Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (25 page)

“Stop it,” Mean Magda said.

As they resumed their walk, Vega began to feel the heat getting to her. While Rook and Mean Magda reminisced about Huey to mark time, Vega’s tired mind wandered. Bill had just wanted to go home. Sure, Vega was nothing more than a substitute for the woman he should have saved a long time ago, the woman his friends raped.

Dizzy, she tried to figure out how Huey managed to get himself killed for her, and maybe even Bill. Too many people were dead, and she wasn’t. She tried to get herself killed, and it still didn’t happen. It was her fault Bill and Huey were both dead.

The old Catholic guilt creeping in. What would Father Joe say about it?

She missed him. The smartass priest was a good influence on her, and he knew it. If she found Traverse, she would find Father Joe. Traverse had probably killed the priest, but it was worth fighting through all this shit to find out. He would do the same for her. Traverse was the key to everything, and Desjardins had mentioned they were going to finish some kind of war with that bastard. There was a lot more to this whole thing. Vega was just a soldier, and all she needed was a set of crosshairs on the Artist’s face, and it was over. All over.

Except it wasn’t.

She could ask Desjardins more questions, try to get more out of him, but she was exhausted, her body crashing hard from the adrenaline surge and the Bushmaster’s firepower. All she could think about was laying down and taking a long nap. A dirt nap was probably best. That’s what she deserved.

Stop thinking like that. There was work to be done. Don’t let Bill’s death mean nothing.

Maybe he wasn’t dead.

Damn, it was hot. Her skin burned. Her throat was parched.

When they made it to Rose Parks Boulevard they could see Michigan Central Station looming in the distance. Dizziness and nausea blurred her vision, and Rook’s voice seemed far away.

“This was their year. They had a nice draft this year. They got that guy from Texas, I think his name was Bailey. And I like their coach. The Lions were going to be good.”

Vega faded. Went somewhere else. Sickness and delirium took over; maybe she passed out. Voices drifted through her brain. Rook, mostly.

“Nobody was going to take my Barry Sanders autographed football. I didn’t let them take it. The boss said it makes me important. Nobody else has a Barry Sanders autographed football. I’m the only one.”

She saw a fence, and beyond it, Michigan Central Station. A squatting structure of broken windows and cracked masonry, an icon of metropolitan ruin before the apocalypse. A few scattered zombies lingered around the fence.

“We got the girl!” Rook shouted, and then his voice was closer. “You better be worth it. Huey said you were ugly. I don’t think we could trade you if we wanted to.”

Vega wanted to smile at that comment. Miles would have said something like it.

They brought her inside the abandoned train station, and she listened to Rook and Mean Magda continue their conversation about football. The old woman seemed to be humoring him, and Vega admired the conversation’s simplicity; if only Rook had known Bill Bailey was with her. Maybe the guy would blow a gasket and run back out there to find him.

Such an innocent conversation, yet it betrayed the fact that people could find something better to do with their lives than wallow. She wished she could be like Rook. He was stronger than her.

Fading in and out, she glimpsed the inside of the massive train station with its graffiti-splattered walls and chunks of plaster lying on a marble floor; tall, Romanesque columns covered in dust and shadows caught the glare of cathedral-like sunshine. The lobby was mostly empty; the word VOMIT in huge letters upon a wall was enough to make her think it might actually be good advice, considering the shudders that coursed through her body.

Huddled behind bunkers made up of concrete blocks, men smoked cigarettes and watched her. Rook talked about football. Voices echoed. The men in the bunkers were stationed behind huge six-barreled miniguns. Finally, someone had the balls to bring the firepower.

“She’s got heatstroke,” Doctor Desjardins said. “We need to get her upstairs and clean her up before Sutter talks to her. She needs to be awake. We need this woman.”

“She ain’t trade?” someone asked.

Vega wasn’t sure what the question implied, but she wanted an answer.

THE CHAMP

Vega was gone. So quickly, before he could blink. A group of four people had charged up the hill and dragged her back down. One of them, a big guy carrying a sledgehammer, died in the attempt.

Bill knew how to keep his head straight in a pressure-situation. If he ended up dead in a failed attempt to save Vega’s life, it would be a waste. Desjardins and his people wanted Vega. She was going to survive.

Amidst the shooting and the dropping bodies, Bill had tried to maneuver around the field of abandoned vehicles and wreckage. Zombies emerged from every shadow, from every corner. He pumped the shotgun and fired. His arms were clawed and bloody, and he had been scratched in several other places, but he couldn’t stop to figure out where the pain was coming from.

This was the fight of his life, and he was alone.

He was also out of ammo.

Nothing would stop them. They would keep coming. And coming. And coming.

Their moans filled the air. Distorted noise, different voices ebbing and flowing. They walked indiscriminately, pushing through each other, bumping, stumbling, falling. They would not stop. Once they fell, they would try to get back up. They would grab onto another corpse and try to pull themselves up. More of them would fall. Entire clusters within the massive mob dropped like dominoes.

