The Queen of the Dead (19 page)

“You wouldn’t last a minute out there,” Vincent said. “Bunch of animals fighting over the meat. Law of the land is survival, and the bullet. Way it’s always been for me.”

“You forget what I did for a living,” Griggs corrected him. “
I
was the law, not your child-killing hoodlums. These punks out there won’t survive because it’s every man for himself. You need a bigger gun to keep ‘em in line.” He stared at the chrome barrel of his .50 for affect.

The trip to Selfridge didn’t seem right. Vincent fidgeted and the sergeant kept looking in his rearview mirror. The streets were familiar, and even though the carnage could get in the way, they were going southwest instead of northeast. Selfridge was northeast.

“So…” Griggs started.

“What’s the problem, dick?” Vega asked.

“I can’t speak for my friend here, but I’m of the opinion that… well, we’re going the wrong way. Now, I know you might be at a disadvantage and all, seeing as how Vincent and I have lived around these parts for a while, but Selfridge is northeast of here.”

“We’re not going the wrong way,” John said.

“You guys think
I’m
the asshole,” Griggs said. “Tell them where you’re taking us.”

Vega stared at the sergeant.

“Some people need us,” John muttered. “We can do the right thing. We can make a difference. Instead of chasing a ghost and getting ourselves killed…”

Griggs clapped his hands. “We’re not dressed for the party, Sarge! Come on, man! We’re bringing our own guns! It’s not BYOB…”

“Jesus Christ,” Vega snapped at him. She turned back to John. “You know something we don’t?”

A fiery apartment complex was alight in the chaos. Flames billowed through windows and lifted into the rain. Flesh slapped against the windows of their truck, which wasn’t unusual; the zombies had been following them, a crowd that picked up momentum while the armored vehicle rumbled through the ruins. But the face that screamed against the window was cry for help from someone who was still alive.

“Shit,” John Charles said, “people are running out.”

“You’re not stopping, right?” Griggs asked. “I mean, I trust your judgment and all, but we have somewhere else we need to be…”

The sergeant’s jaw clenched. “Stay in the fucking truck.”

Vega sighed. “This is what I get for trusting someone. So much for Selfridge. We can’t run from this fight,” she looked at the side mirror. “They’re all over us. So we keep driving or we fight.”

“You’ll have to drive it,” John said when the truck stopped.

They were going to get their asses kicked because Captain America wanted to save a mock-up of his daughter. They were going to save that brat, Stacy.

They picked up their guns and kicked open the doors. Vincent followed suit.

“What the hell you wanna do?” Griggs screamed at them. “You can’t fit everybody in here!”

It would’ve been easier to get behind the wheel and say forget about his “friends,” but he found himself opening the door. He swung it wide and pushed someone over. They fell to the pavement; the rain was coming down hard, and he was going to get wet, even with the poncho on.

A lipless corpse reached out for him from the cement, half of its face seared by flame, its legs chewed away, trailing bones and veins. Griggs figured he’d oblige him and blasted the zombie’s face wide open with a trigger pull.

A little violence felt good.

People were screaming with their hands over their heads, running between the cars without a second thought to what was happening around them. Vega, Vincent, and John were already charging toward the building, dropping corpses with well-aimed head shots.

The marijuana smell was thick, and he reminded himself to resort to shallow breaths to preserve his lungs.

Shirtless girls ran past, their ribcages pushed against anorexic flesh, belly-button rings jangling as they fled in their short-shorts and flip-flops. As some of them passed, he couldn’t help but wonder how many of them would have been destined for appearances in one of his movies. 

Griggs was spun around; he looked straight into a black mouth. Lusty hands were on his shoulders. An entire body’s dead weight pressed into him.

His gun entered the creature’s jaw and the blast was accompanied by a flash of lightning.

He jogged to catch up to the others, pushing several nubile girls out of his way. One of them fell, and he surprised himself by reaching down to pick her up. She was still fully clothed, but her left arm was covered in blood. She looked up at him with big eyes, strands of black hair clinging to her forehead, tears and rain melting the purple mascara and eyeliner, her fake eyelashes fluttering. She grabbed his fingers; as her arm turned, he saw that her wound was still bleeding onto the pavement, blood running into a puddle.

She’d been bitten.

“Let me help you,” Griggs said. She was halfway up, her forehead level with the Desert Eagle; the top of her head sprayed like watermelon crushed by a sledgehammer when he pulled the trigger.

“Right down the middle.” Griggs whistled. “Jesus Christ, I can’t get over how much fun that is.”

He looked up to see John Charles rush into the burning building.

“Idiot,” Griggs wiped blood from his mouth and trotted over to Vincent and Vega, who were taking shots at corpses from behind cover.

“How can you tell who’s who?” he asked Vega.

“Lucky guess.”

A new barrage of gunfire; they’d been stupid enough to leave all the Hummer doors wide open. Teenagers hollered and pointed their newly-discovered guns at the crowd of zombies that were behind the vehicle, trailed through the wreckage by the sound of the truck’s engine. The rain misted over them, a crowd of shapes that were visible only in the glowing flames of the party’s death, lightning flashes, and thunder; shapes distorted by intent, approaching unhurriedly.

“Hell yeah!” A punk wearing a Tigers jersey with Verlander etched on the back shouted with an AK-47 in his arms. The kid tried to sweep the weapon over the dead, but he ended up on his ass from the gun’s recoil.

“This is what you risked our asses for!” Griggs said.

Vega was half-dazed, her hand planted against her forearm while she rested against the sedan’s door. Her head wound was catching up with her. Any minute now, and she would be useless.

