Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (18 page)

“He’s either desperate or stupid,” Vega said. “It would take both for him to be alone. Hanging out around here for no reason.”

“Just stop it,” the man said with his hands up. “I can explain. If you quit your bullshit and let me talk, I think we can help each other out.”

They waited for him. Any minute now someone else would jump out of the shadows.

“I worked here,” the man said. “My name… my name’s Brad. Doctor Brad Desjardin. Look, I have my ID. I still have my ID. It’s in my pocket.”

“You carry your ID with you?” Vega asked. “Why would we care?”

“You don’t know me, but I was in the neighborhood. I was there when everything fell apart. I know who you are, and I know what you want. I didn’t figure it out until you came here. I mean, I didn’t
know.
I came back here. I came because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. But I saw you with him. I saw you…”

Vega frowned. “What the fuck? Get your shit together.”

“The Artist. I saw him talking to you. He was… he was
my
patient.”

Vega lowered the rifle. Her shoulders relaxed. Bill lowered the doctor’s gun.

***

The doctor sat in one of the group therapy chairs and spoke. After fifteen minutes passed, Bill attempted to relax again. He decided he could at least trust this guy; nobody else was going to show up and ambush them but still, he couldn’t let his guard down again.

The long day began to settle into twilight, as shadows extended and the bright day’s strength waned and surrendered to birdsong and blue. Mosquitoes attacked and tiny creatures scuttled through the wreckage.

“Damn convenient you were here,” Vega said. “Considering I was, you know, hoping to find some information and all.”

“I know how this looks,” the doctor said. “But this is where I worked. The neighborhood that you all had set up—it’s not exactly far from here. And I saw him. I saw him after the attack.”

“What’s your point?” Vega asked.

“I know what he was, and you came here. You came here, and I have to assume that you know something. That you want him. And I know what he was. I know who he
is.”

Vega sighed.

Bill scratched the bottom of his chin. She was clearly intrigued and wanted to hear more or else she would have wasted this guy by now. Vega didn’t seem interested in taking unnecessary risks.

But she was in charge. This was her fight, and he was just along for the ride.

“So who is he then?” Vega asked. “There isn’t much paperwork on the guy, and he was your prize.”

“Why do you want him?” the doctor asked.

“You’re in a position to ask questions? You pointed a gun at Bill’s head. You came at us, and you’re trying to say you have good intentions? Let’s talk about your intentions.”

The doctor glanced at Bill, then at Vega.

“I can tell you he’s out there. But you already knew that. We’ve been working on a project, a special project, for years.”

“Go on,” Vega said.

“Things are going to get worse, not better. The Artist—Traverse—he isn’t finished. But you’re obviously looking for him. We were waiting on a team to come get him when things started. We were supposed to try and hold the fort, keep everything in check, but it got out of hand too fast. By the time those orders came through, it was too late. You were on that team, I think.”

Vega tilted her head. She wanted more.

“It’s a military weapons project. It hasn’t been a number one priority for years until Traverse got involved. The money, all the research; it was never directly funded from the government but from someone else. I don’t know who, nobody knows. But they’ve been trying to make this happen, trying to make the connection… for almost seven hundred years.”

“What connection?” Vega asked.

Bill didn’t like where this was going. Secret government agencies and experiments. He was a patriot through and through, and he hated conspiracy theories; both of his brothers were in the service. His grandfather was in the service. As much as he didn’t want to hear it, these might be horrible truths he would have to accept. Just like the world he lived in now, the world he tried to deny existed. The human race was always full of selfish people, but it seemed to be every man for himself now; Bill had enjoyed living in their little neighborhood because it gave him something to do, and he could help others. He could ignore the fantasy world, the hell-world that awaited him outside the borders of that makeshift village. They had a priest, they had guns, they had
order.
But when he heard Mike, the old cop, talk about the future, and when he watched the others argue back and forth, he understood that he needed to accept some human failures.

“Hell,” the doctor said. “A connection to Hell. It exists. It’s real and it’s hungry. But it’s not what we’ve always been taught. It’s not a place.”

The doctor stopped to assess their reactions.

“Keep going,” Vega said.

