Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (32 page)

MINA

Daddy rarely drove her anywhere, so she didn’t recognize the memory right away. She was an adult, a version of her flesh that now walked under Rose’s command.

Well, that was okay. At least she didn’t have to fight with Jim or the demon. She didn’t have to fight with Rose, either. If her consciousness would always exist at the whim of her father’s ghost, then it was a better alternative to being eaten alive in her dreams every single night. It was better than eating people to keep the nightmares away.

Head against the window, she watched the highway.

No more roads to travel but this one.

Safe from everything and everyone but Daddy.

White houses, mowed lawns. A dog running on a leash through the neighborhood with a little blond-haired boy chasing after it, pumping his fists. Mina smiled to herself.

The sun was bright and high. Nice. Very nice.

Everyone was still alive.

“I never want to move,” Mina said. Not from the neighborhood, not her body. No movement anywhere. Rest her head against the window and watch houses roll by.

“You don’t have to,” Father Joe said.

She whipped her head around.

The strong, warm smile on his face inspired her own smile. The muscles in her face were uncontrollable. She wanted to smile at him forever.

“Hey,” he said. He reached over and mussed her hair.

“You’re so funny,” she said, laughing.

“I sure hope not. I thought I was Father Joe.”

“Silly!”

“You know what you want to do today?”

“Go home, maybe watch some television. Do I have to eat anyone?”

“I don’t think so. Not if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to. I know you’re supposed to represent what I wish my Daddy had really been like. But he wasn’t like you, Father Joe, and you should go away. This isn’t a good place for you to be in my head.”

Father Joe shook his head. His tan face disappeared for a moment in a flash of sun glare. When the moment passed, she could still see his crooked nose, his heavy eyebrows, his smiling eyes.

“I’ll always be part of you,” he said. “You don’t have to hurt. Nobody has to hurt. Why don’t you let me help you?”

“Okay. But you’ll turn into my Daddy at some point.”

“You don’t really want that.”

She wanted to look at him forever so that he wouldn’t disappear. As soon as she looked out the window again, and then back, he would be gone. Daddy would be telling her about the movie they might watch later.
Zombi
by Lucio Fulci. Over and over again. The mask he wore into their bedroom sometimes looked like one of the dirty, rotten faces of those zombies. Full of maggots, no eyes in their heads, bodies stiff, awkward.

Better to get it over with.

“I don’t recognize the neighborhood, Daddy,” she said, looking at houses composed of white aluminum siding and sharply triangular roofs.

Now Father Joe would be gone.

“I’m taking you to see some friends of ours.”

Father’s Joe’s voice, but it contained a note of seriousness, a note of dread that nearly sent a shiver down her spine.

The car squealed to a stop, and the transmission made a grinding sound as it shifted into park. The houses were packed closely together, privacy fences erected between many of them. Screen doors with holes in the screens. Houses with air conditioning units sitting in picture windows.

When they opened their doors wide to step out, the long groans from the rusty hinges seemed to break the street’s bright serenity.

“Is today a Sunday?” Mina asked. She couldn’t stop herself from skipping toward Father Joe as he walked up a driveway. Sundays were always fun because kids were always playing outside, and they sometimes waved to Mina as she watched them play from her living room.

“Do you want it to be a Sunday?” Father Joe asked. It was just like him to counter her question with a question. He could exchange words with her all day long.

“That would be nice,” Mina said, stroking her long red hair.

She didn’t recognize the house.

Nobody else was out in the neighborhood. Maybe everyone was asleep. Sundays could be like that sometimes. Especially if there was a NASCAR race on.

“Are you comfortable with the fact that I killed you?” Father Joe asked. He buried his hands in the pockets of his black slacks. He shook them as if he wanted to hear change dangle in his pockets. “Twice?”

“I asked you to do it both times,” Mina said. Was he struggling with guilt? How could he feel any kind of emotion if he was just a dream? The dream-Patrick had displayed all the emotions she thought he would share with her if he lived. But she hadn’t been thinking about Father Joe’s feelings about killing her until now. He had killed her at Selfridge Air Base, and he snapped the neck of the zombie she had resided in.

All she wanted to do was escape.

“A part of me wants to protect you from what you’re about to see,” he said. “I’ve done everything in my power, even if I have failed. I think about my boxing matches sometimes, but it’s always been that way for me. Sometimes I would compare being a priest to being a boxer.”

“They’re nothing alike,” Mina said.

He shrugged and lifted his hands from his pockets. “Most people called me
Padre
instead of Father.”

“You miss it?”

“Being alive? I don’t know. I can still fight with you. Here.”

What did he mean? She believed she had discovered clarity as long as she understood that her soul was forever lost in the synapses of eternal nightmares. The demon had made sure her terrible power was used now by Rose, and it was beyond her reach. She was okay with that. Her world had never made enough sense for someone else to understand her, and no routine was ever safe. She didn’t hate change, but it took her a long time to figure things out.

“I never had any friends,” she said, tossing hair over her shoulder.

“Yes, you do.”

“I like it when you smile. You have a handsome smile.”

“Thank you.”

“Something terrible is about to happen. Are you trying to surprise me?”

“You’re right that something terrible is going to happen. I’m not trying to surprise you. I want your help, Mina. I need you.”

She didn’t get it.

Well, of course she didn’t get it. She was insane.

Stroking her long, soft hair, she waited for him to gather the strength to continue toward the house. He was nervous about something. Sweat on his forehead, along the edges of his neck, above his upper lip in the shadow of a moustache.

