Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (6 page)

Vincent was holding his dick. He shook himself and promptly zipped.

“Hey,” the voice said again, impatiently.

Vincent turned and could hardly see the shape in front of him; the light of the house’s shadow wasn’t strong enough to illuminate the street. Suede was standing in front of him, the guy who worked on Vega’s dove tattoos. A former career thug who had worked the streets in one of Fireball’s crews, although Vincent had never known the guy until the past few months.

“Nigga, you need to have a good reason,” Vincent said, trying to deepen the edge to his voice. He wasn’t supposed to be afraid, but he was jumpy. It would be easy to blame the alcohol; he should have been less jumpy, more alert.

“Look man, there’s something going down,” Suede said, his eyeballs shifting quickly. He looked over his shoulder.

“What?”

Suede’s voice cracked.  “Those
things,
man. You know. You know what I’m trying to say.”

“No, I don’t know. Get your shit together.”

“Those mutherfuckers, those things. Those things are here. Those things are
here
man, I’m telling you.”

Vincent grabbed Suede by the shoulders. “Hey, look at me. Look right at me. You high? You on shit?”

“You gotta see this. You gotta help.” Words reduced to a state of whimpering.

The darkness seemed to be spinning around Vincent’s head, a tangible thing that vibrated, trembled. The twilight sky quaked and his hands trembled.

He reached into the waistband of Suede’s jeans and removed the 9mm. The weapon was cold; there hadn’t been any gunshots in the night.

A bullet in the chamber. Safety off. Full clip.

“Show me,” Vincent said.

Although he could feel his feet touch the ground, he seemed to float through a narrow corridor of shadow and darkness, of starlight and moonlight, of shaking sky and a silent suburban street. He was drunk.

So many dark houses. Silent houses. Black windows. Invisible lawns. Moans from somewhere. People screwing or praying. People gripping each other tightly, huddled in corners. People sitting up in bed, sweating. People staring from behind black windows.

This should be easy. But why did he have to do it? The Champ was probably capable, if the stories were true, and Taylor knew how to use a gun. Suede had to come and get
him.

“There,” Suede said, his voice shaky. “In there.”

They were standing in front of a dark house. Smell of dirt. Insect chatter. More insects than there should be.

But he could smell
them
, could taste them. Yes. It was true. Blood. The air tasted like blood.

Vincent had felt this way the first time he was in a combat zone, waiting for his officers to direct him; there might be landmines in the Iraqi city, snipers, children with grenades.

Vincent was frozen all over again, just like that first day. Standing in front of a dark house, his body unwilling to do anything. The insects were so damn
loud.
There was too much noise in this kingdom. There should be silence. There should be nothing.

Vincent was not in control. His body moved forward, guided by a principle he didn’t understand. These were monsters he had destroyed time and time again. Why couldn’t he just get this over with?

His hand was on the door, and he gently pushed it open.

Thick blood smell, as if were inside a rotting factory with its taint of sweat and rust. The air was hot, stale. He could taste the stillness on his lips, and the heaviness inside the house made him even more aware of the cold grip on the gun in his hand.

Standing on the threshold, he waited. His eyes adjusted to the deeper shade of darkness. He glanced up a nearby staircase and could see the cigarette burns on the carpeted steps; Suede was behind him, a flashlight in his hand slowly roving over the details of the house. The place looked normal.

“Wasting my time,” Vincent said under his breath.

“Then why you whispering?”

“How do you know something’s here?” Vincent snapped at him.

“Because I was here. With Junior. You know Junior? He’s upstairs with his girl, Dina. I was down here when I heard the noises, and I ran out.”

“Upstairs? How many people?”

“Three.”

“You just said Junior and Dina. What the fuck’s going on?”

“They got that video. You know the one. I told them not to watch it. I told them. Man, I heard it from downstairs.”

“Video? You gotta be real with me. How’d you get it?”

Suede looked away. “I ain’t no snitch.”

“How’d you get the video? I’m not asking a third time.”

“You know where we got it. The bone man sent it. But I didn’t trade for it. It was Junior’s idea.”

Vincent was getting more irritated by the second. The bone man was a name he heard too often now, and a part of him felt jealous; this strange man had invaded the neighborhood as a drug supplier, and Vincent hadn’t done a thing about it. He didn’t want to care.

But he should care. It wasn’t about turf; it was about protecting people who believed in him.

“So you come get me, and this all you got?” Vincent nodded at the gun in his hand.

“I thought you would have a plan or some shit. I thought we would roll in with a crew. I ain’t afraid of one of those mutherfuckers, but I know there might be more than one.”

Vincent shook his head. He snatched the flashlight from Suede’s hand. “Get out of here. Get another gun. Get Taylor and Bailey.”

Suede took off, and Vincent slowly made his way up the stairs, each step creaking beneath his feet. His fingers adjust to the grip on the gun. His lips tasted like sweat.

A door at the top of the stairs was slightly open, a faint glow inside throwing shadows onto the floor. It must have been a television, although Vincent hadn’t heard a generator outside. He thought he could hear slurping, as if someone was drinking broth from a bowl.

The darkness was spinning. Vincent was drunk, his thoughts muddled.

He violently pushed the door open and heard it slam against the wall. Time to get this over with.

There was a television in the room, and its screen was black, but there was just enough of an electronic glow for Vincent to see a shape sitting upright on the bed. He brought the flashlight up to the shape and saw the red-eyed face, mouth full of blood, wet hands covering its mouth. The creature slurped something into its mouth. Beside it lay Dina’s slaughtered body, the stomach a flat pool of liquid.

