Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) (9 page)

And the boy. Macon.

The old man in the wheelchair. Frank. Dead on the freeway. The wheels inside his heart stopped turning.

The other woman. Rose. He carried her through a mob of the dead, and the soldier, Vega, had skewered her with a ridiculous katana (didn’t Vincent still have it somewhere?). Why? He was never sure. But he had tried to help Rose.

Sergeant John Charles. He knew him only briefly, but had been thankful the man gave his last remaining breaths to protect them.

Jeremy. He never saw what happened to Jeremy, but nobody saw him again.

Nor did anyone ever see Mina in the flesh, or her boyfriend, the detective he met only briefly.

And General Masters? The batshit-crazy prophet? Vega had shot him. The man had been chewed up, and Vega shot him because she was convinced he was going to transform into one of those dead things.

But when did the transformation actually occur? There was something special in such a germ that would activate specific brain patterns and initiate the desire to eat living flesh. Why did they have to eat people? What kind of crazy, lab-engineered germ would reanimate the dead, and
then
cause them to eat people?

And there was the moment he had stood outside the church for the first time, when he first came to this neighborhood. He had stood with Vega and Vincent, and there was a look in Vincent’s eyes. “Dead bodies in there,” he had said, and that was it. Vincent didn’t come inside. In a hallway, a dead man lay slumped against a wall, and a woman in a small kitchen had been butchered, her blood smeared on the walls, organs missing. Father Joe knew it used to be a woman because he saw the clothes which had been separated from her body before the mutilation.

Vincent had said one word about the whole thing: “Traverse.”

Father Joe felt like he had stepped into the middle of some personal war between several people, all of whom he was only loosely acquainted with. He knew just enough about Vega to know that her addictive personality and self-loathing were never going to go away, and that she wouldn’t be happy until she died in a barroom brawl or in the arms of an angry mob, living or undead. Vega had told him a few things about Traverse before, but she had never met him herself. Vincent had met him and said little.

Opening his eyes, Father Joe was nearly surprised to see that the sun was still up. How much time did his memory devour?

“Thought you were going to help me unload?”

Father Joe turned around to find Bill, shirtless, sweaty, standing in the bed of the truck, heaving junk into the sinkhole.

“Working on my tan,” Father Joe said. “I’m starting to feel like I’ve been living in the lap of luxury lately, and I gotta keep myself humble.”

“The lap of luxury.”

“That’s my pity story. Everyone’s got a pity story. Maybe not. I don’t know. I grew up poor, a poor little Mexican. Liked to fight. Liked to feel sorry for myself. Where I come from, you either become a priest or a bandit…”

He often quoted that line from
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,
but now it felt off somehow, as if it didn’t belong, as if the movie had never existed, and nobody would ever, possibly, understand the reference but him. Or he was just getting old.

Bill stopped shuffling garbage around and crouched. The back of the truck smelled like a ditch full of dead homeless people. There were body parts in there from people who had committed suicide, people who had found solace in needles and pills. A lot of people asked for the Last Rites of a loved one before the head was removed; people tended to hack the entire body to pieces.

Not all the body parts made it into the truck.

Once, he had seen a body stripped almost as soon as he stopped praying. The suicide had been a woman who had lost two children. There were stories about her desperation, her breakdowns. Father Joe wished he had seen her before she took her own life. The former mother’s entire scalp had been removed, and her hair was still vibrant enough to be traded somewhere, for something. Father Joe couldn’t guess for what or why. Who was out there looking for such things? Wouldn’t food be the hottest commodity good?

But there were more and more people moving into the neighborhood. Nobody knew exactly where everyone was, who everyone was, or what they could do. Ammunition seemed to be the more prominent currency. It was cold metal, and it served a purpose.

“How does it feel?” Bill asked.

The priest wasn’t sure he knew how to answer the question.

“I think it hurts,” he said.

“I can’t do anything for you.”

“I knew that.”

“Well. Shit. I feel like a damn fool thinking about this.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t?”

“Don’t think about it. Don’t let me go back into town. You won’t ever be comfortable if you let me come back. If we both guess wrong a lot of people might be hurt.”

Bill nodded. Looked away. “What would you do? If we were sitting differently. If you were me, I mean.”

