Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (40 page)

“Enough!” Bella said.

She kept her gaze concentrated on the street, hoping that their voices stayed low enough to remain unheard. Every time she found a place to stop and catch her breath, it didn’t last long. Her body stank like blood and armpits. When was the last time she had shaved her legs? A strange thing to think about with hundreds of zombies roaming around outside.

There was a place they could go, a place well-stocked enough to keep them fed and fat, at least through the winter.

Ford Field. Where Angelica had lived like a queen.

Brian had said Desmond and Jerome were both dead. Even if he was telling the truth, nothing would change. The wasteland would still be in front of her. Desmond could not make her forget all the horrors she had witnessed and suffered. The man she had loved might be able to help Brian salvage his soul, but that could prove wasteful.

It was more difficult to live than it was to die. She could make everything easy by giving up.

“I should have known,” Brian said. “I was distracted by weakness. That’s what it was. Weakness.”

“Weakness?” Desjardins asked.

“Wasting time on my mother. We should have kept moving. I should have left her out there, wandering around.”

“What’s your problem? She’s standing right here, man! Do you know what I would give to see my wife again? My kids? And I’m part of the reason why they’re gone. I’m responsible for this shit, and I have to live with the guilt—”

“Your guilt has nothing to do with how I feel.”

“I feel something. You don’t feel a damn thing. You’re no better than those things out there.”

“No. I am better. I’m better because I know what it takes to win.”

They could go to Ford Field. Away from all of this. Brian was ruined by everything he had seen. It was easy to forgive him, to pretend he didn’t mean the things he said. He was a confused young man. Confused young men struggled with their feelings, especially when it came to parents.

That had to be Desmond talking. She didn’t hear his voice, but those were his words. His thoughts.

“I have to get back out there,” Brian said.

“Good for you,” Doctor Desjardins said. “You do what you have to. I’ve been pushed around, pulled around by assholes with guns for too long. I was supposed to get the guns. I was supposed to have your help. I was supposed to be getting out of this hellhole.”

“I’ve been on the run for a long time. I never once had a time where I was safe. Not once. Not since this whole thing started.”

“I can hear the world’s smallest violin playing for you. You and everyone else who’s had the bad luck to survive. You were supposed to bring that radio to the Depot, order the airstrike to kill a whole lot of people who actually helped start this thing…”

“But not you,” Brian said. “You’re exempt from that list, right? I’m just supposed to believe you, like I’ve believed every swinging dick who promised they could help.”

“You need the help, buddy. You abandoned your mom? That shit’s rich, too rich. You know what? You go right ahead, and get the radio. Order an airstrike. Blow up a few abandoned buildings. There are
millions
of those things out there. Millions.”

How many of these conversations had she listened to over the past year? Brian had been in the middle of several of them, and nobody was ever right. Nobody could win.

Doctor Desjardins and her son continued to argue. Back and forth, back and forth. Which of them was a better person? That’s what they were trying to prove. Who was the better human being? Who knew the right way to stay alive?

Their voices became a low rumble in her mind. She watched the dark outside, looking for signs of the rotted. All the emotional weight from the past few hours blurred her vision, and a headache reigned over her vitamin-starved body. Hunger and thirst had been her familiar companions for too long; being with Angelica at Ford Field had spoiled her.

Desmond’s car. Angelica’s death. The dead family. Her escape from the blond-haired flesh trader. Sleeping on the roof after pushing the corpses into the street. Roaming through Detroit, stumbling upon Brian who did not regret abandoning her. Attacked by the rotted. Sitting here now, looking into the dark, hands stained with dry blood as if she worked in a meat freezer. Calloused, rough hands. Flesh that was aging too fast.

Bella walked upstairs and left the two men to their argument. She found a dark, airless room stifled with dust and trash. Scavengers had been through here already, upturned furniture and ripped up books and magazines proof of their disrespect for the dead. They were trying to erase the past completely. Nobody had ever lived here. We can destroy the memory of hurt.

A few moments later the voices were quiet downstairs, and she could hear someone walking up the steps. She tensed, afraid of the silence. Silence was nothing more than an extended pause between moments of all-encompassing terror.

