Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (42 page)

Mina took a step back into the living room. The demon had control of young Jim. The demon was in control of everything.

“You sound stupid,” Mina said. “Did I ever tell you that? You’re the weak one. You don’t even have a name. Most of the cool demons have names. Their names are in scary movies. Nothing you say is real or true. You’re a liar. All demons are liars. Even I know that.”

Rose laughed. “What are you trying to do? You want me to stop everything? Just let it all go? You’re part of the reason why I’m here. I know Jim. I know that he is evil incarnate. I know that stopping me won’t stop him. Stopping me won’t heal all the damage that he’s done, or all the damage that you’ve done. Do you think you’re suddenly a good person because you decided that you want to try and stop me? You’re right that we have something in common, Mina. You, me, Jim. We’ve always been the people we are. We’ve always been shitty human beings.”

The smooth, strong voice of Father Joe was in her ear, and she could feel his firm hands on her shoulders. “You’ve already won. I’m so proud of you. It’s over. It’s all over.”

Mina swallowed. How was it over?

“This is your mind, too,” Father Joe reminded her. “The demon is linked to you, not Rose. They’re nothing without you. Your bloodline has been cursed with that demon for thousands of years. Rose has to believe you’ll never stop her, that she’ll never have complete control as long as you’re still here.”

Now she understood what had to be done.

She clenched her hands into tight fists, fingernails biting into her palms.

“You’re wrong,” Mina said to Rose. “We’re different because I’ve changed. I know I can do something good, something that is worth more than my own flesh could ever be worth. You can keep on trying to hurt me, but I’ll always come back because I want to come back. I’ll always come back, and I’ll never leave you alone. I’ll be here to remind you that you’re just a visitor. I was Jim’s first choice, not you. You’re nothing without me.”

The demon, young Jim, put out his arm to bar Rose from stepping forward. “Don’t listen to this idiot. Let her ramble. Just let her keep on rambling. This nuthouse reject is going to keep talking to distract you. We have more important business to take care of, like killing people. Slaughtering them. All of them.”

In the living room, Rose’s father lay slumped into the couch, eyes locked onto the television.

“This is my damnation,” Rose said. “This is my horror, my fate, my nightmare. This is what I deserve. This is what I’ve always deserved. We’re done with you, Mina. Better for you to leave.”

Rose turned her back on Mina and returned to the kitchen table. Her hands were tucked between her legs, as if she were folding inward on herself, uncomfortable with a tragic revelation.

Young Jim leered at Mina, hands clasped behind his back.

“I’ll never leave you,” Mina said.

But she was thinking of Patrick when she said it. She was thinking of Father Joe. She was thinking about the world that she helped destroy. She was thinking about the hurt she had caused.

“Get out of my house,” Rose said without looking up.

A malicious smile touched Jim’s face. “This is a lot of fun, and we’ll keep having fun. Over and over and over again. Oh, how much fun it will be to use you, destroy you. I have been trapped inside this ancient blood, this disgusting, vile place. The human smell of shit and tears. Everywhere, it’s all there is. Everywhere and everything. Shit and tears. And you, Mina, will be here with us forever.”

Rose did not look up.

“That’s fine,” Mina said.

And she believed it.

Everything would be fine.

Her hands trembled, and her eyes filled with tears.

It was over. Finally, at last. All over. No more pain. No more hurt. A bright warmth filled her stomach, and everything around her brightened. She wanted to run into the street. She wanted to shout her name or the name of everyone she could ever possibly love; she wanted to walk the Earth again in her mortal flesh and meet with the families who still struggled on and apologize to them all, find a way to console them, hold them, share their tears.

She turned and walked out of the house, her red hair swinging behind her like a flag billowing in the airwaves of a hurricane.

Trembling, shaking, sobbing. Sunshine drenched the street, and she stood there feeling the warmth of the bright sun on her face.

And they came. Of course they came. Doors swung open. Bodies slithered out of open windows. People stepped out from the shadows of open garages. Car doors swung wide on moaning, rusty hinges. Like a crowd gathering to watch a house on their street burn to the ground, everyone in the neighborhood awakened. Bodies, faces, people. Figures, arms, legs. Mouths, eyes, faces. Faces. Faces.

Every one of them, she recognized. They were dressed in the clothes they had worn when they died. As members of the collective undead, they approached, and she waited for them. In the street, she waited for them, and she wasn’t afraid.

Closing her eyes, she inhaled deeply.

She held out her arms, her wrists upturned to the sun’s warmth.

Let them have what they wanted.

“This is just the beginning!” the demon-Jim shouted from inside the house. “You have no idea what we have in store for you.”

Mina smiled.

She knew what was in store for her.

“You can do it,” Father Joe said.

She heard him, but she did not look for him.

