Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (5 page)

BELLA

Bella stared across the Ambassador Bridge and could feel the tightness in her chest, the swelling of pride in herself that conflicted with the pain of loss and regret. She had come this far, had survived this long, to get here. She had lost everything—maybe—for this moment. There was no looking back.

Desmond might be dead. How would she find out? That question, more than any other, bothered her the most.

With the scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face, she remembered again. His voice on the phone. Coltrane in the background. Stranded on the Ambassador Bridge. She called to ask if he was okay. She called to make sure he was out of danger.

The bridge waited for her. Abandoned cars. The sun-disc dipping beneath a crumbled skyline signaling the end of a day. The dead could see in the dark just as well as she could, and the living were far more dangerous than the dead. This, she knew from experience.

There was nothing for her in Detroit; if she found Desmond in his car, or near it, would she move on? If he was dead, he might be one of
them,
and a part of her denied it.

She was eager to get this over with, but she couldn’t move. She stared at the bridge. At the military barricade in the center. At the wandering shapes drifting among the cars. Wind picked up dust and ash and slammed it into her face; the world was an ashen desert now, and she was a traveler through this wretched wasteland, looking for the man she loved because the search was all she had left. She threw her hood over her face. 

Desmond would have told her to get on with it.

Don’t watch the news, he always said.

She had watched the news.

His startup law practice finally had a client.

The last thing he told her.

Every one of his words from that conversation were recorded into her memory. She remembered a lot of things that kept her going forward. She saw a lot of people die in shelters and on television. Her teenage son, Brian, went looking for supplies and never came back. He volunteered to help the group. He was out here too, because he had probably gone looking for Desmond without her.

Everything was quiet now. Everyone was dead now.

Now. The bridge.

Bella carried a backpack full of granola bars and a couple bottles of water that had been boiled over a fire. She had a cooking pot and some knives. A few other odds and ends. All that she carried, and no weapon. The last mistake people often made was trying to fight instead of run. If you were forced to fight, you were fucked anyway. No use carrying extra weight.

Fine. Okay. Take a step. That’s where it all starts. With one step.

She walked toward the bridge. She walked onto the bridge. Was it smarter to walk along one of the edges or down the middle? There was more room to run and scramble in the middle, but she might be surrounded easily.

In the oasis of silence, nobody would hear her scream. Nobody would hear her last words. Nobody would hear the last words of those she had known. Nobody else would bear her burden; the last moments and confessions of survivors she had known, survivors who didn’t last this year.

The blood on the concrete looked like oil stains, unwashed by rain and time. Spider webs had replaced broken car windows. Glass crunched beneath her boots. Flat tires and open hoods with their batteries ripped out indicated a salvage team had been this way. Toddler chairs strapped into back seats. Soda bottles on floor mats. Dangling cell phone charger cords. Shoes. Bloodstained upholstery. Bloodstained concrete. Silence. Silence.

She had looked into hundreds of cars over the past year, thousands of them. There was a Cadillac on this bridge somewhere, Desmond’s Cadillac.

A year ago she would have been able to smell the dead. She would have turned and run. She would have screamed.

They sat on the pavement as if they were nothing more than sleeping gargoyles. They were colorless and fleshless, their mutilations and wounds obscured by decay. Their clothes were tattered. Some of them no longer had eyes. When their arms moved slowly, they bled dust and ash. Bones cracked. A turning head snapped like a tree falling in an invisible forest; the head tumbled over shoulders and rolled along the ground, and the body sagged against a car door.

A dozen of them, maybe more. They used to be people, and now when they moved, they crumbled. They collapsed. Their body structures surrendered.

“Don’t move, nigger.”

A woman’s voice. Bella obeyed.

“Look up.”

Sitting atop a semi truck’s trailer, a woman kneeling behind the sights of a bolt-action rifle. A dark-skinned woman with a silver stud pierced through her right nostril. The gray suburban combat camo the dead soldiers had worn; pants and jacket, an olive green shirt on her thin body riding up, revealing a tight stomach with a dangling belly ring.

“You ain’t a scavenger,” the woman said.

“We’re all scavengers.”

“That so?”

“Was the racist remark supposed to intimidate me?”

The woman behind the rifle smirked. “You are what you are. I’m sure you’ve heard worse. You’re a woman. You’ve survived.”

“Obviously.”

