Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (12 page)

Brian had asked a man a question once. He asked how long the man had been watching them. How long they waited for their survivors to fracture and nearly get themselves killed. How long before he waited until Bella and Brian were alone.

Bella shuddered.

Angelica had clearly gone insane. There was nothing left inside of her skull except for the machinations of a sociopath.

She and Brian had been watched, and the watchers had told her all of this. Former Iraqi war veterans who knew how to survive in a wilderness of pain, ex-soldiers who’d secretly fantasized about the apocalypse, or dreamed of killing sprees to make up for all the combat they never saw, all the people they never shot, all the gunfire that never happened. They told her this. They told her they were meant to inherit the world. They were made for it. It was theirs. A jungle filled with monsters. A jungle filled with predators and prey.

The watchers had killed her, even though she physically survived them. The watchers had killed both her and Brian. They had taken the remnants of hope and humanity; they become two souls drifting without their bodies, drifting through the ruins.

When Brian left her to forage, she assumed he was still alive, a phantom that lost its way.

“You really are a hardass,” Angelica said. “You didn’t even flinch. Maybe you want to protect those little girls. Go help them?”

“I want to tell you to go fuck yourself, because I already know how this is going to end. So go fuck yourself.”

“No reason to help them. They stay in one place, too afraid to move on. Used to be a time when someone might argue I had an obligation. Go and help them. Help them die faster, help myself die faster.”

Bella knew the logic. She knew the horrible truth. The weight of this truth used to be too much to bear, but in the end, she understood. Understanding became a certain kind of power, a power that helped her protect her son, helped her stay alive.

“You’re not going to fight me on this?” Angelica asked. She seemed surprised; she wanted a struggle, wanted someone to inflict their moral superiority upon her.

“My son and I were watched,” she said, and saying it caused her to remember, and remembering caused her to feel—the anxiety that comes with feeling betrayed or lied to, as if the entire human race had been keeping secrets from her. “There were about a hundred of us to start. In a grocery store, of course. That’s where the biggest groups were. The groups we knew about. But like you said, some people were desperate. Some people were mad. There was killing. Inside the grocery store. Those dead things aren’t the worst threat out there. They’re not the worst thing we have to deal with. You can imagine there was a hierarchy. A lord or a king or a boss. I don’t know what he was called. There was another person. They fought. We all fought. We starved. We argued. Animals trapped in a cage. That’s all we were. Animals trapped in a cage with each other. We tried to escape. My son and I tried to escape, but they knew we would. They feared we would. When it was time to leave, they already had a plan for the women who were left. They made my son watch.”

Angelica blinked rapidly several times.

“I remember the watchers, watching like you watch. They wanted what we had left bad enough to intervene. They didn’t rescue us. They told me it wasn’t a rescue, but they spared me. They spared my son. Some others. They took everything that was left and wished us good luck.”

Angelica couldn’t peel her eyes away.

“There was a woman who begged them to kill her. Said it was a waste, said it wasn’t right to leave her to those things. She said she didn’t have the courage to kill herself. Linda. Her name was Linda.

“And the watchers believed they were doing the right thing. But they didn’t kill her. I don’t know what happened to her. She went with them.”

Angelica shook her head and looked out the window. “For a nigger, you’re tough. I respect that. But you know your black ass is mine. You belong to me.”

***

They sat for a long time, neither of them in a hurry to get anywhere. Bella was content to just sit and listen to the vast nothing that was broken by exultations of savagery. Wild dogs barking, snarling, snapping while the corpse of a rat lay between them. Seagulls fat off the world’s garbage circling over a new discovery, squawking in the early twilight haze. Silence. Silence.

A grumbling stomach.

Silence.

The apartment across the street.

Silence.

When Bella walked out of the room to urinate against a wall in one of the other apartments, there wasn’t any protest from Angelica.

Run away? She didn’t know this city. Angelica might trade her to flesh dealers and still, on her own, she might be captured by those same dealers.

Once, she had thought about leaving Brian behind. The long silences—she had grown used to them. The silence was everywhere and it was predictable, comfortable.

