How much blood did Angelica have to give? How much blood did the world have to give? The undead could not be satisfied. An entire population of consumers that wanted, wanted, wanted. There was never enough. There could never be enough. The cities of man had become wastelands, deserts of shattered glass, rusted metal. Those who were left to survive in those wastelands subsisted on the unlucky. There was nobody left to care, nobody left who could correct an entire kingdom of endangered animals into another paradise.
“Stand up,” Angelica said. “Let them beg, let them work for it.”
Bella felt tired, drained. She was used to moving with a goal in mind. A destination that awaited her. She had to remember that Desmond was still out there.
The cheap wood finally surrendered. A hand punched through a hole in the center of the door.
“Bella, help me up.”
Where was Brian?
His voice was gone.
She looked up and saw more hands tearing through the door.
“I’m still alive, Bella.”
Angelica’s voice was filled with desperation, fury.
“Do you hear me? I said I’m still alive. I’m still alive!”
The dying woman wore her own blood. The dying woman grunted and tried to push Bella away, to stand anew, to look upon her own death without trembling.
The room looked like an animal had been slaughtered in it, and still Angelica tried to stand.
The couch moved across the floor.
“Get your gypsy ass up,” Bella said. “Movie it, Angie.”
And they stood. They were on their feet. They did not look behind to see the first corpse that crawled over the top of the couch, its mouth filled to the brim with Angelica’s blood.
Bella picked up the rifle, and they walked toward the window, toward a slowly approaching dawn.
VEGA
Another backroom to a derelict building, closing the door softly behind them, waiting. Sweating.
Oh, Doctor Desjardins.
He stepped into the dark room, and Vega shoved him against the wall; she couldn’t wait to rip the Desert Eagle out of its holster. This asshole deserved to have the gun shoved all the way up his ass, but pressuring it against his chin was good enough for now.
“Just wait a minute,” Bill said.
“No no no,” Vega said. “This is it. Right now. Right here.”
Desjardins’ hands were flat against the wall. They needed to check to see if this place was even safe. They needed to secure it, make sure they could hide out here until dawn; but there was something more important on Vega’s mind.
There had been just enough time for her to process the bullshit, filter it through her memories, and realize she wanted to blow Desjardins’ brains into the ceiling.
She kept trying to breathe, but it was no good. Everything was a ragged gasp. Everything was a blur.
“We have to keep moving,” Bill said.
“Don’t you see what he did? Don’t you know what happened? What he’s telling us?”
The doctor stared down the barrel of the gun. “Look, we can just sit down maybe...”
Vega wanted to scream. She wanted to slam his head into the wall over and over and over again.
Bill grabbed her arm.
She closed her eyes. All she wanted to do was kill this man over and over again. No matter how many times he apologized or tried to reason his way out of any torture he deserved, she couldn’t stop herself. Her entire body was hot, her teeth grinding, her heart on overdrive.
Millions of people.
But when did she care about everyone else?
This wasn’t about everyone else.
Bob. Miles. Shanna. John Charles.
More. More. More.
So many dead. And all she wanted to do was kill. All her life she straddled the edge of godlessness and savagery, and now she was over that edge. She dreamed of blood on her hands in the name of vengeance, and her vengeance was forever. Traverse was just an excuse.
Bill had her arm, and the gun slowly lowered from the doctor’s jaw.
“Why don’t you take a walk,” Bill said. “Walk around the inside of the restaurant, make sure it’s safe.”
She didn’t even know they had walked inside of a restaurant. Festering garbage had been left behind, but then everything was festering garbage. They had been left in a world of festering garbage, and it all smelled the same.
Desjardins wasn’t wholly responsible, but he knew enough to have stopped it. He saw the potential for a future mired in genocide and became an accomplice to the greatest crime in the history of crime.
A government project that engineered the apocalypse.
“I understand why you’re upset,” Desjardins said.
What else was he supposed to say? He had conversations like this plenty of times with his deranged patients; this was a matter of habit for him. And she was a deranged patient. A very sick woman who was beyond help.
She didn’t want to look at him. This doctor. This mass-murderer.
“Heh. Yeah,” she said, trying to collect herself.
They waited for her to speak.
“What you said doesn’t make any sense,” she said, and opened a door to the kitchen which was mired in darkness and shadow. “Nothing makes sense the way things used to. But you came to me, right? You were following us. Watching us.”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, that’s right.”
“So you think there’s a way to reverse the process, or fix it somehow, and you want to make good.”
Nobody replied.
“Right? You feeling guilty, Doctor?”
“Something like that.”
“They put you on trial, and you stand there and shed some tears. Show the judges, show the jury, that you’re remorseful. But I’m not seeing much remorse from you now, and I’m the judge.”
Bill watched and listened, probably wondering when she was going to shoot up the place. A man like him was going to get his ass chewed, but she’d been wrong about that before. The hard men—Griggs, Bob, Miles, Crater—they were dead. Father Joe had survived with all his goodness intact.
And where was her goodness?