The doctor he struggled to articulate his research. “Hell… it’s a state of mind. Modern psychology was devised to find it… to understand it. What we understand as madness, and all of these psychological disorders… the human mind carries Hell with it. Wherever we go, our minds are… half-submerged in Hell.”

“I want the short version of all this,” Vega said. “Someone wanted to open Hell and get all kinds of power, blah blah blah. We’ve heard this shit before.”

“I know you want to stop Traverse. Uh… he was sent on a mission.”

“To Egypt,” Vega said, “and it changed him.”

“He was already involved. He helped create a project, a sort of consciousness-insertion program. Someone thought we could figure out how to open Hell, how to make it available to us, to harness the power of nightmare… and I don’t know. I don’t know everything. I know what Hell is supposed to be, but I don’t know what kind of power anyone could… get… but Traverse found out, and instead of sharing the information… he became The Artist. He changed. We assume he did his own research while he was on the run. We assume he was caught because he wanted it, because he knew where he would go. We wanted it, and so did he. He needed to be close to the project, and we needed him close. And Mina… we worked on her for years. We made her. She is… a product.”

“She’s dead,” Vega said.

“Not exactly. I didn’t know how bad it was. I didn’t think she would figure it out. When the dead started to withdraw, I knew that
she
knew, that she made the connection, the connection we’ve been waiting for. And when they attacked, I knew something was
wrong.
And when I saw Traverse talking to you, playing with you, it started to make sense. You see, he found a way to bring Mina back, to use her, to control her. It could only be him. Unless Mina just suddenly changed her mind and decided to wipe everyone out… but that’s not the case. I don’t know how Traverse did it, or what he did. But he figured out what we… what I was supposed to… he figured out what…”

“I get it,” Vega said.

“Doctor Desjardin,” Bill started, “you’re the one with the most knowledge, right? That’s what I’m guessing. And you happened to survive. You lived, and you didn’t tell anyone this. How come nobody came to get you? How come there wasn’t a rescue team for the doctors, for the scientists—how come you’re not important enough to save, even if you know all this? How come you’re not important enough to kill?”

The doctor looked to Vega and then back to Bill. “They have the files. Everything was uploaded. It’s only a matter of time before Colonel Richards sends in Agent Rose. She was the program that Traverse designed. She was a person he had a connection to in the past, and her personality was imprinted on a microchip. It was something we’ve been doing for years to create soldiers, men and women without memories. She’s their last resort. I’m surprised they haven’t sent her in already…”

Vega leaned back in her chair. The doctor had avoided Bill’s question, and Vega seemed to be appraising the last bit of information. Who the hell were Richards and Rose? What did they have to do with anything?

Instead of asking him, Vega shrugged. “Yeah, you’re a lucky one, that’s for sure. You know where Traverse is? You want to help us find him? Seeing as how you were experimenting on him and all that, seems like you might be here to help him. You might want a taste of whatever he’s after.”

“No, no, it’s not like that. I swear. It’s not like that at all. I’m just telling you, warning you. There are a lot of people involved.”

“And you want to help? What’s your stake in this? You probably made a good living doing what you did, and it didn’t seem to bother you none until now. Am I right? You were helping people figure out how to kill people, how to get power from Hell, right? Now you’ve changed your mind. You just conveniently show up with all this information.”

“Okay, I know how it seems. Just… hear me out. We can find him. We can stop him.”

“We?”

Vega aimed her rifle at the doctor’s head. He flinched, his hands up, bottom lip quivering. Bill stood too.

“You want Hell so badly,” Vega said, “you can write me a letter from there, tell me about the weather.”

“That’s not the right way,” Bill said.

“What?”

“I don’t know what’s going on. I can’t make sense of this, but shooting him isn’t going to make anything better.”

“Who said I wanted to make things better?”

“I think I understand what you’re going through… ”

“What? Are you kidding me? You understand what I’m going through? Watch his head explode, and tell me what you understand.”

Vega’s eyes flickered up, over Bill’s head.

The smell.

“Remember when that gun went off?” Vega asked. She picked up her pack and hauled ass out of the room.

A rush of putrescence filled Bill’s nostrils and throat. Cold hands gripped his biceps; he lost his balance and fell backward over the chair, a dark shape following him to the ground. His first thought was that he was lucky not to impale himself on a chair leg.

