The Queen of the Dead (36 page)

Mina’s hand was surprisingly warm against her own cheek. “You’re a pretty girl. You could have anything the girls get on TV. I think I wanted love and I think I knew my own name, but I might not even be here. Patrick was a lie because he didn’t know how to love, like Jim. They’re the same.”

Rose was the expert. She’d studied love in all its forms and she murdered with the idea and the feeling in the hearts of her victims. She created the illusion of love. She weaved it like a spell and used it to close eyes. But in herself it was an infection from outer space.

The van rocked.

“If the world ends, there will be no more people like Jim or Patrick,” Mina said. “No more people like me. All of us are like the zombies. No different. Tell me that we’re different, and we’ll live. We’ll save the world. We’ll do it for love, if love is real.”

“He’s not me,” Rose said, “but he
is
me. I can’t be him, and I don’t know if I can understand him, and it’s the mystery that moves me. It’s the wonder, the magic. It’s everything that can’t be that I want to be. It’s balance.”

Mina ran her fingers through Rose’s platinum blond strands, untangling them and looking upon individual strands as if reading them to find clues to a murder case.

“It didn’t matter yesterday,” Mina said. “If we find out how this happened, will it help us? Will the nightmares go away? The people who saw it—will it change them?”

The van seemed about to tip completely to one side or the other.

Meat inside a can.

A Special Forces operative is trained to make decisions under pressure; you could be wounded and attempting to evade capture, but you must find a way to survive. The mission must not be compromised. You must be trained to react accordingly, emotion be damned. Fear is for the primitive, the weak. You must not break in an interrogation; you must disconnect yourself from your body, let the pain kill somebody else.

“It doesn’t make a difference what changes,” Rose said, “we’re still human, no matter how fucked up we are. We’re nothing like those things out there. They’re what we can’t be… what we shouldn’t be… what we’ve allowed parts of ourselves to become.”

Mina looked down at her lap.

Rose was gone. Far away. Drifting into a cold place. She let it get this bad, and she deserved it. Suddenly vulnerable at the mention of a man who broke her down, the man who showed her how to breathe. The mission had never really mattered. A warrior’s final battle is against oneself… had Jim said that, once?

The van stopped moving.

“I think I like your answer,” Mina said. “I never really wanted to live, I mean, I didn’t know what any of it meant. I loved Daddy, and Patrick, and I did what I thought they wanted me to do. But not everyone is bad like me. There’s Father Joe, and Jack was a nice person before his brother killed him.”

It was over, just like that. Feet scraped along and stray hands bumped against the windows, but Rose didn’t look at them. The time for looking had passed, too.

“We’re all going to Selfridge together,” Mina said. “I can take you to Jim, and he’s going to tell me who I am. What I am. This is what I want to know. Can you help me?”

She fumbled with the radio equipment on her belt. Macon, the boy, had watched her use it before, and his freckles were now beneath an ocean of blood. She saw his body, and that of Kathy. There had been no blame in Father’s eyes, but Frank had a few choice words.

“Yes,” Rose said, and wondered if now was a good time to kill her, while a legion of the dead passed outside.

VEGA

“A cold beer,” Vega said.

Father pushed the mouthy old bastard along the empty freeway. The priest smiled.

“Tequila, I think,” Father said, “but I’d settle for a beer, or two.”

The morning was peaceful and welcoming. A reprieve from blood and war, enough to make you forget about the buckets of gore that soaked the streets, enough to make you forget about all the dead people who wanted to eat you. If peace like this lay at the end of civilization’s days, then maybe the end wasn’t a bad thing.

Even though the military shut down most of the freeway, Vega wondered about the missing barricades that should’ve been positioned around the ramps. From a tactical standpoint, it looked like the boys upstairs decided to focus on the evac in Detroit at the Renaissance Center, seal the Canadian border, and let the rest of the chips fall where they would. Instead of concentrating all the forces on containment, stabilization, and recovery, everyone bugged out. That could only mean Detroit wasn’t a priority, and neither was Michigan. The zombies had to be all over the damn place, and bombing Detroit into the ground wasn’t even necessary at this point.

Selfridge then, would be abandoned.