The big football player seemed to be keeping his distance, as if he had something he desperately wanted to share but refused to even think about it, a skeleton he kept locked in a closet in the basement of his soul. He wanted to trust Father Joe, had probably always wanted to trust someone with this secret, but he was afraid of the secret. He was afraid to feel whatever emotions he refused to feel.

Father Joe could relate.

He looked at the football player. “You’re asking if it’s right to let me back into the down and possibly endanger others. Or maybe it’s right to kill me right here and now, before I can spread… the zombie disease, whatever it is.”

“You don’t think it’s a disease.”

“I didn’t say that. And that’s not what you care about right now.”

“True.”

“Could you kill me, if that’s what you thought was the best thing?”

“You make it sound like it’s no big deal. Like killing is simple.”

“A lot of people are used to seeing death around here. You’ve probably seen it, too. I’m sure you’ve had to do some hard things, make difficult choices, to stay alive.”

Bill looked to the sky and chewed on his bottom lip. “I don’t see why we have to change the way we think, just because all kinds of bad things have happened. You talked about that at mass, once. You said we can’t forget to be human, even if everything around us seems like it’s not human. Not humane, I mean.”

Father Joe could respect this man. He was strong and wanted to do the right thing, but he couldn’t decide what the right thing was. Everyone needed guidance, but Bill wanted to be a guide.

“I think I should make sure you’re okay,” Bill said. “Check on you from time to time.”

Father Joe remembered John Charles. “I saw a man who was sick. A soldier. Didn’t know him for a long time, but he was bit. In his leg, I think. Never found out what happened to him. I don’t know how or why some of these people keep dying. I don’t understand fear. It’s a weakness because I don’t know what anyone is dealing with.”

“Yeah. I get it.”

Bill resumed shoveling garbage.

He was reminded of the last time Vega spoke to him. Just a couple days after Father Joe began settling in, he was in the church kitchen trying to scour the walls of blood, working without a shirt on. He used his forearm several times to wipe sweat from his forehead. Scrubbing blood in the glow of candlelight. A little less than a year ago. Or had it been longer?

Like a ghost she had walked through the church corridor, because he hadn’t heard her. His mind wandered to the letter from Father Cassidy to thoughts of the mysterious woman named Rose. Who was right? What did he know? What actually happened? There was a chance he was close to figuring it out, but he wasn’t sure if it mattered.

“How do we know we’re not dead?” Vega had said.

Looking upon her slender body in the doorway, surrounded by the blood of a woman Traverse had murdered, he wondered if she would ever fully trust him.

So far, he couldn’t save anybody. Never had. He used to be called upon to read Last Rites; his visit had always meant death was at hand. Father Joe was the last voice. He gave them a chance to find peace in a better realm than this. Even in Purgatory, there would not be fear. There would not be pain.

A sheer nightgown clung to Vega’s rail-thin body. To him, she did not look weak at all, but deadly.

“Because we’re not,” he said to her.

“You’re insane.”

“I don’t think so. I think it’s possible I’ve met people who fit the description.”

“And you healed them? Cured them?”

“You tell me.”

“Is God watching?”

“Why wouldn’t He? I haven’t had a chance to talk to Him.”

“I can’t tell if that’s a joke.”

“Maybe that’s why you heard me say it.”

He approached her and put his hands around her waist before he knew he was actually doing it. Stopping in front of her, candlelight throwing strange shadows upon her face, she leaned back against the doorframe.

“I want to protect you,” he said. “I feel like I shouldn’t. I feel like another man wouldn’t protect you.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“You think it’s easy to watch people die? You think I don’t want to hurt the world back? This world was made for people like you to fight for it. It was ruined by people who thought God was a profitable business model. There’s still good work to do. There will always be good work to do.”

“I came here because I had a question. You answered it.”

“Let’s get you home.”

Vega laughed. “I don’t think you get it. I’m supposed to be out there fighting, not here. But I can’t do it. I don’t know why.”

“You just wanted me to convince you to stay or convince you to leave. Which one is it? I have work to do.”

“People to pray over when they’re dead. Walk me home then, since you can see in the dark.”

Better to walk her home before she drove him crazy. Was she high on something? On the way back, she shared a war story with him, but he only half-listened. Some kind of mercenary job in Jordan. Her presence unnerved him, and he thought about her through the night. He kept working in the kitchen, scrubbing blood from the walls. Sometime in the next afternoon, he fell asleep on one of the pews.

