Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (8 page)

“Do you like it?” Jim asked her. “I made this for you. I know that I told you about Georgia Cone before I left you. I told you that she made me, like I have made you. Do you know anything about yourself? Do you know who you were before we met? Can you remember the first time we met?”

Look at his smirk, his narrow eyes, his smooth face.

Memories.

Who was she?

There are so many things for us to do together,
the demon said.
Do you love him? Do you want him inside you? Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted? Now you can live forever. Now you can grow old together and participate in mass-genocide.

Millions of people were already dead.

Rose felt like she was falling, but the body she now owned remained inert. She felt like she was falling, the air enveloping her, heart caught in her throat, mouth wide.

Mina had commanded the zombies. Rose remembered Mina taking control of them somehow, as she had stopped a horde of the dead from devouring them.

Did Rose control
them
?

See what we can see,
the demon said.
You were made for this moment. We were made for each other.

How could Jim do this to her? What a fool she had been to believe there was some semblance of humanity in him, some measure of empathy buried inside his twisted soul.

Do you think you were an innocent little girl?
the demon asked.
Oh, such a sweet little thing you were. But you wouldn’t remember. It won’t help you to remember. Mina is in here with us. Mina is waiting for you to give her body back. She’ll take you away from your precious Jim.

And she could scream back at the terrible voice inside of her head.

This isn’t about Jim!

Really?
She heard the demon’s contemptuous laughter.
Stupid bitch.

She was still falling. Her vision swirled again, the darkness twisting around her. Jim was talking, his voice muffled as if he were talking and they were both underwater.

I never wanted this,
she said to the demon.

Yes you did. Oh yes, you wanted it badly. And now you have it. You have everything.

Wholesale slaughter of the human race. Jim had talked about it as nothing more than a fleeting fantasy, but it was something that he didn’t quite understand about himself. Like a sexual fetish unrealized, nothing more. But how long ago was that?

I want out,
she said.
I’ve been used. Let me go. I would rather not be here. I would rather not be. I don’t want any part of this game.

How can you forget everything you and Jim have shared? You owe everything to him. Your emotions, your existence, your skills. You were made in his image, and he has made you again.

You’re not a demon. This is some kind of psychosis. I’ve gone insane.

But even that explanation was rather silly.

It was the only thing that made sense, in a world that didn’t make sense, in a world in which she was supposed to be dead. A world in which almost everyone was dead.

Okay,
the voice said to her.
I’m not a demon. You got me figured out. I’m just a little voice inside your head.

Wouldn’t it be better for her if the demon was real? What was the alternative? Maybe it would be better to just go with it.

Just go with it,
the demon said.
Yeah. I’m here, baby. Jump into my arms. Let me sing you David Bowie songs.

David Bowie. Why did that sound familiar?

She was falling. She couldn’t see, and she was falling.

Ground Control to Major Tom. Can you hear me, Major Tom?

She could watch the memories unfold again. Linda in the shopping mall, hugging her knees close to her chest. Weeping as her savior approached, a dark woman with a sniper rifle.

Then she could see something else. Entire fields littered with hunks of bloody meat. Human meat. As if a giant had picked up entire groups of people and ground them into a pulp in its fists and then dropped the pieces onto the ground. A bright red field of blood and skin. There was no sun. The plain of human waste did not have a sun hovering over it, and the sky was not dark.

You’re not real,
she said.
None of this is happening.

Oh, you’re such a rational young gal, ain’t cha?

You don’t sound like a demon. You’re a joke. Mocking me.

Love. The man she had loved stood over her, his hands messy with the blood of the body that did not belong to her.

“Am I a joke, darling?” Jim said.

Rose looked into his face again, her consciousness ripped away from the nightmare imagery. This man she had loved—despite how much she denied it, despite how much she told herself that love was not real, that people like her were incapable of such need—smeared a wet, sloppy mess of organs over Mina’s face.

Her face.

And she could feel him now, pressing against her thigh.

Falling again, and she physically reached for Jim, grabbed his shoulders, drawing him close. She wanted to tell him to stop her from falling.

He was inside her. Warm, strong. And she was dry. Completely dry. Worse: she could not feel anything except the pressure of his insertion.

A new flood of images washed over her.

Lying on a bed, wearing fishnets, black skirt, black eyeliner, purple lipstick, ink-black hair, forearms covered in bracelets. Who was this girl? Oddly familiar. Linda maybe?

