The Queen of the Dead (41 page)

Rose was simply a better fighter; she was faster and likely a hand-to-hand expert. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t get her answers, and get her last shot in at Rose. It would be too easy. The woman stared at Jim, as the maniac rose to his feet, shaking the cobwebs away. The Chinook and Jim were linked, and so was Rose.

Vega and her team had likely been pronounced dead, or something worse was going on.

Jim was going to make a deal.

A colonel strode out of the plane, surrounded on all sides by big bastards using Land Warrior gear, with cameras mounted on their guns.

“Jim!” the colonel shouted.

Jim rose to his feet, while Father had the redhead in his arms, a gun in her face. Why didn’t he just shoot Jim?

Everyone knew what she didn’t.

“Don’t take a step closer,” Father Joe said. “I know what she means to you. She’s a weapon. Something
you
created.”

“Something like that,” the colonel said. “Why don’t you just hand her over, now, and you can all come back with us. We’ll take you someplace safe.”

The colonel’s eyes found Rose. “I clearly hired the best.”

“He
belongs
to me,” Rose sounded like she was defending one of her own children, if she had any.

Jim ignored Rose. He faced the real priest and weighed his options. He had to be confident he could still get the woman away without a challenge. He’d been cocky, and Father Joe landed a good shot.

What were their chances, now?

Rose’s weren’t very good. Jim’s eyes caught her for a moment, and she froze; she didn’t hear Vega pick up the sword, and she probably didn’t hear it go through her abdomen from the back, ripping right through. It wasn’t easy because the sword was cheap, but without force and wriggling, the sword made it through the other side. Rose had been staring at Jim and her mind disappeared, until she looked down and saw the point of the sword staring up at her.

Vega didn’t let her fall; she twisted her around straight into the arms of a dead man wearing a shirt that said, “Holy Diver”, and showed a demon whipping a priest in chains. Rose was sucked into a vortex of arms and teeth. Her mouth was still open until she completely disappeared into the black hole of hungry faces.

At that moment, Father Joe blew Mina’s head off.

That had to be it; Jim was going to kill him right then and there; for whatever reason, he’d wanted the strange woman, and now it was taken from him.

“We can still go,” the colonel said, “I’ll still take you to Egypt. I believe you now, after all these years. I never forgot what we found. Nobody else believed us. It’s too late for everyone. The video you uploaded’s already going viral.”

Jim had been counting on this to happen. He jogged up the ramp before Vega could approach.

Besides, she didn’t have a weapon. It was down to her, the priest, a bullet or two, and death.

She knelt beside Father in the dust as the Chinook ascended. The colonel and Jim were so focused on their objective, so unwilling to risk losing it, they decided to escape now rather than shoot her and the priest.

“I understand it all now,” Father Joe said to his bloody hands, to Mina’s dead body. Her face was gone.

Vega’s hands intertwined with his. Finally.

There was a thought in her head. Something she wanted, something she needed, a piece of her shelved in some distant place, like a recurring dream that’s always forgotten after awakening.

Once, she was running around the backyard with her cousins chasing her. She was a toddler maybe. Youth beyond remembrance. Only the action and the scenes remained, pictures without dates or confirmation of real people; it may have simply been her mind running amok, but there she was, a little girl being chased around a big pool, her father sitting in a chair by the pool in a big gray suit and a black silk shirt. His thick hands were covered in jewelry. The man he was talking to wasn’t wearing a shirt, but his bathing trunks, and he was wearing his own jewelry. There was the sheen of sweat on her father’s forehead that made his big head look shiny, and he wore dark sunglasses; he didn’t even acknowledge the heat. The other man kept nodding and looking down. Nodding down. Looking away.

Running around the pool with her cousins. Laughter. Delight.

Her father, somehow, demonstrating a regal presence that she could never forget, her impression of him forever etched into her soul; he was like a god to her, the principal force that inspired her to become an awful human being. She’d been laughing once, innocent, ignorant. Her father was going to live forever.

It was time for her to go. Time to die.

Not yet.

The heavy machine gun that fired from atop a nearby Humvee was louder than the departing Chinook. Father Joe squeezed her hands while he stared at Mina’s corpse.

Vincent. In the confusion of the fight, and watching Father kill Mina, she nearly forgot about him. She managed to convince herself that he was dead, and it was hard to accept that he was really here. Pounding away at the dead.

There was enough room to maneuver around the back of the Humvee and watch Vincent lean into the heavy gun. He did it with all the authority of a CEO arriving for a board meeting, his expression a stoical mask of nothing.

The dead were falling. Their numbers had already thinned to almost nothing. Piles of bodies littered the ground. They were slow and cumbersome, and once again, Vincent had killed a whole lot of them.

All. Everyone.

He was just that good.

***

A few zombies around the outer perimeter that couldn’t make the trip with the rest of the stampeding herd were still coming their way.

Vincent stepped down from the Humvee and jogged over to them, his dress shoes clacking against the pavement. His expensive suit was splattered with blood, as it should be.

“You alright?” he extended his hand to Vega.

She shot to her feet and slapped him across the face. Before he could react, she wrapped her arms around him.

“We have to get back inside Operations,” Father interrupted them, “trust me.”

There wasn’t a chance to get pissed off about Traverse; the man was long-gone along with whatever conspiratorial scheme he took with him. General Masters had rambled about government involvement; he might have been more than a paranoiac, driven insane by his love for America and his own terrible knowledge.

“You thought I was dead?” Vincent said when they separated.

He was fishing for a compliment, but she didn’t have the strength to think beyond honesty. “You shouldn’t have left me. That’s the start of a bad habit.”

