The Queen of the Dead (37 page)

Shattered corpses reached out with gnarled fingers for their flesh, desperate until the end. They were like land mines, and looking at them, pausing, meant certain death. As long as they didn’t look behind them—as long as they didn’t stop for one second, one breath, they could outrun the dead bastards.

Five miles until the base. Exit 241.

Exit 236, Metro Parkway. The freeway was a death trap; Father had the same idea in his head because he headed for the exit. He was keeping up with her, but that wasn’t saying much, considering how badly she ached all over.

It was a matter of life and death. If they stopped for one second, it was over. The dead were on their heels.

Father Joe stumbled up the ramp and she stopped to grab his hand. Bad move.

Corpses pushed over the edge of the on-ramp, tumbling down with their bones snapping and twisting in a ball of tattered clothing, and the coloration of a nearly empty can of tomato soup. Another crowd stumbled through the brush along the road, and Vega yanked hard on the priest’s arm, trusting his strong grip and sandpaper fingers.

They moved with ferocity and purpose, scrambling over hoods—the larger ones taking off mirrors as they passed between cars on Metro Parkway, which was jammed with cars that had been looking for an escape through the barricade that had disappeared. Smoke on the horizon again, with traffic lights that no longer worked.

The dead were moving Eastward, their eyes missing Vega and the priest. The flood of corpses that were snaking along I-94 thundered behind them, their feet beating through puddles and kicking up litter like dust balls pushed through a desert.

“Cover me,” Father Joe said.

There was a plan, and she didn’t stop to ask what the hell it was. She knelt on top of a sedan and opened fire with the Larue; the corpses moved for a few feet even as their heads popped open, carried by a powerful momentum that made it seem as if they were actually running. She didn’t know what normal zombie behavior was, but something had gotten into them, making it harder for her to track targets. No matter where she took up a firing position, she would be exposed. They could surround her in seconds.

Their audience was coming up the ramp.

Glass shattered.

“Fucking priest,” she pulled the trigger. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Sweat in her eyes. Pivoting, rotating on her heels. Keep firing.

A familiar engine roar, like a thousand skeletons gurgling blood in their throats, a low rumble, a blast of exhaust.

It was time. Whatever it was, it was time.

The priest was sitting astride a Harley, waving her over. She leapt down and dropped the rifle; she knew it would be too bulky for the ride.

She sat behind him and he wrapped seatbelt material around their waists; the man had been thinking clearly. With a Sig in her right hand, she held on to his waist while he pumped the engine.

At the same time, they showed each a thumbs-up. Great minds think alike.

The suburbs might not have seen as much zombie action, but the horde had to be composed of people who’d once been alive. The devastation had spread through Detroit, cruising through East Pointe and Roseville, and now they were already roughly five miles away from the nursing home. If Selfridge was overrun, that would mean containment had been comprised within a twenty to twenty-five mile radius from Detroit.

In less than seventy-two hours.

The power between her legs was enough to remind her about the power of machines, the extensions of man’s imagination. She was a machine herself, killing with impunity the dead-eyed creatures that squirmed out of her peripheral vision. She could make no distinctions. Each body was one of them; each featureless, dead face was nothing more than a moving target.

The Harley powered along Gratiot Avenue past the triumphal golden arches of McDonald’s and a car dealership in which several vehicles were on fire. Father Joe had to swing the bike through a maze of cars, and Vega could see them coming. In their fast-food uniforms and visors, blood and grease stains mixed. The street curved into Mt. Clemens, the seat of Macomb County.

The narrow corridor was enclosed with buildings on both sides, including a Pizza Hut. Corpses scampered over cars, but their backs were turned to the Harley.

Vega looked over her shoulder.

The horde was still coming.

Ahead of them, a wall of dead that seemed to be trying to escape the oncoming tidal wave. Vega and the priest were caught in a vise of rotting flesh.

