BELLA
“Jesus Christ, look at ‘em all.”
Angelica thought it was funny. Milling around in the street, hundreds of walking corpses filled the avenue purposefully, and all the woman could do was stand there and smile.
“I’m telling you this is wrong,” Bella said.
“No shit. They’re all bunched up. Making noise. Like they all just woke up or something.”
Something crashed inside their building. Noise on the stairs.
The women exchanged glances.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Angelica said, and picked up her rifle.
Bella followed her down the stairwell, and it didn’t take long for them to see the dread figures pounding up the stairs, sleepily wavering on their feet, heads rolling between their shoulders, eyes flowing upward toward the women. They looked more like rusted machines than zombies, their bodies rusted by dirt, grime, and time. Though they wore clothes, their rotted bodies had endured the four seasons of a year without shelter; clothes hung on them like wet, hole-infested towels. They skin had rotted away, leaving nothing more than hollow husks, inhuman monsters made of bone and hunger.
“Motherfuck.” Angelica took aim behind her gun.
She fired her bolt-action rifle. Pumped a bullet through the chamber. Fired again. Bullet casings popped out of her smoking gun. Bodies dropped as pieces of skull exploded; the dead flopped onto the stairs and rolled down or slumped against the wall. But they kept coming. More of them. Coming up the stairs.
Angelica quickly reloaded, and Bella ripped the handgun from the woman’s hip holster. Angelica didn’t argue or so much as reprimand her with a look. Bella was terrible with a gun, but with two guns between them, they had a better chance. Angelica snagged a round object from her belt. Bella hadn’t seen it before, but she recognized what it was.
Angelica pulled the pin from the grenade with her teeth and tossed it down the stairs. She aggressively pulled Bella up the stairs and pushed her into a room. The floor pulsed upward as Bella slammed face-first into the dust. Smoke wafted into the room as plaster and wood splinters rained from the ceiling. Pressure slammed into Bella’s ears, and she felt her ears ringing.
Angelica’s arm was draped over her back. The women rose, and Angelica stepped back into the hall.
“They’re still coming,” Angelica said breathlessly, her face dripping sweat.
Bella placed her arm over her mouth but still coughed through the cloud of dust and smoke. The stairwell had broken, but there were several shapes still trying to find a way up.
Angelica stomped back up another floor into the room where they had made camp. Bella followed, wondering what the plan could be, if there was a plan at all. They had just cut off one of their own escape routes, and they made a lot of noise in the process.
Bella had never seen a city street congested with so many people; all of them slowly making their way to a mutual destination, as if they had been herded by an unholy shepherd. They walked stiffly, as if their legs were crookedly-connected prosthetics. Jerking, twitching their way along the avenue, eyes fixed ahead at nothing. In the gloom, it was impossible to make out their faces; Bella saw nothing more than awkward marionettes parading through the dark.
Angelica’s voice did not betray the faintest note of panic or desperation, even though Bella wanted an outburst, a display of weakness and need from her captor. “They’re on the move,” Angelica observed while looking out the window. “So many of them, aggressive, not like they were before. Moving around, moaning. Like they knew someone was here.”
“That was my only grenade,” Angelica said, her eyes still on the street. “I’ve got more back home. But that’s it. And we don’t have enough ammo to go through them.”
Angelica looked like she was trapped, cornered.
She was afraid.
This was the survival game. What were their chances? What were their options?
Angelica looked at the gun in Bella’s hand, and then into the woman’s eyes.
“We could climb the fire escape,” Angelica said. “But I can’t see an end to them. It’s too dark to see where they end.”
“Wait,” Bella said. “We’re stuck here, but how’re we going to get across?”
“Across?”
“You said there’s a man with two daughters in the building across the street. You wanted to see if they were going to make their move, go outside, maybe get themselves killed. You wanted to pick over their shit. Like a vulture.”
“Don’t you dare give me any moral garbage…”
“It’s not moral garbage. That’s what you wanted to do. And now they’re going to make their move, live or die. Just like us. Either way, you have to get over there to get what you want.”`
Angelica stared into the street at the waves of dead people who just kept coming. For a long time now the undead had become passive, and now they were on the move. They had been almost an afterthought now for several months, and here they were.
Bella had a gun in her hand.
She hated guns. Desmond had hated them, too. Brian used to argue with her at length about how much they needed guns, and Bella had thought all of his arguments were charged with emotion, too irrational. Yet, here she was, holding the gun because holding it made her feel like maybe she could do something to defend herself against the dead and against Angelica.
Her captor was already unstable. There was no telling what she might do next.
“So we wait for those things to move in there, and kill that family,” Bella said. “We wait for those little girls to experience what we… the thing that we have nightmares about, the thing we’ve been running from this whole time. You don’t give a shit if those girls die. You sat here waiting for them to die.”
“How did you ever survive so long?” Angelica shook her head, still staring into the street.
