The Queen of the Dead (21 page)

***

A small house off the road, a neglected home that had been rotting since the day it was built. They could still hear the alarm, and the crowd they carried with them had grown in number.

“Sweep through the house,” Vega ordered Griggs while the sergeant was set down. “Jeremy, push that couch in front of the door. Vincent, knock some legs off that kitchen table so we can make a tourniquet for John. We’ve got seconds, people.”

She tossed her rifle to Vincent, who caught it. The ultimate sign of trust between warriors.

It was obvious she just wanted to get Griggs out of sight. If they survived the next few minutes, the blame game would begin, and her cold eyes suggested she already had a scapegoat picked out.

He rummaged around in the bathroom for alcohol or pain killers—anything. The people who’d lived here must’ve been total assholes. There was nothing.

When he returned to the living room, he could feel the sweat and humidity; they were all huffing and puffing. He helped Jeremy move a bookshelf in front of the living room’s picture window, which barely covered the middle of it.

“Ammo check,” Vega insisted while looking over the sergeant’s wounds.

“Got shit,” Vincent said. “Got my nine, and cracker boy still has his cannon. That’s it. Maybe a handful of slugs.”

“Fuck it,” Vega said with sweat dripping into her eyes. She had lost her own rifle in the fray.

She wrapped a wooden table leg to the sergeant’s shin with duct tape. “Don’t you dare pass out on me,” Vega said to the sergeant.

“You gonna do me like you did Stacy?” John looked up at Griggs, his face wet and slack, his eyes wavering between consciousness and unconsciousness.

Griggs didn’t answer.

“Why don’t you cut his leg off?” Jeremy suggested. “If this thing’s an infection, I mean, I’ve seen it in a couple movies. We stop the infection by cutting off the leg. I should’ve done that before… We can try it.”

“Wow,” Vega said, “pure genius at work. Both his legs are bit all over. He could pass out, go into shock, or die if we cut him, and we don’t even know if we need to do it, or if it’ll work.”

“Rather die on my feet,” John choked, his head rolling between his shoulders.

“Vincent,” Vega’s frantic movements masked the weakness in her tone, “I can barely see, and the dark isn’t helping. Be ready to take over if I fade out again. You already look for—”

“There’s nothing,” Vincent replied, “no alcohol, no bandages.”

Vega wiped sweat out of her eyes by dragging her forearm across her face. Her hands were covered in the sergeant’s blood. Her poncho was painted with gore. All of them wore red ponchos now, except for Jeremy, who was soaked through from the rain.

“Well?” John asked Griggs again.

The bank alarm’s volume lost its resolve and faded. He could feel Vincent’s eyes fixated on him. They’d all adjusted to darkness; what would happen if there was light again? How many years ago since the sun had shone? The second day of the end of the world was concluding, but he felt as if he’d always been here. There was nothing else that came before.

He flexed his fingers over the gun’s grip.

“You reloaded,” Vincent said. “Pull that trigger before I got to hear your mouth keep on running its bullshit.”

Knocking, thumping on the door. The knob turned. Jeremy looked at everyone’s face, waiting for someone to do something, to get the hell out.

The gun felt cold in Griggs’s hand. Cold and heavy. He’d never been aware of its weight until now. It was magnetized to his hand, embedded in the flesh of his sweaty palm. He couldn’t remember using another weapon.

A hand punched through the front door, and other hands ripped the cheap wood to pieces while the couch scooted back into the room. The window rattled.

Vega helped John to his feet, and they stood together in the darkness, waiting for Griggs to answer the lingering question.

“Guys?” Jeremy quaked.

Only seven shots left.

They were dead already.

Vincent didn’t flinch when the window shattered behind him, the bookshelf crashing forward onto the floor.

They were willing to give their lives to prove a point, because they knew it didn’t matter if it happened this second, or the next. The truth could be felt while they stood together in the living room. The cycle could be repeated; running, shooting, hiding, and the desperation in their lives hadn’t withered at all, the silences hadn’t grown longer, the responsibilities hadn’t disappeared. Nothing had changed.

He was wrong about them.

Laughter tickled his throat, and he sputtered in the kitchen doorway. Vega walked with John past him, while a corpse pushed its way through the open door and climbed over the back of the sofa. Two other muddy bodies poured through the window, glass fragments sliding into their soft flesh.

Vincent and Jeremy walked past him while he kept laughing. The flash drive was still in his pocket. Mina’s video would give him the last laugh.

Only the flash drive was gone. The precious instrument had slipped from his coat pocket, and it lay somewhere in the mud, his dream trampled underfoot by the dead.

JACK

“We gotta get the hell off this base,” Officer Keefe said, “this place is a death trap.”

“I know,” Jack said. He felt safe while hiding out in the plane, even while his stomach rumbled.

The four of them sat together in the dark for a few hours. Jack had been checking on the battle inside the hangar, waiting for the dead to move on after their feast. Only a few stragglers remained behind, the rest had gone looking for something else to chew on. Ed, the man wearing the Dio shirt, held on to his daughter, Alexis, in a corner, whispering in her ear from time to time and brushing hair away from her face.

“You’re welcome to it,” Ed told them. “We’re going to wait for daylight. I would think more people just shut themselves up in, their houses, so we’ll find a place.”

“How’d you end up here?” Jack asked.

“Same way you did. We live next to the base and saw everyone headed this way. We all believed the same thing. Our military would help, would bail us out, like they always have. Our forces are invincible, right?”

“That’s not how I ended up here,” Keefe shook her head. “We were called in to help barricade the onramp on the freeway. The Guard was spread all over Detroit, from what I heard. Our people were screwed, too. I did what I was supposed to. Parked my car by the ramp, but it didn’t stop anything. The whole road’s jammed up.”