“Dead yet?”

Father Joe looked up at Bill, who had finished with the garbage.

“Still here doing the Lord’s good work,” Father Joe said.

“You’re doing it so well you wasted what was left of the Crown Royal. It’s hard to come by, you know.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Salvage.”

“You could have traded it for something. A night with a woman or something.”

“Things aren’t that bad, Father.”

Father Joe smiled. “Good to know. Maybe I’m getting cynical in my old age.”

“You’re not even forty.”

He looked down into the hole where their dingy neighborhood was throwing its trash. The hole seemed bigger; it was an open mouth that wanted to eat the sky. Even now, it was growing, spreading like a fresh bloodstain across the highway.

“You okay?”

Father Joe nodded. Smartass comments bubbled on the surface of his mind, but shit; he felt weak, could barely talk, could hardly stand.

The sky was black. The mouth in the highway opened wider, stretching, stretching. Spidery shapes scrambled over the edges of the cavernous hole. Hands. A thousand hands. Fingers reaching over the edge.

“Oh, fuck,” Father Joe said.

He didn’t know that Bill helped him into the truck until later. Until he was back at the church, lying in one of the pews. Bill was beside him, praying.

When Father Joe sat up, he was bandaged and sore. A headache blurred his vision, and he was nauseous. He wanted to lie back down. To sleep forever.

Until Father Joe coughed blood into his fist. A zombie had bitten him, and he didn’t have time to be afraid; people needed him to lead, to remain confident, to guide them.

It was nothing but a bad cough. That’s all it was.

Bill peeled back a makeshift bandage that he had applied to Father Joe’s wound. The spot where he had been bitten had swollen, the skin around it a blue and purple circle of infection.

Well, this was certainly different. This might change things.

And Father Joe didn’t know what to do; he was speechless. No witty remarks came to mind. But he could hear Bill mumbling a prayer under his breath. At least somebody had a plan.

THE CHAMP

The same arguments every night. The same plans nobody could initiate. The same people bitching and complaining about the same things.

Bill used to be a football player. Now he sat in a room full of people who thought they had ideas that could help keep a fragile community of people alive for another week. He listened and nodded. He listened and added his own suggestions. But who was he? A big white man in a neighborhood with almost seven hundred people. Maybe there was more than seven hundred people.

Mike Taylor had his shit together. A former cop who knew this town way better than Bill knew it. The Champ played football games in Detroit, but he was from Texas.

“They’re smoking crack instead of doing anything to help,” Mike Taylor told the room. “We’ve got a handful of people doing all the work, but we’re not set up. Not even close. We need too many things to keep it together. We need to be more organized.”

This was almost a repeat of last night. Vincent, the former gangster whom everyone seemed to be afraid of, knew it. And he stood against the wall with his arms folded against his chest, half-listening. Maybe not listening at all. His girlfriend, a soldier named Vega, had plenty to say, but most of the crap that came out of her mouth didn’t make sense.

Ten people in this room, all of them with ideas.

What was the Champ to them? Muscle. Hard work. A soldier. He didn’t have the weapons background or the military training, but he was a soldier for these people. Because there wasn’t anything else to do. No other way for him to survive.

“So you want to protect a bunch of people who don’t care about each other, who don’t want to be protected?” someone asked.

“These people deserve a chance,” Taylor said. He sounded like a cross between Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson. Short and to the point, his voice scratchy and worn. “They need someone to step up and take charge, but nobody here wants to do it.”

“You want government, police, and everything else from the good ol’ days,” Vega said. “But we keep hearing stories of another setup in Sterling Heights, another further up north, some people in the U.P.—”

“We got people all over the place,” a woman stopped Vega. “But we’ve got people here because of the supply chopper, and it’s not coming back.”

“So let everyone just scatter to the winds…” someone else added.

The Champ had other things to think about. Like why Vega’s eyes kept wandering around the room. Vincent didn’t say anything. Why didn’t Vincent care? Why didn’t anyone really care about each other? This neighborhood was nothing more than a graveyard for people who were dead but didn’t know it.

Bill wanted to help everyone. There had to be a better way.

He’d been taught that someone always had to lead by example; words didn’t always cut it. When he was on the football field, you had to carry the day with actions. You had to show up for every game, every play, every Sunday. You had to show up for practice. You always had to work hard because your job was on the line. There was always someone younger and hungrier waiting to take your job, someone who would do the same things you did for less money.

