Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (4 page)

A green world came into focus with the goggles over his eyes.

His opponents were moving slowly in the darkness. Waiting for him to come to them. Sutter was gambling that Traverse would be impatient.

But there really was work to do.

Stomping down the damaged hallway and finding the stairs, he stopped suddenly when a group of rotted corpses waited on a landing. Creatures that had been made by his video, demonic creatures with black orbs where the eyes should be, their lust for violence awakened easily; otherwise, they slumbered. They dreamt in the darkness, and of what, Traverse did not know.

Instead of opening up on them at full auto, he charged into the trio of dead people and tossed it over the stairs onto the next floor. The bodies crumpled over the stairs below, their dead bodies fleshless, light, easy to throw over the edge.

Gunfire pounded the dark below.

One rotten corpse left to throw over. He dropped the M16, grabbed both forearms, and drove the zombie forward and used it as a shield. Nearly sliding down the concrete steps, Jim dropped the shield and dove toward the next landing. He caught himself, rolled against the wall, lay on his side, and drew the 9mm in quick, fluid movements.

Target.
Pop!
Target.
Pop!
Target.
Pop!

Another. Another.

Another.

Until nobody was left standing.

“Jim? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Goddammit. Can I at least have my guns back?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you have to be so difficult? You usually gloat, don’t you? I heard your speech earlier to that poor girl. Why don’t you read poetry to me? Tell me a bedtime story. Come on, Jim. Please?”

He backtracked, pleased with his body’s performance. The spoils of war belonged to him. Sutter would bring more men. The fight wasn’t over.

Time was running out.

“Oh Jiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiiiiiim. Why don’t you come out here? That place is too big to smoke you out. Why do you have to be so difficult? Let’s get this over with, and we can both go about our business killing people for fun.”

Quickly, too quickly, the action was over. Did it happen at all? There was no adrenaline rush, no desire to keep fighting. There was nothing.

He pulled Linda into his arms, set her down on a table, and used his trepan kit on her brain after pulling back her scalp. Sutter remained outside, his taunts nothing more than an added note of chaotic music accompanying Linda’s screams.

MINA

It was better here, down in the dark, away from all the hurt. Mina cared about all the people who had died because of her afflicted mind. She cared that some of them could love or feel. Cared that some of them could have families. Cared that some of them could live as she had not been able to live. No need to be selfish; she had the power to hurt, and the power to do nothing.

Her mind was no longer jumping into other dead bodies. Maybe she could live forever, but she didn’t have to see the world crumble.

It’s not so easy,
the demon said to her.
You know I won’t let you hide. Not when we can do so much together.

Mina didn’t want to do anything.

You want your questions answered.

No, she didn’t.

Your mind is not yours alone. Your soul is not yours alone.

Mina was sitting in Eloise Fields again. In a blue gown in a sterile room, a television monitor hanging from the ceiling in a corner; one of those shows where doctors had melodramatic relationships with one another while arguing about the morality of the non-existent Hippocratic Oath, and once in a while, they would be trying to save someone’s life in a pulse-pounding surgery scene. Nothing else in the room besides a round table, four plastic chairs, and the muted television.

Her long red hair. She missed it. It was clean and smelled like the cheap shampoo they let her use at Eloise Fields.

“What do you think?”

Gillette aftershave, Marlboro cigarettes, slicked hair thinning over his scalp, brown sports jacket, jeans. Stomach just pushing against his waistline. Leaning back in his chair, even though he wasn’t sitting there a moment ago.

She tried to think of something to say.

“Well?”

“Patrick,” she said.

“Do I get an apology or what?”

“Um.”

“At least tell me why.”

“Wait. You’re not Patrick. I ate Patrick.”

“You did. You ate me. And here we are.”

“You’re not in Hell. I’m not in Hell. I don’t think so, I mean. I think I loved you, but I didn’t love you. I loved Patrick for a little while, but not you. I think I loved
him
.”

“I am Patrick.”

“No. You’re the voice inside my head.”

He crossed one leg over the opposite thigh and tapped the cigarette against his shoe.

“So if I’m a voice in your head, then you’re not here, are you?” Patrick asked.

“I’m insane. I don’t think I should spend time trying to figure things out. You can do the thinking for me.”

