After The Apocalypse (Book 2): Church of Chaos (12 page)

Chapter 18

My mom's curly dark hair had tangled into a horribly snarled rat's nest and her clothes were covered in filthy stains. I hesitated at the door to her cage. My heart was pounding so loudly in my ears that I felt like it was going to explode. I reached for the handle that would open my mother's prison cell.

Seth caught my hand before I could turn the key that was resting in the lock. He shook his head at me and jerked his square chin in my mother's direction. “Something's not right.”

“That's my mom,” I said. “It doesn't matter what you think. Gauge is wrong about her being part of Bud's experiment. He has to be wrong. I need to get her out of there. She'll be fine once she sees me.”

Seth's grip was uncomfortably tight on my arm. “Hey!” He called out.

“What are you doing?” I asked. His yell was still echoing through the tiny room. There were only three cages in this second room of holding cells. My mother was the only occupant.

“She didn't move.” Seth pointed to my mother.

“She's alive. I can see her breathing. She might be sick. She needs my help.” I attempted to tug myself loose of his grip with no luck.

“Call to her,” he said.

I frowned at him and then turned my focus back to my mom. She looked so much thinner than she had the last time I'd seen her. “Mom!”

No movement.

“Mom, it's me. Pilar.”

Her shoulders shivered slightly.

“Mom! I'm here to get you out. Please, look at me. It's me. Your daughter.”

She let out a low moan.

I jerked myself free of Seth and wrapped my hands around the bars. “Mom, I know you're scared but we're here to save you. Please, look at me.”

My mother's shoulders moved again and then her head began to turn.

My mother's familiar brown eyes peered out at me through a raw mass of bleeding flesh and open, oozing pus filled sores. Her mouth opened wide as she sprung to her feet and rushed the bars of the cage. All I saw was black tongue and bleeding gums coming for me.

Seth ripped me away from the cage. He threw me backwards so hard that my spine hit the wall behind me. I landed on my butt in the aisle as my mother flung herself mindlessly against the cage that was holding her captive.

“No. No. Please God, no. I'll do whatever you want, just please no.” I didn't even recognize my own voice or its whispered prayers as the woman who had raised me continued to fling her rotting flesh against the metal cage over and over and over again. “No. Mom, please stop. No. Please no.”

Seth's sword came down through the bars and sunk into my mother's shoulders. She didn't appear to notice the wound. She just kept flinging herself against the cage. A low, keening growl was coming from her bleeding mouth.

“Shit.” Seth pulled a long bladed knife from his pocket and stood in front of the cage with it held towards my mother.

“No, Seth. Don't kill her. Please. We might still be able to save her.”

“Pilar, I'm sorry.” Seth thrust the knife forward right as my mother flung herself into the cage bars again. The knife went straight through her right eye.

She stopped moving abruptly and staggered backwards away from Seth. Her hands clawed at the knife handle that was now sticking out of her face. Shrill shrieks were coming from her oozing lips.

“No. Please. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry,” I couldn't stop the tears that were streaming down my cheeks. “Mommy, no. Please.”

She let out a vicious howl as one of her hands gripped the knife. She yanked it out of her skull. It came loose with her eye still skewered on the blade.

The zombie who had once been my mother stared down at the knife with her remaining eye and then spun the blade around so that the pointed end was facing towards us. This time when she ran towards the cage bars, she was armed.

Seth caught her wrist as it went through the cage. He twisted upwards, breaking her arm with one vicious blow and taking control of the knife in the same gesture. He used the hand that wasn't holding my mother in place to jam the knife through her neck at the base of her spine.

My mother twitched twice more and then slumped dead on the ground.

Seth turned back around to face me. He started to step towards me, one hand held out in a gesture of peace. The expression in his eyes was anything but cold. “Pilar, I'm sorry.”

“Get away from me!” I spat the words at him. “You killed her!”

“I had no choice. She was a zombie.”

“I don't care. You didn't have to. She was in a cage. You could have let her live. She couldn't hurt us from inside there!” I flung myself against the ground and began sobbing in earnest.

Chapter 19

I laid on the ground and cried until Gauge and Lola came for us. Every time Seth tried to come towards me, I screamed at him that I hated him. I told Gauge the same thing, but with slightly less venom. Gauge muttered that we absolutely had to get out of the bunker regardless of what Seth had done. He picked me up against his chest and cradled me in his arms like a child, carrying me out of the dark hallway and into the sunlight.

Back out in the fresh air, I struggled against him until he set me down. The dead guard was still lying on the ground outside the bunker door, indicating that no one had come by yet and noticed what Seth had done to him. I took that as both a good sign and a bad sign. Clearly, no one knew we'd been here. It was disconcerting to see that they weren't worried about guarding their lab. It made me wonder if we had discovered their plan too late. What if all the guards who were supposed to be here were in the Cube, injecting people with zombie serum?

Gauge boosted me over the fence without a word. Back on the streets of Ra-Shet, we stayed off the main thoroughfares. It took the four of us nearly two hours to make our way back to the Underground.