“Hell is inside of us,” she said. “We’re carrying it with us wherever we go. Something inside our heads or our souls. But I don’t want your theories about Hell. You want to help me get Traverse, maybe feel better—you have family, Doc? You lose anyone important? Wait, don’t answer that. If they were so important you would have stopped this bullshit when you had a chance.”
There was nothing in the darkness, nothing in the kitchen. Stainless steel and emptiness. Flies. Spiders. Shadows. The usual.
Now she turned to him.
“Mina was the key to this whole thing. Her head was some kind of portal to Hell, right?”
The doctor’s eyes flickered to Bill, who put a hand on his shoulder to give him the confidence to go on. Bill was this man’s bodyguard all of a sudden; he was everyone’s bodyguard, in his mind.
“Something like that. We gave up on her a long time ago. We still watched her. When she was with the detective, we were trying to go in a different direction. By then, Traverse had already been sent to Egypt. When he came back, he didn’t know what he was looking for. We didn’t know what he was looking for. Or who. But somehow, there was some connection made when she killed a man on the camera. There was a video of her having sex with another man, and something happened when she ate him on camera, only we didn’t know it until it was too late. And all this time, we knew the gateway, or portal, would be of her own design. Hell was her nightmare. That’s why she was… abused. Damaged. We put pushed that poor girl to her limits when she was a child.”
“Say again?”
“Look, I know how this sounds. You have to believe I… this is my nightmare, too. Not in the same way. I thought… oh God…”
“Don’t pull this shit. I’m not feeling sorry for you. You can ask the Devil for forgiveness.”
Doctor Desjardins looked away.
Vega wasn’t buying it. Too many people were dead because of this asshole. Even if they hadn’t used him, they would have found someone else. But here he was, one of the engineers, and he had the bad luck of meeting her.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked. “I came to you. I’m telling you everything I can…”
“What’s your point? You want to trade something? Do I owe you because you’re such a nice guy and want to save the world? Fuck all that noise. I came back out here to put a bullet between the Artist’s eyes. You won’t find any angels out here in the land of hurt and blood.”
Her words hung in the stifling air between the three of them for a long time, an open challenge to everything they had been thinking for months now. Was there a way out of this hell? Vega could only hope there was a way to quench the hellfire that dogged her heels. There were no answers for the cowboy or the scientist. They were on their own. They were all on their own, even though they stood in the room together, thrust back into the dark city, beyond the borders of the tiny little place they tried to call home for about a year.
And she could truly feel it now. As if she’d been dropped into a combat zone by a chopper that was never coming back, tossed into a storm-lade ocean in which she was tossed about on waves of blood. But didn’t that really happen? Dropped into Detroit with Bob and Miles; did that actually happen, or was she always here, in her own cozy land of shadow? There was no way out. No home for her to go back to.
She felt the weight of the rifle strapped over her shoulder. Patrick’s Desert Eagle holstered at her hip. The ammunition. The dirt beneath her fingernails. The lingering threat of another headache. The broil of hunger in her stomach. She was alone in the restaurant with the two men, and each waited for someone to break the silence, to snap them from the helplessness of their cause, whatever it was.
Bill was nothing more than a hulking outline, a large presence of confident strength in the dark. Vega wished she could look into his face now, get a glimpse of his expression. Here was a man who said he just wanted to go home, a man who believed he had a home waiting for him. How old could he be? 24? 25? She might have been 24 a thousand years ago.
Was she being too hard on Desjardins? Maybe she was the only way he could find his own redemption; she might have the winning bullet that would give him some kind of hope that all the damage he caused could somehow change the world for good.
She wasn’t being too hard on him. She was growing soft.
“There wasn’t a plan for zombies, was there?” she asked him.
It took Desjardins a moment to come up with an answer. “There was hope for a trainable corps of soldiers who couldn’t be hurt… but I guess that’s beside the point.”
“But Mina gained control of them.”
“I think she made another connection at some point recently. I don’t know how. I don’t know what happened or what’s going on in her head. But she took control, and she stopped those things. For a while, and that’s why we felt safe. She realized she was in charge, and she stopped all of them, and I don’t know how or why she did it. After what happened to her, and what we understood about her mental state…”
“You would know. You did it to her.”
“I don’t need to be reminded that you’re pissed off. You can throw it in my face every five seconds, and nothing will change. I’m telling you that if those things are up and moving again like we saw, and they’re suddenly making noise, then something has changed. I’ve heard the priest talk about Mina without mentioning her name. I know he met her, and I… Goddammit, I confessed to that man. Do I have to bleed for you right now so that you can see that my soul has been poisoned with this? I don’t need your approval, but I need your help. I want your help. I want the same things you want.”
There was no backing down. She couldn’t believe he was a born-again, God-fearing man just because he fostered the advent of mass-genocide. He didn’t know what she wanted, and she couldn’t help him. She couldn’t help Bill. She could barely help herself. Desjardins didn’t have a plan; nobody had a plan, and nobody knew what the hell was really going on. Except for Traverse, and his time was running out.