When the door opened she hoped Brian would be there. She wasn’t surprised to see Doctor Desjardins instead. Bella tried to look over his hands, but there was nothing wet, nothing red.

“I’m really trying to help him,” he said. “You have to see that I want to go on living, and I’ll do whatever it takes. I know I can’t do it alone. I’m sure I can find some of Vincent’s guns in the neighborhood. And he might be lying about the man you’re looking for. Your husband, right?”

“I hear what you’re saying. I think I’m so used to all this, I just want to keep going. He would do the same. He’s already thinking if he should kill us both or kill one of us. My son is worse than I am, but he’s right. And you’re right. That’s the problem.”

“No. I don’t believe that shit. We just have to get out of here. I know for a
fact
there are people outside. I worked with Sutter. And I’ve been here from the start. I helped raise the girl who started this. No matter what happens, there has to be someone who will help. Sutter was actually rescuing people and getting them out. Sutter’s force is supposed to die here, slowly, or stay until everyone was out. Sutter was given Detroit. Who is there to give it to him? Think about it.”

Bella whirled around and lunged for his throat; the man had let his guard down, had no intention of hurting her. She pushed him down and stood over him. For a moment, their eyes met, and they both knew what was going to happen next and decided it was okay.

The woman straddled the scientist’s hips as her hands dug into his throat. His hands fumbled for his belt. Bella slapped him across the face. Hard. She slapped him a few more times, each blow wearing her out more. His hands were on her hips, pushing her up, and they helped her out of her pants and onto him, sliding down until he was completely inside. She slapped him in the face a few more times, called him a different name, and told him to finish inside her. When it was over, she rolled off him and screeched. She dressed herself. Doctor Desjardins appeared to be asleep, his face reddened from her hands, his lips cut, eyes bruising.

Bella charged back downstairs. More than anything, she wanted to see if Brian was safe. She really wanted him to be safe. To wait for her.

When she made it to the second floor, she didn’t care about anything else. “Brian. Wait for me. Just wait, please.”

Brian stood from a kneeling position.

It wasn’t Brian.

She thought it was Brian at first, because what she saw now was impossible. Brian lay at a zombie’s feet, his mouth quivering, eyes wide, his throat torn open. His stomach had a gaping hole. The zombie standing over him had bloody hands. It seemed to be daring her to stop it from eating. It was upset she had interrupted the meal.

Brian was dead. His mother backed into a wall and watched her son’s killer approach. Her eyes drank in every detail. Beetles and worms dripped out of its nostrils, and spiders roamed over its thin, rotted scalp, eyes almost invisible behind a layer of ash. A centipede crept along the edge of the hole where the ear used to be. A foul belch of gas groaned through its stiff jaws.

“Stay out of the way,” Doctor Desjardins shouted into the hall.

He appeared and swung a baseball bat at the zombie’s head. The scientist had been nervous and just clipped the creature’s forehead. Hands grabbed at his shoulders; no attack would distract a walking corpse unless it was completely destroyed. Desjardins got his feet tangled with the zombie’s, and he dropped back with the undead atop him.

Bella picked up his baseball bat and kicked the zombie where its ribs should have been. The creature was light, being nothing more than a bag of bone and dust, and was easily pushed off Desjardins. She slammed the baseball bat onto the back of its head and shattered it; she thought of a vase.

She walked over to Brian’s corpse and bashed the skull in. Bella clanged the aluminum bat against the floor as Brian’s face was turned into mush. Over and over again. She would never see her son again. She never wanted to see him again. The dead had taken everything from her, but she would never let Brian become one of them.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Doctor Desjardins said.

“No, it’s not okay.”

“I bet people are still alive. The neighborhood, I mean. I was there. Vincent Hamilton was there. Brian must have been there, too. Maybe he lied about some things to protect you.”

“You don’t know that. Just stop talking. This should be you. I should be killing you, right now. What is there to stop me?”

“Nothing. Nobody can stop you. I’m afraid. Okay? You win. Neither of us knows how to use the airstrike equipment, so we have to think logically. Think for a minute.”

“Think logically. Right. Of course.”

“You understand.”

“I got nothing left. I’m standing here with nothing left. It’s like being born again. I don’t have to be afraid of death to get the most out of the life that I have. You’ve always been a survivor. That’s why you’re still alive.”

