Jim felt they had been waiting for him, killing Suirabi so they could have him alone. He did not believe in atonement, or karma, or redemption, nor did he think an exclusive destiny was his. Death had always been a certainty for his mortal lifespan despite all of the government projects he had been invested in. Looking upon these dreadful pharaohs, he saw nothing more than opponents that must be destroyed so that he would continue to live.
But Suirabi was dead, and he remained alone with these creatures. Against such odds, a lesser man would wither.
They had waited for him to move. They had singled him out from Suirabi as if they wanted him to exhaust all of his strength in a doomed struggle against them.
He lay there, waiting for them to approach. Traverse was not in a hurry. Let them come to him.
A shape darted through his perception, a man moving at accelerated speed; Jim’s first thought was this person must have been a member of their team, and he admired suck quickness, but he checked himself—nobody was faster than him, and this person had nearly fooled him. Jim watched the figure aggressively attack the undying pharaohs, and his eyes struggled to adjust to the shape’s quickness; he couldn’t identify the person, and this bothered him.
The figure began a flurry of strikes, and Jim recognized the style of attack, the variance in stances, the posture.
Impossible. Nobody else was that good.
Jim sat up, his attention riveted. He was aware of his own heartbeat’s acceleration and an unfamiliar shortness of breath. He was uncomfortable and interested at the same time.
Nobody could move that fast. Nobody but him.
As the stranger moved through a sequence of well-coordinated strikes, the mummies barely moved. They did nothing but put up their forearms and defend their ancient bodies as the attacker moved between targets. They were unfazed, unmoved. The stranger might have been attacking statues. Clouds of dust burst into the air as he lashed out, the mummies jostled only slightly by the force of each blow.
One dead lord reached out with its hand and seized the attacker from behind, and just as Suirabi had been so easily lifted into the air, so the attacker’s feet dangled as a mummified pharaoh held him up with only one hand. Jim was amazed at this display inhuman strength.
The pharaohs closed in, and Jim could see that the attacker was a man, and this man did not cry out or scream.
Jim looked closer.
The swarthy face and lean body type were familiar.
Jim was not aware that he stood, nor was he aware that he moved closer to the crowd; the stranger was a man, and Jim was compelled to look at him, to know him. The pharaohs did not pay attention to him, but were focused on their victim.
As he approached, he listened for the man’s cries, for the sound of his desperation. Surely, he was afraid. What did this man think about now that he saw death approach? Jim had always wondered these things. He enjoyed looking into the eyes of his target before they met their end at his hands.
Here was someone who could have met his match.
The pharaohs ignored him.
While the circle of dead kings closed upon the man, Jim caught a glimpse of the man’s eyes, and the twinge of familiarity pricked at him. The pharaohs continued to ignore Jim, just as the mummified lord that had killed Suirabi ignored him.
There was a legion of dread lords, their numbers uncountable, and still they ignored him.
Inside the circle, the stranger’s fleshy face became clear.
Jim froze.
He could feel his blood run cold. All of his training—his carefully ordered mind—dissolved in that instant.
The man was him. The attacker was a mirror image of himself, short black hair swept to the side, lean figure, stoic eyes uncaring even now, as the pharaohs closed in. A carefully wrapped hand reached into the mirror image’s mouth, and then another hand; two hands pulled his cheeks, and pair of fingers entered his nostrils, yet another rank entering the lower part of his mouth and grabbing the bottom of his jaw. The mirror image choked, eyes rolling to the back of his head.
Jim was being ignored.
He grabbed one dead king’s shoulder and wrenched it around to face him. The lower half of the dead king’s face was uncovered, and there was nothing there. A vast, black nothing hid behind the wrap.
Now, there were hands upon his shoulders. A hand covered his mouth. Helplessly, and with his gaze focused on the mirror-version of himself, he felt compelled to watch. He wanted to watch. He was curious and interested. This was something he never could have anticipated, and there was no rational explanation, no experience that could explain or define what he witnessed.
And he watched himself being ripped apart. Never once did the mirror image cry out or struggle. The mirror image accepted its bloody fate. Skin was peeled away from the skull by the assembled hands; there seemed to be hundreds of hands at once, and blood spurted out as if the head were being popped open, crimson spray painting the wrapped faces of the undead lords. Limbs were wrenched from their sockets; and pieces of Jim Traverse’s reflection disappeared into a misty cloud of gore.
***
Jim Traverse realized that he had been afraid one other time in his life. The feeling surprised him; the fact that he was afraid now and could remember what it felt like.
A dirty, grimy hand reach for his throat and seized him. Jim was lifted into the air, his feet dangling, the impossible strength from the long-dead pharaoh squeezing his throat.
This was it.
But his perception was filled with a vision composed of nightmare. Knowledge filled his mind, and he was helpless against the images that assaulted his memory.
These were the lords of nightmare, the gatekeepers of Hell. They could not die and had been imprisoned in this ancient tomb. An eternity of questions were answered, and these overwhelmingly transitioned to images of horror.
