Necropolis Rising (10 page)

Here they sauntered through high white halls and galleries, exploring ancient works of beauty, exploring each other’s likes and dislikes and finding that by the end of the afternoon, their world had become one; united and indistinguishable.

It was in one of the galleries that Suzie found
“The Triumph of Death
” painted in 1562 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. She stared at the painting’s themes of Death culling mankind with macabre fascination; the way one feels guilty watching someone’s misery at a distance: the dazed people standing by their over turned car, the woman crying on a park bench. Bruegel’s oil-on-panel rendition showed flames and bodies and Death on a killing spree, but she found its colours and texture beautiful.

“
Do you like it?” O’Connell had asked, placing his arm about her delicate waist.

“
I love it,” she’d replied.

“
Do you want it?”

This had taken Suzie by surprise and she’d looked up at him with a wry smile. She could see by his face that he meant it.

“
Yes,” she breathed, almost intoxicated by those damned eyes of his. “But I want
you
more.”

“
You have me,” he replied and her stomach churned and her heart missed a beat and she felt a yearning to have him touch her, have him inside her; and she didn’t feel revulsion or guilt - the legacy of her father’s kind of love - she felt only the purity of O’Connell’s total commitment to her. And a need return it in kind.

“
I want you to make love to me,” she’d whispered beneath the Bruegel painting.

“
And I will,” he said gently. “Once you have this painting on the wall of your apartment; we will make love under it.”

“
Why wait?”

“
Because: I want you to be sure. I want to prove that you’re not making a mistake; not taking a chance with me.”

“
I know that now,” she said.

“
You think you know,” he urged. “But people wear masks, Suzie. I wear a mask to do what I do. But, not for you -
never
for you. I need you to know this for sure.”

And so she waited. The painting arrived two months later, secreted behind a print of a white orchid - her favourite flower, of course - and no matter how many news channels she searched, she found no report of it being stolen. But she knew it was the real thing. She knew because O’Connell had told her he would get it.

That evening he came to her apartment and, true to his word, he had made love to her, gently, a lover consumed by his passion for her, and under the shadow of the
The Triumph of Death
they learned about the Triumph of Life; their bodies cavorting, hungry to share each other, explore each other, their wants and desires encapsulated by their caresses and their utterances of pleasure beneath the canvas landscape above.

And in the post-coitus calm that followed, they lay huddled together, thanking parapets and fate for bringing them together.

***

Three years later, Suzie Hanks was looking at an image that reminded her not of love-making and the soft speech of lovers; it was more like the Bruegel painting languishing on the wall of her apartment all those years ago.

“
It’s like a scene from Hell,” Suzie whispered into her headset as she squinted through her portal. There was sadness in her voice. And no one inside the truck disputed her assessment.

Kunaka was moving through the blasted street, the Mastiff’s armour plating illuminated by the flames all about it, although the blaze had lost most of its intensity. Several tenements were now sheathed in dancing flame, palls of smoke rising into the night sky.

The detonation of the tanker had stopped the exodus in its tracks. Suzie counted the blaze-blackened carcasses of ten cars and three larger trucks. Most of the vehicles had been cast aside by the explosion, lying on their sides or on their roofs. Those that remained in the road were carefully nudged aside by the Mastiff’s powerful shell.

“
What the fuck is going on, O’Connell?” Clarke said peering through his own observation slit. “Are we at war, or something?”

“
We’re on a job,” O’Connell said gruffly. “Let’s not get side tracked.”

“
Side tracked? Are you blind?” Clarke said in disbelief. “We nearly got ourselves totaled.”

O’Connell’s arm snaked out, his fist wrapping around a swatch of material just below Clark’s throat. He dragged the youth towards him, their visors almost touching.

“
You want out?” O’Connell growled. “Well how about we kick you out here and you can explain to an army patrol how you’re roaming around an exclusion zone in a stolen uniform. Or maybe you can explain to
The Consortium
why they shouldn’t put a bullet in your head.”

O’Connell’s rage simmered below the surface. He hadn’t lost it yet, hadn’t let the beast consume him as it had once, the last time he’d allowed it to take control, the time he killed someone with his bare hands. No he hadn’t lost it yet, but he was close.

He felt a hand close over his upper arm, the gentle squeeze upon his taut muscle, a comforting hand. Suzie’s hand.

“
Easy, babe,” she whispered. “Easy.”

With these three words Suzie Hanks tamed the beast, sending it back to the dark place, where it would skulk in shadow until roused once again.

O’Connell released Clarke and the youth slumped back in his seat, panting with fear and exertion.

Suzie rubbed O’Connell’s arm, her eyes on his, the message clear.
Keep it together, O’Connell; the job’s relying on you. I’m relying on you.
He nodded, giving her a watery smile.

Atonement.

O’Connell turned back to Clarke, the younger man’s sulky demeanor belying his age.

“
Look, Clarke,” O’Connell said, his voice now soft and persuasive. “This job is reliant on us all doing what we’re here to do. What we’re being
paid
a fortune to achieve. You’re an integral part of this and I need you to hold it together, okay?”

Clarke’s face remained surly, but O’Connell saw something surface in the youth’s eyes: the sense of pride that O’Connell had stripped away had returned. Clarke blinked a few times and then nodded an accord. After a few more seconds he asked,

“
Now do I get a rifle?”

Just as O’Connell began to chuckle, the Mastiff stopped with a sudden jolt and pitched everyone sideways.