Let the dead drag her down with them forever, and there she would wait with them in the darkness, forever. Let them drag her down and bring her soul into the cold place, where peace and nothingness waited. She didn’t have to exist forever. There was no need to haunt Rose’s soul.

This was the only way out.

Only she hadn’t known it until now.

She felt them get closer to her, but she would not open her eyes. She would feel everything, but feel nothing. It would no longer hurt when their mouths clamped down upon her skin and ripped her to pieces. No more.

The first contact against her body was a warm hand that clasped one of hers.

“You are strong and wonderful,” Father Joe said.

The tears that squeezed themselves from beneath her eyelashes warmed her cheeks and traced the contours of her cheeks, dripping over her chin and onto her chest.

She was strong, and wonderful.

ROSE

Mina was surrounded by hundreds of zombies. The redheaded woman disappeared in the circle of dead people, the mob of decrepit, walking corpses descending upon her with relish.

Rose stood at the window and watched.

Mina did not scream.

This power Rose had, she didn’t understand it completely, but she knew that it wouldn’t be too difficult to enter into the lost memories of anyone who numbered among the undead. Worse, she knew everything that Mina knew.

Father Joe had made a huge difference in Mina’s life, changing how she felt about everything simply by holding her close, simply by wanting nothing from her but to help her.

Rose didn’t consciously reach out and touch the window with her fingertips. Her hand pressed against the class, as if maybe she could feel what Mina felt now, whatever it was.

To feel something. Anything, besides hate and anger. Most of her life she had wanted Jim. For too long, maybe; since this fateful day she relived now in memory, her existence was nothing more than an extension of his. Why didn’t she remember that he murdered her parents? Why didn’t she remember that she had been locked away in several institutions until she found a way to take her own life?

She killed herself while Jim was trained to become a covert murderer for the government.

They took her personality, embedded it into a microchip. But they hadn’t really taken her personality at all, did they? Couldn’t they have simply made a completely different machine and insert it into a puppet body, just as they had done to her? Why did they choose her personality? Especially since they negated her entire existence—what was the point?

“Isn’t it obvious?”

Rose turned from the window and saw Jim sitting on the couch beside her slouched, inattentive father. Jim had one legged crossed over the other, his hands resting neatly on his lap.

Instead of answering him, Rose looked at the television and saw that Vega lay unconscious. Her vengeance was nearly complete.

Outside, the zombies devoured Mina.

“Nothing is obvious,” Rose said.

“The world is your oyster,” Jim said. “With Mina out of the way, you can do whatever you want. She was never a threat to begin with.”

Rose shook her head. “This is all just a game. Your game.”

Jim frowned and tilted his head.

“It isn’t so complicated,” the demon said. “You were kept around for Jim. They figured you were the little incentive they needed to keep Jimbo in line. And it worked. He brought you back. Several times, in fact. And here we are.”

Why didn’t Mina scream?

Rose’s father stared at the television. Her mother stared at a laptop screen.

“Show me how he did it,” Rose said to the demon. “Show me how Jim brought me back.”

Demon-Jim smiled, an awkward expression on the face of a man who did nothing but smirk at everything. “Why bother? You know what you want. This filthy world deserves to suffer. How many times did you have to die to make Jim love you? You think he is incapable of feeling love, but he wants to possess you, and that’s the same fucking thing. A need to control, or want, or fuck. All the same thing.”

Rose looked outside one more time, and then back to Jim.

“Show me,” Rose said.

There was a girl in the kitchen, a teenager with a bowl-shaped haircut of dyed, jet-black hair and a spiked choker around her neck, fishnets on her arms and legs. This was her. Hard to believe it, but this was her. No matter how many times she saw this version of flesh that she once inhabited, it made her uneasy. How could she look so weak, so lonely? The girl sitting in the kitchen was a stranger. Rose felt like she was watching a Lifetime television special about the life of a lonely girl who had been picked on by her peers because her parents didn’t love her. Did she suffer from anxiety, depression, insomnia? Did her parents send her to counseling because the pills could serve as a proxy for their lack of interest in raising a daughter?

The demon sat on the couch next to her father, and this young version of Jim who had so casually been admitted into the home whistled a tune while he walked around the kitchen with his hands clasped behind his back.

“You should probably leave,” the girl in the kitchen said.

“Oh, fair Ophelia, there is so much for you to learn,” Jim said. “To be or not to be. To be or not to be.”

“What?”

“I don’t think it’s a question. I think Hamlet said the words and realized that it should be a question, rather than a statement of fact. Because it was, indeed, a statement of fact.”

“I don’t want to talk to you. You’re fucking weird.”

Jim removed the serrated bread knife from the knife block. At the table, the younger Rose watched Jim’s eyes trace the edge of the knife.

“I think this adds a twist,” Jim said as if he were talking to the knife. “This makes things more interesting, I think. This blade is used to cut through entire loaves of bread. A blade that has teeth. A blade not used for slicing, but carving.”