He was using the training facilities in Allen Park when the bad news hit. Riots swept through Detroit and to the rest of the metropolitan area; a pandemic of violence and panic hit everywhere too fast for anyone to react, except with madness and confusion. He’d been working out in the weight room, working up a sweat, trying to take his mind off everything. The situation was going to be under control anyway. The National Guard was going to take care of business. The television hanging over the treadmills showed an outbreak of student protests at Wayne State University. The National Guard had rolled up to the college with tanks and heavy gear; there was more than just a protest going on, more than just riots. But still, Bill knew there was a plan, and everything would be under control soon enough.

He had been the only one in the weight room, working out, trying to keep his mind focused on the season. It was coming. He was going to compete for a spot. Seize the moment. He was a hard worker, and he was one of those young dogs, hungry and salivating for a chance to play. He pumped weight and tried to ignore the television. He tried to ignore the stories of chaos and despair; he didn’t have time for negativity. He was focused. He had a goal.

Even when smoke drifted past the windows and the lights flickered, he stayed in the gym and worked. Emergency vehicles screamed along the streets, and the emergency broadcast system took over the television, but he didn’t hear the noise; he listened to Tim McGraw through his iPod and worked. Worked. Worked.

Bill wasn’t thinking about what he was going to do after the gym. He went into the locker room with his head full of visions of the future. He went into the locker room dripping sweat, his biceps tight, his legs rubbery. A good workout.

A man lay slumped against the lockers, and Bill’s first thought was the guy was stoned. Why was there a junkie hanging out in the gym? A young guy with a distant expression on his face, despite the hole in his stomach. A gaping, bleeding hole. His intestine was a dripping, glistening rope that served as a bridge between the hole in his stomach and the chewing mouth of the man across from him.

Bill knew the second person was a man because of the clothes; the skin on his face had been ripped off completely, as if his face had been nothing more than a mask. A wiry body wearing a tank top and gym shorts, although one of his legs looked like a wasted tree with clumps of moss and wiry branches hanging from a desiccated form; blood-slick bone replacing thigh and calf, almost prosthetic, but it wasn’t prosthetic. It looked fake. Was it a prosthetic?

“I think I’m going to die,” the man slumped against the lockers said. He sounded drunk.

Bill swallowed and stood with a towel around his neck.

Was that actually human intestine stretched between the opposing benches? It had coiled out of one man’s stomach, and the other end was being chewed on by the man whose face was mostly gone. Bill’s first thought was that he needed to help the man who was chewing because he looked like he had been hurt. But that man should be dead, shouldn’t he? Instead, he was chewing on intestine.

The chewer’s tongue flickered over red teeth as the intestine squished around in his mouth, blood-juice running down his fleshless, skeletal chin. Bill thought about fruit snacks. He used to eat fruit snacks when he was a kid. He used to beg his mom for Gushers; they were sticky, but they filled his mouth with flavor. He loved them. Gushers had been awesome.

“I think I’ll be a cool zombie,” the dying man said as he watched the other man chew on his intestine.

Then his head dropped. He wasn’t breathing anymore.

The other man kept chewing.

Bill walked out to the parking lot, and the night sky was glowing. An orange-red glow that stained the evening with yellow; pillars of abyssal dark rose like horns from the head of a dead bull’s rotted skull. Smoke. Smoke and fire.

The quiet reminded him of a wintry Sunday night. All the sirens had stopped. Distant pops and screams—gunfire and horror—made him think there was a soundtrack somewhere, like a bad Halloween soundtrack that played from someone’s front porch while kids gleefully ran up with their candy bags open.

Inside his car, Bill called his mom from his cell phone. Over and over again. No signal. He kept trying to call. Nothing. Zero signal. He tried to use the internet on his phone. Nothing. Bill was still able to play Candy Crush, and he could open his eBook app and read
The Art of War,
but he couldn’t call anyone.

Over the next few hours he never managed to call home. He was never afraid, and he never felt like his future was slipping away. Everything would be fixed, in time.

He joined a small group of survivors who either died or scattered after their sanctuaries crumbled. Everything fell apart under the weight of democracy and disagreement. There needed to be structure. Someone needed to be in charge, but everybody wanted to be in charge, and everyone had their own opinion. Bill liked some of the people who died, and he felt bad for them, but he did his best to help them, and he didn’t feel bad when he failed. He didn’t feel like he was a failure. He would do better next time. He would save someone else.