Posters all over the room. Out-of-place rock stars, old rock stars, classic rock stars. Rose knew the girl on the bed wasn’t in the distant past because this was not a residual image, but a sort of real memory, as if she couldn’t possibly have made it up; this memory existed in someone’s memory, maybe Mina’s, maybe Linda’s, maybe it was the demon’s trick. It was almost impossible to decide what to do, what to think. She was used to processing information quickly in her mercenary experiences, and this experience diluted her senses, her thoughts.

One poster featured Kurt Cobain sitting on a stool wearing ripped up jeans, hair over his eyes. How normal. How simple. How easy it was to understand this girl. She obeyed the designs of an archetype. Another poster was David Bowie, the Thin White Duke in his 8o’s mode. Bowie wore his thin suit, his torso like a perfect triangle tucked into fabric, his blond hair like a fire brushing against an evening sky, or in this case, a stage. He was on a stage, singing into the microphone, leaning forward into the camera lens.

“Perhaps I have not made myself clear,” David Bowie said. His mouth did not move, but it was Bowie’s voice speaking to her from the poster. “Perhaps you shall consider my insatiable lust for genocide something archaic, something spoken in Latin or broken into Homeric verse. Ah yes, demons are old things, ancient things, speaking dead languages. We have not evolved. Evil has not evolved. I am not evil. I’m nothing more than a spirit who thinks we have something in common. We both want to kill everyone. I think that’s a special bond. I’ve replaced Mina. Used her up. But I still need her body. And let me speak from a more contemporary perspective: I will degrade you, spit on you, urinate on you, torture you, speak to you in the accent of a Spaniard roasting alive on a stake during the Inquisition. I will be whatever I choose to hurt you, over and over again, but I don’t have to do much. You see, you are used to hurting yourself. Your soul is already ruined. I don’t have to do anything but sit here and enjoy the show. I will be whatever I need to be. You are mine, and I shall eat the living with Mina’s nightmare.”

Falling again. David Bowie had talked to her. None of it made sense. None of it was in the least bit horrifying because it was too absurd. Yet, she was going through these delusions, suffering them uncontrollably.

Another delusion. She was in front of a window that looked into a church. She watched a man walking between rows of polished mahogany pews. Candlelight shades of light crumbling shadows against sharp walls. Father Joe limping, muttering to himself in Spanish. Father Joe, the emotionally unstable priest who had saved her life, carrying her through a crowd of zombies.

There was something wrong, and she could feel it. No. She could
smell
it. His presence was like a bright beacon floating at the edge of a calm oceanic horizon, and his scent was forever, like the ocean’s salty smell. The ocean didn’t smell salty, did it?

Father Joe was hurt, and she could hear a thousand more thoughts, a thousand more voices. Screaming voices. Hurt voices. Tear-choked voices. Children. The elderly. Infants. Everybody. Everybody at once. Everyone who had ever lived. Everyone who had died. Everyone who had been killed by Mina’s nightmare-epidemic.

Show Father Joe how much you miss him.

Rose didn’t know who said it, but the voice was louder than the rest.

Inside of her, somewhere, an ocean moved.

FATHER JOE

Always the best part of his day, out here in the quiet. The garbage hole was a few yards behind him, and he liked to sit on its edge and look down into the community’s waste pile. He liked to watch the twitching corpses that he had thrown down there when he was done with them.

When he was done with them.

Father Joe had removed his cassock and stood among the freeway’s ruined vehicles with his muscle-tight body. He climbed onto the roof of a car and surveyed the area.

There. Just one of them.

He rubbed his thick beard. How long since his last shower? Everyone alive stank. If someone was clean they would obviously come from somewhere else, which happened once or twice. They walked down the street like tourists, and there was the possibility that maybe one or two of the zombies that had walked into the neighborhood were actually living people.

Which only meant that people were still dying.

Mina had destroyed herself, or so it seemed. She had controlled the dead, and in the end, she managed to help Father Joe and the others. But she wanted to die, and Father Joe helped her. She no longer wanted the power, whatever it was. And he could only begin to guess what her power actually was.

The living dead did not attack. Only the rotted ones, creatures made by people who had watched Jim Traverse’s video, attacked.

Mina’s mind had been inside the dead body of a big guy wearing a heavy metal T-shirt, and the corpse had gestured that it wanted to have its head twisted around, severing the brain stem from the central nervous system. He knew how to do that. His fists had done that before, long ago in the boxing ring.

That’s why he was here.

It never dawned on him that he committed a serious sin. Helping someone commit suicide; it seemed God had presented an opportunity for him to do something right for once. For a Catholic priest, Father’s priorities were pretty screwed up.

Or maybe his sense of faith was completely screwed up.