They had both been tormented by lawless men who were governed by desperation and hunger. Not too many women were alive now. Consumed by the men who promised to protect them, or hunted down and traded by slavers. A new economy had replaced the old one in the ruins. In one year, the new economy was everything.

“Where’s your crew?”

Bella listened to the creaking bone-machinery of the dead falling apart as they tried to walk lazily, their kneecaps snapping, ankles twisting.

“I’m alone,” Bella said.

“Bullshit.”

“They wouldn’t send a woman as a scout. Nobody would risk precious merchandise.”

The gun dropped slightly, and Bella could see the black stocking cap, the long eyelashes, wisps of black hair.

“Either shoot me, or let me go on,” Bella said. “You’re a hunter? Looking for skin?”

The gun dropped lower. “You’re probably nuts like everyone else.”

The dead had fallen apart, their bones sinking back into the dusty pavement.

Silence again.

The woman was crouched on her heels and rested the gun between her knees. “You didn’t stop and look for nothing,” the woman said. “You must be a crazy nigger. Only the crazies survive for a long time on their own.”

“And what about you?”

The woman was calm and had already decided she wasn’t going to shoot Bella.

“I don’t work with niggers. Hell, I don’t work with anyone. I trade. I kill people and rob them. You don’t have much with you. I’ll take whatever food you have, and I’ll think about letting you go.”

Bella began to walk away.

“Turn around!”

Bella stepped over a skeleton. That’s what they were now: skeletons.

“I said turn around, bitch!”

A Cadillac. Was it Desmond’s Cadillac?

It had to be.

His briefcase was in the backseat. He had taken the first case for his private practice, and he was on his way home to see her. On his way to be with her. 

If she looked at the dead bodies would she find him? Would she find his corpse? Bella whipped her head around at the scattered bones and looked for the suit he wore when he left that morning, or his tie. Was the really his briefcase in the back seat? It had to be, and this was his Cadillac.

The woman was in the street now, her gun aimed at Bella’s head. She could have fired from atop the semi.

“Drop your bag, and put your hands up,” the woman said.

Bella smirked. “His car. But I don’t think he’s here. He ran. He ran somewhere.”

The woman sighed and lowered her gun. “You really are nuts.”

“You would have killed me by now if you were serious.”

Unspoken words, something whispered along the edges of silence, borders designed by the idle cars, artifacts that would have to dissolve. Artifacts that would have to be unearthed several thousand years from now by the same people who were looking for Troy or the Fountain of Youth.

“The racist comments make you sound trashy, not tough,” Bella said.

“Fuck you.”

Bella walked away.

***

Her name was Angelica, and she called herself a gypsy.

“Call me Angie, and I’ll rape your skull with this rifle,” she said.

Bella opened her backpack and shared some beefy jerky. She had no qualms about sharing with a stranger.

“You talk a big game,” Bella said. “Where’s your crew?”

“I don’t have a crew. I trade. I scavenge and trade. I kill and rob.”

They ate and talked on top of the semi. Angelica ate with the rifle on her lap, her eyes never straying far from Bella. She was another half-mad survivor, a woman who had seen everyone die and had listened to the screams of a million people fill the streets of a gutted world.

“You’re out here alone,” Angelica said. “You’re not afraid to die. I’m not sure why I haven’t killed you. Maybe after I eat.”

“That’s all you think about? Killing people?”

“I like staying alive. It suits me. Death was always a normal part of things, we just didn’t take the time to look around. To experience it. I had three brothers in jail for being involved in all kinds of crazy shit. I haven’t changed. I was waiting for it to happen. Something like this.”

Whenever Bella met a sole survivor, they would ramble for a while and do something stupid to get themselves killed shortly after. It was like the presence of another survivor rocked them back to the real world, and they suddenly realized they didn’t want to be alive anymore, but they wanted to confess their sins and bleed what remained of their humanity. Bella carried their names, their stories, their burdens.

“Why aren’t you dead yet?” Angelica asked.

Bell shrugged.

“You were careless. Walked in a straight line. Right down the middle of the bridge. You’ve been alive this long, and you do shit like that.”

Brian might have something to say if he was here. His ghost might have something to say. “Mom, we can’t trust her. She’ll kill you just because she’s used to it. It’s what she does. She kills people because it’s a habit. Trust me on this. Trust me.”

She always trusted Brian. He promised he would come back and he didn’t, but that’s only because he was on the other side of the bridge. He was in Detroit somewhere with Desmond.