He needed to aim the gun, pull the trigger. Instead, he stood there, staring. The feasting zombie’s body was a sickly green, and its deliberate hands suggested the undead creature had intent; Vincent had known Junior and Dina, two mid-twenties survivors, but he couldn’t see anything in this creature that resembled Junior. Its skin reminded Vincent of a snail, wet and sickly. Not a single follicle of hair remained on the dead thing’s head. The eyes bulged from their sockets, and there were no eyelashes; eyelids did not blink. The foul thing did not have lips. It sat there, chewing and staring back at Vincent.

The television. Suede had mentioned a video.

The creature sitting on the bed was one of the rotted, one of those zombies created by the video. Vincent had never seen one of them before, but had heard they were different; they were faster, greedier, hungrier.

The zombie lowered its hands from its face, liquid slipping through its fingers; blood dripped onto the bed sheets, and Vincent looked into a hole that overflowed with gore. The zombie cupped its hands and threw them in the air, launching blood and meaty chunks across the room.

Vincent blinked his eyes as Dina’s blood was splashed into his face. Still, his limbs would not respond, and he did not know what to do. His brain completely shut off, locked out by overwhelming fear.

The rotted zombie stood upon the bed, and the putrid stench of an open sewer wafted into Vincent’s nose and caused his stomach to flip-flop, bile rising through his throat. He stifled the urge to vomit as the dead creature stepped off the bed, a black Miami Heat Lebron James jersey hanging from a thin, skeletal body; Junior had worn that jersey almost every day. The creature burped a gaseous moan, and its decrepit smell became more pungent.

On the bed, Dina sat up. Vincent took his eyes off Junior.

Somebody he hadn’t seen crashed into him.

A rush of fetid air filled his nostrils. Vincent twisted in the attacker’s arms and directed the body toward the door, pushing it onto the steps outside the door. He heard bones crack and snap as the body tumbled down the stairs. The attacker must have been the third person Suede mentioned; Vincent didn’t stop to look. He glanced back over his shoulder with the 9mm up, and he fired into the dark, bright splashes of light searing his retinas.

After three trigger pulls, a lumbering shape jettisoned through the black room, and Vincent again found himself in a tangle of limbs. His attacker was wet and slippery from blood and other liquids he could not identify, and it sudden shift in weight upon him forced him back against the banister which cracked; he hugged the zombie tightly to him to bring it crashing down with him into the living room. With a firm grip on its shoulder, he shoved his gun into its mouth just as space opened up beneath them. He fired a bullet into the dead fucker’s brainpan in that instant before they hit the couch below.

Vincent lay in a mess of blood and slime, intestine coiling around his legs like a rope that had been dipped in a swamp. He must have shot Dina; the corpse was fresh, not rotted like Junior.

Flashlight beams shot through the house’s windows; they had heard the gunshots and came running.

Horizons of light cut through the darkness, revealing a rotted corpse walking down the stairs, Lebron James jersey sagging from the weight of blood.

And then Vincent saw: maggots twisting in empty eye sockets, broken teeth in a fleshless jaw, an animated collection of hungry bones.

But he saw something else. In that instant, he was afraid like he had been afraid that first night, the night he world changed forever, the night his kingdom fell apart. He had been trapped in a church with a group of people who were all dead now, except for Traverse.

Vincent forgot about the gun in his hand. His head filled with images of violence and blood. He had spent his entire life making up the rules as he went along, and that life wasn’t coming back. A part of him might have believed that fighting alongside Vega would somehow bring it all back.

These bastards took it all. Griggs made a video with Mina, and that video started this. He knew the video was responsible, and Griggs was responsible. This creature was the detective’s vengeance against the world. A final joke.

The alcohol in his head muffled his roar; he didn’t hear himself cry out as he rushed toward the rotted zombie. Vincent shoved it through the open doorway with his bare hands and wrestled it onto the lawn. He straddled Junior’s chest and looked into the rotted face.

Memories jumbled through Vincent’s drunken mind. He remembered Derek. In the church, right after Traverse had chopped up Rhonda with an axe, Vincent put a bullet into Derek’s head to keep him from becoming a walking corpse. Traverse had shot Derek, and the dying man had begged Vincent to finish him off.

Derek’s blood was on his hands.

Derek had told him to get calm down, get his act together. There had been a little girl among them, and Derek was watching over her. Derek was supposed to be strongest of their little group.

Vincent pointed the 9mm gun into Junior’s rotted face and pulled the trigger. A part of the jaw shattered.

“You always right about shit, ain’t you?” Vincent asked the corpse.

He wanted to talk to Derek. He wanted to talk to everyone he had ever known and scream at them; his life was somehow their fault. His nightmare-existence was somehow everyone else’s curse upon him.

The zombie’s mouth opened, and it tried to sit up. Vincent fired a bullet that exited through the back of its head, missing the brain. As if he hadn’t shot it at all, the zombie continued to push itself up.

“You wanted me dead from the beginning,” Vincent said. “Yeah, you thought you were right. Thought I was in the way. But you were the one who tried to do too much. You tried to be a hero, and you ended up dead. If you weren’t dead maybe Shanna would still be here. Maybe things would have worked out different.”

The corpse stood in front of him.

“You were the better man. You were supposed to live, not me. You were going to save people. You were going to put your ass on the line to help people. You were supposed to survive. Not me. You were supposed to be standing here. You knew what to do.”

The corpse reached for him. It might have been Derek. It might have been anybody.

Vincent shot Junior in the forehead; the Lebron James jersey seemed to fold inward as the zombie crumpled. Blood was in Vincent’s eyes. Blood was on his lips.

He looked back at the door and saw the second attacker, the zombie that he had thrown down the steps, watching him.

The corpse in front of the door looked like Patrick Griggs.