saw what it did out there, and you see that it nearly killed everyone in here. Look around you: everyone you see is still alive. We’re not the things out there, but we can become them. Or maybe we already are those things. Sure seemed like it a second ago. Do you think it matters anymore how this started? What’re we gonna do about it? Shit, that’s what. They bite us and we become them. Someone has to stand up and make the bad decisions if we’re going to continue. Someone has to be the bad guy. If we don’t want to be any kind of group, then we might as well go back outside. If we kill each other in here or out there, it makes no difference.”

Someone piped up, “We can do this. We can work together. We come up with some plans, maybe cast a vote…”

The cowboy chuckled. “Democracy, huh? You think that gets shit done? Those things will be crashing through the doors while we’re sitting around debating. You wanna talk it out? Think it over?”

“So what do we do?” someone asked. “We just let
you
run the show? We don’t know you. Nobody in here… I mean… look around… we don’t know each other.”

“I don’t have your answers,” the cowboy said. “I ain’t leading this horse and pony show. You’re the ones who got the answers. If someone takes the lead, it won’t be pretty. People will hate, and plot. People will think they can do better. We all got a chance at power, a room full of leaders and people who know right from wrong, people who know they’re always right. One group? Smaller groups? Maybe we walk outside and find out.”

A long period of awkward silence followed. There were scattered coughs and long stares. Somewhere in the hangar, a man wept.

“You killed that poor woman,” someone said.

“Everybody knows what’s right,” the cowboy repeated. “I don’t know a damn thing.”

The cowboy stepped out of the center and the crowd parted for him to return to his isolation. He leaned against the wall and holstered his revolver. With his arms crossed, he twirled the toothpick between his teeth while murmurs in the hangar reverberated in that confined space.

Jack didn’t know what to think. Once again, he realized he was standing against the wall in gym class, waiting for that moment when he would be the last one picked to play, or maybe not picked at all.

“Who are you?”

They waited for the cowboy to answer while he twisted the toothpick between his teeth.

“Clint. Eastwood.”

MINA

The first order of business of the day was Jim’s experiment. Mina was amazed at his intellect, and there was a part of her that wished she could be as smart as he was.

Jim didn’t share the plan with her; she was supposed to hide and wait while he gathered materials for his “special project”. This involved sitting behind a car while Jim tinkered around in an electronics store. She sat beneath tree branches that reached over the avenue, casting shadows that swayed through the slow wind. If it weren’t for the occasional scream drifting into the street, it would have been just another lazy summer afternoon, with the empty serenity of a Sunday in which everyone stayed indoors with their air conditioning cranked up. The street smelled like barbecue and diarrhea.

She already discarded the zombie-priest she had tied to her waist after leaving the church. He was getting a bit heavy.

The epidemic had extended beyond the borders of Detroit; she was sitting in the middle of Gratiot, a main street running through the city that connected several cities in Macomb County. This section of the street near Detroit was separated in half by an island down the middle for traffic moving east or west along the corridor.

For as many abandoned cars that burned or had crashed into others, there weren’t many corpses walking around. It seemed as if everyone had quit the apocalypse; they fled into their homes and locked their doors, abandoning the streets to the violence of the hungry dead and the rioters. The barricade set up along the East Pointe-Detroit border had only been three cop cars, and the former policemen were still walking around the position they once defended, staring up at the sky with glassy eyes.

The suburban streets and all the other main roads that connected to Gratiot didn’t have the benefit of a police barricade. Detroit’s scant resources had been over-extended in vain. The county’s cash-strapped force had been thrown into the meat-grinder for nothing. 

Her mind was running amok. Her thoughts didn’t feel as though they belonged to her.

More than twenty-four hours passed since the last time she took medication.

Her stomach rumbled. It was time to eat.

A long shadow blotted out the sun, and Mina’s heart skipped a beat.

Attired in his bloody priest attire, Jim stood with the shotgun he’d stolen from a dying soldier and a plastic bag in the other hand.

“There was somebody hiding out in there,” Jim said. “Sorry for the delay. I left them inside with their kneecaps shattered. I was thinking of you. You must be hungry.”

“I’m not so sure.” Mina shook her head. “I wanted to be with Patrick. We were supposed to be together. I just left him, and I don’t know why. You’ve been so nice to me and I’ve had fun. After everything I told you, I don’t understand what’s going on… I caused it all. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I didn’t want Jake to die, although I always wanted to eat him.”

Jim knelt beside her. His square-jawed, all-American look could have been the plaster face of a mannequin in a preppy-clothes mall store. There wasn’t a mark on his face, and his eyes were always halfway between thoughtfulness and daydreaming, as if each object he looked upon was worthy of philosophical inquiry. A strand of brown hair that was combed neatly over the side of his head slipped over one of his eyes, and he smiled.