Maybe it was Jack’s turn to share. There were things they weren’t saying or describing, and Jack didn’t want to go back. 

“It’s good to talk about it,” Ed nodded to him. “I’m a psychologist, or maybe I
was
. We need to keep talking, keep sharing our story. Let the monsters out to play so we can see them instead of letting them tear us up on the inside.”

“So what happens next?” Keefe interrupted him. “Did you see those news trucks out there in front of the base? Those people were the first to go. Normally, they’d have a microphone pushed up my ass. They’d ask me to comment and I’d say, ‘no comment at this time’, or some other shit that’s supposed to reassure people. But I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

“What’re we supposed to say right now, or think?” Ed asked.

“Don’t start that bullshit. Don’t answer a question with a question. Don’t agree with every damn thing we say.”

Ed sighed. “Go out there and fight the good fight. Save the world, if you want to. Or maybe you can come with us. Maybe there’s a place we can go, and I’m not talking about a shelter. Any shelter would be up against the same thing that happened here.”

“We couldn’t trust you,” Jack said, thinking about Clint Eastwood, whose body, ideas and voice, personality and history, had poured over the hangar floor with the rest of the human race’s blood. “You barely let us in here.”

“That’s fair,” Ed agreed. “Maybe the worst part is that nobody can trust anybody. That’s just the way it is.”

“You let those people die,” Keefe pointed out.

“You’re wrong. I protected Alexis. I didn’t kill anybody.”

“Let it make sense in your head. You had a chance to do the right thing and you didn’t. You’re an accomplice to murder.”

“I’m no more an accomplice than you. Why didn’t you go out there and start shooting? Why’d you run?”

“Don’t argue,” Jack said, “it’s not worth it. Just forget it. Nobody’s going to win this fight.”

They let the discussion drop. In just a short while, Clint Eastwood, or whatever the hell his name was, taught him it was better just to shut up and let one person lead, or let nobody lead. Everyone had an opinion, and it lead to their massacre. These same arguments were going to replay themselves over and over again no matter where Jack ended up.

After sitting in the dark for a while longer, Jack returned to the cockpit and watched the rain outside the open hangar doors slow to a calm sprinkle. The hangar was mostly empty; not even body parts had been left behind in the drying gore that was slashed over the floor. A few scattered, legless corpses stared up at the ceiling, their jaws grinding while their eyes searched for nothing. Bloody skeletons lay in dark puddles without a single scrap of flesh that could identify them. Heads had been busted open to let the brains fill the hands of the hungry dead.

Not every victim had been left with enough remains to reanimate and join the legion of murderous cannibals.

This is what Jerry wanted. This is what the lyrics of
Coincidental Genocide
predicted. This is the doom Jack had hammered into his drums, the throbbing heartbeat of Jerry’s baseline, and the anguished scream of Beanie’s guitar.

Hungry little piggies

Hungry little piggies

Stomping through the mud

running through the shit

marching for the milk

and the blade

the milk and the blade

mother’s love

and the wheat on rye

meat package piggies

meat package piggies

hungry, hungry, hungry

little piggies

Jerry was hardly a poet, but his emotions were supposed to empower the music, a message that went with the anger and the wrath of their stage-thrashing. It was Jerry’s rage all along, and it wasn’t just a game or a fantasy. It was real, and maybe he was out there among the piggies. Butchering them.

Little Alexis wasn’t a piggie. Ed wanted to keep her alive
—how could he be amindless meat stick? Officer Keefe was a hero, putting her life on the line fearlessly.

Jack used to see faces in the snare drum, in the bass drum, in the cymbals; the faces of people who mocked him or wouldn’t give him a job interview because he didn’t have a college degree. He’d been taking care of his mother while Jerry brought home the money, and bought instruments with Mom’s disability checks. But he left the rage inside the kit, never taking it with him.

In the blood on the hangar floor was his brother’s dream.

A tall, lean man stepped into the hangar clothed head-to-toe in black. Jack watched him for a moment and wasn’t sure if it was another one of those things. The guy seemed to be stopping and observing the scene, thoughtfully assessing the damage with his hand beneath his chin, his other arm crossed over his chest.

A priest. Out of the rain and terror, a holy man.

“Uh… Officer Keefe, come up here. You need to see this.”

“Call me Denise,” she said while sitting in the chair beside him. Ed and Alexis crowded in.

“He’s still alive,” Jack pointed to the man in black.

“Screw this,” Denise said. “I have to get out there. I’m doing nobody any good by rotting in here.”

“I’m with you,” Jack said as she leapt out of the seat and pulled her big revolver from its holster.

“We’re staying here,” Ed announced.

“Nobody asked you,” Denise said while opening the door. She stopped and looked at Ed and Alexis. “You and your daughter are welcome to come with us. I’ll keep Alexis safe, even if you don’t trust me.”

Ed tousled the girl’s hair. “We’re not staying here long, but I think we’ll move faster if it’s just the two of us.” He looked down for a moment, and Jack knew he was struggling with what happened. The psychologist
did
feel responsible for those deaths, and he didn’t want to get anyone else hurt.

Jack followed her down the steps, careful not to slip on the blood. The smell of burning sewage and melting copper was powerful enough for him to think about going back inside the plane.

The priest stopped and watched them descend. He seemed to be middle-aged with short, dark hair matted to his head. There wasn’t a single mark on his face, and he didn’t seem wounded. He looked up at them without any fearfulness in his eyes; he was trusting, a trait that should’ve already doomed him. He seemed lost in thought, even when he looked at them. Jerry used to have that same look in his eyes when he would give his speeches about the future.