“What were you talking about earlier?” Angelica asked. “You were staring at that car and mumbling something.”

She wanted to get personal. This woman, who called her names. This woman, who ate her food after threatening to kill her.

“Mom, just get away from her,” Brian said. “Please.”

Brian wasn’t with her. She knew he wasn’t there with her because he was in Detroit with Desmond. He had crossed this bridge to come looking for Desmond without her. Why did he leave? Desmond would coach her out of thinking negative thoughts; he would tell her to keep moving forward, not to think about things that might cripple her emotions, might stop her from doing the right thing. Desmond had been a good man, one of the best men to have ever lived, his heart full of justice and love. He was always right.

“You said you were a trader,” Bella said. “Who do you trade with?”

“This is my turf,” Angelica said. “Nobody crosses the bridge without paying. You’re the only one stupid enough to come this way. Who would come to Detroit? You would be going north. You Canadian? You should be going north.”

The same argument. Everyone went north where it was colder, where it was easier to die. Easier to die because everyone was going north. That’s what Brian had told her, and it made sense. Running through the Canadian wilds would be suicide, even though anything and everything was suicide now.

“This is your turf,” Bella said. “I get it. Why don’t you join the people you trade with? Who are they? They must think you’re valuable if they’ve kept you alive.”

Angelica was sexy in her own way, with an exotic face which lent itself to the gypsy persona, and she would have fetched a fair price. A month’s worth of food or more, maybe some ammunition, too. How could a woman like that keep herself from the greedy hands of the people she traded with?

Bella allowed her eyes to wander over the wasted skyline and the slow Detroit River. Why didn’t Angelica go south where it was warm? Maybe because everyone else was going south. She liked it here. This was her home, and she relied on herself.

There was an acknowledgement between the two women; they were alone and had survived alone.

But Bella wasn’t alone. Brian was out there, and so was Desmond.

“I think I might let you live,” Angelica said. “I want to think about trading you.”

Angelica was letting her guard down. She wanted to trust Bella. She wanted to trust somebody, anybody.

VINCENT

With a festering skull sitting on the edge of his spade, Vincent thought about the day he stood in the street and gunned down maybe a hundred or so of the undead all by himself.

The funny thing was that he couldn’t imagine how he had done it. He dreamed of it sometimes, though the dream was always false. He couldn’t remember exactly how it all went down. With each passing day, it was becoming more difficult to believe that he managed to pull it off. He had mowed down a crowd of zombies, and now he didn’t even carry a gun with him.

He didn’t carry a gun because he didn’t want to fight them anymore. Vega still didn’t know, but he knew she was pretty screwed up, too. After all the running and fighting they had done, it was silly to think they could barely lift a finger to save themselves, now.

He tossed the head into the back of the waiting pickup truck and resumed picking up the neighborhood’s trash.

A little more than a year ago he was smoking Cubans and getting next year’s Jordan’s delivered to his home. His Mercedes dealership was one of the top ten most lucrative Mercedes dealerships in the country. He had people on the street hustling bricks of cocaine. There were money machines in his office, even though he never used them. He carried a stack of tightly wrapped hundreds in his pocket. He had a Columbian girl he saw in Miami, and he had strippers on voice-dial. He owned four cell phones. Bodyguards. Shook hands with Jay-Z. A former Detroit mayor owed him money. Not a single person he paid money to do any “wet” work was found because he could afford the best professionals. Every single dollar he made was accounted for because he only paid for “business” with cash, and his dealership had been started with a group of investors, all of whom were bought out. He hadn’t lived too lavishly because he was careful not to show off.

Now he was shoveling garbage into the back of a truck.

This was important work. Their garbage needed a place to be incinerated, and it had been a hot topic of debate amongst the locals when everyone in the neighborhood first decided they would be a community and work together to help each other. A few miles from their neighborhood there was a massive sinkhole in the middle of the Lodge Freeway. They were dumping their trash into that massive crater and burning it.

Burning. Vincent inhaled deeply, and his stomach growled. He could smell the burning meat from their weekly barbecue. Families were hanging out in a nearby park, doing their best to pretend like nothing had changed.

“You look like you could use some help,” someone said.

Vincent turned around and found the retired cop, Mike Taylor, standing by the pile of garbage with work gloves on his hands. He brought his own shovel. He wore a burgundy tank top, and his tattered jeans looked like they had been ripped off a corpse, which was likely. Despite being in his early sixties, the old man had a lean, tight body. No loose fat hung from his arms, and his barrel chest could have belonged to a semi-retired professional bodybuilder.

