Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (24 page)

Lowering her weapon, Vega charged across the street, glancing over her shoulder one more time at Bill in case she could get a clear shot. No such luck. Bill was mixed up in bodies, but a resounding blast from his shotgun and a splash of brain meat against the car’s passenger window indicated he was taking care of business.

She was in the open and climbing atop a hill of debris. Her feet became tangled in wires and metal, and she had to watch her step. Higher ground would offer a better vantage point and a more defensible position, but she would be exposed to Desjardins and his team. They weren’t going to risk damaging the merchandise.

Was any position defensible? The dead had to make the same climb. For an entire horde of them, it wouldn’t matter.

Dumb. She was going to be surrounded.

How badly did Sutter’s people want her?

If only she could think clearly. Battle lust and rage had commandeered rational thought. Her position was not defensible. She stood atop a hill of trash and became a fresh meal. She was also bait; scores of zombies were going to be run into her bullets, and more than anything, it’s what she really wanted.

Not Traverse. Not Sutter.

Combat.

Nobody was going to take this from her.

Dropping to one knee, she positioned herself atop the hill of ruin and looked upon a never-ending field of targets. Bill had told her not to turn around, and she didn’t; there was enough in front of her to look at.

Hundreds of dead people clambered over each other. Zombies struggled over each other in a bowl-shaped crater in the middle of the road, a hole that had swallowed vehicles and shattered buildings that looked now as if they had been dropped from the sky, only to burst into a million tiny pieces. Zombies dropped out of the windows of high-rises like hesitant tears, bodies slapping the concrete and breaking apart.

“Come to Mama,” Vega said, and squeezed the trigger.

Vega’s thoughts disappeared behind a veil of gunfire. She dropped zombies until she was forced to reload. She ripped the undead to pieces until her fingers fumbled around blindly for a clip that wasn’t there.

Unlike any other enemy, they were not afraid of her. Their numbers dwindled, and still they marched. They climbed. They moaned. They came for her, no matter how many of their number fell. They bumped into each other and jostled together, their snapping, cracking limbs a composite of one mass group of rotted bodies.

Time to draw the Desert Eagle. Make sure one bullet was left in the chamber when the time came.

What happened to Bill?

It didn’t matter much. This was her moment. The same moment Miles had, the same one Bob had experienced with Traverse.

But she didn’t draw the gun. Instead, she dropped the Bushmaster and watched them come for her. How funny it all seemed. How unreal. If this was a nightmare, then she deserved it. There were no excuses for the way she had lived her life. But she had wallowed in her depravity. She enjoyed it. What was the difference between her and Traverse? The man had enjoyed killing, made a show of it, and here she was, staring at a mob of corpses. If this was a nightmare, it represented everyone she had killed, multiplied by the hundreds of thousands of people who had lost someone to one of her bullets, people affected by the loss of life she demonstrated.

How many people had she killed on missions? One was too many. One was more than enough. Certainly, hundreds of people had met their end by her hand.

She deserved this.

Let them come. As they climbed the heap of trash, she looked upon them and waited.

Unbreathing, awkward people grabbed her ankles. Dead people. They wanted her. They wanted her flesh.

Fingers dug into her skin, and she looked into eyes that did not have eyelids; wide, blood-glassed eyes. Holes where a nose should have been. Pockmarked skull with a filmy layer of black flesh stretching as a mouth opened wide, skin on the cheeks ripping open. Vega looked into a mouth full of broken teeth. Vega looked into a mouth as hundreds of more zombies came for her.

All she had to do was draw the Desert Eagle.

But she wasn’t moving. She stared into the mouth full of broken teeth.

Vega’s body jolted when the top of the head exploded, leaving nothing but chunks of hamburger brain sitting atop the lower jaw. The body remained upright for a moment, hand still clasped firmly around her ankle, until it slid sideways. Another zombie replaced it, climbing atop its destroyed companion.

Its head exploded.

“Get her the fuck down!”

Why couldn’t she move? Why was she just watching? She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the horde that climbed through the concrete valley. Someone was trying to help her, and after all that adrenaline she had stopped completely, frozen. Her gaze was locked on the wave of undead.

Hands pulled her from atop the pile of rubble, and still she did not turn or look anywhere but ahead of her. Corpses could have been holding her down, but she couldn’t shake the vision of the zombie storm; bodies raining out of buildings, the cresting tide of decaying flesh reaching over the rim of the valley.

Suddenly, her body awoke and began flailing. She did not have control over herself.

“She’s gone over,” someone close by said. “Just get back.”

“We can’t wait around.”

“These bitches are going to taste the hammer!”

A large beast of a man stepped into view, a sledgehammer hefted over his shoulder. He strode over to the edge of the valley and dropped the hammer upon a zombie head, squeezing brain matter through the eyes of a crushed skull. He brought the hammer up again, and dropped it onto another skull.

“I’ve been working on the railroad…” the big man sang as he worked.

Vega stopped struggling against the hands and tried to stand up again, but her knees buckled beneath her. Blood circulation had stopped, and her nutrition-deprived body surrendered.

What was the point? Didn’t she want to find Sutter?

What the hell did she really want?

No, it didn’t matter. Let these idiots have her. She could live to fight another day. Enough time and ego had been wasted trying to resist.

“Dude, we got to go!” someone shouted to the hammer-wielder.

The big man turned around, brain and skin stuck to the hammer as viscera dripped. “Can’t you see I’m working?”

“Huey, enough fucking around. We’ve got the girl, now let’s bug out. Come on!”

Vega could see two other ragged survivors. Huey must have been the hammer-man, and talking to him was a thin, long-haired man with a crooked jaw and a shotgun. Beside him was another survivor, an old woman with white hair and a 9mm in each fist.