It would help to have Vincent around, or anyone else who’d been killed in the past three days. She knew him and understood him; even if she tried to numb herself against the pangs of loss, it was never a simple thing to forget that a man she cared about was gone.

Back in the hotel with Miles, watching him snort coke into his brain, she hadn’t cared about anyone. When Miles died, everything changed. Then Bob. Shanna, a girl she never met.

Vincent had been standing only a few yards away from her, and he vanished into the arms of the dead.

The priest couldn’t wipe the stupid grin off his face. The quiet houses and the lack of smoke in the sky were validating his hope in the human race. Not everyone was a bloodthirsty monster; and the priest could shove it down her throat.

“You sure you don’t want a sidearm?” Vega asked him out of common courtesy.

Father Joe looked into the sunlight, the creases of middle-age scarring his face, his crooked nose like a smashed meatball.

“I’ll take one,” Frank said, “I can put both of you out of my misery.”

The priest said, “The soldier should keep the guns. With the luck I’ve been having, I’d probably shoot Frank accidentally.”

“Going to rely on a bit of Jesus power to keep you alive?” Vega said, though she knew she was asking for it. She wasn’t in the mood to argue with him, and she knew she was going to take her frustration out on him. Emotions she didn’t want to face had to be faced now before she let a thousand zombies chew on her.

The priest was about to become her punching bag, and he knew it. They both needed to talk this out. He needed to get it off his chest, too.

“My faith saved me, yes,” Father said. “I’ve beat myself up over everyone’s death. I’ve been fighting with myself, and I’m not going to blame God, or say it was part of His plan. I don’t know what His plan is; I’m not a prophet, I’m not a saint. I’ve fucked up plenty of times, Vega. That’s how I got here. And I don’t know if Kathy was a believer, and I don’t know about Macon, and I don’t know about Frank… but I did what I could. I did what was within my power.”

“You’re invincible and you thought the others would be, too,” Vega said.

“I never said I’m invincible,” Father said. “Maybe I took it for granted. Mina’s a suffering woman and the zombies… I already told you. I don’t know if it has anything to do with faith… I don’t know anything. I can think and I can guess. I can pray. Maybe the zombies don’t like me because I’m Mexican, or because I smell, or both. The smelling would explain why Frank’s still alive.”

“I’m Arabic, Spanish, and black, and the zombies think I’m a damn quesadilla,” Vega said. “I believe in God, but He lets me go on killing people, and He lets me keep living despite what happens to good people like John, and a little girl named Shanna. You have all the answers, so keep talking. I’m all ears, and it seems like we have a couple miles to answer the most important questions we have.”

“Both of you can shut up,” Frank’s voice was labored, his hands shaking violently, his red eyes widening. “Stop the fucking caravan.”

Frank unbuttoned his shirt and Vega sensed he wouldn’t want their help. His fingers worked quickly as if prompted by desperation only a deadline could provoke.

His exposed, mottled flesh sagged beneath a forest of bristling white hair. “This is my heart,” Frank choked, his voice trembling in tune with his hands. “When God took my boys from me, I didn’t question it. I was angry at the fucking world, but I knew there would always be goodness. I knew there would always be light. God is everywhere, but it’s no goddamn miracle that evil exists, too, and it’s no goddamn miracle that He’s here with us. You don’t know what faith is.” His red eyes focused on Vega. “You don’t know what faith is.”

Frank wheezed and stared beyond them, looking at the light above them, his lips smacking together wetly.

Miles used to call her a narcissist.

Pouring alcohol and violence into her soul so she wouldn’t have to look for the goodness she didn’t know how to find. The ignorance of a savage was preferable. Following the path of a bullet into a man’s flesh to empty out the suffering in her soul. She always knew what it meant to her, but she didn’t know who God was; she was a follower because she needed her actions to define wickedness, and the wickedness made her alive. It was her way. Until Miles. Until Shanna.

Until Vincent.

Until now.

Father ran his fingers over Frank’s head, stroking the wayward strands of wiry hair, limpid cobwebs of a dying spider. Frank sagged in his chair and closed his eyes. His neck lost its strength and the bulbous head drooped. A foul gust of breath pushed through his face, and Vega thought of the undead cannibals and the scent they carried with them.