They were so clumsy. They all seemed like a normal group of people who were just drunk. Their limbs moved awkwardly. If you looked closely, if you stared at one of them, you could see the wounds. You could guess how they had died. You could begin to make up stories in your head about these people, what they may have been like, maybe even what their names used to be.

He didn’t want to think of them as people. Best to look away. Best not to stare at them. Keep moving. Don’t stop to think. They’re nothing more than an obstacle in the way of victory.

But there were so many. So many.

Through the crowd, he noticed two shapes that scrambled faster, pushing through a few of the muddy bodies, the colorless bodies, the gray bodies. Ashen bodies. Charred bodies.

Two shapes running. Pushing through. Going against the crowd. Not travelling in the same direction as the mob that flowed like a river down the street and over the valley of walking corpses. A river filled with rot.

They were alive. Two people were alive and trying to get through.

Bill tried to run through. If they could do it, he could, too. The mob was driven to one purpose, and they didn’t know what that purpose was. They didn’t know anything. They were a mob of dead people.

Go through them. Just walk right through them.

He elbowed several of them out of the way, and they bumped into others, causing temporary confusing among them. Undead gridlocked traffic.

Bumping into him. Jostling him. He kept his head lowered and did his best not to look at their faces. He lowered his shoulders as if about to go through a tackling drill. Elbows locked, poised at his sides, knees bent. He needed to keep his feet moving.

Crowding around him. Bodies, shapes. Surrounding him. Closing in.

They were no longer surging forward, but trapped in a pattern. They had stopped, unable to push through each other, unable to climb over one another. Soon enough, though. Soon they would be climbing over each other.

But he couldn’t stop with them. They would devour him. Rip him to pieces.

Then he imagined it. He imagined their mouths filled with his blood. Their eyes filled with his blood. Their empty throats where veins and flesh had been ripped away; their chests, their clothes; their hands, meat slipping between fingers; covered in blood. His blood. His body. The inside of him. His face gone, ripped away. He could be like one of the corpses that had become indistinguishable, barely a walking skeleton.

No time to stop moving.

He pushed them aside. He wondered if this is what it felt like to swim in quicksand. Pushing weight aside. Dead weight.

“Not happening,” Bill told them.

But could they hear him?

Why did he talk to them? They were dead.

“Let me through,” he said. “Get out of my way. Just move.”

Heads cracked on mangled spines, turning to him. Mouths opened. Toothless mouths opened, lips shriveled, gums shrinking.

Any moment now they would grab him. They would untangle their limbs and seize him, drag him into a world of pain and blood.

“I want to help you,” he said.

Why did he say that?

These people were victims. They were victims of a hellish infliction, a terrible experiment. Somehow, he was doing them a favor by resisting them. They were not in control of their souls anymore, and they should not be damned to Hell because they could not control the monstrous presence that commanded them. It was not their fault.

They could kill him, and he felt sorry for them.

“Just move, please. Please move out of the way. I want to help.”

How was he going to help? These people were all dead, and they were supposed to attack him. For too long they had been seemingly asleep, waiting on the outskirts of Bill’s little suburban haven. He had grown soft. Unable to accept what these things were. He knew what they were, but he hadn’t confronted them in a situation that seemed hopeless.

Because he was never hopeless.

There had been two people moving through the crowd, and he had a better chance of getting to them. But for what? They didn’t need him, did they? He was a stranger. They might shoot him on sight.

Encircled by hundreds of walking corpses, a sense of dread began to fill him. How had he come this far without thinking this through? Why make a silly gamble and attempt to break through the wall of dead people, just to give up on Vega, give up on everything, throw his life away?

The challenge. He wanted the challenge.

A fight that belonged to him alone. Nothing in his life ever came easily, and he wasn’t going to hide behind one person’s death. For what had he saved her, only to abandon her now? He had saved her because of the challenge. Because he had felt left out. He wasn’t part of the heroics, the fight, and now he was at the very center of it all.

If only there were cameras. A crowd. Bright lights.

There was a crowd all around him. The sky was bright white. The buildings around him, the perimeter, looked like hollowed-out skulls. Windows without glass. Doorways without doors.

“Let me through!” he shouted. “LET ME THROUGH! LET ME THROUGH LET ME THROUGH LET ME THROUGH!”

Without thinking, he grabbed a corpse and nailed it with a right hook; he heard the jaw crack as the dead face rocked sideways. With his left hand, he grabbed the same corpse by the neck and punched it again with his right. And then again. And again.

He wrestled the dead person to the ground, and several members of the crowd moved aside. In the back of his mind, a faint whisper reminded him that he was going to die. The dead were going to close in, and it would be all over for him. So easily, so simply. Still, he sat astride the dead person’s chest and roared. A long, terrible roar that seemed to reach for the blank sky like a ghost hand reaching for the edge of a cliff.