He saw ditches filled with murdered Holocaust victims; plague carts heavy with diseased corpses pushed through the mud of rain-battered roads; Rome was on fire, children and slaves screaming in the streets; history’s atrocities were the manifestation of a nightmare. A curse visited upon the blood of Hell’s gatekeepers.
Images tormented Jim’s mind. As a boy, his kidnapper had trained him to become the methodical killer that he was, and now, after all the violence and bloodshed that defined his existence, there was another level of torment. Another level of knowledge that would forever change him.
Jim was not afraid of this change.
He was afraid that he would not live to see such glorious slaughter.
Unless he was chosen.
This is why he was sent here. His team was composed of the world’s most efficient assassins, and only one could be re-purposed.
The terrible kings shared their visions with him again. An entire plain of corpses. Tornados lingering outside of sprawling metropolises that had become nothing more than colorless layouts, as if the buildings had been built of featureless blocks, and there was no noise, no life, no color. Jim saw a plain of corpses, and the sun was setting. His visions shifted. Horror upon horror upon horror. Throughout the collage of visions he could hear Rose’s voice, her words replayed from intimate encounters they had with each other.
From this vision, Jim’s mind whirled around, and he saw the plain of corpses again, bodies left to rot in the sun. Here was a world purged of flesh. Purged of iniquities and expectations. Entire cities reduced to ash, mortality and inevitability bringing mortal man and all of its ingenuity and waste to nothing. All struggles and wars were nothing more than a prelude for the ultimate annihilation. Mankind seeks its own destruction, hoping that a better version of itself might survive, a version that could govern itself, start over, build Utopia from the ground up.
A world purged of emotions, standards, ideas. A world in which one survivor might have the impetus to become God and start anew.
This was Jim’s fantasy.
I know what you seek, the voice of young Rose said in his mind. You believe it
to be an impossible fantasy, but the fantasy is part of a dream, and dreams can become nightmares. We are the nightmare. We are always here.
When Jim’s eyes snapped awake, he immediately thought the entire thing had been nothing more than a hallucination; he had been drugged. He was in a helicopter, his mind groggy and confused. A lapse in personal judgment caused this to happen. He was still alive and surrounded by teammates, the chopper vibrating as it carried the soldiers to another destination.
But not everyone was in the chopper, and Jim had to wipe sleep from his eyes, found his limbs weak and unresponsive. There were only two other members of the team that had been assigned the Egypt mission inside the chopper with him.
Never before in his life was he denied the ability to control his fate; not since Georgia Cone defined his every breath. He lay there on the helicopter floor, unmoving, waiting.
Two other veteran Black Ops killers—two other men who should have been dead. Jim tried to rationalize whether or not the undead lords were real, and he had been thrust into a new nightmare in which he couldn’t understand reality.
This might be the hell that had always awaited him.
But why these two men? Ron Sutter, a big American from the Southwest with a long, thick beard stretched down to his chest. Stephen Richards, a career officer who had ambitions to generalship, a well-groomed man who believed in efficiency. Like Jim, these men had been considered expendable. These men had been thrown into a mission that was certain to kill them.
“What’s up, Jimmy boy?” Sutter asked while he chomped on a thick cigar.
“We survived,” Jim said.
“Yuppers,” Sutter said. “Did you see what happened to Rakesh?”
Jim understood that Sutter was implying Jim had killed him. “No.”
“Well, sheeit. Cocksucker probably worked for ISIS, anyway. Fucking A-rab.”
Ron Sutter held a record for most ISIS insurgents killed in one mission. In the same mission, he did not lose a single soldier under his command.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Richards said, “but we’re not going to start killing each other. This isn’t survival of the fittest. Not like it was supposed to be.”
“The game’s changed,” Sutter said. “We could have left your skinny ass to rot with the A-rab and the rest of the crew, but I told Richards I like your haircut and that shit-eating smirk you got; there’s a soft-spot in my heart for you. Richards didn’t want to kill you, either.”
“Like he said, the game’s changed,” Richards added. “We know what you saw. We had a similar experience. I can’t say we felt the same, or we… suffered… the same, but we’re here. We’re alive.”
“And we know it’s never happened like this before,” Sutter said, his tone finally serious.
“I see where this is going,” Jim said. “We’re going to make a deal, or a pact. The three of us will be like the three men in the Pardoner’s Tale. It’s only a matter of time before we try to kill each other. I expected to be the only man to return from Egypt.”
“That’s dramatic as hell,” Sutter said with a loud laugh. “Are you always this serious? Dude, we got an opportunity. You want to go solo? I’m cool with that. I’ll save us all the trouble and off myself. You think I give a shit what happens next? I made my peace with who I am. Both you handsome bastards got all kinds of plans. I don’t have plans. I’m a soldier, and I like to kill shit. I’ll die doing it someday. It could be now, could be later. Don’t we all think this way? I’m not trying to be a poet like you are, Jimbo, but shit, it ain’t all that complicated.”
There was only one possible conclusion to Jim’s career, and Sutter and Richards shared the same destiny; they weren’t going to retire in a plush mansion and live the quiet lives of mysterious, independently wealthy bachelors. Sutter was right: death was inevitable, and for them, it would be violent. It could be no other way. Egypt was supposed to be their last mission.
