The Queen of the Dead (38 page)

“How many missions for you, Vega?” Father Joe asked, his voice collected and smooth as if he were sitting across from her at a nice restaurant and he was the confident bachelor.

The zombies didn’t look at them; their focus was centered on whatever damnation-infused goal drove them forward.

It was a question she didn’t have an answer to, and she knew it would take her some time to figure it out. He was doing it to keep her calm, to keep her eyes out of the bright sun, to keep her from retching while the foul aromas of murder and rot made her eyes water.

“My name’s Amparo,” she almost whispered, her will to breathe ravaged by the presence of the horde.

“They called me
Sangriento Joe,
” he said. “I was a boxer. I grew up near Ciudad Juarez. I’ve outlived most of the kids I grew up with. I know because they were dead when I was still there.”

She wanted him to talk. She searched the faces for people she recognized; maybe Miles hadn’t been completely destroyed at the Renaissance Center. Maybe Bob hadn’t been finished off by Griggs. She could look into the bloodstained visages that looked like bad Halloween makeup jobs, sloppy and chaotic, slashes of blood crusted over teeth and seemingly finger-painted over the blank canvases of fleshless skulls. If she stared hard enough, she’d find the first man she killed, cut down by her machine gun while she was behind the cover of a wall in Kabul. It happened quickly, and with the hail of bullets over her head, there was no time to recognize what happened. The man had simply been killed with no fanfare, no final words, and no goodbye kiss to a child or a wife. She hadn’t even seen his face. She kept firing at bodies, at flesh, and the casual moment of combat, the fusion of adrenaline and purpose, was not unlike going on a theme park ride for the first time, only to jump back in line right after.

The faces around her were the ghosts of the slaughtered, the specters of shadow and the victims of an insatiable lust for violence. Vincent and a thousand others who represented questions she could never answer. A criminal with no memory of the crimes she committed.

“I don’t know how many people I’ve killed,” Vega said. “I don’t really care, either.”

“You’re thinking about it,” Father said, “now it matters. You’re not shaking, and you’re not cold. You’re not even afraid. If I let you go, you could disappear into the crowd, float away from life.”

“Father, I want to survive this, but I can’t change what I am. Don’t waste your breath.”

The tide of corpses was moving too slowly; she wanted Father to carry her right through them all and straight to Traverse. After he was dead, she knew what she would do next: keep fighting. Keep killing. Because somebody had to, and it was all she could do, all she was capable of. This fight wouldn’t end with the death of one man. Were all these dead fuckers just supposed to drop dead when Traverse was cold?

Her arms hugged the priest’s broad body. She didn’t want to let him go.

“Father,” she hesitated, looking into the frozen faces of dead people who were fixated on a subconscious need they couldn’t possibly understand.

“I’m here for you,” his big hand rubbed the black hair on her tangled scalp. “Tell me. Tell me anything now. Tell me anything and everything so you know it… so you can feel it now.”

“Do you blame yourself for what happened?”

He didn’t hesitate. “I did what I could. I did what was in my power. Better to do everything than nothing. I’m not a martyr… I just have that whole guilt bullshit I’ve been dealing with. And I haven’t had a beer… in a while.”

The priest began to tell her about the time he killed a man in the boxing ring. The sweat poured into her eyes without resistance, her eyelashes fluttering. The wall of dead flesh blocked the breeze, and the sun pounded relentlessly, the morning assault baking the exposed bodily fluids, and organs not bled into the ground or stuffed into the mouths of the dead race they had joined upon admittance to the realm of the deceased.

The story of manslaughter and the old man who might’ve been the eldest man in Ciudad Juarez, or perhaps he didn’t exist at all, which was more likely, rolled off the priest’s tongue with the sun beating down. They swayed together between corpses, and she half-listened to his story while searching the dead faces for memories. For hints of the past, but the past wanted nothing to do with her.

She was afraid for her life, but she wasn’t afraid of
them.
Grotesquerie and mutilation, blood corrupted by disease, or narcotics, or mental dysfunctions catalogued and medicated. There was nothing to fear from the human race ripped inside-out, the internal mechanisms that had defined their lives exposed to nature to rot until ash and dust conquer the world at last. The evolution of the species. The depressed, the arrogant, the impoverished, the wealthy. The sum of derangement and normalcy, conformity and individuality.

The miasma of history in chewed limbs and creaking bone, putrescence and tattered clothing. There was nothing to fear from these.

“Prayer to God is like talking to a therapist,” Father said. “It holds the same power. We speak and no real answers are provided. Answers are revealed and granted through action.”

“If you died now, you’d be satisfied?” she said, clinging to him.

“It’s a feeling we should always have,” he replied. “Any moment, we might be called away. Some people spend that last moment text-messaging, and some spend it in the arms of a lover.”

What did Vincent want? What did anyone really want? It wasn’t this. Whatever it is, it sure as hell wasn’t this.

Death has been redefined, and nobody envisioned this.

They would have to conquer death.

A storm of flies accompanied the pillars of smoke that rose from the museum; piles of the dead had collected on bloody hills of limbs and flesh, fabric and bone. They looked like nothing more than mannequins being moved, bulldozed out of a warehouse; manufactured bodies thrown away carelessly. The herd thinned over the airfield, though there were more obstacles for the dead crowd to struggle through, including wayward shoes and bullets, baby strollers and machine guns. The entire county had tried to push through the base’s perimeter for the safety network only a barrage of gunfire could provide; those left behind had become this second wave of refugees—the undead, the wasted, and the murdered.

Wherever they were going together, not all of them would make it. Broken knees and twisted ankles dropped hundreds of them.