In the descending night gloom, he could barely see the thing on top of him. He couldn’t see, and he didn’t want to see. All he needed was the shape. Long fingernails scraped across his arms, drawing pain and blood. With one hand he managed to fasten his fingers around the creature’s neck, and his other hand found the doctor’s gun on the floor. He pushed the gun beneath the zombie’s chin and pulled the trigger. A bright flash blinded him temporarily, leaving stars where the shadow had been. The corpse sagged atop him, and he quickly pushed it off.

When he stood, he found Doctor Desjardin pointing the shotgun at his chest.

“Really?” Bill asked.

“You understand,” the doctor said.

“I understand you don’t know how to use it.”

“At this range it doesn’t matter.”

“More of them behind me.”

“And at the window. More of them outside. More coming now.”

“We have two choices.”

“I like the one where we run like hell,” the doctor said.

Bill nodded and picked up his pack. He’d worry about grabbing the shotgun from the doctor later.

He stopped for one moment, and he saw several shapes meandering down the corridor, bumping against the walls.

For the first time, he heard them moan.

Bill grabbed Doctor Desjardins by the arm and dragged him through the dark hallways.

“Is she always that bitchy?” the doctor asked about Vega.

“I hope not.”

Now they would have to find her. She was a danger to herself and anyone else who had the misfortune of stepping into her path.

BELLA

The restless dead would never allow Bella to rest again. The longer she sat with Angelica in the room with the moaning and pounding beneath them, the more reason she had to convince herself she was living on borrowed time.

She tried to shut out the sound by talking with Brian. The sound of her son’s voice was absent, or it was drowned out by the growing number of corpses and their dreadful moans.

Sitting across from each other, the two women perspired and waited. They hoped the dead would leave, become disinterested. The moaning signaled a parade of dead that would not stop coming, a soundtrack for inevitable doom. Closer and closer, louder and louder. Scratching, clawing, bumping, pounding.

But there was no way for them to get up to the room. Part of the decrepit, aged stairwell had been obliterated.

They waited an hour. Two hours. During the third hour, it felt like all oxygen had been cut off from the room, replaced by the putrescence of the undead legion. The lone window with a view to the opposite apartment building was open, and the dead filled the street and flowed like a river, streaming into the lobby of either building.

Bella wondered if a Holocaust survivor would have gone insane if they had to endure it again. Surely such a nightmarish scenario never left their minds, just as the genocide of the living was not forgotten. It was conveniently filed away, and its corruption lingered. The trauma had poisoned their souls and murdered their futures.

Now they faced it again.

And they could not move.

Bella was trapped in her own imagination, remembering how everything started. From the phone call to Desmond, to the riots outside her apartment. This wasn’t supposed to happen again. It wasn’t supposed to happen the first time. All control over her own life had been ripped away by an indomitable force of nature, a horrific power that danced through cities like a hurricane that would never lose its strength, or a firestorm that could not be extinguished.

Bella couldn’t smell her own noxious body odor over the overwhelming scent of waste and rot that wafted in from the window, carried by a slow breeze.

“You had a son,” Angelica said, breaking the silence between them as if she was surrendering.

“I have a son.”

“What was his name?”

Although Bella wondered why she wanted to know, she had very little strength to participate in banter. This could easily become a frustration game, and while she was used to staying awake for an extended period of time, she could feel herself falling into a pattern of shallow breathing. She tried to accept the presence of death all around her, and the violent end that awaited her. Desmond would never forgive her if she took her own life, and neither would Brian, but there was the possibility now that Angelica was going to ask her for this important “favor.”

“His name’s Brian,” she said. “He’s still alive. He’s still out here somewhere.”

The words seemed to ooze out of her mouth, as if she had to wake up her tongue to form sentences. Her thoughts felt like they didn’t belong to her, as if she were in the throes of a drug that was supposed to make her feel drowsy.

“It’s good to have hope,” Angelica said. “You live because you believe in goodness, in doing the right thing. You believe there still is a right thing.”

“You don’t have to prove how right you are,” Bella said, because she didn’t want to play the game. “We need to make decisions. The time for talk is over. If you need to overpower me, call me names, go ahead. Say what you need to say to make this easier for yourself.”

