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

Somewhere a dog barked.

“There was a face in the window,” Vega said. She swallowed a mouthful of air.

“Another bad dream,” Vincent said. His voice smooth, calm. Soothing.

She closed her eyes for a moment and opened them. Nothing there. Nothing but moonlight.

“There was a face,” she said.

“Ain’t nobody here but us. I promise. Lay your head down. I’m here.”

His fingers swept strands of sweat-soaked hair from her forehead.

The dog barked.

She could hear Vincent sitting up on the bed. He slept soundly sometimes, but not always. He stayed up more often than not and watched through the window. He waited for something. He watched over her.

A gunshot. A distant pop. Another one. The dog barked. A few people shouted.

Her body shuddered, and she wasn’t cold. This night was like all the others. Vincent had told her more than once that life hadn’t changed much in the ghetto. A couple gunshots and no sirens. No ambulances. No rescue. Shouts. Tears. Silence. Church on Sunday.

They weren’t going to repeat their past conversations.

“Finding him won’t make it stop,” Vincent said.

The mission. She talked about it sometimes. The mission she didn’t complete. Vincent knew she would start up about it, and they would have their usual argument about leaving to go out there and find Jim Traverse, the man she had been brought into to Detroit to find. But the trail was cold. There was no sane argument for taking off to go hunting for a ghost.

When she was a mercenary, she killed plenty of people in combat, but her nightmares were mostly about her father, the man who abandoned her. There was no alcohol now.

“I’m sick of hiding in our little hole,” Vega said. “The nightmares are getting worse, not better. Those things aren’t going away. I’m rotting here.”

“He’ll be back,” Vincent said. He’d said it before. “Whatever he wanted was here. He lost it, so he’ll come back.”

“Right. He’s coming for Father Joe. That was supposed to happen a long time ago. And here we are.”

“Things aren’t getting worse. Wherever he went doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter. It matters to me. It’s unfinished business. It was something I should have done, something I failed to do.”

Vincent stood in the dark and left her on the mattress. He went to the window and allowed the moonlight to touch his face. He ran his hand over his head.

“You’re going to give me shit about your mission,” Vincent said. “You never get tired of talking about it, but I’m getting tired of hearing it.”

Her mission was to find Jim Traverse and bring him out of Detroit. He might be dead, but she wasn’t.

Another gunshot outside. She could only hope they were killing zombies. What if they weren’t? What would happen? Everyone got along in their little commune so far because everyone pitched in. But she wasn’t the only one having nightmares. These civilians had survived a mild winter with survivor’s guilt.

Another gunshot. A dog barked.

Another sleepless night.

Vincent eventually fell asleep, as she expected. She walked out into the neighborhood. Sometimes she saw other people wandering around in the dark, and she always feared they were zombies. They probably thought she was, too. But she had a reputation for walking around at night, and some people tried to talk to her about random things. Like the weather, or old movies they wanted to see again.

Nobody bothered her this night, and she was able to make her way to a fenced-in basketball court for a scheduled rendezvous.

“I can hear you breathing,” Vega said to the darkness.

Long pause.

“You don’t look like you brought anything with you,” a woman responded, cloaked by the shadows. She was invisible, though Vega had a good idea where she might be.

“I probably didn’t,” Vega said.

“Wasting my time. I can’t come out here every single damn night. When I do come back out here, I’m kidnapping your ass and trading
you.”

“
Calm down, bitch.”

“You got one minute.”

Vega sighed. The other woman was good at doing business, had a nose for it. Angelica was her name, a woman who was probably mixed with every bloodline known to man. Calling her “Angie” was an easy way to piss her off.

Angelica had done Vega a huge favor. Their first trade involved Angelica making a promise that she would be able to get Alexis, a little girl who lost both her parents, to a better outpost. Vega wanted the girl to be safe, but she didn’t trust herself anymore. She spent a lot of time wishing she had the courage to go back out there, to take Alexis to a safer place herself. Angelica was the next best thing, or so she had hoped.