“You stay here and wait to hear them scream, but what happens when they’re gone? They hold out for a long time, they wait for death like we’re doing, until one of us dies first. They die first, then we wait longer for the dead to get out of our way, then we scavenge what they have left over. Let’s say we wait here for a very long time, and we don’t have the supplies they have, if they have anything at all. They might be able to wait longer. So then we have to leave, and go back to your little hideout, and maybe we never come back. Maybe by the time we get back, all their supplies are gone because someone else got to them first…”
“I get it.”
Moans from the street drifted through the evening air.
“You made a lot of noise with that grenade,” Bella continued. “Those things are more interested in us right now. If we make a break for it now…”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Why not?”
“Damn it!” Angelica whipped around from the window. “Because if we go over there, we either put bullets into their heads and save them trouble, or we take them with us. Their chances are fucked either way.”
“Their chances are not fucked. Especially if we can give them a chance. But you can’t handle the responsibility, can you?”
“I’m not a babysitter.”
“They’ve survived long enough on their own. What makes you think they can’t survive better than you?”
“You’re wearing on me, girl.”
“You won’t do shit. You want to make sure you get fair market value for handing me in.”
Angelica spat on the floor. “There’s plenty of people who like their meat dead if it’s still fresh.”
Bella dropped the gun.
She wasn’t a fighter, but she managed to get Angelica’s blood up. They were both under pressure now, with the undead doing something sudden and unpredictable, changing the game they were used to playing. They had a common foe; no matter how many people Bella met, it seemed as if she was the only person who felt that way.
“That’s it?” Angelica asked. “You give me shit, and you just back down?”
“This i
sn’t about us.”
Angelica laughed. “What? It’s about me, you dumb bitch. I own your nigger ass. You’re a slave just like your ancestors. You want to get yourself killed, then go for it. Just don’t scream too loudly, I hate the sound. It’s the sound of weakness.”
This woman had convinced herself a long time ago that she was hard, and she wouldn’t compromise a code she trained herself to believe in. It kept her alive, but now she was trapped. They were both trapped. There was no place for moral ambiguity in Angelica’s world, and Bella respected it. She admired it. As hateful as Angelica was, the woman was using a self-defense mechanism.
All this optimism; Desmond taught her to think this way. This way of thinking kept her alive, kept her from falling apart.
“You don’t have to take this crap from anyone,” Brian said. “She’s a killer, Mom. If you don’t stop her, she’s going to hurt others. If you can do good…”
Bella nodded. Her son was right. Angelica kidnapped people and sold them; she kidnapped people at the end of her gun and forced them to endure her power-tripping until she was done with them. She was a lonely woman who was too screwed up, too damaged, to maintain a relationship with anyone in this wasteland. She was like most survivors, only she wasn’t afraid to steal a temporary friend, someone she can push around with her strong personality until she was finished.
“Kick her ass, Mom,” Brian said.
It was unlike her to launch herself into a fistfight, but she wasn’t afraid of Angelica. She had never been afraid of another living person before, except her ex-husband, Brian’s father. She couldn’t blame adrenaline or anger, or any survival-instinct; she simply acted.
Angelica caught her wrists and twirled her into the wall. She punched Bella in the stomach, but now there was adrenaline, and the realization that she was fighting for her life. She was going to kill Angelica.
“Fucking nigger bitch,” Angelica slapped her across the face and kneed her in the groin. Bella felt the pain. Instead of falling to her knees she hugged Angelica tightly and raked her fingernails across the woman’s shoulders, digging deep and exposing blood.
Bella head-butted Angelica, and the women separated from each other. Angelica pressed her hand to her forehead and stumbled back against the window.
The rifle was lying next to Bella.
Both women, dizzy from pain, stared at the gun.
Angelica dove for it with a scream.
Bella wasn’t interested in the gun. She knew it was important, but she had tasted Angelica’s brand of violence and wanted more.
In a flurry of hair—and slapping and biting—both women took turns being atop the other; their hands were locked upon the other’s throat, squeezing. They were not thinking, they were not in the room. Their bodies were locked in a violent embrace, but they were not present. They did not hear the moaning. They did not hear the dead outside.
Bella was on top of Angelica, and it was only a matter of time before oxygen fled one of them, cut off from the brain, cut off from thought and awareness. Death was seconds away.
Angelica kicked into Bella’s groin again and sent her into the dust; Bella wasn’t in the best position, hadn’t settled all of her weight onto her opponent.
Choking and sputtering, the women lunged for each other again, but this time the crown of Bella’s head connected with Angelica’s temple.
And so they lay in the dust, Bella atop Angelica.
They were breathing, still alive. Sweating, slick with each other’s blood that did not belong to them.
“Kill her, Mom.”
Bella didn’t want to move.
“She’s not even awake. Just kill her. If you don’t do it, she’ll kill you.”
Pain in her neck, behind her eyes, in her groin, stomach. She’d been scratched, and she was dizzy, confused, unsure. She could hear Brian, but she couldn’t see him. She lay atop Angelica and felt the woman breathing beneath her.
She pushed herself off and crawled toward the rifle.
