The Queen of the Dead (34 page)

“Blonde?” Vega asked, hoping she was wrong. The woman bothered her, and she wasn’t sure why. “Pink highlights?”

Father nodded. “And this is Frank.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. When he stood, he towered over her.

“I thought it was faith,” his jaw clenched. “The zombies won’t touch me. I had a crucifix over that door and they wouldn’t come in. Kathy had it in her hand, and it didn’t make a difference. But those things don’t want Frank, either. So here we are. And yes, it’s my fault. I killed everybody. God has nothing to do with it. I’m a man, and this is what I’ve wrought.”

“You’re an idiot,” Vega said.

“You shouldn’t have let Mina go,” Father said. “I’ve seen what she can do. They obey her… I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“You’ve seen lots of bullshit with your eyes, I’m sure. You can blame me if it makes you feel better, but we don’t blame God, and we don’t blame ourselves. It’s not faith, Father. I know it’s not faith…”

Frank laughed. “Dumbasses.”

“I don’t have time to care what the zombies want or don’t want,” Vega said. “We’re not going to have a debate here in the middle of Armageddon. Your best option is to stay here, if they won’t hurt you. I’m heading for Selfridge, and there’s something that might be… worse than zombies.”

Through the desolate parking lot, crippled dead people struggled forward, but Vincent was nowhere to be seen. One second he was there, and the next, gone. No final spray of bullets. No last-minute bravado. He killed for her and put his ass on the line to save a doomed little girl. He had to kill a man who’d been loyal to him to the bitter end. He saved Griggs, and he fought to help Jeremy and Stacy escape the hellish party.

A gust of wind whipped her black hair in front of her face. The rifle felt heavy; she wanted to drop it and run. Father Joe stared at her because he knew she wanted to talk, but she didn’t know what to say anymore. Warriors earned their deaths in this wasted place, and it waited for her, too.

Her first instinct was to bat his hand away when he reached out, but she let his big, gnarled hand rest on her shoulder. His voice was deep and soothing, and she wanted to hear him talk. “If you’re going there, it’s for a reason. A good reason. You don’t have to go alone. I made mistakes, but I acted because I believed I could do something worthy, something good. If three hundred thousand people die so I can save a million, I must accept it.”

“We had our chance here,” Vega whispered, unable to meet his gaze. “We screwed this up. We’re still alive because we’re assholes, Father. God made this world for assholes. And here we are.”

She could feel him smile. “Speak for yourself. Frank, you ready for a walk?”

“Do I look like I’m ready for a walk?”

“Yeah, you do,” Father replied. “The highways were shut down when Detroit was quarantined. We might have a clear shot from here to the base. It’s worth it to try.”

The day’s arrival quickened, the pale sky shredding apart to allow blue spaces to occupy Earth’s canvas. The breeze felt cool as the humidity fled with the storm.

If she waited long enough in the silence, maybe she would hear a gunshot. Maybe she would hear Vincent call out for her.

Trees waved their leaves to applaud the arrival of a more bearable heat.

“It has to be now,” Father Joe said. “They died for us. Maybe we’ll find Jeremy or your friend out there, waiting. Rose might be out there. But now, there’s only Selfridge.”

She looked into his dark eyes. “There’s only Selfridge.”

“I have to piss,” Frank said, “and someone has to help me do it. Unlucky fuckers.”

GRIGGS

After Mina was done with her feast, Griggs tossed her the wet lingerie she’d been wearing beneath the bunny costume. After she dressed, he picked her up and threw her over his shoulder. Her eyes were half-closed, her lips trembling. She looked like a drunk vampire.

Carrying her semi-conscious body past the truck and through the shattered wall, he stepped over rubble while a group of zombies waited for them.

“Nice going, Griggs,” he said.

“Walk,” Mina said through a weak groan.

The zombies didn’t move. They wavered on their feet and watched as Griggs walked by.

Maybe he heard a gunshot a few moments ago; Vega and Vincent probably had to fight their way out. They could be dead by now, so it was no use looking for them. Those two seemed like they wanted to die—hopefully, their wish had been granted. It was too bad about Vega, though. Waste of a tight body.

Life would be easier if he didn’t have to carry Mina. It might be better just to leave her, but that would be a waste, too. She was the key to everything. Without the external drive with the video, he still had his star, and she would make another video.

As long as she lived, the dream lived with her.

Two rows of zombies stood on either side, forming a corridor of dead flesh. Griggs stopped, his 9mm in his fist because there was only one bullet left for the Eagle.

Feces and vomit, blood and dust. The smell of the unwashed, the dirty cement where a chalk outline would replace a person. He’d duck under yellow tape, smash a cigarette beneath his heel, and step into a room filled with flies and conclusions. The smell never left him. He was surrounded by it, and the dead watched.

If he looked closely enough at their faces, he might find the guilt he always wanted, the sadness that should accompany morality. He would want to deliver justice to a killer rather than apprehend, because it was the job. Chasing blood through abandoned houses and streets where men sat on porches with shotguns. In the faces of the dead, he might find the ghosts of the murdered, the people who didn’t haunt him, the people who didn’t ask for deliverance from whatever universe they were exiled to.

But he couldn’t see any faces. He couldn’t remember any of the victims he swore to avenge beneath the nimbus light of badge and paycheck. He used to go straight home and ignore his wife and their mewling babies. He would hide behind skin mags and videos of black women getting drilled by a gang of hairy men who sweated and grunted. When his kids grew older, he had the internet, and when they were gone, he had Mina.

He didn’t move and the dead watched.

“You belong to us, cocksucker,” Mina said.

Mina never sounded so sure of herself. The withdrawals were breaking her down.