Hundreds of soggy undead collapsed onto the teens near the Hummer, tearing away flesh and ripping organs out of stomachs; screams were cut short as teeth ripped open jugulars. Limbs disconnected as if a buzz saw had ripped through rotator cuffs and elbows, knee joints and knuckles. Shirts worn by the undead became bibs soaked in gore.

Vincent lifted Vega to her feet, “That’s our buffer,” he said to the solider, ignoring Griggs. She moaned and tried to prop herself up with her assault rifle. Vincent brought his AR-15 up and dropped two approaching zombies.

He followed after John.

Blood and broken beer bottles on the stairs. Needles. Syringes. Not much has changed in Detroit.

People crashed over the banister and pushed each other over to get out. Some of them slipped on the stairs, and Griggs shot his hand out more than once to get a pinch of flesh. The orgy might not have been a bad idea; maybe he should’ve shown up sooner—it would’ve been better than eating burgers and listening to Vega bitch. He wasn’t much into the young ones, but beggars can’t be choosers, and firm and tight is better than slippery and wide any day.

Smoke floated down the stairs; he felt like he inhaled enough in the last few hours to kill him three times over. It didn’t take a scientist to figure out several of the lower-level rooms were starting to burn.

He walked into an open room because it would’ve made sense for the sergeant to be in the one room that wasn’t on fire.

An older black man, with a salty beard and a handful of teeth left in his smiley jaw, sat in jungle green camouflage fatigues on a couch. He held a head between his thighs and was carving into the face with a pocketknife.

“You seen Chavo’s son?” the man looked up at Griggs.

“Heard he was dead,” Griggs said. “You just… hanging out here,” —he noted the stars on the cap— “General?”

“Why the hell not?” The general shrugged. “We should have more of this fire. Burn it all down. It’s the only way. Get every one of them bastards and cleanse the evil. Clean it right out. Like picking scraps of dogshit out the bottom of your boot.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Griggs nodded, because he didn’t know what else to do. “Have you seen a big army dude running around through here?”

The old man stopped carving into the face and stared at Griggs as if he were a quadratic equation written with Chinese numbers. “If a killer kills a killer, do they both go to Hell, and one killer kills the killer over and over again, forever? Maybe the other killer gets to kill the sinner
he
killed?”

Griggs took a step back. He had to get out while the getting was good.

“You ain’t thought about it,” a gap-toothed grin flashed. “We all sinners, and if hell is your worst fear, your worst pain, then we all just killing each other the same as we’re doing here. Fire ain’t nothing. Fire’s clean. Fire can win a war.”

“Griggs! Let’s get the hell out!”

John appeared behind him with the same people they found in the porn shop; Jeremy and his stepsister, Stacy, who was kicking and screaming.

“We roll!” John announced over his shoulder.

Griggs turned to the skull-peeler.

“We can win the war if we kill the warriors.” The general nodded and tipped his star-studded cap.

Griggs saluted him and ran out of the room with his forearm over his face to keep the smoke from seeping into his lungs. The stranger wasn’t affected by blood or war; he wasn’t afraid, and Griggs could respect that. He was no less crazy than anyone else who survived.

He couldn’t remember being grateful for the smell of rain. He stepped through the smoke and felt the drops patter onto his forehead.

Something heavy pushed his face forward onto the concrete. He scraped against gravel, rainwater flooding his nose; he could taste blood from his lips. He brought his elbow up and struggled to rotate to his back; he lifted his gun up through flailing hands. He fired into the rain, pushing aside arms that reached for his face. He couldn’t see anything but a blur of motion.

He kicked his legs up into the mass of flesh, and water flooded the back of his throat; he closed his mouth and gritted his teeth. It felt like doing a leg press. He grunted and shifted the shape above him. He fired into it.

Whatever was on top of him gave him some leverage. He sat up and pushed it off, unsure if he managed a headshot. When he was on his feet, he was pushed forward again, but he kept his balance because he was against a car door. His arm was pulled behind him and a sharp pain in his shoulder caused him to cry out like he was an action figure that had its button pushed. He twisted around and found himself looking at two leering faces.

Hands grabbed his hair and his head was pulled forward. He could feel the last few strands being ripped right out of his skull. Griggs brought the gun up beneath a chin and fired. When the zombie fell, he had breathing room, but not much. A jaw clamped onto his forearm, and teeth chomped into the nylon and scraped against his sport coat beneath. With his gun hand, he pressed the barrel right into the zombie’s forehead and shot it. Something hot and wet splashed his face and stung his eyes.

His ears were ringing.

He could feel the warmth from the burning building and its bright heat on his face. He braced himself against the car and staggered while trying to wipe blood from his eyes.

His heart wasn’t beating faster than normal, though he was almost out of breath. Not bad for being forty-six. How many more shots in the clip? There were supposed to be seven total. How many shots had he fired?

“Shit, fuck me,” he muttered. He bumped into somebody and kept walking, unaware if they were alive or dead.

Griggs wasn’t surprised to see Vincent and Vega behind cover a few yards away, providing a field of fire to help the sergeant walk out unharmed.

Those bastards left him to die.

Vega slowly rose from her firing position, while Vincent slapped another clip into the AR-15 and moved backward to watch their six. Griggs waved at them, and Vincent dropped his eyes from the scope.

He was going to do it. Nobody would notice.

The burst of gunfire woke up his ear drums. He jerked; the gun seemed to be firing in slow motion.

It sounded like a grocery bag loaded with bread loaves hitting the ground. He turned around to see a corpse lying in a puddle.

Vincent didn’t say another word. He turned his back, and Griggs followed.

***

Slogging, jogging, running. Stopping, breathing. Running again.

Vega nearly passed out twice.

They could’ve been running for two hours, an hour, fifteen minutes; water sloshed around in Griggs’s shoes and he was soaked. He would have ditched the sport coat if it hadn’t saved his ass once already.