Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (33 page)

She didn’t want to be eaten again.

Mina shook her head back and forth. She could feel her bottom lip quivering. She really wanted to move, try and get out of there, run back into the sunshine, maybe help the boy chase his dog.

She curled into a ball and tried to say something to the dead people that stood over her.

“Daddy…?” was all she could muster.

Rose was shouting.

The window in the bedroom was bright. The sun outside was high, its light strong.

Mina thought about moving. Shivers coursed through her frail body.

The dead always knelt, their knees snapping. Patrick was no different. He knelt beside her, and Daddy knelt with him.

Patrick’s hand closed over her face. Rough and weathered, calluses scraping against her cheek as his hand attempted to grab the fleshy part of her cheek. There wasn’t much for him to grab. Fingernails dug into her face. Her face became wet. She couldn’t see. Another hand was on her face.

Smothering her. Smothering.

Punched in the stomach. Wind sucked out of her body. She couldn’t see, fingers digging into her face. Heat. Her skin was hot. Her face was hot. Her stomach felt cold. Her face was hot, and she couldn’t breathe. A cold space where her stomach was.

No. She knew this feeling.

Pressure in her eyes. Something pressing into them. She tried to grab whatever it was, her hands grasping air.

Her lower jaw opened wide because she wanted to scream, but something warm and dirty filled her mouth. She gagged on it; a hand that pinched her tongue, tried to pull it out. Her tongue was stretching, stretching.

Her face was wet. Her stomach was cold. Her face was hot. She couldn’t see. Smothered. Couldn’t breathe.

At least she couldn’t see what they were doing to her.

Look at how much they love you, Mina.

The demon’s voice.

And then she could see everything.

VEGA

Time to get the fuck out of here.

The building was shaking and people were shooting. Vega was missing out on something. She didn’t know exactly where she was or if she was anywhere at all. There was a fight, and she needed to be part of it.

Starving, thirsty, tired. But there was no time to be any of those things. Vitamin-deprived, hollow eyes. Weak.

Excuses.

Guns.

Zombies.

One of those three didn’t mix. She had a one-track mind, and there were plenty of zombies to waste. Plenty of guns lying around. There was no way she was going to feel sorry for herself now.

She was going to kill Traverse. And Sutter.

And Vincent.

The thought randomly occurred to her. It should be her bullet that ends him. Her mind was cluttered with thoughts of violence, and Vincent was included in that confusion.

Shouts and jeers throughout the train station indicated that something big was going down.

The massive, multi-storied train station seemed like an ancient temple dedicated to murder and carnage. Every corridor looked the same. Broken glass, shattered doorways, trash, clothing, the smell of blood and dust. Trash everywhere. Artifacts left behind by the homeless who used to sleep here. Walls sprayed with a variety of unique graffiti tags. There was no glass on the windows. The glass was on the floor. The glass had replaced any carpeting that might have been here.

Pyramids made of human bones, the rags of carved flesh hanging like wet moss over the skeletal eaves. Two men sitting together in the bones, watching her. One of them was Rook.

“What happened to me?” she asked him.

“You met the bone man. I don’t know what he did to you. Probably what he did to all of us.”

“Explain.”

“You’re not afraid to die.”

“You’re sitting around and moping because your friend is dead.”

Rook looked away. Here was a man who had given up. Someone had taken his fantasy away from him, and reality was too much.

“We got some ammo,” Rook said. “Guns. You want to go out there? Go ahead.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Fair deal.”

They weren’t in a hurry to die, and preferred she just go out there and do the fighting, if that’s what she wanted to do. Better her than them. Was this the new way of thinking for survivors?

Everyone wanted to be left alone?

Really?

And they did have guns.

“Sutter lets you do this?” Vega asked them.

“Who’s Sutter?” the other man asked her. Rook picked up guns and loaded them for her so that she could see the weapons were in working condition.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” she said.

“It’s not like this everywhere, you know,” the other man said. “Just here. This place is some kind of fucked up. Real bad. We’re bringing in food and bringing people out. It’s a good deal. No reason why anyone needs to be here.”

“I’ll take all of them,” she said, looking at the spread of weapons.