“Hold on,” Doctor Desjardins said while getting to his feet. He kept his palms up in front of his face. “We’re both survivors. We can be honest with each other. We can try to kill each other right now or later. Unless we get absorbed by another group, we won’t get very far together. Maybe not out of this room.”

Bella inhaled deeply, suddenly aware of the soreness in her forearms from swinging the bat. She wanted to breathe air that didn’t smell like blood. The baseball was wet with the bloody mess from her son’s face.

“I’ll go with you because you’ll do as I say,” she said.

Doctor Desjardins dropped his hands. He was right; it was only a matter of time before she killed him, but wanted her help to salvage more guns. Why not try the bar down the street where Brian’s followers had been massacred? If everyone in the neighborhood left alive took off there, then the living might be severely outnumbered by the dead. He seemed to think the guns were easier to get from the neighborhood, so she would kill him as soon as they got close or when he made a move on her.

And then she could be just like Angelica. Haunting Ford Field with a few guns, scouring the wasteland for danger.

JIM

Through the smoke, the Artist ascended the stairs, careful not to slip on blood, bullets, bodies, or bones. The last shouts of survivors drifted through the Depot.

During his ascent, he wanted to stop several times and look at the mangled corpses; he wanted to listen closely to the final breaths of those wounded men who gasped and bled. He wanted to linger near the twitching corpses of the dead-again zombies.

Rose did this. Directed this.

There was no telling the influence the demon had on her fragile emotional state. As beautiful as this massacre was, she didn’t appreciate it. She had escaped from Jim in a jealous rage, though she would forgive him in time. She would thank him. For everything he did to give her a reason for living.

There was no battle-blood coursing through his veins now. Instead, he was calm, focused. Able to stop and admire the scene.

Breathtaking—the amount of chaos she wallowed in. Faces painted in blood, bodies ripped apart by bullets or hands. Shredded remnants of flesh sticking to the walls or lying in puddles of blood like pancakes floating in a lake of syrup. He walked through the dead halls, the acrid smoke of a thousand bullets offending his sense of smell. Better to smell the blood.

“Over here, Jimmy.”

Sutter. His voice rising through the echoing cries of his dying people, the people who had believed in him.

Sitting on a stack of footwear likely scavenged over the last few months, Sutter rolled a quarter between his fingers. Over and under and over and under and over and under. He still wore his white suit, but it looked like he had been swimming in an ocean of blood.

“That’s a good look for you,” Sutter said, indicating Jim’s nudity.

He had nothing to say to Sutter.

Sutter had gambled to get his attention. He bided his time and thought capturing the soldier, Vega, would bring Jim close. Believing he understood Jim’s tendencies, he used Vega as a curiosity. Jim awakened her and eliminated Sutter’s poisoner, the bone man. While Vega was certainly interesting, Rose had a more vested interest in the woman, considering that Vega had killed her. He awakened Vega to satisfy Rose.

“I do not wish to speak with you,” Jim said. “You are a simple barbarian. The zombies did not come here for you or for me, but they came here because Rose—
my
Rose—wanted the soldier. Vega killed her once. You couldn’t have known that. I came here for Rose. I did not come here for you.”

Sutter stopped playing with the coin and pocketed it; his jacket was stiff from drying blood. “Jimmy, I don’t think it matters how you got here or why. Shit man, I know you’re a sociopath, and you don’t give a shit about others, but let’s be serious for a moment, okay?”

“I would prefer to end your life and move on with mine.”

“Okay, I get it. You’re going to kill me. Give me a chance to tell you how you’ve lost.”

Sutter was stalling.

“Give me five minutes of your time,” Sutter said. “I guarantee you’ll be entertained by what I have to say. Now, I’m not going to recite you a Homeric in Spanish verse or anything like that, but I’ve got something you want to hear. You forget that I survived Egypt, too. You forget that I know as much as you, if not more. There wasn’t a whole lot you could do while you were locked up in the nut house.”