They had been on the second floor of an assisted living home; they weren’t too far from the ground if they needed to exit through a window, and they could put space between them and their attackers if they wanted to hightail it upstairs. Brian, Bella, and three or four other people. If Bella thought about it hard enough, she would remember their faces and their names, but she didn’t want to.

Brian was obsessed with card games, mostly variations of solitaire. The others didn’t want to play cards. Brian would mumble to himself while shuffling the cards. He would argue with his strategies, berate himself when he screwed up. More than once he threw his cards into the air or swept the layout from the table, cursing at God or Luck or Desmond or Dad.

More than once Bella thought about leaving him.

When the others decided they wanted to salvage, Brian said he would go with them. They looked at Bella with cold eyes. They were going to go out for a few hours and come back with more supplies.

They never came back.

She only waited one night.

Angelica still sat in the rocking chair with the rifle across her lap. Her eyes refused to move.

If the people across the street were smart, they moved at night. They survived this long, so there was a strong possibility they had their shit together.

If morning arrived and Bella wasn’t dead, or if they remained here together in the dark and the silence and the nothing, she would leave. Give Angelica a chance to rot by herself in the shroud of personal terror.

Angelica left the rocking chair, the cracking of her awakening bones heard over the creaking floorboards. She sighed and walked into another room, leaving Bella alone with the window.

Light flickered in the window across the street, and shadows pranced behind the curtain.

There was something else. Something new.

More pungent, more obvious.

The smell of the dead.

And a noise. A terrible wailing that sounded like the wind gales of an impending thunderstorm.

Bella knew better.

The dead were moaning.

The dead never moaned.

FATHER JOE

The church was full, and everyone present listened to his words. There was a secret in his soul, a sacred power they wanted him to share, and if they sat and listened they might understand. They might know why the dead never attacked Father Joe.

His festering wound was proof enough he was not a miracle man.

Among their faces he found Amparo Vega. She was a lost woman; he heard rumors about her ramblings, her sudden mood swings, her blackouts. The fact that she talked in her sleep or woke up in a cold sweat wasn’t unique; the majority of the survivors had nightmares. People looked up to her because she was Vincent’s girl, and she was part of Father Joe’s story. She was a hero, but people were starting to doubt. They doubted she was a warrior.

While he went through the mass, his eyes strayed to Vega’s tired face, her dark features shadowed by candle light.

The organ music thundered. He prayed over them. Blessed them. Shared a parable from the Bible. He was structure and salvation. He was hope and order. This was the first time in his life where he was in charge of his own parish, and he weighed every word carefully in his sermons; he strived to be effective, to stir them, to make them regain confidence in themselves through faith in God. If they could love God, they could love.

When the mass was over, he found Vega waiting for him in one of the pews, sitting alone. She was the only one in the church this evening. More often than not, a small crowd waited for him to touch his hands or receive a personal blessing, but in the last few days, nothing.

He slid in next to her.

“Not drinking yet, Father?” she asked.

“One stereotype I’ve managed to avoid,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a long time.”

“Been bored,” she said. “I remembered that I wanted to give you some motorcycle lessons.”

He laughed. “Oh. That. Well, you have to admit we did pretty well. The zombies thought you were a chicken nugget or something. Maybe if you weighed more than twenty pounds you wouldn’t have flown off the back like a sheet of paper.”

She smiled. “You’re the only priest I haven’t hated.”

“We still have time.”

“You’ve been busy.”

“A lot of people come. But not you.”

“If you’re going to lecture me, I’ll go now.”

He switched to Spanish.

“I’ve worried about you, Amparo. I heard what happened the other night.”

She shook her head and spoke English. “I don’t need your worry. I need some answers. I need to know where to go from here.”

“Go? You mean you want to fight again. You mean you want to get back out there and find that soldier, Traverse. But you haven’t thought about what happens after you find him.”

Vega stood quickly. “What did I say about lecturing me?”

He looked at his gnarled hands resting neatly on his lap. There were too many people who died after he vowed to protect them, and he promised himself he would never stop trying. If he didn’t try, who would?