“We stay with the tide,” Father Joe said, releasing her because the crowd spread out over the base. They could move freely, but they had to be careful not to get stuck against a wall of bodies and the roving horde.

“Don’t let them sweep us through,” Vega said, pulling him by the hand between the walking dead. “It’s like we’re not even here. They don’t notice us.”

There was an intelligence, or some directive, behind this epidemic.

If they weren’t careful, they would get pulled into a meat grinder.

She led Father Joe to an open hangar where a refueling plane had been left behind. The damn priest better not ask her if she knew how to fly it; civilians always assumed that a soldier knows how to fly a plane, like a war hero in a bad action film.

The zombies were filing through the hanger; the place smelled like a slaughterhouse and most of the blood hadn’t dried yet. The former boxer had the same idea she did, and followed her into the plane.

Both of them plopped down. They stared at each other for a moment, covered in sweat, their bodies heaving while chasing breaths. Vega remembered a moment just like this with Bob when they managed to get into the Eloise Fields. She had grabbed that crusty old bastard and shared a laugh with him.

There was no laughter this time. There were no more words. They had confessed their sins and here they sat, the redeemer and the damned.

“You need to learn how to drive a damn motorcycle,” she said.

“And you need to learn how to shoot,” Father said.

Her reaction to him outside had been strange, but now that she found herself alone with him in the plane’s dark, she wanted to move away; he didn’t need any more opportunities to pry her open. She had enough cathartic moments in the past few hours to last a lifetime.

Exhaustion was taking its toll. Her headache was returning in full-force, and too many hours had passed since she ate anything. Some bad hamburgers at Vincent’s gun shack grilled by John Charles on a George Foreman.

She was tired of feeling sweaty clothes cling to her skin. The shirt and Kevlar were peeled off, leaving her in the black bra and the tattoo of the Virgin Mary that was sketched expertly upon her left side, a large portrait of the woman that extended across Vega’s hard abs. New scars had joined the old ones from hands that had ripped across her flesh, but none of that mattered now.

“You might want to close your eyes,
Sangriento,”
she said from the cockpit. “I’ve got tits like a boy, so maybe you won’t mind looking.”

“Lots of whores where I come from,” Father said. “I’m a priest, not a fucking eunuch.”

He lost his cool for a moment; he was playing games, too. The business at hand was survival.

“We’ll pick up guns outside,” she said. “They’re all over the place. I’d like to see how those things congregate, where they end up. Then we make our move.”

“I never asked you exactly what your mission is,” Father said.

She sat down in the pilot’s seat where Jack had been a few hours before.

A part of her wanted to give him another snotty retort, but the time for playing games was over.

“His name’s Jim Traverse. Former Black Ops, Delta Force. Went AWOL and became a serial killer. He’s The Artist, now, and he’s been locked up in a loony bin. Somebody thinks he’s involved with this, and he’s supposed to be roaming around here. My guess is whatever’s going on… it involves him.”

“The government doesn’t want him,” Father said. “There’d be more of an… effort to get him.”

Vega shrugged. Miles and everyone else had already second-guessed the mission, and that was ages ago, in another lifetime.

In a few more minutes, the mystery would be solved.

MINA

Rose was pretty, and it was nice to have her hands all over the woman’s body. Patrick always wanted to have two women at the same time, and she understood why. It would’ve been fun. While the dead filed past the van on their way to Selfridge, Mina held Rose and let the woman make the decision to move. It would be nice to be carried like a princess, or even just played with for a while.

But Rose was scared, and wasn’t sure what to do. Mina wanted to see the world through the eyes of the dead, and she wanted to be with Jack. She gave up on Rose and left her body.

The voice kept telling her she was responsible; these were her creations, but she didn’t understand how it could happen. Sure, there was the first video with Patrick, and he somehow let that video get out, but that didn’t explain how everything happened, or why
zombies
, of all things.

You’ve always been one of us,
the voice explained.

Nothing could scare her, not even the voice. Eating Patrick had been a matter of course; his goals had nothing to do with hers, and he wanted to take her away from all the things that were becoming important. He didn’t understand her power and he would abuse it for himself, and it was
hers.
Something she was meant to have.

There was still love for Patrick in her heart. She loved him now more than ever, since he’d been willing to share his flesh with her. It was true love, and something she wanted while she was in his arms. She’d always been a giving lover, and for once, her desires became paramount, and he enjoyed it. The sad thing was that Patrick was dead. She hadn’t been thinking at the time—the voice had complete control, its words egging her on, telling her how wonderful he tasted (he did taste pretty damn good).

So many of them—dead people full of memories and regret, their subconscious collective a dirge of sorrow. She could feel their sadness, but she kept them moving forward. Hundreds, thousands… and when she found Father Joe and the soldier woman, she let them pass. She wanted to see Father again because he was such a nice guy. She didn’t want her power to be used for evil; killing everyone wasn’t on her list of priorities, and Father could help her with the voice.

Jack was easy to find. She was drawn to him because she was already familiar with his madness, his pain. All he ever wanted was love.

She was with Jack in a conference room at the base with people tied up to chairs, their mouths exposed so their screams could be heard. Jim walked around them, his arms behind his back, patiently listening to their denouncements, their hatred, their begging.

Jim limped around them and smirked. A television monitor in the room came to life, and the captives stopped their protesting.

Another man stood in a corner with his arms over his chest and a wide grin splitting open his face. This was Jerry. The killer.

One of the captives lashed out, his voice louder than the rest. Jack knew him, and Mina remembered his name. Ed. The cool shirt he wore helped him stand out in Jack’s memory.