Sutter used to be a professional; he had a knack for earning loyalty and expending it as a resource. Once, in Afghanistan, he infiltrated a Taliban-controlled village; in the guise of a preacher, he slowly mobilized the entire village over a period of six months and promised them beautiful deaths worthy of Heaven. Almost everyone in the village was killed, but Sutter had completed his mission. An entire Taliban stronghold had been overtaken, but Sutter had fled the village when militants found it and set it afire long after the Taliban lost their stronghold.

Sutter was a man of respect. He had earned his victories. He survived Egypt, and he was here at an important moment in the history of the world.

Jim crossed his legs beneath him and sat on the ground, brushing aside glass shards and a severed arm.

“Can I at least get you something to eat?” Sutter asked, unable to hide the excitement from his voice. “We have some MREs left, I think. I know I’ve got a few bags of potato chips. Better Made chips, of course. Made in Michigan.”

“Do not delay,” Jim said.

“Fine, fine. Just trying to be nice.”

Sutter rose from his throne of shoes and boots, and then stretched in front of an open window. “What did you think of the music? I thought it was a nice touch. I figured a guy with your poetic sensibilities might find irony in it somewhere.”

“I was not amused.”

“Fair enough. I know Richards was trying to help you, because he tried to reach out to me, get me involved. We were the baddest dudes this country has ever sent into the field to do wet work. We really were.

“Anyway, let me get to it. I know you’re impatient. I think about the past a lot. Not in a regretful way, but I like to reflect. All of us were criminals long before the government rehabilitated us, remade us. We were perfect. You murdered an entire family, and this was after you had been tortured by an old lady for a little while. I know you killed those people because you wanted Rose. I get it. Things have a way of coming together. Since you were good at killing people, you were trained to become a professional killer. Same thing happened to me. A boy, like you. Worked at a country western bar in Alabama, stalked and killed two good ol’ boys who didn’t like African Americans. Anyway, you and I were recruited. Same with Richards. They had this Egypt mission planned for years.”

“I know all this. You’re wasting my time.”

“I’m getting warmed up. Anyway, I think about this stuff. They took that girl, Rose, and pretty much burned the memories from her head. Meanwhile, they were still breeding the Egyptian bloodline. Mina was the last one. So they eventually dumped us into Egypt, hoping we would wake up the beast. Hoping Mina would become a conduit for all the power they ever wanted.

“But you wanted to do things your way. You just couldn’t help yourself. They knew whoever survived was going to have a taste for it. Richards decided he was going to help them. That guy was an asshole. Richards should have known you were going to erase him.”

A revelation was forthcoming. Sutter had gambled his philosophy, his meandering, bumbling thoughts, to show something he thought important to Jim. Meanwhile, Rose might be confronting Vega; Rose would be blinded by her emotions, and Jim had no idea how well-trained Vega actually was.

But Vega couldn’t destroy Rose. The idea was ridiculous. Rose’s consciousness was forever. Jim had won. Continents had become abattoirs. Entire government buildings had become charnel houses. The great cities of the world were ash and dust.

Jim unfurled himself and stood. Time enough had been wasted.

Sutter turned to him.

“This is a love story,” Sutter said. “You want to be with your queen at the end of the world. And then you’ll become bored, like you always become bored. You’ll become bored, and you’ll wander around, hoping for a challenge. There won’t be anyone left to appreciate what you’ve helped create. Nobody will care. You can make all kinds of art, Jim, but you’re just another kid scratching on paper with crayons. Nobody will see your art, nobody will appreciate it, so nobody will care. And if nobody cares, is it art?”

Outside, a tank rolled over the field of corpses, crunching bones and flesh beneath the treads. Who could it be? Sutter had played his cards close to his chest, and now there was a surprise in store.

“I imagine you would be a good chess player,” Sutter said. “But damn, that’s a sexy-looking tank out there. Is it yours?”

Jim didn’t care about the tank because nothing would stand in the way of his inevitable victory. Sutter’s words about art resonated, and it was hard to discount the veteran soldier’s wisdom.

If nobody was left to interpret art, or perceive its creation, then art could not exist.

Poe and Baudelaire had both appreciated suffering the love of women and existing in a nightmare designed by their own souls. Their lovers could twist and contort their mental process, serving as muses one moment, and then crippling all creative energy the next with their derision or disapproval.

Georgia Cone had pointed to Shakespeare’s words with withered fingers, sucking air between her teeth. She taught Jim everything important about life and love. She taught him everything.

