Mina could hear plaster cracking as if a storm of eggs fell from the sky. Cracks fissured, crawled, split the wall behind the television monitor. The wall opened.
“There’s someone else in our head,” the Patrick-demon said. “A visitor.”
Through the hole walked a woman. Beautiful. Dangerous. Slender and busty. Platinum-blonde hair with pink extensions. She wasn’t a stripper.
“We can have a body together,” Rose said.
Agent Rose.
Mina smiled. “I didn’t want you to die. I thought you were cute. You loved Jim so much, and he didn’t care. You know he didn’t care?”
“I’ve been dead for a very long time,” she said. “I didn’t know it until now. I didn’t know it until I died again.”
Smoke began to rise from the demon-Patrick’s hands.
“But you can’t be here,” Mina said. “This is my head.”
Rose shook her head. “You can’t die. Even if you don’t know what you are. Me? I’m a microchip. I used to be a woman who died…” she trailed off, the remembrance cutting into her throat with the emotion of hurt and anger.
Patrick-demon’s hands were melting. Sizzling. Cooking. Flesh fusing with the table.
“Inside of Jim there is a truth we’ve always wanted,” Rose said.
Mina stood from the chair, and she felt something warm, odd, unwelcome. Her throat tightened and teeth wanted to tear chunks from her bottom lip. Anger. She was angry. After all this time.
“This isn’t about Jim! This is about me, dammit! I’m insane. I’m insane and this is where I belong so I can’t hurt anybody!”
She sank into the chair, exhausted from her outburst, her hands immediately reaching for her face, covering it in dark. She hid behind her hands because she wanted to be alone; there were too many people who knew what she should do and what she should be or what she should have been, what she should have wanted.
“You don’t have to want anything.”
Daddy.
She was home again. She was a little girl, clutching her blanket to her chest.
Her bedroom door was open, and it was dark. Time for her to go to sleep. Did she have school tomorrow? She was a little girl. She was eight years old.
And she knew what was coming.
When she slept, she dreamed of monsters. Terrible, flesh-eating undead monsters that used to be people. She never thought about Daddy because she had loved him and understood him; that’s why she had to eat him.
Mina got out of bed wearing her favorite nightdress, a sheer gown of white, frilly and lacey. She approached the hall and looked upon the figure. A tall shadow, the man who loved her, the man who waited for her.
“Daddy, I’m ready for bed,” she said.
“It’s time for a new nightmare,” Daddy said, although it wasn’t his voice.
Jim had tricked her once. Pretended to be Daddy.
Flash of lightning. Daddy’s face.
He wasn’t wearing the mask. Another lightning flash. It looked like the mask. Another flash. Something more monstrous. Something real.
“You don’t have a Daddy,” he said.
“Um.”
“They’ve been trying to make you for hundreds of years. You have such old blood, and I can show you. I can show you that we are one. You are eternal. You are a goddess.”
“Can you read me a story?”
“Daddy was a killer. They took him out of prison and told him to abuse you, hurt you. He was a child molester, a sexual predator. They gave him a child. They gave him you. Sweet little Mina.”
He wasn’t her father. What was this? Another game the demon was playing with her. Of course she had a Daddy. He hurt her, but sometimes he read nice stories to her. Before her hurt her, of course. If she was a good girl and promised to be nice to him, he would read to her. She liked it when he read to her.
The thing that was not Daddy stepped forward.
“You’re an experiment. They wanted your mind. They wanted what you could give them. Eternal life, and access to the inferno. It’s simple, my little sweetling. You were a tool, and you got away from them. You got away from them because you let me in. And they didn’t know. They didn’t understand.”
“I want to go to sleep now.”
Flash of lightning.
“You’ve always been asleep. I’m here to wake you up.”
He took a step forward, and she took a step backward. He came for her, and she retreated.
She ran into her bedroom and jumped into her bed. The face was the monster, not a mask. A mangled, rotted face that was hungry, needy.
“Please Daddy, take off the mask!” she threw the blanket over her.
But she knew it wasn’t a mask. When the blanket was snatched from her hands, she looked up into the dark and found the decrepit face of the man she once loved; rancid, pungent breath escaped through a mouth from the bowels of a rotting stomach, and the hanging pieces of cartilage and lip belonged to Patrick. This is what he would look like. This is what she made him.
“Just let me have a taste,” the demon said. “You want it. I know how badly you want it.”
She screamed. She never screamed for Daddy.
The demon laughed. Daddy never laughed.
The undead demon-Patrick arched backward, and a bright explosion of fire through its black mouth blinded Mina. She felt the weight of the demon fall upon her legs until it was shoved off the bed by the woman who just saved her.
“I didn’t save you,” Agent Rose said.
She pointed her gun at Mina’s face, pushing the warm barrel against her cheek, shoving her back onto the pillow.
“You don’t want this power?” Rose asked. “You don’t want this body? I’m going to take it from you. I was always meant to be with Jim. He made me, created me. I didn’t know it before, but I know it now. He made me to be like him, to be with him.”
The hot gun burned into Mina’s face.
“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” Mina said.