“I don’t have anything for you,” Vega said. “I just want to know what it’s like out there, by yourself.”

Angelica chuckled.

And then awkward silence. For a long time Vega wondered if Angelica was there at all, if she had ever been there. Vega might be totally nuts by now, and nobody was around to tell her. A cold beer would have made all the difference in her world.

“You can’t trade me enough to answer what your real question is,” Angelica said. “You want to know if you can do it. You want to take my place. You think you can do better, huh? I’m not coming back. Ever. Fuck you, and fuck this place.”

“I’ve always liked your sense of humor,” Vega said. “I keep hearing about this Sutter guy. You think he’s going to come in guns blazing, or give everyone a chance to surrender?”

Vega didn’t wait around too much longer before deciding she wasn’t getting an answer.

JIM

Her name was Linda and her stomach rumbled. Suspended from chains, her limp body dangled outside of a window, three stories above the pavement. Linda often twisted and turned, but she wasn’t going anywhere.

Jim flipped through the pages of a poetry chapbook and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while sitting by the window. He paused every few lines to inhale; dust and rot and ash, smells that he never wanted to grow used to, smells that he wanted to feel and experience to remind him where he was, and what he had made.

The abandoned automobile factory, the Packard Plant, was the perfect place for his new kingdom. How silly it was to think going back to Egypt would be helpful. Detroit’s ruins were perfect, and it was ground zero for the apocalypse. What better place to build his kingdom of suffering?

He closed the book and walked through the shattered halls, his boots crunching on broken glass shards, the graffiti of dead men sprayed on the walls.

The lines from the last poem he read kept running through his head. Good literature followed you, like music. It left an impression on your mind and changed how you talked or thought, at least for a little while.

The smell. He opened a crate and inhaled again. He closed his eyes. Yes. There it was. Sewage and curdled milk. The human body’s destiny. A rotting corpse that had become a festering colony for maggots, a breeding ground for disease as nature consumed the flesh.

He put his gloves on, scooped several maggots into a bowl, closed the crate, and walked down the hall and stood in front of the window where Linda dangled above the street.

“Hungry yet?” Jim asked.

“Go…”

“You were pretty once. Perfect skin. C-cup breasts. You were also a mother? You keep talking about someone named Blake. A boy? The zombies ate him, I presume. You’re sharing your delirious nightmares with me. Did you know that? Do you know that I’m here? Can you hear my voice?”

He wasted a lot of his time finding women who were semi-attractive, only because he didn’t want an ugly woman to offend his aesthetic sensibilities. It was easy to find any number of ugly people, and he started his project by playing with them, first. But pretty girls were harder to come by these days because most of them were dead.

This part had become boring. Most of his subjects chose to die from starvation. They actually preferred to become zombies rather than believe in his plan.

“It’s so easy,” Jim said. “I have food for you in this bowl. Take a bite. If you eat, I’ll bring you inside. I’m not begging, but I am repeating myself. Can you tell my patience is wearing thin?”

She mumbled her questions, the same ones they always asked. Why me? Why are you doing this? Always the same.

“I need a commitment from you,” Jim said. “You wouldn’t understand my intentions if I went into detail. You’re too stupid. You can’t let go of your boy’s death. What is one more death? Everyone dies. Right?”

More whining and crying. Whimpering and begging.

He looked over the ruined city. Detroit was more beautiful than ever. The Renaissance Center was gone, half of it sitting in the Detroit River. Smoke and ash from Windsor continued to fill the sky. Skeletal shapes—girder and steel bone, pillars of glass and brick, rusted metal car corpses, dust flesh—Detroit was an open grave. He enjoyed the silence here, a silence that could be felt all over the world now.

The video he uploaded when he was at Selfridge had gone viral and had wiped out almost everybody. Almost. There were pockets of civilization, people who still felt like they could start over. He heard them on the radio; he listened to their desperate attempts to reach out, to ask for help, to survive.

Nude and twisting in the breeze, Linda whimpered. Her ribcage stretched her dirty skin, feces crusted on the back of her thighs.