Now he was running around without his shirt and collar. How much vanity could one priest have? He needed to stop convincing himself that he was always right. That was his problem; stay the course, no matter how many people died along the way. And forget about guilt. Just keep doing what you do, Father Joe.

He leapt off the car and wound his way through the cars on the bridge. He jotted, doing his best to run in good form, doing his best to run nimbly without stopping, pushing himself to run between a valley of open car doors. An obstacle course. He had to make sure he didn’t trip on garbage. He had to move his knees through those narrow enclosures between cars.

When he found the zombie, he was greeted by a surprise.

There was more than just one.

Sitting against the tires of an eighteen-wheeler. Their heads slowly turned toward him.

Back home, in Mexico, they had called him
Sangriento Joe.
Bloody Joe. In the boxing ring his fists had spilled blood.

He used to do this twice a week during the winter, and then three times in the spring, though he wanted four. He wanted five. So then in the summer, he went six days a week, in the mornings. He rarely slept; all he wanted was to be out here, beating the shit out of the walking dead.

Father Joe grabbed one by the collar of its shirt and punched it in the stomach. His fist passed through wet, globulous matter. His hand emerged through its back, the frail thing resting over his forearm. He could lift it into the air with his arm, and he did.

It felt good. Really good.

The corpse on the end of his arm slowly craned its neck and looked up at him.

The others were looking at him, too.

That wasn’t good.

Something hot pocked into his forearm. At first he thought he was being stung. When he looked at the fingernails that were pushing into his bicep, he quickly withdrew his arm from inside of the corpse that hung on him.

So much for a standup fight.

He didn’t know what was happening, but he knew he needed to act fast.

This is what he had wanted all along.

He stomped at the head under his boot. Eventually, the skull gave way, but he had stopped paying attention.

Father Joe’s head was jerked back, long, clumped black hair snagged in an undead fist. He knelt and reached back for the arm with both of his hands. He had no idea if what he was going to do would work, because it seemed absolutely insane. He visualized himself doing it, and snapped the arm from the creature’s elbow. The entire arm above the elbow separated, his black hair still in the fist.

Holy shit.

It worked.

The attacker’s other hand dug into his wounded right shoulder. With his left hand, he grabbed onto the creature’s remaining arm with his left, tucked his right shoulder, and tossed the zombie over his shoulder.

The severed arm fell out of his hair.

Moving his feet, dancing over garbage and bloodstained cement, he dodged another lunge. He wasn’t sure how many were still standing. The one-armed corpse was still around, too.

His right hook shattered a jaw, and he remembered what it had felt like to hit Traverse. Good. Real good.

So he came back with a left this time, a smooth left uppercut balanced by the right side of his body. The damn thing’s head rocketed off its spine.

Pivoting, he half-turned and shuffled his feet backward, his balance perfect, his posture square.

But he jabbed at the air.

Something crashed into his exposed flank. He tasted dirt.

Smothered in shapes, flailing limbs like the dead branches of a lightning-scoured forest. He cracked through some of those gnarled limbs, snapping bones in his fists, wrenching appendages from sockets and joints. The dirt taste in his mouth reminded him of asphalt that would have been tucked inside the treads of monster-truck tires.

Icy water poured down the side of his body. Not water. Pain. Numbing, sharp pain. With it came realization, and with realization, fear.

There was a chance he might die.

This thought compelled him, igniting a fury of desperation. He grunted and spittle frothed through his teeth. He wrapped his arms, and it seemed as if all sound had been muffled, save the beating of his heart, its rhythm thumping inside his ears.

Losing his balance, he slipped and fell onto the pavement, his heavy body dropping as if his knees had disappeared. This is what it must feel like to realize that you were dangling on the edge of a cliff all along and just when you come to this realization, you let go.

Standing over him, things without skin, things without faces. Now he saw them for what they really were. All this time he had been invincible against them. Even before Mina’s death, the undead did not want him. Now he lay beneath them, broken and bloody, at their mercy.

They had rotted to the point where it was impossible to tell whether they had been men or women. Their race and gender were indiscriminate because
they
were indiscriminate in their desire for violence. Father Joe thought he should pray, thought he should begin reciting the Act of Contrition, but his lips were still. All he could do was stare at them in disbelief.

Maybe if he looked hard enough he might recognize a few people he had tried to save—people who ended up dead because of him. Look hard, Father Joe, because you deserve to feel all the guilt you’ve been avoiding.

One of them dropped as something slammed into the top of its head.

Then another head rocked sideways with a loud
crack.
The body wavered like a balloon, and Father Joe saw the big blond man standing there with an aluminum baseball bat. The man measured up his next swing, readied the bat, and there was another
crack.
A zombie dropped.