I was thirsty, exhausted and had no desire to speak to anyone by the time we reached safety. Seth and Gauge had spent the last hour arguing about whether or not they needed to go back to the compound and destroy it. Apparently, Gauge and Lola had located an office at the very back of the bunker. It had been full of documents that charted how long it took individuals to turn into full zombies after being injected with specific variations of the zombie serum. Drake's batch of serum had been one of the more successful attempts, with participants staying human for up to two months before symptoms appeared. No one mentioned how long it had taken my mother to turn into a flesh eating monster and I didn't ask.

I felt numb as I made my way up to the small second story room where I'd slept last night. My clothes and hair smelled like rotting flesh. Unfortunately, the Underground didn't have private bathrooms. Lola had informed me last night that the nearest public bath house was roughly a quarter of a mile up the road. At the time, I hadn't wanted a shower that badly.

I gathered up my small bag of clothes and made my way carefully down the hallway. I wanted to slip out of the Underground unnoticed, but as usual my luck failed me. Seth was standing in front of the front door.

“Move.” I kept my head down and avoided looking at him as I reached for the doorknob.

“Pilar, we need to talk. I know you're angry-.”

“Angry?” My head snapped up and I met his eyes with as much fury as I could muster. “No, Seth. I'm not angry. I'm furious. I asked you to help me find my mother! Find her!”

“We found her,” Seth looked stricken but I didn't care.

“We found her and
you killed her!
” I practically screamed the words in his face. I knew that everyone in the Underground could probably hear us fighting but I was past caring. “You killed her!”

“She was a zombie!” Seth argued.

“So are you!”

“No, I'm not.” Seth caught my wrists with his hands. He was much stronger than I was. “Pilar, she was suffering. She was rotting. I put her out of her misery. You can't leave someone to live in that condition. Whatever humanity had been in her was long gone. The qualities that made her your mother were gone. She was a mindless corpse with a hunger for flesh. If she still felt anything at all, it was pain.”

“You never even gave her a chance,” I hissed at him. “You killed her before I ever even had the chance to talk to her. She had been turned the same way Drake was turned. Drake still talked. I could have talked to her. I could have made her realize that we were there to help her.”

“She was beyond helping, Pi.” Seth's grip was starting to hurt my wrists. I yanked my arms loose from his hold.

“You didn't even try to save her.”

“She attacked us.”

“Maybe she was scared!”

“I was trying to protect you!” Seth yelled back at me. “Maybe I was scared that you were about to get your face ripped off by a zombie. She would have killed you.”

“No.”

“Wake up, Pi.” Seth leaned down so that he and I were nose to nose. “If you had tried to save her, she would have killed you. I saved your life when I ended hers.”

“I didn't ask you to save my life.” I put both my hands in the center of his chest shoved him backwards as hard as I could. “You killed my mom and I'm never going to be able to forgive you. I don't care if you think you were doing me a favor. Its not your place to decide who lives and who dies.”

He stumbled backwards away from the door. “Dammit Pilar.”

“Go to hell, Seth.” I grabbed the door handle and yanked it open. Sunlight poured into the room. “Don't bother waiting around here for me. I'm not coming back. I never want to see you again as long as I live.”

I stormed out of the Underground and into the busy city street. Everything I owned was tucked into the backpack that I'd slung over my shoulder. I still needed a shower and I had nowhere to go. Other than Seth and the people at the Underground, I knew exactly no one in the city of Ra-Shet.

Being alone was slightly terrifying, but I had become a lot braver in the weeks since I'd first left the Cube with the Scavengers. This wasn't the first time I'd found myself alone in a strange place. I would be fine. I just needed to focus on one task at a time. I decided to stick with my original plan to head to the bath house.

Thankfully, the bath house wasn't hard to find. It consisted of a large wooden building that straddled the corner of a semi-busy road. Thankfully, the middle of a weekday afternoon didn't appear to be a popular time to get a bath. I was able to slip inside and get into a shower stall without having to speak to any other human beings.

I turned the water up as high and as hot as it would go and then used a small bar of soap that someone had left behind to wash my hair. I scrubbed my skin until it turned bright red. With bathing accomplished, I still couldn't bring myself to face the outside world. I sank down to my knees under the spray from the shower and tried to wrap my mind around the reality that my efforts to save my mother had resulted in her death.

Chapter 20

“Hey, you know there's a limit on how long you can stay in here, right?”

I blinked, startled to see Lola standing in front of me wearing a tight blue mini dress and dark blue sparkly high heels. She'd pulled the canvas curtain back on the shower I was sitting in.

“Oh. Sorry.” I had no idea how long I had been sitting on the bath house floor. The water that was pouring down on me from the shower head was still warm, but my hands were so pruned and wrinkled that I could barely move them. “Do you want this shower?”

“No. I wanted to make sure you were okay,” she said. “I know what you went through this morning with your mom had to have been horrible for you.” Lola shuddered visibly.

“Horrible is an understatement.” I went to move my legs and realized that they'd gone completely numb. I tried to stand up and nearly fell to the ground.

“Are you sure you're okay?” Lola started to reach for my arm and then hesitated.

“I'll live. I'm just tired and my legs fell asleep.” I belatedly realized that I was completely naked. “Can you give me some privacy, please?”