“I know. That’s the problem. But it was always supposed to be this way. I’m supposed to have your power. I’m supposed to have your body.”
The gun exploded again, and parts of Mina’s face and hair decorated the mattress, the walls, throwing blood upon a picture of an elephant in a frame above her headboard.
BELLA
Bella stared across the Ambassador Bridge and could feel the tightness in her chest, the swelling of pride in herself that conflicted with the pain of loss and regret. She had come this far, had survived this long, to get here. She had lost everything—maybe—for this moment. There was no looking back.
Desmond might be dead. How would she find out? That question, more than any other, bothered her the most.
With the scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face, she remembered again. His voice on the phone. Coltrane in the background. Stranded on the Ambassador Bridge. She called to ask if he was okay. She called to make sure he was out of danger.
The bridge waited for her. Abandoned cars. The sun-disc dipping beneath a crumbled skyline signaling the end of a day. The dead could see in the dark just as well as she could, and the living were far more dangerous than the dead. This, she knew from experience.
There was nothing for her in Detroit; if she found Desmond in his car, or near it, would she move on? If he was dead, he might be one of them, and a part of her denied it.
She was eager to get this over with, but she couldn’t move. She stared at the bridge. At the military barricade in the center. At the wandering shapes drifting among the cars. Wind picked up dust and ash and slammed it into her face; the world was an ashen desert now, and she was a traveler through this wretched wasteland, looking for the man she loved because the search was all she had left. She threw her hood over her face.
Desmond would have told her to get on with it.
Don’t watch the news, he always said.
She had watched the news.
His startup law practice finally had a client.
The last thing he told her.
Every one of his words from that conversation were recorded into her memory. She remembered a lot of things that kept her going forward. She saw a lot of people die in shelters and on television. Her teenage son, Brian, went looking for supplies and never came back. He volunteered to help the group. He was out here too, because he had probably gone looking for Desmond without her.
Everything was quiet now. Everyone was dead now.
Now. The bridge.
Bella carried a backpack full of granola bars and a couple bottles of water that had been boiled over a fire. She had a cooking pot and some knives. A few other odds and ends. All that she carried, and no weapon. The last mistake people often made was trying to fight instead of run. If you were forced to fight, you were fucked anyway. No use carrying extra weight.
Fine. Okay. Take a step. That’s where it all starts. With one step.
She walked toward the bridge. She walked onto the bridge. Was it smarter to walk along one of the edges or down the middle? There was more room to run and scramble in the middle, but she might be surrounded easily.
In the oasis of silence, nobody would hear her scream. Nobody would hear her last words. Nobody would hear the last words of those she had known. Nobody else would bear her burden; the last moments and confessions of survivors she had known, survivors who didn’t last this year.
The blood on the concrete looked like oil stains, unwashed by rain and time. Spider webs had replaced broken car windows. Glass crunched beneath her boots. Flat tires and open hoods with their batteries ripped out indicated a salvage team had been this way. Toddler chairs strapped into back seats. Soda bottles on floor mats. Dangling cell phone charger cords. Shoes. Bloodstained upholstery. Bloodstained concrete. Silence. Silence.
She had looked into hundreds of cars over the past year, thousands of them. There was a Cadillac on this bridge somewhere, Desmond’s Cadillac.
A year ago she would have been able to smell the dead. She would have turned and run. She would have screamed.
They sat on the pavement as if they were nothing more than sleeping gargoyles. They were colorless and fleshless, their mutilations and wounds obscured by decay. Their clothes were tattered. Some of them no longer had eyes. When their arms moved slowly, they bled dust and ash. Bones cracked. A turning head snapped like a tree falling in an invisible forest; the head tumbled over shoulders and rolled along the ground, and the body sagged against a car door.
A dozen of them, maybe more. They used to be people, and now when they moved, they crumbled. They collapsed. Their body structures surrendered.
“Don’t move, nigger.”
A woman’s voice. Bella obeyed.
“Look up.”
Sitting atop a semi truck’s trailer, a woman kneeling behind the sights of a bolt-action rifle. A dark-skinned woman with a silver stud pierced through her right nostril. The gray suburban combat camo the dead soldiers had worn; pants and jacket, an olive green shirt on her thin body riding up, revealing a tight stomach with a dangling belly ring.
“You ain’t a scavenger,” the woman said.
“We’re all scavengers.”
“That so?”
“Was the racist remark supposed to intimidate me?”
The woman behind the rifle smirked. “You are what you are. I’m sure you’ve heard worse. You’re a woman. You’ve survived.”
“Obviously.”
They had both been tormented by lawless men who were governed by desperation and hunger. Not too many women were alive now. Consumed by the men who promised to protect them, or hunted down and traded by slavers. A new economy had replaced the old one in the ruins. In one year, the new economy was everything.
“Where’s your crew?”
Bella listened to the creaking bone-machinery of the dead falling apart as they tried to walk lazily, their kneecaps snapping, ankles twisting.
“I’m alone,” Bella said.
“Bullshit.”
“They wouldn’t send a woman as a scout. Nobody would risk precious merchandise.”