“Dearest Mina.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve inspired me. You’re my muse. Without you, killing people isn’t as fun, and neither are the zombies. There’s a link between what you’ve experienced, and what I’ve seen in Egypt. It’s not completely your fault. You can’t help what you are.”

“Jerome was a nice guy,” Mina said. “Is he dead? What about Derek, or Vincent? Shanna?”

She peered into his face, and his gaze interlocked with hers.

“You don’t really care,” Jim said. “You feel nothing.”

“That’s not true. I mean, partly it is. I know I’m supposed to feel something, or worry about them just a little. My doctor always asks me how I feel about things, like the people I’ve eaten, and I know that I’m different than everybody else.”

“I think your doctor might be dead, too,” Jim said.

“Maybe, um, I don’t know. He might be. Patrick didn’t listen to me, and now all these people are dead. I don’t want to be eaten. Patrick would have protected me, and you promised you would protect me, but I should just die. I’m not a good person.”

“Most of these things are true. I forgive you for not understanding the majesty of what we’ve accomplished together, what we’ve seen.” He stood up and gestured at the scattered corpses that were attentive to Jim’s preaching. “These people made you. You’re a product of their world. Your father, Patrick, all the doctors who’ve worked on you—they’re the ones responsible for this. They created your nightmares. They created
this
nightmare. A society that wallows in such violence devours itself, and here is the proof. We can help them, Mina. By destroying all of them, we can save this race from itself.”

Mina shook her head. “I don’t see how that helps anything.”

“That’s what we’ll figure out,” Jim lifted the plastic bag for her to see. “I have video equipment and batteries. I’d like to test a theory.”

“I think maybe I should look for Patrick by myself. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You’ve become a party-pooper,” Jim lifted her up by the elbow. “These clothes we’re wearing are like camouflage; everyone trusts a priest and a nun, especially now. We’ll find you some drugs, and once you’ve eaten, you’ll feel a lot better about things.”

She allowed Jim to grab her hand and lead her through the maze of cars. She considered asking him about the people whose kneecaps he shattered for her sake.

***

Drowsiness broke her perception into prismatic shapes. There was still looting, and a group of young men accosted Jim because they wanted to rape her, even though she would have let them. Jim smashed their throats with punches and left them to rot in the sun; they were nothing more than a nuisance to him, as were the few zombies that stood in their path.

Jim let Mina hold the weapon and the video equipment while he dealt death to those who wanted to take from them. Killing in such a way gave him no pleasure.

They walked down zombie-congested streets, but there were still hardly enough to account for the entire populace. There were entire blocks untouched by fire—streets that yielded nothing more than graveyard silence. It was as if there were people who didn’t know the apocalypse had come, or they refused to participate in the world’s conclusion.

But it wasn’t over. It wasn’t over until Jim had his way.

They tried a Rite Aid and a Walgreen’s. Both drugstores had been looted. Jim remarked that even the coloring books had been taken.

Stomach rumbling, headache imminent.

Strands of red hair hung in front of her green eyes, damp with sweat. There were people who called out from windows and from rooftops. “It’s safe here!” they begged. Apparently, the Catholic attire attracted attention. Everyone wanted to be saved, even if they drew attention to themselves. As survivors called out, walking corpses were diverted and converged upon the noise.

There was blood on the pavement but there were no bodies.

Once in a while, a car barreled down one of the streets. Each avenue became like the other. The birds in the sky floated lazily while the human race sorted out its problem below. The sun baked the concrete and waves of heat shimmered in the air. At one point, Jim dumped lukewarm water over her head and handed her a plastic bottle filled with it. She was more delusional without her meds, and the heat, along with the headache, added to her discomfort.

Patrick came for her. Patrick wanted her, and she left him there, maybe to die. And she felt nothing.

A tiny shape darted through the street. Maybe it was Shanna. Or maybe it was a dog.

Smoke, the breath of dying structures, replaced the clouds.

She collapsed once, or thought she did.

Leave me here, she wanted to say. Let them have me, at last. Maybe if I die, it will all be over. Maybe they all die with me. This could all be a hallucination, you know. I know what their teeth feel like, and their hands, so one more time won’t make a difference.

She heard Patrick’s voice.

I want you, Mina. Like I’ve never wanted anything else before.

Her voice responded.
But you had a wife, and two kids. Didn’t you love them, or want them? What about your career?

Those were things I thought I wanted. I needed them more than I wanted them. People accepted me and I could do my job.

Mina wanted to touch him.
Do you know who the real Patrick is?

You’ve shown me.

She was a killer and a freak show. Jim wanted her to believe differently. He knew everything, and nothing could destroy him. She knew nothing about him, yet she followed him down these streets as she inhaled sulfur and ash. The smell of burning rubber on sun-soaked asphalt, glass shattering, gunfire rattling in the distance and stopping abruptly.