Over his shoulder, Vega tried to steady her aim and carve a path by dropping a couple deadheads in front of them. Father Joe kept the Harley straight and true while she wasted six slugs trying to hit two targets.

Something was moving these things. Pushing them forward, motivating them.

They poured through windows, heedless of any potential harm to their frail bodies. The younger ones stood up more quickly, their youthful bones and muscles not yet shrinking beneath the weight of middle-aged frustrations. There was no room for the Harley to weave through the vehicles.

She drew the second handgun.

They wore suits, and they had tattoos. They work flower dresses and they wore lipstick. They were fat and they were bald. They crawled and they pushed. They tripped over bushes and beer cans. Alive but not alive. Summoned from the places they had died, places where they were supposed to rot. She didn’t see their various modes of mutilation. They were the melted pot of American flesh that had died without knowing why.

Pop! Pop! Pop!
Vega waved the handguns in front of her eyes. The Harley rumbled forward through the forest of limbs.

Men in suits and women in pencil skirts dropped out of the courthouse windows like they were committing suicide.

Children filed out of a burnt bus.

Men in tight shirts and women in sparkly clothes or barely any clothes at all lingered around a bar. Their heads opened up just the same.

They were tightening around the Harley, reaching with open palms. Yellow teeth, baseball caps and expensive basketball shoes, jewelry, cleavage, hair pieces, rotted breath, faces leaning in close, leaning in, pushed together, black mouths opening, hands waving like babies experimenting with fingers.

Eject a clip from one gun. Empty the bullets from another into faces that dropped or disappeared behind the brief, bright flash of gunfire in close quarters.

Fingernails dug into her shins, drawing blood. Into her thighs, warm pain, and new scars.

The bike picked up speed as the street widened. A bit of breathing room to reload both weapons. She holstered one and reloaded, then switched hands and performed the same trick while leaning into Father Joe’s sweaty back.

Close now. Only two or three miles away.

Her saliva tasted like bacon and vomit. She spat over the side of the bike and looked again at the oncoming wave. The dead would not be persuaded otherwise. There were bullets left and she could still fight.

The adrenaline kicked in while the wind scoured her hair. It was as good a moment to die as any. It didn’t have to be for any benign purpose other than death itself. Miles had the look in his eyes when he made his decision, and if she looked in a mirror, she would find the same wild eyes, that same commitment to the abyss.

But she jerked sideways and the belt connecting her to Father Joe loosened as gravity fled. The city with all its smoke and blood circled around her and she felt the air on her arms, on her face. The smoke from the rear tire and the burning rubber were the only things she could process as reality in that one second.

She was flung along the hood of a car and ended up on her side, the wind escaping from her lungs. Nothing was broken, but every joint in her body protested when she tried to sit up. She still had one of the guns. Blood seeped into her right eye.

And they were coming.

Get your ass up. Get up on your feet and face them.

“The gas station.”

Father Joe stood beside her with the other Sig Sauer in his hand.

“Hit the wiring, and I’ll hit the fuel truck. I’ll throw in a prayer to help.”

He was insane. Shit like this only worked in movies. In the movies, Bruce Willis might hit a gas pump with a bullet and watch the whole thing ignite, which was damn-near impossible. But a spark from a downed wire in a pool of petro might do the trick. A long shot. A very long shot.

“Pray,” she said, and aimed for the lights above the gas pumps.

Her body was already on fire from pain. Her joints were stiff. She felt her bloody skin stick to her clothes. If she hit her head in the fall she would’ve been in a coma. Every bullet counted. Every pull of the trigger was her life.

A hole was punctured in the fuel tanker and petroleum spilled onto the ground.

She could see them again. Out of the corner of her eye, the glare of sun caught by a candy-red corvette blurring the oncoming, inevitable shapes.

Sparking wires dropped from the top of the gas station terminal.

Click.
The clip was empty.

“Run!”