“Let me know if you need me.” Lola dropped the shower curtain back down and stepped away. “I'm just trying to help.”

It took me another couple of tries before I got my legs under me and supporting my weight. My feet and toes were tingling brutally as I made my way out of the shower and turned it off. I grabbed a towel off the provided rack and wrapped it around my body in hopes of maintaining some kind of belated sense of decency.

Lola was sitting on a bench outside the shower. She had a shiny, shimmery bag sitting beside her. It looked like it cost more than Gauge's entire wardrobe.

“You didn't have to come check up on me,” I told her. “How did you even find me?”

“Seth asked me to come check on you. I told him I would. Besides, you're not the only person who needed a shower after this morning's little misadventure.” Lola poked the bag that was sitting beside her. “Where else is a girl going to go when she has zombie blood all over her skin?”

“I just needed some privacy and this seemed like the best place to get it.” I dug into my bag of clothing and scowled at the contents. Other than the whimsical yellow dress that Seth had let me wear yesterday, everything in the bag was incredibly practical and functional. No fun colors or flowing skirts. No glitter. Nothing that said 'I'm a girl and I'm alive'.

Mom had loved girly clothes and things. She'd always sewed sequins into my skirts and made bows for me out of scrap fabric when I had been a little girl.

I closed my eyes and fought back yet another round of tears. I'd known that it was possible my mother would be dead when I found her, but it had never occurred to me that I might have to watch her die.

“The bath house isn't the worst place to find privacy,” Lola commented. “It's quiet in here.”

“It is,” I acknowledged. “Maybe too quiet. I think I must have fallen asleep.”

“You looked like you were asleep when I opened the door.” She fussed with the hem of her incredibly short skirt. “Pilar, I know you're upset about your mother, but Seth did what he had to do.”

“No,” I shook my head at her. “Seth did what he wanted to do. Seth always does what he wants to do.”

“Your mother would have been incredibly dangerous if she'd ever managed to escape Bud's compound. We couldn't take that kind of risk. Think about all the innocent people living inside the city.”

“If that were true, Seth would have killed all of the zombies we found in the compound. Not just my mom.”

“Seth did kill every zombie we found in the compound.” Lola sat down on the bench next to my stuff. “He executed all of them.”

“I don't remember him doing that.”

“Do you remember him leaving the room while Gauge and I were trying to convince you to leave the compound without your mother's body?”

I frowned. I did vaguely remember Seth disappearing. “I figured he was just running away so he didn't have to deal with me.”

“Seth never runs away,” Lola said dismissively. “He went back into the first room we were in and decapitated the rest of the super-zombies.”

“Were they all super-zombies?” I couldn't help asking even though I seriously doubted I wanted to know the answer.

Lola shrugged. “The entire place was an experimental facility. Seth said we couldn't risk letting any of them live.”

I shuddered. Looking for a distraction, I dumped the contents of my bag out onto the bench. The yellow dress had been wadded up into a crumpled, stained ball. I'd already tossed the clothes I'd worn today into the trash can because they were spotted and stained with the blood of two people who had once been important to me. The remaining clothing consisted of two long-sleeved t-shirts and two pairs of nondescript blue jeans. One t-shirt was black and the other was gray. I was willing to bet they would hide bloodstains well. I scowled down at them. “I don't want to wear either one of these.”

“You can always go down to Boer's Dress Shoppe and buy something new,” Lola suggested. “They have a good clearance section if you're tight on money.”

“Money. Right.” I remembered Seth saying he was putting a handful of coins in the side pocket of my backpack in case the two of us got separated and I needed something. I checked to see if they were still there. The coins jangled reassuringly as I shook my bag. “As much as I'd love to have a new dress, I don't have any money that I can afford to spend. I need to save the little I have for buying food and finding somewhere to stay.”

“You're not coming back to the Underground?” Lola didn't look entirely surprised by the news.

“I don't want to be around Seth right now,” I said. “My dad is somewhere in the city and I'm going to find him.”

“I understand you're angry,” Lola said. “But Pilar-.”

“Angry is an understatement.” I picked up the jeans and the gray t-shirt and pulled them on before turning back to face Lola. “And I know Seth sent you to check on me, but I don't need a babysitter. I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

“You're really angry with him, aren't you?” She asked.

“He murdered my mother.” I put my hands on my hips. “Would you forgive him if he murdered
your
mother?”

Lola looked me up and down for a minute. I got the unexpected sensation that she was taking my measure. “I still haven't forgiven him for murdering Jeremiah.”

I was too startled to know what to say. I felt my jaw drop open. “Seth murdered Jeremiah?”

Lola eyed me for a moment longer. “We should talk somewhere a little more private. Have you eaten dinner yet?”

I had to think about the question. I didn't feel hungry but it had been a long time since I had eaten. “Not yet. I don't know if I can bring myself to eat anything.”

“You need to eat something. I know this amazing little cafe, if you want to join me?” Lola offered with a smile. “We can talk there.”

I hesitated and then decided that I had nothing to lose by eating dinner with Lola. “We've never really had the chance to talk.”

“No, we haven't,” Lola confirmed. “But I think we need to.”