When she finally gave in, he spooned writhing maggots into her mouth, pushing the spoon between her lips. 

There was so much to do. The process should work this time. Mina’s consciousness was out there, inside the collective existence of the undead. Did she still have awareness? Mina could not be killed, not completely, not now.

Not after what she had become.

There was so much for them to do together.

Maggots frothed out of Linda’s mouth as she whimpered.

“I wonder if I would have pitied you, when I was a child,” Jim said. “It’s so illogical to feel anything for a stranger, for a life that I have not lived, or created, or birthed. Do you understand that nobody will miss you? Nobody will cry for you. It will be as if you never lived. You have left nothing behind on this world that will survive you.”

“Oh God, please, please God please please just stop please just stop.”

Jim shook his head. “Isn’t there anything more important to say? Anything you can think of? Just think about all the wonderful things that have happened to you in the short time you’ve been alive. Think about anything you wish you could have done. Is there a memory you would like to share?”

Nothing but whimpering from Linda.

He sighed. “I suppose I don’t understand. Verbalization affects cognition. I’m giving you an opportunity to feel happy again. See that moment, experience it.”

Useless. A blithering idiot. Hopefully, the procedure would work right away, and none of these defects would be included in the new version of his favorite weapon.

Turning away, he silently made his way down the long, forgotten hallways of the Packard Plant. The crying of a tormented woman was the only sound in that abandoned factory. Long before the near-apocalypse, this place had been a tomb for glass and broken doorways.

For how long would she cry?

Everyone died differently, and every person faced their death differently. So interesting. When they realized they were going to die, they confessed every imaginable sin, every fantasy dreamt.

In the darkness, the woman’s cry echoed through the factory. The world was incredibly dark. Nearly impossible to see at night in the factory’s interior where light, natural or otherwise, had barely touched the shadows since the old machines shut down.

He listened to her cry.

In his fingers he twirled a microchip.

Rose. Her personality was contained within the microchip. A woman designed by his ingenuity. A personality embedded in a microchip, one of the first successful attempts at creating a sort of hybrid artificial intelligence and clone, although there was always the risk that it would backfire, that she would regain her original memories.

Really, he was growing bored. He had been mostly unchallenged in the ruins, except for the bandit girl who saw him regularly with fresh meat. The woman was annoying. She made juvenile, racist jokes to cover up her own vulnerability. Her words offended his sense of taste in language. Angelica, her name was.

It was only a matter of time until someone heard Linda cry.

Outside, there were people who wanted to kill him. People who wanted him. They waited out there, and now Linda’s cries could bring them closer.

Yes.

He heard it.

Voices in the courtyard. The crackle of radio static.

There were no insects, no night creatures besides those scurriers and scavengers who stalked the night. There were other scavengers, too. Waiting in the dark.

His opponent wasn’t a fool.

Jim had always known Sutter was a worthy enemy. He expected it to come down to this, and he was pleased to hear the other man’s voice cut through the night, a deep baritone bursting through a megaphone.

“Jimbo! Jimmy Boy! Wet Jimmy! Wet, limp, sloppy Jimmy. Cold Jimmy. Jimmy the child rapist.”

Jim listened.

“I thought maybe you would get all bent out of shape with that one. Here I am thinking you got an ego. Oh man, oh man, how wrong I was.”

How many men did Sutter bring?

Linda cried out sharply.

“He’s here! Please oh God please please please I’m here God please please please help me, help me…”

“You know, I always kind of felt like we could have been a good team,” Sutter said. “I feel like this is a wasted opportunity. Whatever happened to Richards, anyway? I can’t blame you for killing him. I thought about it, you know. But I didn’t think I could do it as well as you could. I don’t have your sense of style.”

Movement inside the bowels of the labyrinthine factory. Sutter’s people were inside, looking for him. Now, there would be violence. Sutter would have professionals with him, men who survived in Detroit’s ruins because they were men who had left nothing behind and had no future to win save that which Sutter made them believe in. Sutter always managed to train his personal shock troops into faithful followers who adored his personality.