There was no way around, no way to go back or forward. Morning was being summoned by time and gravity, a cool breath of wind carrying the taint of rot heralding a colorless dawn. The dead stood at attention, waiting for him.

“They’ll let you pass,” Mina said. “We own your soul. You’re fucked.”

He laughed at Mina’s outburst. “Of course you do,” he said. “I already knew that, I guess.”

But he still didn’t move. Their clothes had been shredded, threads hanging with slices of flesh. Hair scalded by fire or ripped off with departed scalp, eyes missing from their sockets, noses chewed away, rows of crooked teeth revealed in fleshless faces, veins dragged from throats, heads hanging askew, empty rib cages sitting atop thick, fleshy thighs.

“This is nothing new, people,” Griggs said to them. He needed to say it. They were dead, and he was familiar with them. They didn’t have the power to judge him. They were weak; they allowed themselves to be killed. Maybe they did something stupid like run out into the street to fight back. Maybe they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Tough luck.

To hell with it.

He carried Mina through the aisle of corpses without giving it another thought. Being afraid of the dead was for losers. He never would’ve survived on the force if he was afraid of dead people.

Nobody moved.

When he reached the end of the line, he heard Vega’s wild shout. “Vincent!”

Maybe the bastard was about to die. Maybe they were both going to bite the dust. Good for them.

He turned around, holstered the 9mm, and showed the zombies behind him a middle finger. “Suck on it,” he said, unable to contain his laughter.

They wanted nothing to do with him. Maybe they knew he tasted like shit.

More zombies milled about in the street, but he couldn’t see his old friends. Neither of them fired their weapons; weren’t they supposed to go down with guns blazing?

Since nobody felt like eating him, he lowered Mina to the pavement. She belched, and Jeremy’s blood dribbled from her mouth. Her eyelids fluttered like moths in the throes of seizures. Without the hard drive, he needed her now more than ever. A smart businessman modified plans and took risks. A smart businessman protected his greatest assets.

The crowd was still watching him.

He traced the line of Mina’s jaw with his finger. She was a pretty creature who nearly slipped through his fingers and into the grave, his precious commodity stolen by a horrorist, the only woman who truly knew him and gave a damn, a woman whose brain was saturated with his identity. His name was on her lips and she would please him on the rocky shores of Mars near the time-murdered riverbeds; she would please him on a melting glacier and on the street in the middle of a revolution. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do to make him smile.

Emerald eyes snapped open and searched his face.

If need was an emotion, then he felt it. If need equated with lust and desire, then he was a junkie with track marks on his soul. Her body made him quiver, even now, amidst the burning concrete and brick and the storm drains carrying the human blood of villages and cities back into the mouths of a civilized species.

Muscle and bone hardened and his breath wrestled with hers.

“I want to forgive you,” he said. He painted his tears onto her heart when they were together, and she traded him for a serial killer.

The dead dragged their feet across the pavement. Boots stomped through puddles. Exposed toes were scraped through the cracks and potholes.

Her arms wrapped around him.

“We’ll always love you,” she whispered in his ear.

From out of his pocket, he produced his dead lawyer’s cell phone. Desmond Hunter could still help him. There was enough battery left in the high-end phone; he ignored the text messages from a woman named Bella, whose desperate cries for her lover had devolved into an admission that he was dead, and her messages were being greeted by the silence of death.

Mina was going to make it up to him. In front of an audience which now encircled them with their putrescent bodies, he unzipped his pants and showed it to her.

“This is all that matters.” He straddled her hips and looked around him. “You’re all going to be movie stars! I’ll bring you the fuckin’ waiver, or maybe you don’t have rights now that you’re dead…”

He was a genius and his body felt like it grew, his shoulders spreading miles apart, green-gemstone eyes staring up at him with all the subservient complicity of a cat which appeased while a benign intelligence crafted dreams of other animals. He was the most powerful man in the universe, and everything was as it should be. Mina belonged to him, and together they would record the greatest sex scene the world could imagine. An episode written in the blood of dead gods upon the walls of temples, a union foreseen in apocalyptic visions, which emulated the designs of men who thought only of fucking and murder, of caves and fires, of wheels that spun upon wheels which spun upon wheels.

Even if she wasn’t wet, his strength would break her.

The phone recorded, and while he pushed her into the ground, he panned the camera around the crowd.

Mina moaned for him.

“Fill me, please fill me…”

The zoom feature captured her blood-moistened lips. Her back arched.

“Closer,” she said.

A genius of the first order. This is what they have all wrought… this is what those bastards have made, those degenerate bastards, those dehumanizers and war machines, those blood-monkeys and grinning clowns with big heads stuffed into starched collars. This is what they want. Give them what they want. This is what they made, so give it to them. He was their product and their son, their monster and their angel. He was their truth soaked in crime scene sorcery and the acidic upheaval of saints who’ve given up on everybody because it was just a waste of time, anyway.

“Closer.”

Let them watch. Let them see.

“Inside me.”

He could go on forever, and his adoring fans had all the time in the world.

The energy was too much. His time was ending. Stop the flow of blood at the pass and keep going. She deserved it. She came back just to have it again. To be his lady.

Mina wanted to press against his body whenever he was close because she wanted to feel every inch of his flesh relax against hers; when she sat up, he felt like he was watching the video and not recording it. He looked down the length of her back at the tangled mass of red hair. Her spinal cord stretched her thin, pale flesh as if it wanted to explode through her body.

Her kiss upon his neck was cold, but the warmth that ran down inside of his shirt didn’t make sense. His fingers tingled, and the phone slipped. He hoped it wasn’t broken. If she brought her lips to his, a taste of Jeremy might linger there.