Jim watched the tank approach the Depot.

“Where do we go from here?” Sutter asked. “It’s the question I always ask myself. I think I’m a practical man. I mean, I think it’s great that love played an important role in everything that happened. It’s nice to think about. Let the whole world burn for love. But you don’t know what it means to love anything, Jim. Surely, you figured that out a long time ago. You’re a fucking murderer. You’re a KILLER! How could you love anything? To you, it’s about possession. It’s about expression. It’s about trying to understand yourself while you keep telling yourself that you know exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.”

No man could understand the importance of Jim’s mission. As he watched the tank approach, rolling over the remains of Rose’s emotional distress, he considered a world without artists, a world in which he was the only one with a unique vision, the only person with something interesting to say.

In his cell at Eloise Fields, these considerations were never far from his mind. He understood his vision of the apocalypse as a manifestation of his selfish tendencies, but none of it mattered. Out of chaos would come permanent stasis; the creation of a realm that did not harbor foolish ideas of good or evil. The complete annihilation of all the inadequacies of the human race. Everything, in time, was reduced to ash, even thought. Memories. Emotions. These things meant nothing. There was no point to anything, save for the purpose which an individual might create to help give them a reason for living. Children, love, God, Buddha, money—these were nothing in the hurricane-eye of inevitable death. Everything decayed. Everything was replaced or ruined.

Sutter slapped him on the back, a gesture Jim didn’t see coming.

“Quit beating yourself up,” Sutter said. “You didn’t cause this. It was going to happen. We’ve spent our entire existence dreaming up ways to destroy our own civilization. Hell, we’ve become pretty good at it.”

“You have thought about this deeply,” Jim said. “I have not spoken with anyone on the subject in quite some time. I have not encountered a deviant opinion, one that is informed. Richards thought he knew well enough, but he was deluded. We did not want the same thing.”

Sutter stroked his beard and watched the tank. They could hear the engine over the immense silence that now settled over the Depot. After the battle, the silence felt stifling. Jim knew this feeling and loathed it. It was the feeling that followed every major conflict in which blood was shed. It was the feeling that haunted those who were both relieved and anxious; the battle was over, and the warrior had survived to fight another day, but it seemed unreal.

You realize that you’re not dead. You realize that you’re still breathing. There are so many others around you who are dead, who are maimed. You’re not among them. You have survived. You were nervous a few moments ago—afraid, violent, inhuman. Maybe you were the absolute best definition of a human, doing everything in your power to stay alive in a fateful conflict. And then, adrenaline crashed. Quiet. You listen to your own heartbeat. You think about what you could have lost. You wonder what you have won.

“I think we’re like-minded people,” Sutter said. “We’ve seen what people refused to believe. We’ve seen what people fear most. We came back from Egypt with it. It was like a curse. And we see it in front of us. We see it in front of us, and we feel alone. You want companionship, a friend. I just want to kill you. But it’s kind of funny, Jim. It’s funny that we saw Hell, and we haven’t seen Heaven. That’s what I look for. That’s what I’ve been trying to find. If there is Hell, then there must be Heaven, right? Isn’t Hell the antithesis, something that can’t exist without its opposite? Wasn’t it created as an act of rebellion against Heaven, against goodness? What does it all mean? We didn’t meet Satan. We didn’t meet any fallen angels. What we saw was worse than anything we imagined.”

There was undeniable wisdom to Sutter’s rambling, but patience has its limits.

“You truly don’t understand,” Jim said. “The folly of this species is incredible. Nothing will ever change about the nature of man. Centuries will not change the way we think or feel.”

“You took that right out of a Thomas Ligotti book.”

“I’m surprised you know who that is.”

“Why’re you surprised? We’re all chasing our damnation. Hell is what we want. We want to ruin ourselves and acquire pity. We want to ruin ourselves and find redemption. Redemption and salvation mean nothing to us if we haven’t fought for it. If you’ve killed everyone, there is no redemption for you. There is nothing. And these things that we’re talking about are just ideas, and these ideas don’t exist if we don’t exist.”

Sutter walked away from the window and removed the coin from his pocket. Once again, he rotated it through his fingers and watched its movement.