The night was about to become exciting.

Jim watched Linda, her feet dangling, kicking, voice choking. Her body wet with tears, urine, and sweat.

Sutter’s voice echoed throughout the factory. “So, um, Jimmy, I was thinking, you know, since we’ve never been good friends, if I just rip your tongue out of your mouth and eat it. I have dreams about it, Jimmy. I want to sit on your chest, reach into your mouth, and rip your tongue right out of there. I guess I’m letting you know that when I’m breaking your arms, it isn’t anything personal between us. I just want to eat your tongue. Mostly because you remind me of Daniel Craig portraying Sting in a movie about the musician’s life, or based on his life. I fucking hate Sting. Hey, so, let’s talk about killing you.”

“I’m up here,” Jim said calmly to the darkness. Leaning out of the window, he wondered how many snipers were across the street. Of course, they probably wanted to bring him in alive, just like Bob had wanted.

“Looking good, Jimbo,” Sutter said. “I’d be willing to call off the dogs if you could just step down here, you know, do it all macho-like. Come on down here. Just the two of us, I promise.”

“But I want to kill your men, first.”

Sutter laughed. He sounded like a little boy. A foolish little boy playing in the kingdom of a god.

There was something waiting for Sutter’s people in this factory. Something special Jim kept for just the occasion. And Jim listened for the music that only screaming men could make when faced with mortal terror.

***

The first man who screamed begged for his mother.

The second man who screamed had fired several bullets from a machine gun. An M16 from what Traverse could figure from the sound. A burst of light popped along the distant corridor, which seemed a mile away from where he was perched—in a window, listening, watch, waiting.

Another firefight, more screams.

“What a bunch of assholes,” Sutter said from the darkness through his megaphone. “Wasting ammo. AT LEAST DIE WITH DIGNITY, YOU ASSHOLES! Run for your lives or kill yourselves. Don’t shoot your guns. Let’s be professional about death. ACT LIKE PROFESSIONALS, YOU SCUM!”

“Linda, keep begging for help,” Jim said to his captive before rushing into the darkness.

When he heard the sound of pigs slopping through a trough, he knew how close he was. The blood smell was rich, mingled with the smell of dirt and dust. Fluid splashed the floor nearby, like a bucket of water dumped over someone’s head.

The living dead were eating, and eating well.

Did Sutter’s men have night vision goggles?

Jim knelt, and his fingers found the rifle. An M16. He was standing above the feasting dead. They couldn’t see him. His personal beasts, their hunger absolute.

Once he had infiltrated an enemy hospital disguised as a blind man. His eyes were bandaged, and he had to fight his way through the front door without a gun. But he ended up with one.

Jim was among the dead now, and they would want him just as much as they wanted the other men. Their lust for flesh was indiscriminate. He could hear the chunks of meat that dropped out of their mouths as they pinpointed his location. The blood smell saturated the air, and Jim inhaled it deeply.

Ever since the first time had taken life, the aroma that accompanied death interested him. Many people enjoyed the smell of a new car or a new pair of leather boots. To spill the blood of another, to witness their vain search for angels in the eyes of the dying—it was its own reward, and the smell reminded him of that victory.

Jim emptied the clip into the heads of the undead—three targets. He took them all down and ejected the clip, letting it hit the floor. Spots danced in front of his eyes from the gunfire burst.

“This hall is clear,” Jim announced. “Come on up.”

From outside, Sutter’s voice blared through the megaphone. “You have
zombies
in there with you? You are a sick, sick man. How do you sleep at night?”

Jim knelt and found the goggles on the dead man’s face. Sutter had his own commandos? Flak jacket, holstered sidearm, combat knife, undershirt, crucifix pendant on the end of a necklace. He dipped his hands into an open stomach and rubbed his hands in the dead soldier’s warm blood, and then smeared his bloody hands across his face. He put on the goggles and removed the sidearm. He put a bullet into the dead man’s head.