If dragons made a sound while breathing, it would have sounded like the gas station’s eruption.
Woosh!
She felt the heat on the back of her neck and saw the orange glow reflected on the rear windshields around her. Her legs moved in slow motion. The gun slipped from her fingers.

She looked back and saw it, a fireball blooming into bright sky, smoke slashing across that perfect expanse. Shapes passed through the fire, their bodies crumpling without protest, their cause expiring only when they did.

“One more mile,” Father Joe put a hand on his shoulder. “Do you believe in miracles?”

“You weren’t praying,” Vega said.

He chuckled. “Were you hurt in the fall? I hit a… speed bump. More like a torso.”

“You’re not carrying me, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. “If you don’t like girls, then I don’t need your hands on me.”

He removed his hand. “I never said I was a virgin. Only that I swore an oath.”

Father Joe reached for the collar around his neck and ripped it off.

“Frank was right. About a lot of things. If I remove the collar, I’m still a man of faith. I’m still me. But I’m also just a man, a sinner who continues to sin. There is goodness worth sinning for.”

“I’m glad we got that out of the way,” Vega said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to walk…”

One mile.

***

They ran. Lungs burning, heat rising, they ran. The tide of dead had been slowed, and there was a mile to make.

More cars were jammed together on 21 Mile Road, and corpses flooded through the base’s gate from all directions. The fence had been trampled over and the museum planes looked like they were covered by an army of black ants.

“Holy…”

Vega stood in a truck bed with the priest and watched thousands of people pour into Selfridge. She’d been an obstacle in their path, nothing more. It could’ve been the entire state. It could’ve been the entire world.

“Take my hand,” Father said.

All the pain, all the death, all the bullets—the smoke, the fire, the blood, the fear. Shanna. Bob. Miles. Vincent. John. The crazy-ass general. Maybe Jeremy. Maybe Griggs. Frank. All the countless faces she’d put a bullet into, all the gore she’d stomped through to get to this point, trapped in this fight that didn’t have an end. No matter how far she ran. No matter where she tried to hide.

She felt it now.

“Our father…” she choked, “who art in Heaven…”

She squeezed Father Joe’s hand, and he said the words in Spanish. She switched to her native tongue, and they said the words together, watching the overflow of dead flesh and stream over the tarmac of the once-mighty base.

There were no more prayers, no more questions of forgiveness or mortality.

The dead moved purposefully, groans forced out of their stomachs with the release of putrid gasses and rotting insides, reminding Vega of half-asleep churchgoers humming along to the hymns. They moved like monks attending a ritual that each would see only once in their lifetime.

This was bigger than the zombies were; if Traverse possessed an important secret, then this had to do with him. He was on the base, waiting to complete some penultimate enterprise that would damn those who’d survived the initial massacre.

The world wasn’t dead yet, but someone wanted to put the nail in the coffin.

Father Joe led her into the crowd, though she wanted to test the waters as if jumping into a swimming pool for the first time. They joined the crowd smoothly, swept up by the current of rotted flesh and twitching bone. Father held her, his arm around her waist as they walked with the corpuscular congregation. They shuffled without hurry, careful not to disturb the orderly procession, the undead dirge roiling up from those who hadn’t been disemboweled.

In the glory of sunshine the crowd moved with all the rush of a caffeine-junkie fugue; thousands of people without their Starbucks or Tim Horton’s, most of them wearing their best jewelry, useless relics that had defined entire lives, the impetus of labor and time. Timecards had been punched to buy the shiny black loafers, drug deals negotiated to buy big silver chains that were draped over thin, tattooed necks. Kneecaps and ankles twisted because years of misuse had worn away their strength; they surrendered to the pavement and the sun, and other members of the mob tripped over them, creating awkward moments of chaos among the swaying bodies. Cold, wet flesh slapped against Vega’s face she lost her balance in the priest’s arms. They were a ship coursing along a stormy sea, rocked by the hungry waves of dead flesh that lapped against them.