They gave her what they could. A Daniel Defense carbine, 5.56mm semi-auto with black stock and scope, complete with shoulder strap. Four cartridges for the weapon.

“Cost a lot?” Vega asked. They didn’t answer.

She was provided a belt and a shoulder holster to carry a 9mm. Two cartridges.

That would give her maybe five minutes of action.

But damn, it felt good to hold the rifle.

“JIMMY! YOU’RE MY HERO, BABY!”

Sutter calling out through his megaphone. A breeze flitted through the corridor, and Vega thought of a rotted storm, a corrupted storm, a dead storm.

“I promise to kill as many as I can,” she told the men.

“Zombies?”

“Them too.”

A rising tide roaring toward a shoreline; the hum from the groaning mass of zombies outside grew louder.

“I’M HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIFE!” Sutter announced.

The building shook, and drops of an oily black liquid sprayed through the windows, splashing the graffiti-stained walls.

Whatever the bone man had done to her was about to work. She really wasn’t afraid of death.

Gunfire popped off, slapping at the air. Violence. Violence. Screams.

Vega left the men behind, running down the stairs. She joined several other men who filed down the steps, crashing into each other, sliding shells into shotguns, calmly walking, calmly moving. Nobody was panicking. They all moved purposefully. Nobody looked at her.

And then people were trying to run back up.

“Get up the stairs! There’s too damn many of them!”

Panic.

Tide of bodies lapping shore. Nobody could go anywhere.

Vega was slender enough to push between them, and their bodies were wet. Someone tried to grab her rifle, but she was able to make a lucky guess with her heel and kick the right shin. Hands released her rifle.

When she felt the hot, metallic breath upon her face, she knew what it was.

It was time.

Her eyes found a face that was black, a face that had rotted. The skull was stiff, like it was nothing more than the head of a dusty puppet.

She couldn’t draw the 9mm. Not enough space to reach for the weapon.

And the black face jerked forward and latched onto the shoulder blade of a man who was trying to get back up the stairs. The man arched his back and screamed, but he could not move forward or turn around. He tried to wriggle his shoulders awkwardly, as if trying to shrug off a storm of locusts.

Shouting. Shoving. Bodies rubbing against each other, heads thrown back. Cursing, shouting, spitting. Fear-concert filling the acropolis stairwell. This cold place filled with bodies and glass.

Father Joe would have been proud of her.

Because she had reached down and found the gun of the bitten man within the crowd’s forest of legs. She pressed it against his leg and pulled the trigger. She squeezed another round into the leg, and then another, until his hand released the gun.

Nobody here was praying or begging.

They were ready for war.

How long had it been since so many guns had been on her side?

Nobody here was on her side.

The man was trying to fall, his mouth open in a roar of pain. If she could clear through some space, just a few inches, she could get down the stairs. There wasn’t much further to go.

Drop. Drop. Come on, drop. Fall down and die.

There. Just an inch.

Shoulder forward, push through. The poor guy was going to die for a good cause. With his gun, she fired a bullet into the zombie’s skull to thank him, and pumped two rounds into the shape that would have been his face.

What did her body look like as it spun forward, desperately plunging into another fight? Her mind had shut off. There was nothing inside of her. She moved according to a set of parameters dictated by her body’s design. A step slower than she used to be, but smarter. More efficient.

Down on one knee, she carefully sighted along the barrel of the handgun and popped one more bullet through the chamber with a nice head shot to the top of someone’s head. It might have been a zombie. They stumbled forward for a moment as if they hadn’t been shot at all until finally collapsing.

Several people walking in a lot of different directions. People everywhere. Bullets zinging through windows. Through the floor. Through the ceiling. Dust rained through the gun smoke fog.

The handgun was empty.
Click.

Drop the weapon, roll the rifle over her shoulder, hold both grips, rise to another firing position, and slowly walk forward, one foot firmly planted in front of the other. A short burst of firepower at a time, calmly stalking through the dusty fog. Terminating anything that stepped in front of her.

Methodically circling around the room, trying to keep her back to a wall at all times. Any second now, and a bullet would find her own cerebral cortex and shut her eyes off for good.

