Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (38 page)

VEGA

No way.

After everything they had been through. Now she felt something. Now she really felt something. Anger and confusion mixed with the sweat in her eyes, the sweat that dampened her hair, the sweat that chilled her chest.

Vincent had laughed, and he wasn’t laughing anymore.

One random corpse. Out of the shadows. So simple. So deadly.

Vincent placed the Desert Eagle against the side of his head after he wasted the attacker.

“No!” she said.

She held her hands out. What else was she supposed to do? He needed to let her talk, to let her come close.

“Just wait, please,” she said.

He smiled his platinum smile. “Been waiting. We knew it was coming down to this.”

“No. Listen to me. Don’t be stupid. We don’t know for a fact that you’ll turn into one of those things. We’ve never seen it.”

“What’re you talking about? You listening to yourself? You put a bullet into General Masters yourself.”

She watched a river of sweat flowing around his eye and over his nose. It reached his upper lip. His face did not twitch, and his eyes remained calm.

He didn’t want to go through with it.

“Let me help you,” she said. “Let me hold you.”

Vega surprised herself with the last request, but she really did want it, and he needed it. They had come this far. To the edge of time, thousands of dead-again corpses left behind in their wake.

Vincent was not breathing heavily.

She stepped over the zombie and watched the blood flow from his shoulder wound.

“Dumbass,” she said. “You’re going to pass out.” She holstered her 9mm and put both hands on his shoulder, submerging her fingers in his bloody wound. He lowered the Desert Eagle from his head. Now his chest rose and fell rapidly.

“Talk to me,” she said.

“About what?”

“Maybe tell me about the best sex you ever had.”

“Oh yeah. I can do that. This girl I met when I was down in Florida. She came from Barbados I think.”

“Asshole.”

“You asked for it.”

“I hope you turn into a zombie. I’ll hang you from a pipe and use your body for target practice.”

“Sounds fair.”

She squeezed his shoulder tightly. His breath smelled like an old man’s unwashed body. Sutter was running around the room, shouting orders, dancing like a coked-out disco dancer who refused to believe the musical genre was dead.

“You afraid?” she asked Vincent.

“Yeah.”

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“You never held a man who was dying from his wounds, have you?”

How many times did she avoid that scenario while she was in a combat situation? She hadn’t seen too many people go down in a firefight; would she have held Bob, or Miles?

“What you’re saying is that I suck at this,” she said.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

And she thought of the corpse that had been standing over her, the one that Vincent shot down with impunity. He was right; it didn’t matter who that dead body had once been. It might not even have been Miles. It could never be Miles, anyway, because Miles was gone.

There was no emotional attachment to a corpse.

Vincent wasn’t a corpse. She was standing inches from his face. He allowed her dirty hands to touch his wound; she could be making it worse, but they both knew something. They both knew how this was going to end for them. There was no other way. There was no walking away from this fight.

“What do you want to do?” she asked.

“I’m not dead right now. I’m here, breathing. Taking up space.”

There must be a lot of things he wanted to say. A lot of things he wanted to share. Wouldn’t it be better to die suddenly, peacefully? In an explosion maybe. Anything was better than having a moment to think about all the things a soldier might be running from.

There were a lot of things she wanted to say.

“It hurts,” Vincent said.

“Yeah?”

“No, I mean it hurts I can’t fight longer. I’m going to keep this going, because I want to do something good. Just one time. Really do something good. Fight for everyone else. Not fighting for me. For you.”

Easily, he slipped into her arms. A long, tight embrace.

Sutter’s country music twanged in the airless Depot. Vega could taste salt and sweat. Her mouth was filled with blood and salt; her arms ached, her jaw was sore from the constant clenching. Her calloused hands were slick with Vincent’s blood. Her hands were painted in his life.

What would life have been like if they had stayed together in their little hamlet? What kind of man would he have been if she met him when he was the height of his power?

Could they have been different people?

She helped him peel his shirt off, and then wrapped it over his shoulder. The last time she had tended to someone’s wounds, Sergeant John Charles was bleeding on the floor of a strange house. A lot of people who were probably dead now were in that room. Jeremy, Patrick, John Charles himself.

Now it was just them.

“I don’t know why I came here,” Vincent said.

“I don’t think either of us know,” she said.

Their fingers connected, hands intertwined. Wet, slippery hands. Bloodslick and red.

A pause in the country music allowed their ears to adjust to a new phase of silence. An uncomfortable moment as people looked around, surprised to see they were still alive. Sutter’s ragtag group of fighters.

Vega heard the wet slurping sound, and when she looked over at the group of people who were huddled together on the ground, she realized why she had overlooked them the first time. Why she hadn’t actually noticed what they were doing, huddled their closely. They were just hanging out, maybe praying together, or reloading their weapons. No. No, that wasn’t it.

Their mouths were colored red, stark wetness slopped against skin-faded skulls. Rotted mouths chewed stringy meat strands, teeth working. Pieces of food slipped through toothless gaps. Singular strands of hair that had grown out of those death-shriveled heads were stuck together, soiled by blood. Four of them. A fifth approached as if surveying what the others were up to, a card game, perhaps? The fifth paused for a long time, arms hanging as if they had never functioned before. No electrical synapses in the mind’s engine fired those nerves to life, until now. Until now, when the fifth creature, altogether sexless and rotted, dropped to its knees and allowed its hands to disappear inside the open chest cavity of a fresh cadaver.