Angelica smirked. “Okay then. I’ll say what I need to. You ready?”

Bella sighed.

“You’re acting like a fucking cunt,” Angelica said. “Lighten up. It’s not all that serious. You’re not afraid of death, are you? Because if you are, you might as well jump out the window. If you’re afraid of death, you shouldn’t have had a kid.”

She was doing it again. Trying to provoke an emotional reaction, but to what end? Get her upset, get her riled up and willing to fight. Suddenly, Angelica was trying to help someone. She needed Bella’s help to survive—Angelica wasn’t a very complicated woman.

Angelica stood. “Don’t have an answer for me?” She stepped close to Bella and crouched beside her, her wet face and large eyes a portrait of madness.

“You’ve been out there,” Angelica said. “I can guess what kind of shit you’ve seen, because I’ve seen it. I know what the traders do. I know about the men and their guns. I know what’s happening outside of the big city. In the farm towns, the small log-cabin communities. All the good people, the ones who try to help, try to be crusaders and help others—they don’t last. You’re not all that good, are you? Not as good as you pretend to be.”

Bella stared into those big brown eyes. This had nothing to do with the future, or goodness, or survival. Angelica had probably lived her life on the edge in her prime. Desmond used to talk about how growing up in an environment where poverty and crime were status quo was morally crippling. He had grown up in a tough neighborhood with a drug-addicted mother, but he managed to survive, managed to claw his way to the top. He did everything in his power to help keep his junkie brother Jerome out of trouble, and she couldn’t help but notice how much it hurt him to watch his brother suffer so much, no matter how much he tried to help. Like Jerome, Angelica had probably lived in a world of pain her whole life and didn’t know any different.

There was nothing for Bella to say.

“I’m going to live because you’re not going to let me die.”

Angelica ripped open the door and looked down the stairwell. Bella watched the woman’s sudden surge of bravado wither away as the passion in her eyes disappeared like candlelight snuffed out by a sudden windstorm. Her jaw was locked in place, her posture rigid.

Damn that woman for being right.

Bella approached the door and peered into a writhing, pulsing concert of reaching hands and slow-working jaws. Blank eyes and matted, clumped hair. Rotted bone. A cloud of flies lingering over the crowd of broken things. Bella thought of a fistful of moss floating in an ocean of rot. The moaning intensified, as if Bella and Angelica were musicians who finally stepped onto the stage after a long wait.

The dead had piled onto each other, and they were close to reaching the top of the stairwell. So close that a decrepit hand was inches from Angelica’s ankle.

An undead fingernail dug beneath a shoelace, and Angelica lurched forward into the pit, her arms flailing.

Bella followed her in. She landed on top of Angelica, their flesh colliding and falling as if they tumbled through several tree branches on the way down, frail, extended arms breaking beneath them. Bones snapped.

Bella twisted furiously as if she was underwater, trying to swim against the current, struggling for the surface. She couldn’t see anything except for black and gray—all around her, black and gray, as if all the flesh in the world had rotted into something colorless, and she was lost in an ocean of that nothing, that abyssal shade of terror.

She pushed through a forest of ravenous dead, and she did not scream. It wasn’t a refusal to scream on her part, but rather, she wasn’t conscious of her own terror. There was only the impulse to push through, to run, to survive. There was no time to scream. 

Bella ripped herself through the shadows and the forms, through the limbs and the voices, and crashed through a door into another derelict apartment. The violent force of her momentum caused her to trip, and the sharp pain in her ankle was enough for her to cry out. But there was no time to linger on this pain, no time to do anything but survive or die.

When she turned back to the door, she saw Angelica still trying to push her way through. The woman shoved individual zombies and shouted curses at them, spitting into their faces, slapping them, grabbing them by the collars of their ruined shirts, and twirling them around until she pushed her victim into other corpses to clear a path for herself. The rifle was still slung over her shoulder.

Bella shouted for her. “Come on!”