Patrick nodded. “Fair enough. You don’t think I’d be in Hell right now?”

Mina shrugged. Father Joe had talked with her when she was inside Jack’s body, and she had listened. Jack had wanted to protect a little girl and kill his evil brother, but he had to do it as a zombie and with Mina inside of his head.

It would have been easy for her to jump into another corpse, but Mina had listened to Father Joe talk about the true meaning of faith. She listened to him confess his apprehensions, as if she could act as a liaison between him and God, as if she could somehow validate everything he believed in. For hours he spoke. He wept. He laughed. He talked about killing a man in the boxing ring. He talked about guilt; God might have chosen him to survive, might have chosen others to die, might have chosen this fate for the world. He said it would be inhuman to feel nothing, to simply convince oneself that intelligent design or a cosmic plan had inflicted this upon the human race, and he should just accept it as a man of faith. It was inhuman to rationalize genocide, no matter what you believed. Hell was real, and she was supposed to be an envoy, a gateway, a conduit of pain and suffering.

She chose this darkness now. She chose her own hell. Father Joe could focus on helping people instead of fighting zombies. As long as she put all the zombies in the world to sleep.

“I don’t care,” Mina said to the demon who looked like the man she had once loved. “Patrick wanted to hurt people.”

“Since when did you decide to become a moral compass?”

“I don’t know what’s right or wrong, but I know my hair looks pretty. I think it looks pretty. I haven’t seen my hair in a long time.”

Patrick grinned and exhaled a cloud of smoke through his nostrils. She thought of a dragon breathing flame, a dying dragon.

“You’ve killed people,” Patrick said. “You were also my whore for a little while. You sold your body to me, and I made money. Lots of money.”

“I did it for you. Because you were nice to me. I know I don’t feel bad or anything, but I know that people shouldn’t just die for no reason. I’m dead inside. I know I’m dead inside. But some little girls are out there are alive, and they want to be princesses.”

Patrick extinguished his cigarette on his shoe and stared at Mina. She played with her red hair, felt its thick, wavy strands between her fingers. 

“Take a look at the screen.” He pointed to the monitor hanging in the corner. “Look at what your subconscious is doing to you. You’re lucky to have such a wonderful mind.”

Patrick would never speak like that. In the dark he would look into her eyes, trace the edges of her open mouth with his thumb, hold the back of her neck with his other hand while pushing, pushing, pushing into her. And he wouldn’t stop. He often called her by his ex-wife’s name or a mistress he once had, but not always.

“You’re the other voice,” Mina said. “The demon.”

“Okay, you got me. But this is all I had to choose from. Your head is filled with this guy. He slapped you around and turned you into a sex slave, and you wanted it. You can’t convince me you don’t enjoy blood and pain.”

“That’s not true. I don’t feel good things, but I know other people do.”

“So you’re cured! You’re not insane!”

“You don’t have to be Patrick. Be someone else.”

The demon slammed his hands onto the table. “I am your nightmares. I have always been inside your head, waiting to share your flesh. We inherited each other. We are children of annihilation.”

Mina could hear plaster cracking as if a storm of eggs fell from the sky. Cracks fissured, crawled, split the wall behind the television monitor. The wall opened.

“There’s someone else in our head,” the Patrick-demon said. “A visitor.”

Through the hole walked a woman. Beautiful. Dangerous. Slender and busty. Platinum-blonde hair with pink extensions. She wasn’t a stripper.

“We can have a body together,” Rose said.

Agent Rose.

Mina smiled. “I didn’t want you to die. I thought you were cute. You loved Jim so much, and he didn’t care. You know he didn’t care?”

“I’ve been dead for a very long time,” she said. “I didn’t know it until now. I didn’t know it until I died again.”

Smoke began to rise from the demon-Patrick’s hands.

“But you can’t be here,” Mina said. “This is my head.”

Rose shook her head. “You can’t die. Even if you don’t know what you are. Me? I’m a microchip. I used to be a woman who died…” she trailed off, the remembrance cutting into her throat with the emotion of hurt and anger.

Patrick-demon’s hands were melting. Sizzling. Cooking. Flesh fusing with the table.

“Inside of Jim there is a truth we’ve always wanted,” Rose said.