More than all the others who died, he thought of Frank; the old man expired on the freeway in his wheelchair, a man who was devout in his belief in goodness rather than God.

This haunted soldier didn’t want goodness. Vega had seen more than her share of death, and she had washed her hands in an ocean of blood. She was like a criminal who refused to be reformed.

“I need to know what you know about Traverse,” she said. “I want him. I want him because it’s all I have left.”

“That’s not all you have left.”

“You mean Vincent? He’s worse than I am. He can barely protect himself.”

“You need him to protect you? Isn’t he your friend? Maybe he needs you.”

“Don’t do this to me.”

“Have you talked to him about this?”

“It’s not like that. He understands. Don’t give me shit about the fact that it’s still not right. We’re toxic for each other. We’re just… wallowing.”

Father Joe pursed his lips and felt a sting of pain in his side from the wound. He did his best not to let it show. What would she think? Even if he was in pain, she had to believe that his faith still protected him. His faith had never failed him, but his body was becoming weaker from the zombie bite. He was used to keeping up appearances, doing his best to remain strong in the presence of others because they needed him to be strong. He was always supposed to be the strong one.

And now, Vega needed his support. She needed a vote of confidence from him. The more he challenged her, the more she would convince herself that she was a threat to not only herself, but to others. Her mind was made up.

He looked into her eyes again and saw the same conviction that she had walked into the church with.

“I don’t know what happened to Mina,” Father Joe began. “Her consciousness, or whatever it was that controlled those things, is gone. When you die, you become one of those things, regardless of how it happened. The more rotten ones, the ones made by the video, are different. I don’t think Mina controls them. We can only guess how many of them are out there. They’re always aggressive, and they don’t rot beyond their initial death. The others are rotting away.”

Until recently.

Yesterday, over the garbage hole.

Father Joe’s wound was still fresh.

He had vomited several times and wasn’t hungry. He felt weak. He wanted to lie down. While the entire neighborhood was invaded by a horde of walking corpses, he had slept fitfully.

Vega sat down in the pew again and stared at the altar.

He put one of his weathered hands on her lap. There was a part of her, deep down, that wanted to be a good person. Nothing was stopping her from leaving the people in this neighborhood to their own devices; she might be trying to leave now, but she had been wanting to leave for a long time. Guilt had stopped her from taking off. She wanted to change, had probably tried to change, and couldn’t face him because she thought he judged her, even though he didn’t. He accepted her for who she was, as he accepted everyone.

“You can’t tell me anything new?” she said, her eyes locked on the altar.

“I can tell you many things. I suppose there’s a difference between what you want to hear and what you need to hear.”

She squeezed his hand and smiled. “I guess, Father. Before, I was just a punk trying to stay out of jail. I was supposed to be in a gang, but it wasn’t enough. I tried it out. Didn’t like the politics. Didn’t like the politics in the army, neither. But I had the training, so being a merc was good enough for me.”

A broken woman who lived on the outskirts of a killing field. She found meaning in violence and pain; not thrills, but meaning. Purpose. Every time she killed, she killed the woman she could have been.

“I think I was close,” she said. “I think I almost made it. Almost found a way out of my head. But I need to go back out there among the animals. It’s where I belong. I think I came to say goodbye, and good luck.”

They sat together for a while, and she leaned against his shoulder. He wrapped his arm around her and rubbed her arm.

“Do you want—?”

“No,” she said. “No prayers. No blessings.”

He kissed the top of her forehead. When she walked out of the church, he kept telling himself he hadn’t failed.

***

An evening in the confessional that gave him nothing but silence and time to think. Father Joe couldn’t stop thinking about Vega and whether or not he should have done more to change her mind. Did he fail her in some way?

Someone slid into the booth.

The ritual began.

A man with a smooth, calm voice began to speak into the box.

“In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. I have never been to Confession before.”

Father Joe had a passage of scripture memorized; many who populated the rebuilding neighborhood hadn’t found God until everything had been taken from them.

But he paused.