The priest closed his eyes and raised his face to the sky. He performed the sign of the cross on Frank’s head. Fresh tears raced through the hills and valleys of his broad, dark face. He shakily mumbled Latin words, “
Deus, pater misericordiárum, qui per mortem…”

Vega set her rifle down and drew one of the Sig Sauers.

Frank’s chest heaved, and his shoulders shrank as if the man’s body wanted to fold inside of itself, the smaller representation being the natural shape of the man, the original form.

Like a lawn mower moving like a pretend ghost on a summer morning through the silences, a plane roared over them, invisible even in the sky that had murdered all clouds to become a broad expanse of blue.

When the priest finished, he shoved his hands into his pockets and walked away without looking back.

She stepped behind Frank, and the gunshot echoed.

***

Neither of them wanted to talk. They were strangers to one another; their reasons for making the trip were pointless and silly, a rationale replaced by vanity. Selfridge held nothing for either of them, but it existed, and that was enough.

All the macho bullshit had been thrown out the window. It was meat for the dead. She was alone again, even with the priest. Griggs would even be good company, at this point. He had a better chance at surviving than they did; he gave no quarter and fully understood who he was and what needed to be done.

With Vincent, there was unfinished business. Only now did she understand that she wanted to talk, that she wanted to confess her sins, to lay down the horrors of sociopathy and find a human being named Amparo Vega, if she existed at all. Her father had simply disappeared, and so had Miles. Bob never wanted to hear it. All the other men in her life were afterthoughts flushed down the toilet with chunks of a hangover.

But he was gone, like the others. He would have heard her scream without judgment, would have been there to watch her die if she wanted it.

Father Joe stopped walking. He focused on his dusty shoes and the blood on his pants. He looked like a homeless man who’d been dumped into vat of ketchup after rolling in a box of dust. Even the collar was stained by the apocalypse.

“You’re not exactly my biggest fan,” he said.

“I don’t know you.”

“But you’re uncomfortable. I can’t blame you. I’m a threat to everyone but myself.”

“You seem to be doing a great job with self-inflicted pain,” she said. “Do we have to do this now?”

“I just want to know if you’re more of a marathon runner, or a sprinter.”

He breathed in deeply, and she looked at him with an eyebrow arched. She didn’t feel like playing games, or getting to know him.

“What?” she asked.

He smirked. “I can smell them. I’m surprised you can’t.”

If he hadn’t already lost it, his brain was in the frying pain, now. She could smell Earth and asphalt with a hint of ash. Fresh air was the best thing she could taste, here, in the sprawling empty with billboard signs peering down with advertisements for a morning Hip-Hop radio show and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

“You know what?” he changed his tone. “Never mind. I think it’s just you I smell. A bit ripe.”

“You know the way to a woman’s heart, Father,” she said.

“Don’t like women, remember? Took the oath.”

She couldn’t smell them.

Scrambling down an off-ramp, pushing through each other, hundreds of them, picking up speed with the power of their collective mass. Limbs flailed as bodies were discarded from the overpass like they’d been shed by an uncoiling snake. Heads popped open and bones cracked when they hit the pavement below. The crowd’s body slithered over cars. Vega thought of the day after Thanksgiving, better known as Black Friday in the holiday shopping world; she enjoyed watching the news from a hotel room with bleary, drunken eyes from the previous night’s binge—hundreds of people hungry for deals, trampling over each other to break through the doors before it was too late. Before the desired item was gobbled up by another consumer.

“Oh, yeah,” Vega nodded, “let’s fucking do this. Right now. Let’s do it.”

Neither could wipe the smiles from their faces.

A pile of flesh and bone, one creature moving across a dead land, bones and blood cracking, mouths open like the revelers of a shitty Halloween costume party where everyone painted their own makeup in front of a mirror. They were the white-collared gentlemen who ran beside their own rainbow-colored whores, and leathery wives with horse-flesh skin stretched thinly over bones exposed to too many tanning beds. They wore tennis shorts and lost their shoes; they were trampled beneath stronger legs or they were pushed forward by the multiplying number, the uncountable legions murdered by their own malice and disarray.