The old woman spotted Vega looking at her and offered a toothless, gummy smile.

“This is my only chance,” Huey said. “Been cooped up in the castle, and I’m gonna bust some heads. Watch these eggs crack!”

Huey went back to work. Lifting the sledgehammer over his head, sliding it through his hands, watching it drop. More undead fingers clutched the rim of the valley, and the smell of blood wafted into Vega’s nostrils. She swallowed the smell. The smell of death was in her clothes, in her hair. And then this: Huey was going to get himself killed. How many times had she seen this happen? How many times did she try to achieve the same thing, only to have the moment stolen from her?

Huey dropped his sledge and popped open faces.

As a zombie climbed over the edge, the old woman unloaded her guns until it dropped backward into the bowl.

Then everything stopped. All sound—everything—paused. It felt like the oxygen had been sucked out of the world.

Dust shook from windowpanes. The ground trembled.

The tall man said it first.

“Fuck.”

The sentiment was echoed by the old woman, and a lightness in Vega’s stomach stopped her from repeating it.

Stomping toward them, a big motherfucking zombie. That’s what it was. A big zombie made of a hundred zombies. No. A thousand zombies. A towering collection of bones with hundreds of heads and hands all connected, and one huge, monstrous arm hanging from it like an old, rusted crane. Maybe ten stories high.

It wasn’t there a minute ago. She was too busy kicking ass to see it.

Huey laughed at it. “Hammer time, bitch!”

Vega wouldn’t have laughed. She would have run. But she couldn’t even do that. Her legs didn’t want to move for her. She was stuck there, frozen.

The huge arm swung down like Huey’s hammer, only it missed him completely, hitting the ground a few yards away. The ground shook, and Huey lost his balance, falling over the edge of the valley’s rim and tumbling over the broken debris of shattered skeletons. The huge arm swung again; this time, with less force. It dropped swiftly, the hand snatching Huey up by his crotch. He screamed as he was lifted into the air. The hammer dropped from his fingers, and he dropped from the massive skeletal hand.

The big motherfucker had grabbed him by the balls, and it hadn’t held on. A trail of blood followed him through the air as he dropped to the ground without his most important parts.

Instead of trying to save his comrade, the tall man grabbed Vega by her shirt and spat words into her face. “Huey’s dead because of you! How do you feel about that? Huh? How do you feel? Answer me!”

The tall man began to drag Vega, growling in frustration until she moved an inch down the debris hill. She wrenched his fingers away, only to be shoved from behind, probably by the old woman. Vega stumbled forward through the dust and ash, losing her balance and rolling over the ground.

“Cut the shit,” Vega said. “I’m with you. We have to find Bill.”

“There’s no time,” the tall man shouted into her face. “Move it. Move!”

Behind them, Huey roared. “Come and get some!”

These fools had come for her and were risking everything to get her. She was more valuable than Huey. She was important merchandise. A woman who could be traded or sold.

She glimpsed Desjardins out of the corner of her eye as they ran down the rubble hill. Resisting him had probably resulted in Bill’s death. If she had just come with him the first time, none of this would have happened. And their friend, Huey, wouldn’t be screaming now.

***

Thankfully, there wasn’t much action on Michigan Avenue. They walked along the road’s red-bricked overlay concrete and stuck to the shadows for temporary relief from the sun. There were more zombies wandering around the car dealerships and Corktown cafes, but all of them were moving in the same direction as Vega and the others; instead of attacking, the zombies seemed drawn to some magnetic destination.

Vega learned the names of Sutter’s people. The tall man was named Rook, and the old woman was Mean Magda. She was apparently his aunt, and they were Detroit natives, not soldiers trained by Sutter.

“He brought his own men,” Desjardins explained while they wound through the maze of cars and the spaces between the distracted dead people.

“I could give a shit,” Vega said, wiping sweat from her eyes. A part of her didn’t want to admit that Bill’s death was her fault. He might not even be dead; still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her dislike for Desjardins had clouded her judgment. And Bill, once again, tried to protect her.

“We’re almost there,” Desjardins said. “You’ll see. Once we get there, Sutter will tell you. We’re at war with Traverse, and this is the end. This is the very end.”

“Can’t believe we lost Huey,” Rook said. “The boss better say something nice.”

“The boss always has something nice to say,” Mean Magda said. “He liked Huey.”

“We had the band. We were all together.”

“We had the band. Not anymore. Back to the castle we go.”

“Fucking zombies.”

“We’re not even trading her?” Rook asked Desjardins. “Why did we go to all that trouble? We lost a good man. Huey was my friend.”

“I’m standing right here,” Vega said. “I lost a good man, too. Quit your whining, and keep your ass moving.”

Rook stepped up beside her. “Hey, you got a problem? You owe us. We’re doing you a favor, and you keep on running your mouth.”

“Do something about it.”

They stopped walking, and Mean Magda shoved her nephew back. Her lips made wet smacking sounds as she talked. “You leave everything to the boss. We got a war to fight, and Huey knew it.”

“We had a deal,” Rook said. “Huey and I were going to die in the castle. Cracking zombie eggs. I don’t care what the boss says about the war. Huey got himself killed trying to save this meat.”

Vega patted the Desert Eagle in its holster. “You can still join him. It’s not too late.”

“We’re wasting time,” Desjardins said. “We can argue about this later.”

Rook seemed to have all the emotional stability of a five-year-old. Instead of walking away, he tried to stare Vega down. Not many people could meet her glare, and this guy wasn’t budging. Not one bit. She tried to focus on his crooked jaw, but looked away. Desjardins was right. Best to get moving.

“That’s right,” Rook said. “We’ll have to introduce her to the bone man. He’ll know what to do.”