But they were coming back, and Jim saw a new destiny, a beautiful dream. After spending their entire lives murdering people for money, they might have a chance to murder everyone. The money didn’t matter anyway. Maybe it never mattered. They killed because they could, and now they could realize the ultimate potential that only men who could not deny that genocide was the only true path to human purity.
“We can have the power of hell,” Richards said. “We can wipe everyone out. We can give these… people… what they’ve always secretly wanted, what they’ve always tried to do to the species. We already have the Rose project, and we know our superiors have someone who could help us. Someone very, very important.”
Jim searched his memory and tried to make sense of the knowledge that had been shared with him. There was a girl, a woman whose bloodline was part of the ancient race that had been buried in the Egyptian nightmare-tomb. The power-elite had sent Jim, Sutter, and the others into the tomb so that one of them would return and help foster the development of the apocalypse, an experiment that had been tried before by the shadowy figures who manipulated world governments. There was a girl who had been bred to destroy the world.
Richards had mentioned Rose, and it wasn’t her. Richards was already trying to plan ahead, but Richards didn’t understand that Rose belong to Jim. There was another woman, a redhead whose ancestors could not be killed.
Jim looked into Sutter’s face and watched the big man’s lips split into a wide smile.
“We’re gonna have one helluva time,” Sutter said. He turned and spat onto the helicopter’s floor, a big wad of phlegm only an inch or two away from Jim’s fingertips. “Rock and roll. Oh yeah!”
Jim wondered if Sutter would ever stop laughing.
TEMPLES OF HATE
VEGA
The supply chopper was three days late. Vega could hear it; the thundering rotors were still a few miles away, but everyone was probably scrambling for it by now. She was getting tattoos done on her hands, mostly because she just wanted to feel the pain.
The tattoo artist looked up from his work. A dove with its wings spread out on each of her hands, sort of her own twisted joke.
“Not bad,” she said.
The man’s name was Suede, a man of dark flesh who had once worked with the man she shared the house with. “Do you mind if I…?”
“No, go ahead. Thank you.”
He practically ran out the door. She stood and approached the doorway to watch people scramble toward the school. They dropped tools and water bottles. Small children pointed and wailed.
Vincent approached the house, walking over the lawn upon which scores of zombies had once been cut down by his gun. A year ago. Over a year ago. He wiped sweat from his face with a black and brown stained towel that used to be white. He was leaner. Everyone was leaner. He wore a blue tank top and a pair of black Dickies and work boots. Dust was caked on his shoulders and arms.
“Not going?” she asked, flexing her sore hands.
The sunlight caught the glint of his platinum teeth when he smiled. He planted his foot against the porch and leaned over his thigh.
“Thinking we need some time,” he said.
“Been planning this all day?”
She knew he was going to smile, and when he smiled, she smiled. Her face betrayed her, no matter how many times she tried to command the muscles in her face, her lips had their own plans.
His thin, ropy arms were slick with sweat. Behind him was the neighborhood. Their neighborhood. A home they built together.
Vincent looked away in a vain attempt to hide his smile. He scrunched his eyes against the sunlight and watched people race down the street toward the high school where the chopper had already landed on the roof.
“Got the Champ taking care of it,” he said.
“The Champ,” she said.
“The football player.”
“I know who he is.” She pictured the man who looked like a Norse god, arms like tree trunks, eyes like sapphires.
“You’re disappointed?” Vincent asked.
“Why would I be disappointed? You spend all day trying to fix this place, trying to make it what it never was. You’re the one who’s going to be disappointed, not me.”
“I forget you know me better than I know myself.”
She leaned against the doorway and watched people scatter toward the supply drop. Parents picked up their kids, not to hold them close, but to have the ability to race faster down the street without dragging their children along.
“Your hands,” Vincent said.
Vega held up her hands.
“Suede did all right,” he said. “You like it?”
“Doing my part to represent world peace.”
He sprung forward and swept her into his arms. She had been hoping for this. She’d been looking forward to this time together in which he wouldn’t be so exhausted, and they wouldn’t lie awake at night, listening. Wondering. She felt lighter in his arms now, as if she’d removed layers of clothing she’d been forced to wear while working in a desert. She could smell his must, and it didn’t matter.
Vincent carried her through the empty living room and down the hallway. Past the kitchen where she had eaten a meal with Patrick Griggs and Sergeant John Charles. Into a bedroom with a mattress on threadbare carpet damaged by lighter burns and discarded ash. Rifles and bullets on the floor. Hundreds of bullets, like confetti from an old party nobody felt like cleaning up.
Vincent dropped her onto the bed and stood over her. He was already unbuckling his belt, thank God. She lifted the shirt over her head. He grabbed her waist and tore at her blue jeans. His arms wrapped around her. His sweat, his skin, his breath—all of him mixing with all of her.
***
Hours later, Vega sat at the table, and Vincent leaned back against the sink. The Champ sat across from Vega, a wall of tanned muscle and dirt. His large frame didn’t fit in the chair very well. Behind him was Mike Taylor, a retired Detroit beat cop.
Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) Page 2