“Looks are deceiving,” Vincent said and turned back to his work. He preferred to be alone. The work kept him busy. Kept his mind occupied.

“Don’t I know it,” Taylor said while tossing refuse into the truck from the end of his shovel. “Tried to get your ass on tax evasion… how many times? Never got it to stick.”

His former career was out in the open now. He wasn’t going to be that person again.

“I don’t remember you,” Vincent said. “You all looked the same to me. Unless you wanted to buy a car.”

Taylor chuckled. “I wasn’t on your case. The Feds loved you though. I remember this one guy… I think his last name was North or Kim or something ridiculous like that… anyway, he managed to infiltrate. Worked his way up through one of your sales teams. Had dinner with you once at a gentlemen’s club downtown. Said you were a nice guy. Said you hooked him up nice. Hooked him up so nice he got a girl pregnant.”

Vincent rested the spade on the cement and leaned against the long shaft; he laughed. He remembered who Taylor was talking about. They had the guy figured for a wire a long time ago.

“We were convinced they were both going to end up in a ditch somewhere,” Taylor said.

“That’s why it didn’t happen,” Vincent said, nodding to himself.

“That’s the only reason?”

“Only one I can think of.”

“You really are a hard fucker. That why you’re not eating? Showing off the muscle, showing people they should respect your for being strong or something?”

It wasn’t too long ago he would have had Fireball or someone else on his staff escort Taylor out of his sight. But there was nothing to gain from such antics now. This man was testing him. Trying to muscle him in a different way.

A tiny park in the middle of their neighborhood hosted their weekly barbecue, where people brought whatever meat they had managed to salvage from the various trips out into the city, or wherever else they could try to scrounge things up. Vincent watched as a woman walked two children down the street toward the park, both of her hands occupied with one of theirs. Those kids were about to enjoy eating barbecued dog, cat, rat, frog, rabbit, robin. A couple families had venison because the deer population was running around unchecked, although it didn’t make it any easier. There were plenty of dead deer in the streets, too. And there was competition.

“They don’t need to respect me for anything,” Vincent said.

“But you were important here,” Taylor said. “These people knew you, and some of these houses were dope houses. This was your turf. And now people from all over are finding you because they hear that you have guns and that you can protect them.”

Vincent stopped shoveling. He looked down at the pile of garbage, and a part of him wanted to snap. But what would that solve? It was about time someone said these things.

But a man like Taylor didn’t start conversations like these out of boredom. It was smarter to keep this conversation going. To find out what Taylor wanted.

Not even Vega wanted to have these conversations. He always felt like they should talk, but it wasn’t easy. He worried she would kill herself, even though she had never tried. He expected it would be out of the blue, and she would want him to try and stop her. Why would she want that? He wasn’t sure. There wasn’t much he was sure about anymore.

“I don’t know if they’re expecting something from me,” Vincent said. “I don’t know what they would want. I didn’t ask anyone to come here.”

He realized that he wanted to talk. He wanted to keep talking to Taylor. It felt like now he might be able to see through the heavy fog that had settled over his mind.

“We’re all just pretending, aren’t we?” Taylor asked. “When it comes right down to it, I mean. You’re trying to hide, like you always used to hide. You hid in plain sight. Everyone knew who you were, what you were capable of. Some people stayed out of your way. Those who didn’t weren’t in your way for long. You had the Bloods in your pocket…”

“What are we talking about?” Vincent stopped him. “I’m over here shoveling and then you come by and need to run your mouth. I didn’t come to you. You want something—don’t waste my time, or yours. Ain’t like we’re going to live forever.”

“I’m selfish, Hamilton. Just like you.”

“Yeah?”

“I want to know if you’re pretending to care. I don’t assume because I don’t know what goes in your head. We’re not going to try to empathize with each other, revisit the ghosts of all of the people we’ve lost. See everything that’s gone. We have people trying to talk this shit out right now, and we’ve got people who want to climb up the walls. People who want to blow their brains out. How many suicides have we had? How many people have walked away?”

Vincent shrugged. “Didn’t know we were doing a headcount.” He shoveled more garbage into the pickup truck’s bed. “People got their own way of dealing with this. You’re asking a question, and then you keep on talking. I don’t know what the real question is.”