The gun dropped slightly, and Bella could see the black stocking cap, the long eyelashes, wisps of black hair.
“Either shoot me, or let me go on,” Bella said. “You’re a hunter? Looking for skin?”
The gun dropped lower. “You’re probably nuts like everyone else.”
The dead had fallen apart, their bones sinking back into the dusty pavement.
Silence again.
The woman was crouched on her heels and rested the gun between her knees. “You didn’t stop and look for nothing,” the woman said. “You must be a crazy nigger. Only the crazies survive for a long time on their own.”
“And what about you?”
The woman was calm and had already decided she wasn’t going to shoot Bella.
“I don’t work with niggers. Hell, I don’t work with anyone. I trade. I kill people and rob them. You don’t have much with you. I’ll take whatever food you have, and I’ll think about letting you go.”
Bella began to walk away.
“Turn around!”
Bella stepped over a skeleton. That’s what they were now: skeletons.
“I said turn around, bitch!”
A Cadillac. Was it Desmond’s Cadillac?
It had to be.
His briefcase was in the backseat. He had taken the first case for his private practice, and he was on his way home to see her. On his way to be with her.
If she looked at the dead bodies would she find him? Would she find his corpse? Bella whipped her head around at the scattered bones and looked for the suit he wore when he left that morning, or his tie. Was the really his briefcase in the back seat? It had to be, and this was his Cadillac.
The woman was in the street now, her gun aimed at Bella’s head. She could have fired from atop the semi.
“Drop your bag, and put your hands up,” the woman said.
Bella smirked. “His car. But I don’t think he’s here. He ran. He ran somewhere.”
The woman sighed and lowered her gun. “You really are nuts.”
“You would have killed me by now if you were serious.”
Unspoken words, something whispered along the edges of silence, borders designed by the idle cars, artifacts that would have to dissolve. Artifacts that would have to be unearthed several thousand years from now by the same people who were looking for Troy or the Fountain of Youth.
“The racist comments make you sound trashy, not tough,” Bella said.
“Fuck you.”
Bella walked away.
***
Her name was Angelica, and she called herself a gypsy.
“Call me Angie, and I’ll rape your skull with this rifle,” she said.
Bella opened her backpack and shared some beefy jerky. She had no qualms about sharing with a stranger.
“You talk a big game,” Bella said. “Where’s your crew?”
“I don’t have a crew. I trade. I scavenge and trade. I kill and rob.”
They ate and talked on top of the semi. Angelica ate with the rifle on her lap, her eyes never straying far from Bella. She was another half-mad survivor, a woman who had seen everyone die and had listened to the screams of a million people fill the streets of a gutted world.
“You’re out here alone,” Angelica said. “You’re not afraid to die. I’m not sure why I haven’t killed you. Maybe after I eat.”
“That’s all you think about? Killing people?”
“I like staying alive. It suits me. Death was always a normal part of things, we just didn’t take the time to look around. To experience it. I had three brothers in jail for being involved in all kinds of crazy shit. I haven’t changed. I was waiting for it to happen. Something like this.”
Whenever Bella met a sole survivor, they would ramble for a while and do something stupid to get themselves killed shortly after. It was like the presence of another survivor rocked them back to the real world, and th
ey suddenly realized they didn’t want to be alive anymore, but they wanted to confess their sins and bleed what remained of their humanity. Bella carried their names, their stories, their burdens.
“Why aren’t you dead yet?” Angelica asked.
Bell shrugged.
“You were careless. Walked in a straight line. Right down the middle of the bridge. You’ve been alive this long, and you do shit like that.”
Brian might have something to say if he was here. His ghost might have something to say. “Mom, we can’t trust her. She’ll kill you just because she’s used to it. It’s what she does. She kills people because it’s a habit. Trust me on this. Trust me.”
She always trusted Brian. He promised he would come back and he didn’t, but that’s only because he was on the other side of the bridge. He was in Detroit somewhere with Desmond.
“What were you talking about earlier?” Angelica asked. “You were staring at that car and mumbling something.”
She wanted to get personal. This woman, who called her names. This woman, who ate her food after threatening to kill her.
“Mom, just get away from her,” Brian said. “Please.”
Brian wasn’t with her. She knew he wasn’t there with her because he was in Detroit with Desmond. He had crossed this bridge to come looking for Desmond without her. Why did he leave? Desmond would coach her out of thinking negative thoughts; he would tell her to keep moving forward, not to think about things that might cripple her emotions, might stop her from doing the right thing. Desmond had been a good man, one of the best men to have ever lived, his heart full of justice and love. He was always right.
“You said you were a trader,” Bella said. “Who do you trade with?”
“This is my turf,” Angelica said. “Nobody crosses the bridge without paying. You’re the only one stupid enough to come this way. Who would come to Detroit? You would be going north. You Canadian? You should be going north.”
The same argument. Everyone went north where it was colder, where it was easier to die. Easier to die because everyone was going north. That’s what Brian had told her, and it made sense. Running through the Canadian wilds would be suicide, even though anything and everything was suicide now.
Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) Page 5