One of his hands seized a nearby corpse by the waistband of its tattered jeans and pulled; he corralled another, and none of them responded. They did not resist or fight back. The others did not attack. Their bodies were soft, frail, wet. Or their bodies were dry, brittle, ashen. There was no color in this world. He could not find color in those faces. Eyes looked at nothing. Dead people stumbled drunkenly into him, sleepwalking maybe, dreaming somewhere else. Each body was different. Spiderwebbed strands of hair, shriveled flesh peeling, worms falling out of nostrils. A fly stopped upon the tip of Bill’s nose, but he could do nothing about it.

A mound of corpses were piled around him, limbs twitching, bodies flopping in a mangled pile of sewage-ripe decrepitude. He grabbed them, pulled them down. He didn’t know what he was doing or why. Bill, the Champ, was lost. He was gone.

The dead climbed over each other. They were in a daze, unable to realize they were being attacked. Bill was invisible to them. He didn’t know why he was invisible, but it made everything worse. He wanted to destroy more of them. Even though he wasn’t destroying them at all, it was as if pinning them down was good enough to satisfy his latent desire for pain and combat.

“Why did you do this?” Bill looked to the sky. “Why did you abandon us? This is your war! This isn’t our fight! This isn’t our fight…”

Who was he talking to?

What fight?

Words slipped, emotions coalesced. Rage, despair, hurt. He felt everything he could ever feel in shredded moments.

He had never wanted to hurt anyone, and here he was, hurting the world. Sharing with the world the hurt that he felt now. Nothing but a harmless spectator, a yes-man who loved to play football, a God-fearing man who believed in the power of redemption. After he had watched a girl get raped in a field he needed an excuse to carry on, some kind of way to deal with the world after he had allowed horror and violence to occur in front of his eyes.

Bill was not a hero. He was nothing.

He felt the weight of a thousand dead people pressing down upon him as his cries were drowned out by a mass of bodies that threatened to bury him in the dark of cold flesh. They were upon him. They were upon him, and he could not see.

This was it.

Time for him to go.

He was ready to feel everything. He wanted all of it.

***

Bill thought he was dreaming.

In his dream, he moved several of the corpses aside and casually walked over hundreds of them. Dead eyes stared up at the sky, not at him. His shadow passed over them as he stepped over the corpse-littered street.

But it was not a dream. At least, it was not his dream. He didn’t realize that he was alive, that he was conscious, until he began walking up a fire escape. How much time had passed? He was still alive. Where was Vega? Maybe it didn’t matter. She might be out of his life. Gone forever.

He couldn’t remember how he managed to climb out of the pile, but he made it through. He was here, standing, walking. Was he undead? Was he one of them now?

He inhaled. The dead city’s putrescence filled his lungs.

What a fool he was. How could he dare blame God for what happened? Doctor Desjardins was nothing more than a delusional madman, even if Vega believed that bullshit. God would never allow such evil; man would not be allowed to destroy His vision for the human race. Never. This was all wrong. Even if the undead were some kind of projection from Hell, there would be some kind of rebuttal.

Driven by some remote instinct, he finally stopped walking up the fire escape. He leaned against the iron and looked into the street below. Corpses twitched. Shambled. Otherwise, there was silence. A vast emptiness. As if everything had been shut off. Terminated.

He was alone again.

Continuing up the fire escape, the familiar mix of blood and sweat tainted his lips; fresh blood, fresh wounds, fresh pain.

On the roof, the two figures he had seen running through the street. One woman with her head buried in the chest of another. A woman clinging tightly to a bloodied shape, a lumped form.

Two women. The wounded woman reminded Bill of ketchup smeared over the hood of a white car. Her complexion was dark, but in the dull gray cityscape, her blood was bright red. Her blood was a shocking red. An obvious red. Her face was wet, her body ripped apart.

The woman holding her looked up. Deep brown eyes, her skin darker than the wounded woman’s flesh.

“I’m sorry,” Bill said. He felt awkward. It wasn’t the right thing to say, but it was all he could say. The only thing that made sense.

Waiting now. Waiting for someone to speak. The darker woman blinked her eyes several times, not really seeing him.

“I’m alone,” he said.

“We all are,” the wounded woman said.

He was interrupting a sacred moment. He was an uninvited guest.

The wounded woman placed a trembling hand on her caretaker’s shoulder.

“There’s two men,” the wounded woman said. “I want to kill them both. I do business with them. Trade bitches like you. But I stopped. Was going to bring you somewhere safe. I didn’t hate you.”

“Stop talking,” the other woman said. “Just rest.”

“At least you’re not telling me everything’s going to be okay.”

“I don’t hate you.”

The wounded woman smiled a bloody smile. “Then you can do me a favor. Kill both men. They’re fighting each other. Sutter’s one of them. Sits at the old train depot with an army. The other guy’s alone. Don’t know his name. He’s at a factory. Called the Packard. These guys… it’s all their fault. They did all this.”

Bill wanted to interject, offer what he knew, but it wasn’t the right time. Not yet. These women didn’t even want him to be here.

“So you have a plan?” the caretaker said.