The girl watched from the kitchen table as Jim casually walked into the living room and stood in front of the television. The father frowned. What was his name? Did it matter?

Jim approached the father, tilted his head upward, and began to saw away at the man’s throat.

The mother’s eyes were wide. She watched.

“That’s enough,” Rose said.

Demon-Jim cackled. “It’s never enough, darling.”

Rose felt nothing for these people. She didn’t know them.

Out there, in the cold wilderness of memories and torment, was a warm voice. A voice tinted with a Latin accent, a voice she recognized.

“I helped you once, beautiful stranger.”

Rose opened her eyes and saw her parents lay dead in congealing puddles of blood staining the carpet. The girl still sat at the kitchen table, and Jim stood behind her, bloody hands on her shoulders, gently massaging. The demon-Jim was gone.

Standing in the corner of the room, his dark features obscured by shadow, was Father Joe.

“You’re dead,” Rose said.

Father Joe shrugged. “I guess it’s a state of mind, isn’t it?”

“You helped Mina, didn’t you? This is your way of fighting back.”

“There’s no reason to fight,” Father Joe said. “Not after everything you’ve been through.”

“And I’m just going to keep on being Jim’s bitch. That’s what this is. I’m what he wants me to be. From this moment, this day in my house, I’ve been his. And all my hate and anguish is going to help me be the queen of shit and death. I get to be at his side until the end of time. I get to be his forever.”

Father Joe’s smile faded.

“I understand what Mina tried to show me,” Rose said to Father Joe.

Jim walked into the living room, shoes submerged in blood that collected in puddles while it soaked into the fibers of the carpet.

“Get over yourself,” the demon said. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, and get your ass back into the real world.”

Rose turned her back on him and opened the door. The bright, sunlit street she had seen from inside the house was gone, surrendering to a black sky scarred by glimpses of lightning. Bright flashes illuminated the gathered crowd of zombies that still congested the road.

***

Thunder roar.

White explosion of lightning.

Rain began to fall in sheets. The entire neighborhood seemed to disappear behind a veil of night. Houses, cars, lawns—everything was gone.

Rose was face-down on the cement. Rain pelted her, and she could drink the rainwater as it collected along the walkway that led to her front door. Rose blinked rainwater out of her, and the blurred world spun around her. Lightning and thunder complemented the storm again and again. Her arms were in the water. A flash flood that had taken mere seconds to develop.

Water splashed ahead of her. The familiar putrescence of the dead mob wafted into her nose. She could hear them coming for her, even though she couldn’t see them.

Lightning flash.

Pushing herself up, she squinted her eyes against a slash of lightning; through the sheets of rain, she could see the retirement home.

This was her nightmare. She was back in Roseville. Near ground zero.

Lying in the water at her feet was the same shotgun that had been wrenched from her hands by the mob. Little more than a year ago, and yet it felt like it never happened at all.

She had been afraid that day. She had been afraid, until Father Joe saved her life.

“This is my head,” Rose said to the night. “This is my victory.”

White vibration of light. A hundred faces looked upon her. A hundred faces with flesh peeling from cheekbones, eyes rheumatic, teeth cracked, mouths black and filled with blood. Tongues flickering slowly over crusted lips.

How many shells were in the gun?

She committed her feet to the pavement and pushed into the chest of a rotting body. Spinning out of its grasp, she twirled through another pair of arms. She slipped between bodies, letting them touch her, letting them almost get her.

Slippery, wet hands slid over her skin. The smell of their rotting insides spilled from their open mouths like exhaust from a diesel truck. Noxious vapors from the rotting dead caused her eyes to water, and the curtain of rain blurred her vision.

The dead were silent, as they were on that day. They did not make noise. Their mangled forms twisted around her, wrapping over her shoulders. She collided with bodies. Touching her. Needing her. Wanting her.

Father Joe had saved her the first time.

She was alone now.

And that was okay. She didn’t need anybody. She didn’t need anyone to help her end this.

When it was time to lift her shotgun and shove it into a dead-bastard’s open face, the weapon was yanked from her hands. They lifted her into the air, just as Father Joe had hefted her over his shoulder.

They lifted her into the rain. She opened her mouth, opened her eyes wide.

This was her nightmare, and she deserved every moment of it.

You think you can escape me?
the familiar, demonic voice spoke to her.

She is escaping,
another voice intruded.

Mina.

Rose couldn’t help but smile.

The demon fought back.
Both of you are slaves to the horror we have unleashed upon the world. You did it. You’re responsible. The blood is on your hands, and it will always be on your hands. You wouldn’t dare sacrifice so much power, so much vengeance, for everything—

“Go fuck yourself,” Rose said as laughter erupted from her throat. She coughed as rainwater and fingers clogged her mouth.