“We have to go,” Vega said.

He didn’t resist her, didn’t slip into some melancholy, defeatist mode. Instead, he allowed her to help him stand. They were on their feet again, together.

Mean Magda’s mop of tangled gray hair lay on the floor, her body being devoured piece by piece.

Sutter walked over, stood behind the five zombies, and pumped rounds through his shotgun. Heads burst, skulls full of meat popping open. Steaming chunks of skull like broken slices of a ceramic bowl dropped into Mean Magda’s open chest cavity. The headless corpses slumped over as if they had been nothing more than battery-operated toys that were broken for all time.

“The freight elevator,” Sutter said, digging around in his jacket pockets for more shells. He calmly loaded his shotgun.

His timing was perfect. The music started up again, and a slow crowd of people shuffled over the piles of corpses that had barred their way. A wave of people pushing aside a coral reef, eroding a barrier erected to prevent the water from flooding a city. The dead had already flooded this city. Some of them did not have eyes. Some of them did not have mouths. Arms were gone. Hands, tongues, missing. A few of them crawled, their legs mangled during the previous firefight. Here was a crowd that moved with an intent that was natural to their tendencies; they moved forward because they saw the living, and they wanted to consume the living.

Doctor Desjardins had mentioned these things were spawned from Mina’s version of Hell.

No matter how many they destroyed, the zombies kept coming. Here they were again, stepping atop each other, crawling, lumbering, moaning. Vocal chords were stretched to the limit as the undead wailed; a funeral procession of boisterous dead lamenting their own deaths.

Heads rolled between shoulders. Rib bones protruding from fabric, as if they were built of wood that had snapped and cracked; mangled bodies moving forward, moving, moving.

Vega was up. Moving.

Someone screamed.

Someone fired a gun.

The country music disappeared. Vega was trying to hold Vincent, push him forward. They were running through a herd of people, and she couldn’t tell who was alive or dead. There was no point trying to figure it out. Run with the herd, and keep your eyes forward. Every face was covered in the grime of war and terror; blood, dirt, dust.

They ran beneath windows. They ran through a bright corridor. Feet stomped, marched, pounded. Vega wouldn’t be able to see anything if she turned around; she was surrounded on all sides by shoulders and faces.

How many people did Sutter have?

Was Vincent going to turn into one of those things?

Was it better to…? Would she be doing him a favor if…?

Just keep running.

The toxic smell of bones, this was all the reminder one needed to know that ruination was everywhere, and absolute. Death right on their heels. Death everywhere. Death in physical form. Death coming fast.

Tumbling forward into the freight elevator shaft. Sudden darkness, speed of ground escaping underfoot.

She reached for something, anything. For that brief moment, solid footing gone completely from beneath her feet, the idea of prayer popped into her head.

Fuck that.

Fingers grabbed metal, wire. Fingers held on tight. She trusted these fingers. Dust in her eyes. She blinked it away and held on. Held tightly. Hugged the wire.

Vincent?

Vega whipped her head around and watched the bodies fall through the door— falling, falling, screams following them down into the dark.

A shadowed figure in the doorway, barely standing upright, a machine gun in his hands. She knew it was Vincent. He waved to her in the dark, and turned his back to the light.

Rapid-light flashes of gunfire illuminated the elevator shaft and dropped down into the darkness, fading. Vincent did not scream.

It was all she could to do hang on. Hopefully, the gunfire would continue forever. The gunfire would never stop.

She wanted to look up but could not. There was something else in her eyes besides dust.

Squeezing the elevator cables, she listened and waited. It should never have come to this. No. Never. Vincent was supposed to survive. Nothing could stop him. Nothing could destroy him. Life would never get its paws on him and drag him down into the graveyard that was Detroit.

“Onward Christian soldiers!” Sutter shouted from somewhere, his voice an echo.

The flash of light from the firing machine gun disappeared in the dark pit.

She squeezed the elevator cables harder. Hugging them close, wringing the cables in her hands as if she could choke answers from them, or forgiveness, or redemption.

Silence.

She held on tight. Hugged the cables. There was something in her eyes that was not dust.

Damn him. Damn him.

***

Sutter’s annoying voice filled the elevator shaft. Vega wished she could escape his voice, if only for a little while. His presence reminded her that the whole world had gone mad with the idea of violence.

Father Joe would know what to do. He would know how to handle someone like Sutter. Vega had only one answer for a man like him, and it would prove efficient in a lawless land.

A bullet to the face.

If she concentrated on climbing, then she would reach the top. If she concentrated on her anger, her rage, her desire to destroy all of the fools who helped shape this apocalypse, then she would make it to the top.

She couldn’t think about everything she had lost. Not now. Not when she was so close.

“It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll!” Sutter said.

Hopefully, she had ammo.

“This is more fun than a night at the movies!”

Every muscle in her body ached. Her body was sore in places that had never been sore before. Her physical endurance had been pushed to the limit, and her strength was failing her. Her body could only do so much, but her mind could push it further. Her devotion, her need for Traverse’s death, kept her grip on the elevator cables strong.

It would be so easy to let go. Let the darkness and shadows take her. Disappear into the tomb. Nobody would ever find her body. It would be as if she never lived at all. All of her missions, all of her victories, gone.