Didn’t he have a beard before Jim came and took him from the town?

That’s right. Something happened to Father Joe.

She couldn’t remember, but she knew Rose had witnessed it. She knew Rose was involved, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Father Joe was probably dead.

“I’d like to meet my friends,” she said. Her heart fluttered at the thought. Friends? She didn’t have any friends.

Father Joe extended his open hand, and she took it. He led her up to the front porch and opened the door without knocking. Wasn’t that kind of rude? Their friends must have been expecting company.

As soon as they stepped into the tiny living room, the metallic smell of blood overwhelmed her. She had been around a lot of blood, had practically swum in an apocalyptic orgy of violence, but still, humid air allowed the blood smell to hang heavily in the room.

There wasn’t supposed to be death. It was a nice neighborhood. Sunshine and a dog on a leash with a kid chasing after it.

And blood.

And bodies.

Two bodies. Eyes wide open. Broken dolls. Blood soaking into the threadbare, vomit-colored carpet. Broken dolls. Someone had brought a bucket of blood into the room and had thrown it into the air. Broken dolls. Broken people. A man and a woman. Regular people. Broken dolls. This was their home. Broken home. They were no longer alive. Broken lives.

Father Joe performed the sign of the cross and clasped his hands together. He gently placed his hand on Mina’s hip. “This way.”

Head lowered, he led her down the hallway.

He opened a bedroom door, and a young girl was on her hands and knees on a small bed. Completely naked, firm breasts bouncing as a young man pushed into her over and over again from behind. He was holding her hips, and he didn’t bother looking up at the new people who had entered the room.

“We’re kind of like ghosts,” Mina said.

The girl on the bed looked up.

She saw them.

“I like your room,” Mina said. “Are we friends?”

She really did like the room. Even though she wasn’t a big music fan, she recognized Kurt Cobain and David Bowie in the posters that were tacked to the walls. The girl on the bed wore dark mascara and black lipstick. Fishnets lay in a heap on the floor.

“Get out of my head!” the girl on the bed snarled.

The boy didn’t stop. His pace quickened, and Mina noticed the blood crusted beneath his fingernails.

Those icy eyes.

Young, lean, strong. No expression on his face save the perpetual smirk.

“Is that Jim?” Mina asked.

“Get out of my head!” the girl on the bed shouted at them.

Mina put it all together.

“Jim killed your parents,” Mina said.

The younger version of Jim grabbed the girl’s arms and pulled her back, pushing deep into her as his body quaked and a growl escaped from his lips.

“I’m so sorry,” Mina said, because it was the right thing to do.

She would have found it nice if someone gave their condolences if her Daddy had been found dead. She wondered if the police would have offered their condolences to her if she had stayed in the house after eating him.

“Damn you!” the girl cried out. “Get out of my head!”

The girl collapsed face first onto the bed, and Jim disappeared.

“Go to her,” Father Joe said. “She needs you.”

Mina didn’t know what she could possibly say. What was happening? This was someone else’s dream.

She walked over to the bed and sat on its edge. The girl lay slumped, arms dangling over.

“Did Jim come inside you?” Mina said.

The girl looked up. “You’re a goddamn lunatic.”

“I thought he liked me. He liked you, first.”

“What’re you talking about? You’re dead. You shouldn’t be here. This is my power. You’re nothing.”

“You don’t have to be so mean. I think I’ve figured it out. Jim killed your parents, and you let him have sex with you. He was your neighbor. He lived around here, didn’t he? And you’re Rose. Is that really your name? I mean, is it your first name?”

The girl sat up on the bed. How old was she? She seemed to be in her late teens.

“You don’t know who you are,” Mina said. “I’m figuring all this out. It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted, and who I wanted to be. I figured out that I didn’t like to eat people. Father Joe helped me figure it out. Remember when I helped you that one time? I helped you get to the base. I thought it was so cute how much you wanted to see Jim.”

Rose bit her bottom lip and her eyes twitched. She was about to cry.

“The demon is in charge,” Mina said. “But that doesn’t have to be true. You can be in charge. I think I’m supposed to help you, even though I don’t care. I like being gone. I like that I’ve disappeared. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. You have a nice house.”

Rose didn’t know what was happening, had just been resurrected from the dead only to learn that her entire consciousness was stored on a microchip. She was probably trying to figure out if Jim had really killed her parents. Was this real? Did it happen? Is this how Jim knew her from the very start?

“I think I’m putting a lot of pressure on you,” Mina said. She stroked her long red hair, tangling her fingers through its long, thick strands. “I brought Father Joe because he helped me, and I really do want to be your friend. I know what it’s like to give everything for one man to like you.”

Just as she was about to turn toward the doorway, she smelled the blood again. She knew what she would see there in Father Joe’s place.

Duped again.

How easy she was to fool. How vulnerable.

The demon must have been laughing at her.

Rose’s dead parents were standing in the doorway, throats cut open, soaked shirts blood-stuck to their skin.

They weren’t Rose’s parents.

The dead people were her real friends. Patrick and Daddy. Both of them dead, throats cut, eyes looking somewhere else.

Mina couldn’t move.

They were going to eat her.

Patrick had never eaten her before. Neither had Daddy.

Mina tumbled backward over the bed; Rose had pushed her. She knew Rose had pushed her, and the girl jumped up and down on her bed, pointing at Mina, shouting. But Mina couldn’t hear. There was a dull roar in her head.