They ran across the field of corpses together. She nearly tripped over the katana, which was all that was left of Rose besides a few tufts of blonde hair; she might’ve been the bloody skeleton that looked as if it’d been dumped in a pot of spaghetti and sausage. Beside her was the dead-again body of the guy who’d been wearing the shirt with the graphic of the demon and the priest. Vincent stopped to pick up the sword; it was the only weapon they had between them besides Father’s Joe’s shotgun.

“I’m not leaving you,” Vincent said, flicking blood off the blade’s edge. “I let good people who counted on me die. I let Chanell and Louis die. I wasn’t around to help everyone who put me on top. I used to know what loyalty meant—I knew what it was supposed to mean for
everyone
else. I’m still standing here.”

The priest was already ahead of them. It would be easy to just take off now with Vincent, run away from whatever Father Joe was still trying to do, whatever redemption he was still looking for that cost people their lives. As far as she was concerned, the mission was over. Traverse was gone.

They followed anyway.

Before they entered, Vincent looked at her and said, “Thank me later.”

“For what? We had everything well in hand.”

Inside, a heavyset dead man stood in front of Father Joe, his neck scarred with purple and black bruises, his blood-stained belly hanging over his waist.

“Wait,” Father stopped them, “don’t move.”

At the zombie’s feet was a little blonde girl.

She was holding the dead guy’s hand.

“Alexis?” Father asked.

The girl nodded and looked up at the dead man whose fingers opened to release her. She stood next to the zombie and warily stared at the three blood-soaked strangers.

Only one of them could do it. Father Joe’s hands were wrapped in bits of shirt he’d ripped off a corpse outside, and Vega’s head started to go swimming without her. The headache was creeping in, and her hands felt like there were still guns in them, firing with abandon; tremors wracked her body, and she leaned back against the wall to keep herself from falling. Rose had inflicted enough damage.

The fight was over for Vega.

When Vincent knelt and opened his arms for the girl, Vega was already sliding down the wall. Alexis ran into his arms, and deep down, she knew this was an important moment for the gun dealer. He wanted this just as much as she had wanted to save Shanna. There was a shred of innocence that was preserved, something left over from the dying world that was worth fighting for.

“Mina’s still alive,” she could hear Father Joe’s voice, but it seemed to be coming from another room. “The zombie’s name is Jack. She promised Jack wouldn’t hurt us. She said she was inside him.”

Of course he believed it. The zombie stared at them, waiting for someone to either destroy it or accept it.

“Mina said they made her, did something to her,” Father Joe sat beside Vega against the wall, the strength draining from his body. “She said we can stop that man. She can help us.”

“You’re going to be okay,” Vincent said to Alexis. He wasn’t the kind of guy to make false promises, but everything he’d done so far showed he made good on his word.

***

It seemed like something out of a book; the singing of birds. They were distant, but from where she sat on the roof, she could still hear them.

This moment of silence was earned. The wriggling, crawling corpses that had broken apart all around the base looked like worms struggling through mud. Otherwise, there wasn’t any noise. Most of the dead that could still walk had changed their minds, likely from whatever influence the Jack / Mina thing had on them.

Vincent was down to a black undershirt but kept his dress pants. They sat together and enjoyed the quiet for a long time, bathing in the sunlight and the comfortable silence.

“Those dreadlocks look ridiculous,” she said.

“You didn’t say nothing about the shoes.”

“What about ‘em?”

“Gators. Damn expensive, too. Louis picked them out. Actually, he went with Chanell; they were brother and sister. The shoes were a birthday present.”

“You still have birthdays?” Vega looked at his metal smile, which caught the sun’s light and nearly blinded her.

He ignored her question. “Thought you were going to get more emotional when you saw I was back.”

“I’m still learning what I can give.” She pressed the flat of her hand against her forehead. The headache was just a fact of life, now.

“You feel like putting a damn shirt on?” Vincent asked.

“Why? You jealous? Don’t want any dead people trying to get their hands on this nice meal?”

“You look like a starving chicken,” Vincent said.

The witty comeback stopped short of her lips. She wanted to talk business with him, to make sense of it all.

“Griggs is dead, I think,” she started. “I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling Jeremy’s gone, too.”

Vincent didn’t respond. He watched smoke rise above the tree line around the base. He should’ve been able to hear cars jet down the nearby freeway, but there was nothing. Life had stopped.

“There was a lot of blood in one of the conference rooms. There was a porno playing on a TV in the room. You could hear it, but Father said not to go in. He said he…
felt
something. Jack stepped in front of us and wouldn’t let us go in.”

“You could hear it?” Vincent asked. “A porno?”

“Maybe not. I could hear some moans, and I think I heard a man’s voice, but that’s it.”

“Seems like we missed something,” Vincent said. “We’re out of the loop. Don’t know what’s going on, don’t know why. Don’t know how bad it is.”

“I’m not in a hurry to find out,” Vega said. “They wanted Jim alive, and they got him. We treated it like an escort mission, not a rescue. But that’s what it was the whole time. Someone wanted him out.”

Father Joe wanted to make the trip to Egypt; he was a crusader now, and he believed whatever was happening could be stopped if he could just get to Traverse somehow.

Maybe it was worth fighting for. She felt at peace with Vincent, and she liked him more than she wanted to admit. She couldn’t help it. Maybe she was vulnerable, or maybe the headache was dulling her reason. Bob told her to find a reason to keep going, and she knew what it was she was looking for, now. Shanna was just a part of it; but it was a feeling she didn’t understand but had felt
before,
long before her father died.