O’Connell’s head hit the overhead racks hard enough for him to see stars; Amir landed heavily on the floor jarring his right shoulder.

Suzie managed to grab hold of some webbing for support, unlike Clarke who missed it completely and fell on top of Amir in a tangle of arms and legs.

Just as the curses began to rise from his displaced, disgruntled passengers, Stu Kunaka’s distressed voice flooded the truck.

“
Boss! Boss! Get loaded; we got some strange shit happenin’ outside.”

Still groggy from the blow to his head, O’Connell went to his observation portal.

What he saw there cleared his battered brain in an instant.

***

At first O’Connell thought he was suffering from a vile hallucination, a result of post head injury trauma. But his colleagues confirmed what he already knew: what he saw through the window was as real as sin.

There were people milling around the streets, too many to count. But there was something wrong in the way the crowd behaved; the way it shambled through the stark streets as one aimless mass, mouths yawning, heads tilted as though neck muscles had just given in for the night.

But it was the eyes that gave him shivers that no living person had ever given him. Because in an instant he knew that these people weren’t living at all.

“
You seein’ this, O’Connell?” Stu said shakily.

“
Yes,” O’Connell replied as the crowd turned its many heads towards the Mastiff. “And I guess we’ve just been seen too.”

“
What the fuck’s the matter with them?” Clarke said. Suzie noted that his hands were trembling against the wall of the truck.

“
Who knows?” Amir said, sounding amazed. “But this is why the place is locked down. They look like a bunch of zombies.”

“
They
are
zombies,” Stu confirmed over a burst of static.

“
Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Clarke muttered. “Don’t go all supernatural on us now, Stu. There’s no such thing as zombies. Believe me, I love zombies; but that ain’t going to make ’em real.”

“
Take a good look at ’em and tell me there are people out there that shouldn’t be breathin’ let alone walkin’ around,” Kunaka retorted.

Clarke examined the crowd again, easier to make out now it was shuffling towards their vehicle.

It was when he saw a man wearing only pajama trousers with an autopsy “Y” stitched into his abdomen that it really hit home.

“
Okay, this is some seriously freaky shit now,” he hissed. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

“
Get us moving, Stu,” O’Connell said. “The NICDD building is still a click north east.”

“
You don’t mean that this is still going ahead?” Clarke whimpered. “Are you out of your mind?”

Something struck the side of the truck; something heavy but yielding.

“
These guys want in,” Amir said.

“
Of course they do,” Stu muttered through the static. “The Devil’s hungry tonight.”

“
You need to work on your damage limitation skills, Stu,” Suzie said sourly.

Another zombie rammed the truck with a sickening thud.

“
Let’s get going, Stu,” O’Connell ordered. But the truck remained stationary, allowing the zombie crowd to thicken around it; an armoured island in a sea of the starving undead.

The truck began to sway under the weight of them. Even through the dense steel plating, O’Connell could hear their desperate, frenzied groans.

“
Stu! I said get us out of here!” O’Connell yelled.

But all that came through the head set was the discordant sound of static.

***

Stu Kunaka stared out of the wind shield, his face a mask of incredulity and fear. He could face any man - any enemy - but what lay beyond the glass was the image of his childhood fears.

Zombies were real and he knew this to be true. Grandpa Joe had told him stories about them when he was younger; stories that kept him awake for three nights in a row until Momma and Poppa had forced Grandpa to retract his story.

But Stu had never forgotten the tale and simply refused to believe it as anything but a statement of fact, despite the scorn from his parents. This continued until well into his teens when he decided to go to a voodoo ritual where a zombie was raised. Why he’d done this was simple enough, he needed to purge the images conjured up by his Grandpa. He thought it would help, but it hadn’t.

Not at all.

He’d kept his ear to the ground and waited for the next rumblings of a gathering. It was easy to find out if you knew where to listen. And Grandpa Joe had certainly taught him to do that. And it didn’t matter that in the interim he’d researched the process, reading that the ritual involved not so much ancient magic as modern science; the introduction of a powder containing
tetrodoxin
from a puffer fish, secretions from the Haitian
Bufo Marinus
- or tree toad - were administered to a victim by the Bokor, the voodoo sorcerer. Each element was complicit in paralyzing a person and putting them into a trance-like, suggestible state by administering the compound
datura stramonium
when they “woke from the dead”.

He’d snuck into the event, following the procession until it had stopped in a woodland clearing. Here he’d hidden behind a piece of brush and watched the ceremony, devoid of the pomp depicted by Hollywood, but he’d felt a chill. Sure, the Bokor (a large woman with eyes fogged by cataracts) had made incantations under her breath, but overall the ceremony was a sedate, albeit grisly, affair. The man who was to be made undead was a local pedophile, his penance for violating the daughter of a renowned family. The man was forced to drink a concoction containing the potion that would render him immobile and rob him of free will. He was placed in a coffin and buried in a pit for half an hour before the family raised him and allowed him out of the coffin. And there he stood for all to see, a family slave for as long as his body could endure. His terrible punishment for his terrible crime.

But Stu had questioned it all; concluding that perhaps this was mere hokum and superstitious nonsense. But he saw the Bokor staring at him as though the brush wasn’t there, as though reading his thoughts, reading his very soul.

And she merely smiled and said words that had remained with him to this very day.

“
If you do not see death here then be glad of it. For one day it will visit the unbelievers many times over.”

And it seemed that day was upon him, the look on the zombie’s face during the ceremony was there in everyone outside. They had been caught up in bad magic, and they were about to pay the price.