Taylor used his forearm to wipe sweat from his brow. “Haven’t seen you at church. You like that priest? Father Joe? You helped him out before, didn’t you?”

There wasn’t much for him to say on the subject of God. There never had been much for him to say. His mother didn’t raise him that way. He never questioned, never gave it much thought. He used to think about it when the army was in the process of discharging him, but he buried those questions, buried those thoughts.

“He happened to be around,” Vincent said. “People like to hear him talk. I don’t see a problem with what he’s doing. He’s doing something good.”

“I’m trying to figure you out. You’ve got a lot going on in that head of yours. A lot of people underestimated you. They had a habit of underestimating criminals. It takes a certain kind of intelligence, a certain kind of courage, to pull off what you’ve pulled off.”

“Okay, just say it. You want something.”

“If you really want to help people, you can’t do it here. Look around you. Everyone here’s waiting to die.”

“Fuck you talking about? Looks to me like there’s a barbecue. We’re shoveling trash. You want to set up laws and ordinances, shit like that. You want to start this thing over.”

“And you don’t.”

Vincent tried to think about Taylor’s intentions. The old cop was still playing a game, and Vincent knew how to play it. A part of him was interested. He could smell a deal; Taylor had a proposition for him.

What could he do for Taylor?

Right before Taylor opened his mouth, he figured it out.

“We happen to be in the suburbs,” Taylor said. “There’s people everywhere, waiting this thing out, struggling. You’ve heard the stories about Sutter. You’ve heard about the people who are trading women and children for food.”

“Keep talking.”

“I don’t know what you want, but you’ve got the means to do it. You have guns. The stuff you have here in the neighborhood isn’t all you have. I know it. A lot of people know it, or think they know it. Use them. Do something with them. You want to take this city for yourself, you have to go through Sutter. With him, or against him. You need guns to keep your turf. And if that’s not what you want, take those guns and go north. To Canada, or somewhere else, because nobody’s going to wait for you to hand the guns over.”

Sutter. Vincent heard the name before but it didn’t mean a whole lot to him. Everyone else saw him as an important figure, and until now, he wasn’t sure why. They had been talking about him, wondering what his next move would be. What did Sutter want?

Taylor had talked with Sutter. They were trying to strike a deal of some kind. Otherwise, Taylor had nothing to gain by coming to him about the guns he supposedly had. Taylor was a smart man was trying to plan his next move.

Both men shoveled silently for a moment, and their thoughts were interrupted when they heard a shrill whistle. They both looked up and saw the lumbering football player, Bill Bailey—the Champ—walking toward them with a familiar bottle and some paper cups. Crown Royal. A full bottle.

Vincent could feel the grin splitting his face. “Goddamn,” he said.

As a matter of principle, he stayed away from alcohol most of the time because it would make you sloppy, stupid. But the day had been long and hot. It had been a long time since he had a drink.

And he wanted it. Badly.

***

They drank and watched the sunset. Their heads buzzed, and they had to piss multiple times. Bill was going to drive the truck out full of trash tomorrow to the hole. So nice of him to volunteer.

There was laughter. They shared stories. They talked about what they thought was supposed to happen next in their lives before everything was interrupted. Taylor had grandkids and wanted to live long enough to see them get through college. Bill was going to try to impress the coaches so that he could fill in and earn a spot on the Lions when someone went down with an injury. Vincent had listened but didn’t say much about his intentions or his past. It was a habit of his to be careful, even if he wasn’t running a criminal enterprise anymore.

But he listened to them, and it felt good to sit on the edge of the truck bed. This was time dedicated to laughter, to old-fashioned ball busting. Bill had plenty of stories from college, and Taylor had dealt with his share of dumbass criminals.

Vincent stepped away and pissed into a ditch. Only a few yards away, he could see a house full of candle flames flickering in the shadows behind draped windows. The neighborhood was quiet, the barbecue long over. There were power generators set up around the neighborhood, but they weren’t used often; gasoline was in short supply, and the generators made a lot of noise. The quieter the neighborhood was, the easier it was to identify if something bad was going down.

He watched the shadows inside the house. He was trying to decide whether or not he liked Taylor and Bailey, or if he just respected them. It probably didn’t matter.

It felt like the air on the back of his neck was standing straight up. Something panted nearby. A dog?

All over again, he was a little boy awakening from a nightmare and sitting up in bed, wondering if he had really been asleep.

“There you are,” someone said.