Poisoned soul? He didn’t have one; his soul had been sold to the highest bidder. How could she trust him? There was no way this man was just going to walk into her life and suddenly deliver all the solutions she needed. Killing Traverse wasn’t going to reverse the terrible process that had ruined the world, but it would give her a sense of closure. It was important to her and her alone. She was selfish, ruined by an emotionally charged engine that had been built for one function: kicking ass.
But she had to let this guy speak his piece. It would be a waste to kick him to the curb. Wasn’t she looking for her own salvation? Who was she to judge someone, with all the blood on her hands?
“I don’t know if we want the same things,” Vega said. “You played with fire. All of your people played with fire, and we all burned. The fact that you don’t know a whole lot about the zombies and the way they act doesn’t do anything to make me feel better. It’s not helping. I need useful information. I need to know why Father Joe, the priest you talked to, wasn’t attacked by them. We went through a horde of those things, and they didn’t so much as look at him twice. They ignored him.”
“We’re dealing with the supernatural,” Desjardins said, his voice becoming more calm, though the evident frustration remained. “So much of it was beyond what I could understand. Nobody really knew what we were getting into. My only theory is that since these things are manifestations of her consciousness, then she had her own ideas about what good and evil are. I’ve seen those things walk away from people before. I’ve seen them chow down on one person, and just ignore someone who was a hysterical mess.”
“Chow down? Is that scientific terminology?”
“Sorry.”
“Um,” Bill said.
“Spill it,” she said.
“Well, two days ago, I was out on a garbage run. Saw Father Joe running around out there, working out. He was running through the cars. He was out there to beat up zombies. With his bare hands. I think he had been doing it for a while.”
“Go on.”
“They bit him. I… I… fuck. I don’t even know if it matters. I thought it would be dangerous to let him go back. Isn’t it an infection or something? Isn’t this a disease? Even if it comes from her mind—oh, man.”
“So he was bit. I talked to him before he disappeared. He seemed his chipper self. Probably doesn’t mean anything. Don’t beat yourself up over it.” She turned to Desjardin’s dark-shrouded form. “Is it an infection? Did she imagine this thing as a sort of disease? I’ve seen a man turn. I’ve seen it happen right in front of me. Not completely, but he was getting sick fast.”
Desjardins was quiet for a moment, figuring out his next lie. Even though she was trying to convince herself to give him a chance, every passing second made it harder.
“You don’t know shit,” Vega said. “Give me something that will actually help. Traverse is still out there, and you know I’m looking for him, so you must have an idea where he is.”
“I don’t know where he is, but Sutter does. And I wanted to bring you to him.”
“Wait a minute,” Bill said. “I’ve heard of this guy. When we went foraging, we found people who heard of him. There was talk. Sutter’s a flesh-trader. Sells women and children for guns. Mike was worried his people were spying on us. He thought it was only a matter of time before the guy came knocking.”
Throw another name into the mix. Sutter knows where Traverse is, and there are rumors the guy trades people for cans of soup.
Desjardin was here on behalf of Sutter, that much was clear.
Suddenly, she started to lose control of her direction. This wasn’t her against Traverse; she had wanted knowledge, some way to get inside this man’s head, to know what she was up against and why, but this wasn’t about her. There was a power struggle going on between two men, and she had been left out
. She had been here from the start, dropped into Ground Zero, the people she cared about dying around her, people she learned to care about fading into shells of their former selves or dying, fading…
Someone else was fighting the war she was supposed to be fighting, the war she had been fighting from the beginning.
Her stomach twisted, churned, boiled.
Which war?
War… against herself… against Traverse… against the dead… against God… against her father…
A headache crept into back of her skull and filled the blood between her eyes.
“I think I speak for all of us when I say it’s been a helluva long day,” Bill said. “Been walking and running in this heat, panting like a dog. I got a headache, stomach running wild on me. We stay quiet and lay low for the night, this place is as good as any.”
She could remember running into a bar with Bob after Miles let himself die. To stop, pause, catch their breath. Hide from the flame and blood and ash.
“Vega,” Bill said her name.
She needed time to think, time to figure things out, but there was no more time. Time had been murdered by Doctor Desjardin and the people he worked for.
He didn’t try to correct Bill when the connection was made to the flesh-trading rumors. Was she wrong to assume that a stranger had her best interests at heart, that he wanted to recruit her so she could help Sutter win a turf war against Traverse?
What did Bill want to do?
It was time to take a break from all the questions, from all the answers she never wanted. She walked into the restaurant and sat in one of the booths by a window.
If a flesh-trader wanted her, she would be waiting.
***
Dusty blinds covered the windows; customers could open them and close them at their leisure. Preferring not to turn on a flashlight in that dark place, she trusted her eyes and sense of smell; she couldn’t smell any dead things, even though she was definitely used to them. She trusted she could still figure it out. As a fatalist, one of those dead things could be hanging out on the floor like a landmine, and she wouldn’t think twice.
Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) Page 21