Well now.

She kept firing. Stopped to reload. Hands calm. Smooth. Drop the old magazine and slap in the fresh one, line up the scope, share the love. Pivot, and line up another target.

They were dropping around her. Dropping because of her.

Another magazine.
Slap.
Rock and roll. Turn up the volume.

Daddy would be so proud.

“GET THE UPPER FLOORS BARRICADED!” Sutter commanded. His voice cut through the battle, through the rampant gunfire-static. The smell of oil and blood was thick.

And there he was, positioned by a window.
Both
of them were there—Vincent and Sutter. Vincent positioned behind a window, firing through the scope of an AR-15. Good boys always get nice things, apparently. Sutter stood near him in his white suit, arms outstretched as two men outfitted him in chain mail, a gas mask to protect his eyes and nostrils from the fumes that would be caused by his flamethrower.

A flamethrower?

Really.

“Look who’s joining the party!” Sutter laughed heartily.

Vincent turned and glared at her. What did he see? What did he want to see? He didn’t want to see anything. Not here, not anymore.

“Got started without you,” he said awkwardly.

She ignored him and watched the men help Sutter get his gear together. Chain mail armor and gas mask.

“I swear I’m going to shove that megaphone up your ass,” Vega said.

“I’m melodramatic,” Sutter said. “Can’t help myself.”

Look at Vincent not say anything. What was there to say?

She had thought about killing him.

She looked around, her pulse slowing. Time had slowed down. Vega’s eyes recognized a battlefield’s worth of corpses lying atop each other in strange patterns. Moaning bodies. Twitching bodies.

Together, the survivors of this first wave walked down into the main lobby, a massive, open area painted in graffiti. Marble floor. Romanesque columns. The word VOMIT the most noticeable display of vandalism. And of course, the miniguns she had seen when they brought her in.

“Did you see that thing?” Vincent asked.

“Depends on what the thing is.”

“The giant.”

“Giant?”

“I don’t know what to call it. Looked like a giant made of those things. Maybe I’m losing it.”

“Sure thing, buddy.”

“Where’s the rifle?”

“Rifle?”

“The one I gave you. The Bushmaster.”

“I think God has it now.”

The windows were high and thick with cobwebs. What was Vincent talking about? He was back in the thick of things which meant something had rattled him, woke him up enough to jump in. Sutter had drugged them with the bone man’s help, and they were at each other’s side again.

A shadow passed over the windows. Something very big would have to make a shadow like that.

The walls and ceiling shook, and the ground beneath their feet trembled.

The air was sucked out of the room.

Everyone looked up.

A black mass burst through the windows and rained down; a thick black stream of dirt and filth. Vega thought of a trebuchet that fired balls of earth and rock. Balls that broke like eggs and opened to things buried in the dust, writhing shapes with eye sockets full of ash and remaining teeth like wooden stakes.

The following stream through the window was thicker, a sluicing river flowing through the opening and flooding the main hall. The entire room was becoming a mud pit speckled with blood and screams, dust and ash rising like steam. Vega had been through desert storms.

She tried to shield her face with the side of her rifle, one hand on top of the gun, the other beneath the barrel; she knelt on one knee leaned forward into the side of the gun; she held her breath, counted to seven, and peered through a brief hole in the cloud in front of them and moved her wrists as if they were operating a turret. She opened fire. The she stood, inhaled, coughed out, inhaled again, coughed out, inhaled. Combat stance. Feet ready to move.

No more miniguns. The guns had disappeared beneath a mound of living dead. They wriggled atop each other, squirming and untangling, pieces coming apart or being in odd positions.

Vega sprayed a field of fire and stepped back. She sprayed another round, sweeping the gun from left to right, and stepped back again.

This time, Vincent was beside her, his weapon’s horizon of fire below hers. He remained a couple of steps ahead of her as they took turns. Fire. Step. Stop. Fire. Step. Stop. There was no way to assess what lay ahead of them. A surge of forms pushed ahead of them. Taking cover would be a waste of time if there were so many—and there were. So movement and firepower. Footwork and patience. A violent rhythm with her partner, Vincent.