The dead were outside, waiting.
She backed up against the wall with the rifle on her lap and waited.
“Mom, she won’t even know.”
She won’t even know.
Dump her out the window, straight into the arms of the people who would make sure she was never alone again. People who would make her feel welcome, make her feel as if she belonged.
There was a family across the street. Did they hear Angelica’s grenade? Did they think rescue was coming?
Saving others from death was out of her realm of expertise; she stayed alive by staying quiet, by staying away, by doing nothing. She stayed alive by remaining passive. She stayed alive because she had Desmond and her son to guide her, to help her. And she started a fight with a woman who used the opposite philosophy to remain alive. Now that woman was unconscious, waiting for death.
Bella could take this woman’s life right now.
She waited.
And listened to the dead outside.
Moaning. After all this time, how could they? They have changed. They are driven, willing, and wanting.
All this time, to get this far, this close to Desmond.
Angelica stirred.
The woman sat up and looked at Bella, bruises already forming on her face, her bottom lip fattening. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and grinned at Bella.
“Do it,” she said.
“Do what?”
“It’s what you wanted all along. It’s how we survive, right nigger? Life is too valuable to trust anyone. You know that. You’ve lived this long. You’ve killed. I know you’ve killed.”
Bella smirked.
“Come on nigger. Right between my eyes.”
And Bella looked at the woman’s dark face. This was a woman who was ready to die every day; every moment was borrowed in this damaged-mirror reflection of the world they had come from. Nothing was guaranteed. Nothing was safe. Should they have lived their lives like this before? Was this life’s most important lesson?
Deciding whether someone should live or die.
This power. This moment.
Bella dropped the rifle and slid it across the floor to the other woman.
Angelica looked at it.
“Of course not,” she said.
Bella smiled. “It would be doing you a favor.”
“Fair enough. You’re a hard woman.”
Silence for a moment. Angelica’s eyes drifted to the gun.
“That’s the closest you’ll ever get to a compliment,” Angelica said. “You decided you want to stay alive. You want to do this together.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Right. I guess now we pray or something, right? I’m in the mood to get the hell out of here.”
This was the kind of woman who always had a plan, always had a way out. She stood, grabbed the rifle, and didn’t look at Bella, didn’t even seem to consider it. The danger had passed.
VINCENT
Louis had sat in the same chair, with the same look on his face. Vincent didn’t understand the look at first. He thought Louis was angry with himself for letting his life’s story end after being attacked by zombies. Yeah. Zombies. How silly it all sounded in the beginning. Would it matter if they came up with a different name? Some people tried. Louis didn’t have time to try. Louis had sat in this chair because he wanted to say goodbye. He wanted to know it was worth it. That he didn’t spend his whole life working for a two-bit gangster, only to ask that same gangster to help him die.
It wasn’t anger.
The shelves in the room were bare. The place used to be a mess of guns and ammo. Now there was almost nothing.
Vincent was left with nothing.
He had put his gun beneath Louis’s chin and pulled the trigger.
That was a year ago.
Vega had been here with him. She stood and watched. What was the expression on Louis’s face? Not anger.
These guns belonged to the neighborhood. House wasn�
��t even registered under his name. This wasn’t all the guns. Not by a long shot. Nope. Why would he have all of his supplies out in the open? There were crusaders in City Hall who wanted to change Detroit, and they thought they could start from the outskirts, tear it down, shrink the city, work inward. Pull down a house like this one. A house the neighborhood needed.
What was the expression on Louis’s face?
Think about it a while.
Vega was gone. Was she really gone? Maybe she was upstairs.
A door opened in the house. Upstairs, footsteps.
Good. Let them come. Let them come down, and drag him to Hell. He couldn’t fight them anymore. He knew he couldn’t fight them anymore because he didn’t want to. His body didn’t want to. There was something in him, something that stopped him. Something that kept him from fighting when their tiny hamlet was ripped down; when everything he helped rebuild was chewed up by the dead.
And they took Vega from him.
No good blaming others. It was his fault. His business. His neighborhood. He came back here to protect it, to bring it back, and people followed him. They wanted what he was selling. He gave them hope, and someone brought drugs. He gave them hope, and he gave them guns, and they began smoking it away. Injecting it into their bloodstream. Disappearing into the spaces where nothing bad could happen. Places where nothing bad could find them, touch them, hurt them.
Footsteps on the stairs.
How would it feel? He always wondered. He dreamt about it, those rare nights he actually slept. What their teeth would feel like. What death would feel like. Did they feel anything when he put bullets into their skulls? Did they know what they were doing?
Time to get out of the chair, and fight for his life. Get out of the chair, and grab a gun. Die upright, like a man.
Or sit down and rest. Rest, and let them take what they want. He could keep fighting, keep running, but there would always be something else to lose. Like Vega. She was gone now because he couldn’t keep fighting, or keep running.
A figure walked down the stairs into the dark. A figure with heavy steps.
Get up now.
“Turn a goddamn light on,” the figure said.
Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) Page 17