But he was never able to call home. No matter how hard he tried, he could never make the connection. A tower, a satellite—technology couldn’t let him cross state lines to find his parents.

Now he sat in a room and watched another group of survivors fall apart beneath the weight of indecision. Vega or Vincent should step up. Mike Taylor should step up.

They talked about the car barricade. They talked about siphoning more fuel. They talked about establishing contact with other groups. They talked about scavenging.

Bill half-listened.

“I think we should come up with a list of laws, a list of rules, and ask people to volunteer to ensure these things are carried out,” Taylor suggested. A repeat from two nights ago.

“We’ll have Vincent, Vega, you, and Bill do everything,” a woman said. “Basically, you guys will protect everyone, and that will put you in charge of everything. You can have all the guns, and do whatever the hell you want. And that’s something we wanted to avoid in the first place.”

“We need to get our shit together,” Taylor said. “Drugs keep filtering in here, and that’s not even the worst of it. That video is around.”

“The bone man,” someone in the room said.

Eyes shifted to Vincent. A moment of uncomfortable silence as he ignored them.

“Is he working with Sutter?” Bill asked. “Do we know anything about this guy?”

“Nobody’s talking,” Taylor said. “At least, nobody is talking to me. Nobody on the salvage crews is talking. This bone man is a ghost. We have to do simple things. Talk to people. We can do more to be organized, and if people knew we were supporting each other, people might care enough to speak up.”

“You’re going to drive people out of here,” the woman argued. “Some of them love the fact they don’t have to do anything but sit in their houses and mope, and now they’re drinking and doing drugs all over again. This place should be rebuilding itself and fixing what should have been fixed before, but instead it’s the same place it’s always been…”

A halt in the conversation.

Taylor rubbed his elbows and looked at the assembled group. “Someone has to make this choice. Someone has to decide among us before someone decides for us. Before people start killing each other and we sit here, still discussing this, still arguing over it.”

“Sutter,” Vincent said. There was the elephant in the room, the threat that everyone talked about in small groups but never mentioned in a meeting like this.

Awkward silence.

“Let’s walk away without accomplishing anything,” Vega said. “That’s what we’ve been doing the last few weeks. Why buck the trend?”

There was something about her exotic face and her strength, something about the way she sneered at everything, that made Bill wonder what she would have been like in another life. She had the thin body of a supermodel, and the attitude of a warrior. She was tough and didn’t take shit from anybody. Why couldn’t she be in charge?

“What do we have right now?” Bill asked, looking at Vega. “The last salvage team that went out. Did they hit your spot?”

Vega had given a specific location where they might find a lot of guns and ammo; a wrecked police barricade in Roseville near a retirement home.

Everyone’s attention perked up. Talk of guns and goodies was a good diversion. Anything but the same old argument.

“Matter of fact,” Mike said, and gestured to a man who’d gone out on the last forage. The forager left and came back with a wheelbarrow full of guns.

“The other one has the cell phones,” the forager said as another member of their group followed him into the room with a second wheelbarrow.

Cell phones. They wanted to be able to communicate with each other. They thought maybe they could unlock most of the phones, charge them, and use them.

“It was a gold mine, like you said,” the forager said and nodded at the wheelbarrow.

Vega approached the gun pile and picked up a large, silver handgun. Bill didn’t know much about guns, but it was pretty damn big.

“Holy shit,” Vega said. “Vincent, is this…?”

Vincent unfolded his arms and looked the gun over.

“It is,” he said.

“What’s up?” Taylor asked.

Neither answered. They stared at the weapon together, as if it were a sentimental gift they’d lost in the ruins. An artifact they had forgotten, an object that was a link to their past. Vincent tested the weight of the gun in his hand.

“Can someone tell me what’s going on?” Mike asked.

“You have ammo for it?” Vega asked Vincent.

“I recognize it. Damn thing was pointed at my face.” He handed it to Vega as if it were a piece of garbage he’d accidentally picked up.

A fart stuffed the room, a warm, stifling smell that smelled like the inside of any local grocery stores that hadn’t burned to the ground. Mike coughed into his fist, and people started talking again, this time about food. The conversation always came back around to food.