It was past time to close the door, but she waited, for the dead had focused on Angelica who seemed to be doing everything in her power to put herself in their hands. She didn’t acknowledge Bella because she may not have heard, or she didn’t care. Bella shouted again, and Angelica still struggled with the dead. They encircled her, their bones cracking and snapping from misuse, their own ankles twisting awkwardly, their bodies collapsing beneath the weight of their lust for her flesh. A thousand hands reached for Bella, a thousand mouths opened, mouths missing teeth or tongue or jaw. There was no choice for Bella to make. The decision was hardwired into her, but it may not have always been there. When she thought about it later, she would ask herself if Desmond had taught her to behave this way.

She dashed into the arms of the dead again. Her movements were still dictated by adrenaline or an unconscious power that made it impossible for her to see the imminent danger around her.

Angelica may have thought she was one of them, because she resisted as Bella tried to pull her away. Bella clamped her hand around Angelica’s wrist.

And then conscious thought returned.

She knew where she was and what she was doing.

Angelica’s resistance was personal. A part of her wanted to die, or she had vowed revenge against all of those undead bastards.

When Bella looked into the woman’s eyes, she realized all of these things. She realized the woman she tried to save was committed to her own death like so many others before her, like so many others who had been provoked by a fit of delirium, or a need to inflict vengeance upon the world for dying, for fading, for failing to live up to its promise.

A rotted hand pushed the side of Angelica’s face and tilted her head back. A mop of matted, thin hair seemed to nearly leap onto her shoulder blade, though it wasn’t a mop but a face. Bella couldn’t associate the attacker as something that had a face, but she knew, deep down, what it was. Reality was suspended for her, suspended in this moment. A moment in which that emaciated head clamped upon Angelica’s shoulder. A moment in which blood suddenly oozed from her shoulder as if the attacker was vomiting blood onto her, as it poured from her fresh wound quickly, running now and soaking through her clothes. Bella still held Angelica’s wrist.

With her free hand, Angelica grabbed the monstrous hand that pressured her head to the side, but her attempt was interrupted by another hungry creature. Hands seized her arm and twisted it upward. Angelica’s desperate strength wasn’t enough to prevent a hungry mouth from embedding itself into her triceps. The first attacker removed itself from her shoulder, chewing voraciously, jaw grinding, blood dripping from a black mouth, a mouth without lips.

Bella pulled Angelica into the doorway, where she fell face-first. Bella lost her grip on Angelica, and the undead folded atop her, collapsing onto her back ceremoniously, as if they had expected this, and they had been patient and would always be patient.

They couldn’t win. Not this time.

Bella pushed into the crowd, and she didn’t realize that she was shouting. She couldn’t hear herself. Panting and sweating, eyes watering from the perspiration that dripped into her eyes, she pushed and struggled against the dead. They were nearly weightless, nothing but bags of sagging, dead flesh full of rotted organs that were disconnecting from the inside of their skeletal bodies as if computer components were slipping from their wires and slots, machines that were emptying, bodies that were rotting.

Emaciated faces everywhere. Corpses stumbled backward into each other as Bella pushed. She flailed against the hands that reached for her. Fresh pain from her ankle reminded her that she was human, reminded her that her own life was at stake.

She didn’t see the hand that grabbed the back of her head, but she felt the nails digging into the back of her scalp. Another hand reached for her shirt and grabbed, pulling her, fabric stretching, ripping.

With a savage roar, she frantically wrestled with the dead until she was free.

She could suddenly hear Angelica’s words clearly.

“Come and get some, you fuckers. Come and get some more. You like how that tastes? Come on! COME ON!”

Bella dropped to her knee and wrenched the rifle from over Angelica’s shoulder. On her mangled ankle, she lost her balance and tripped over her feet. She scrambled onto her ass and pointed the weapon into the crowd.

Her ability with a gun was limited. She hated these fucking contraptions. What did Brian have to say about it?

“Go ahead and criticize,” Bella muttered.

“Have a taste, you cocksuckers!” Angelica shouted.

Bella fired, and the gun nearly jolted out of her hands. She wasn’t sure if she hit anything. She pointed and fired again. The blast from the rifle muffled her ability to hear, and once again, the only thing she could understand was the tormented howling of the dead, as if their desire was being communicated from a lost language.

She saw Angelica’s face, and knew she was shouting.

There was blood and dark faces.

Bella fired again.

She tried to aim through the scope. Fired again.