Then the third.

The fourth turned to see the blond man.

It dropped, too.

There had only been four.

Lying there on the concrete, blood spilling into his hand, shame flushed his cheeks. He had been helpless because of his own selfishness. He had almost died beating up zombies for fun.

“Nice,” Father Joe said, holding out his hand to the blond man.

“What?”

“The bat. Always wondered if it would work out. Trusted my fists more.”

“Yeah,” the man chuckled because he didn’t know what else to say. He helped Father Joe to his feet.

A familiar face, a regular churchgoer on Sundays. And Tuesdays, and some Saturdays. The big guy sat in the middle of the church, and it wasn’t easy to ignore him. Father Joe vaguely remembered the big man was supposed to play pro football. He had been one of the lucky ones, and he still counted himself lucky.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” Father Joe said.

“You’re bleeding.”

“Maybe. I think so.”

Father Joe looked down. He was, in fact, bleeding.

“Does it hurt?” the football player asked.

“Don’t know. I think at first it did. May I have your shirt?”

The football player didn’t hesitate. He ripped the shirt off his back, bunched it up, and handed it to him. Father Joe pressed the shirt against his side and admired the other man’s musculature.

“Either you’re doing steroids, or I’m doing something wrong,” Father Joe said with a smile.

“You’re a bit old to be out here,” the football player said.

“True. Weren’t you supposed to play ball? For some team in Canada, right?”

“Close,” the football player said and extended his firm hand again. “Name’s Bill. Bill Bailey. Was going to play in Detroit. Practice squad, but it was something.”

“Yeah, that was something to look forward to. You still get to have fun beating people up.” He nodded to the pile of dead bodies.

“I just happened to be in the right place. Just doing my job.” He pointed to the pickup truck loaded with garbage in the bed.

This man wasn’t here for action; he was just doing his job, trying to work for the neighborhood’s welfare. Bill wasn’t out here risking his ass for the sake of vanity. And why did he have to mention “beating people up?” This guy was no more of a Neanderthal than he was, probably less so.

“Thank you,” Father Joe said, and he had to tell himself not to look down or away. There was no reason to be embarrassed just because a man saved him from getting his own ass chewed up. “I’ve seen you in church almost every service.”

“Yeah. I always try to make it.”

“You’re just a devout man, then.”

“What do you mean, Father?”

“Well, you come a lot. I don’t know if you’ve been to Confession. If there’s something troubling you, come and talk to me. I see a lot of people. I don’t mean to say that I’m busy, because well… look at me, I’m not so busy I don’t make time for myself. But anyway, if you need to talk, I’ll listen.”

“So, uh, what now?” Bill asked.

Father Joe didn’t understand the question at first, because he was expecting Bill to begin a rambling, horrible confession.

But when he noticed Bill kept staring at him, he figured it out. The shirt was almost soaked through with blood.

“You think they’re carrying a disease?” Father Joe asked. “Is that what you’re worried about?”

“You obviously still want to live because you’re pretending it didn’t happen, um, Father.”

“And you’re worried I’m going to ask you to do something to me, right?”

“No. That’s a sin. I would never do that.”

Father Joe laughed. “Okay. Yeah. A sin. To end the life of someone who is living on borrowed time.”

“I’m going to leave it up to you. I won’t stop you from hurting yourself, but I can’t do it for you. No way.”

“I doubt we even need to be thinking about it.”

“I can’t let you back into the neighborhood,” Bill said as Father Joe began to walk toward the truck.

“Really? I’m going to help you take care of the garbage. Then we’ll see.”

Just like that, Father Joe walked away. Just like that, he headed toward the truck, bleeding into Bailey’s shirt. With enough pressure, the bleeding would stop, the pain would subside.

Inside the truck was a bottle of Crown Royal, only a shot or two was left. He removed the shirt from his body, peeling it away from the clotting blood, and poured the alcohol over his wound.

Father Joe clenched his teeth to keep himself from making any noise as he rinsed the zombie bite. Here was his ego in play again. After doing everything he could through the years to leave the man he was in Mexico in the boxing ring, he had almost completely become that man all over again. A boxing match smells like the end of the world, only he didn’t know it until now.

When he closed his eyes and felt the sun’s warmth upon the fresh wound, he remembered Kathy when she had emerged from the lobby of the retirement center, her arms outstretched, a bright smile on her face. She was ready to run far, far away. And she would. She would go far, far away. Because she had believed in him. She had believed that Father Joe could protect her.