Mina stood from the chair, and she felt something warm, odd, unwelcome. Her throat tightened and teeth wanted to tear chunks from her bottom lip. Anger. She was angry. After all this time.

“This isn’t about Jim! This is about me, dammit! I’m insane. I’m insane and this is where I belong so I can’t hurt anybody!”

She sank into the chair, exhausted from her outburst, her hands immediately reaching for her face, covering it in dark. She hid behind her hands because she wanted to be alone; there were too many people who knew what she should do and what she should be or what she should have been, what she should have wanted.

“You don’t have to want anything.”

Daddy.

She was home again. She was a little girl, clutching her blanket to her chest.

Her bedroom door was open, and it was dark. Time for her to go to sleep. Did she have school tomorrow? She was a little girl. She was eight years old.

And she knew what was coming.

When she slept, she dreamed of monsters. Terrible, flesh-eating undead monsters that used to be people. She never thought about Daddy because she had loved him and understood him; that’s why she had to eat him.

Mina got out of bed wearing her favorite nightdress, a sheer gown of white, frilly and lacey. She approached the hall and looked upon the figure. A tall shadow, the man who loved her, the man who waited for her.

“Daddy, I’m ready for bed,” she said.

“It’s time for a new nightmare,” Daddy said, although it wasn’t his voice.

Jim had tricked her once. Pretended to be Daddy.

Flash of lightning. Daddy’s face.

He wasn’t wearing the mask. Another lightning flash. It looked like the mask. Another flash. Something more monstrous. Something real.

“You don’t have a Daddy,” he said.

“Um.”

“They’ve been trying to make you for hundreds of years. You have such old blood, and I can show you. I can show you that we are one. You are eternal. You are a goddess.”

“Can you read me a story?”

“Daddy was a killer. They took him out of prison and told him to abuse you, hurt you. He was a child molester, a sexual predator. They gave him a child. They gave him you. Sweet little Mina.”

He wasn’t her father. What was this? Another game the demon was playing with her. Of course she had a Daddy. He hurt her, but sometimes he read nice stories to her. Before her hurt her, of course. If she was a good girl and promised to be nice to him, he would read to her. She liked it when he read to her.

The thing that was not Daddy stepped forward.

“You’re an experiment. They wanted your mind. They wanted what you could give them. Eternal life, and access to the inferno. It’s simple, my little sweetling. You were a tool, and you got away from them. You got away from them because you let me in. And they didn’t know. They didn’t understand.”

“I want to go to sleep now.”

Flash of lightning.

“You’ve always been asleep. I’m here to wake you up.”

He took a step forward, and she took a step backward. He came for her, and she retreated.

She ran into her bedroom and jumped into her bed. The face was the monster, not a mask. A mangled, rotted face that was hungry, needy.

“Please Daddy, take off the mask!” she threw the blanket over her.

But she knew it wasn’t a mask. When the blanket was snatched from her hands, she looked up into the dark and found the decrepit face of the man she once loved; rancid, pungent breath escaped through a mouth from the bowels of a rotting stomach, and the hanging pieces of cartilage and lip belonged to Patrick. This is what he would look like. This is what she made him.

“Just let me have a taste,” the demon said. “You want it. I know how badly you want it.”

She screamed. She never screamed for Daddy.

The demon laughed. Daddy never laughed.

The undead demon-Patrick arched backward, and a bright explosion of fire through its black mouth blinded Mina. She felt the weight of the demon fall upon her legs until it was shoved off the bed by the woman who just saved her.

“I didn’t save you,” Agent Rose said.

She pointed her gun at Mina’s face, pushing the warm barrel against her cheek, shoving her back onto the pillow.

“You don’t want this power?” Rose asked. “You don’t want this body? I’m going to take it from you. I was always meant to be with Jim. He made me, created me. I didn’t know it before, but I know it now. He made me to be like him, to be with him.”

The hot gun burned into Mina’s face.

“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” Mina said.

“I know. That’s the problem. But it was always supposed to be this way. I’m supposed to have your power. I’m supposed to have your body.”

The gun exploded again, and parts of Mina’s face and hair decorated the mattress, the walls, throwing blood upon a picture of an elephant in a frame above her headboard.