The man’s voice had stopped him; the sarcasm, the hilarity, was obvious. Someone had come to mock him.

“What’s wrong, Father?”

The scripture. He forgot what he wanted to say.

“Did you think I could forget you, Father?”

He didn’t recognize the voice, but he should have. This was someone who knew him, who wanted to torment him.

“You’ve got one hell of a right hook,” the sinner said. “Speaking of hell, you’ve been cordially invited, but I have to kill you first.”

“That will certainly earn you a ticket to the party,” Father Joe said.

In his experience, any number of hard rogues would step into the Confessional and begin toying with him just to get off. Especially before he left Mexico; he was the holy man who had once killed someone in the boxing ring. Everybody knew who he was, and they wouldn’t let him forget it.

There was only one person in recent memory who had suffered the impact of his right hook. Father Joe puzzled it together, but he knew it was better to play along with the man’s ego than to jump through the Confessional and bow down to violent hysterics. Better to let this man feel that he was in control.

The man on the other side of the Confessional was a killer.

“I would like to hear your opinion on something I found in your favorite holy book,” the man said, his voice filled with mockery. “I thought of you when I came across this, Father. I thought you would appreciate it the beauty in it mystery. The Bible is a rather poetic tome, is it not?”

“Get on with it. You don’t need my permission.”

“
The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.
”

“Heavy stuff.”

“The beast concerns me, Father. Have you seen the beast that was, is not, and yet is?”

Enough was enough.

“If you came here for another shot at the title, I’d be willing to give you a rematch.”

They had met only briefly, and Father Joe brought him down with one punch. This man who was the bane of Vega’s existence. A man who helped bring the world to its knees.

“You’re an intriguing man,” Jim Traverse said. “I’ve thought about you often, and I hope you’ve been thinking of me.”

No use running. This was a mass-murderer with a carefully orchestrated plan, and he’d been looking forward to this moment.

“You came here to gloat or for revenge?” Father Joe asked.

A low chuckle. “A bit of both, I think. Do you blame me for everything that happened?”

“Maybe you know how it started, but you didn’t start it. You’re an opportunist. I wouldn’t give someone like you too much credit.”

Another chuckle. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

“I know you’re a deluded egomaniac. You’re not exactly original. I forgot about you, but if I hadn’t, I would have predicted this. Of course, you would come back.”

Predictably, Traverse stepped out of the booth. Father Joe exited, and another sharp stab of pain reminded him that he probably shouldn’t be doing too much heavy lifting.

Tall and lean with a swath of hair over a smooth forehead. Thin lips, calm eyes. Traverse could have been on display in a wax museum.

“We have seen the beast because it has always been here, Father,” Traverse said. “We cannot see the beast because it is inside us. A plague that we carry with us. Rather poetic, I think, that we envision Hell as something that man has not created, even though man is its creator.”

“If you say so.”

“I’d like a rematch,” Jim said.

Father Joe shrugged. “Okay. Why not?”

Sangriento Joe
they used to call him. He’d killed a man with a punch, and he fled into the opens arms of the church.

Traverse backed up and allowed him a chance to assume a boxer’s stance. The feet remembered. The body remembered. His fists remembered, but he was older. Slower. He hadn’t boxed in almost two decades. He had tagged Traverse at Selfridge because the man had been cocky.

Father Joe blinked, and his shins buckled. Burning pain laced up his legs, and he gripped the edge of a pew. Traverse had kicked him hard in both shins, and Father Joe hadn’t even seen the man move.

“I should apologize for last time,” Traverse said. “I don’t know why I should apologize, but I think it’s fair.”

Traverse slapped him across the face; more mockery. Another slap. Father’s bottom lip was cut.

“I should apologize too,” Father Joe said. “I’m sorry I have a conscience. I’m sorry I didn’t kill you.”

Traverse crouched down, the smirk on his face never wavering. “Do you know how I found you? Do you know why your little village was attacked? You’re wounded, Father. The wound is a beacon in the dark for the beast, and the beast has found you. You’re the reason why so many people died here yesterday. Does that please you?”