No more visions of lives she didn’t know or understand. All she wanted was to stand next to him, tell him she didn’t hate him, tell him she accepted everything. He had always been her world, had always been the figure that defined her life. He knew it and didn’t care if she said it. But she wanted to. She wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell him over and over again.
She was supposed to be dead.
Shirtless, wet body cut with ancient scars, Jim tilted his head and looked into her face, his hand stroking hair away from her forehead. If only he could pet her like this forever.
“I can hear voices,” she said to him.
“Yes,” he said. “One of those voices belongs to an old friend of mine. A friend who showed me what must be done.”
You’re so fucking hilarious, Jim, the demon said.
“I think I understand,” she said.
“How do you feel?” Jim asked.
An odd question coming from him. He wasn’t one to feign empathy. There was something he wanted her to tell him.
“I can do this,” Rose said. “I can control them all. I feel it. I can do whatever you want. Whatever you think is best.”
How foolish she was to play right into his hands. How utterly helpless and pathetic. But it didn’t matter; as long as she could be with him it was worth returning to life. It was worth listening to the voices of the dead, and the voice of a demon, and the voice of a madwoman named Mina.
“This is what you always wanted,” Jim said. “A world made in the image of genocide.”
How many times had she died for him? The idea was almost impossible to understand; she had been killed before and returned to life, her consciousness stored in a microchip.
“You didn’t do this for me,” she said.
She dared.
Her upper lip twitched.
Not her upper lip. Mina’s upper lip. This was not her body. Remember: this body belonged to someone else.
“Dearest Rose,” he said gently, “you are always right. I made you to be better than me, to complete me, to do everything I could not. You didn’t ask to live forever. But you came for me. At Selfridge. For seven years you waited for me to come back from Egypt. You waited for me, and you came for me. And you would do it all over again.”
He released her.
This is what you wanted, you dumb bitch, the demon said. Go ahead and piss him off when you have him eating out of your hand. He needs you now more than ever. He truly needs you. Idiot.
“This is pointless,” she said.
Her feet were not touching anything. Hands still held her in the river.
But not his hands.
“Tell me why,” he said.
Ice cubed hands clutching her arms, holding her. Dirty, rotting hands were all over her, and there was nothing she could do about it. Jim was no longer holding her. Other hands clutched her. Dead hands.
There was something she could do. These strange powers. Jump into some death-collective and control them. Rose was a spider now, each soul a silk thread. An eternity of silk threads that belonged to her.
She was inevitable.
In a way, she was Death incarnate.
“Now you see,” Jim said.
“See?”
“The power I have given you. I have done everything for you, and you want to doubt me. Haven’t you wondered why I chose to make sure you could never die? I am a narcissist, and I created you in my image. You are the best part of me. I am in love with myself, and you are that image. I cannot be you, but I have… painted you.”
The smirk on his face spreader wider than she had ever seen, touching the edges of a face that used to be impervious to the idea of a smile.
“And I don’t have a choice,” she said. “I don’t have a body. You don’t know what this feels like. You’re not doing me any favors. How could I have ever wanted anything but you? How could I ever want to be anything than what you’ve always wanted? I’m not anything. I have the right to die.”
Jim’s jawline bulged as it tightened, like egg sac elastic. His eyes were crooked. The sky looked like a dry peach.
What are you doing? Your soul will be assfucked by a train full of faceless murderers. Your eyes will be poked into your skull, pulled out through your mouth, and wound back through your eye sockets, then hooking back down through your mouth, over and over again, until your eyes end up in the back of your throat, dangling.
The demon’s voice fueled a rage she had never felt before; she had never directed frustration at Jim.
“You have felt nothing!” Rose accused him. “I waited for you. You were going to leave me at Selfridge. You weren’t coming to find me. You had years to find me. Tell me that Mina was everything you ever wanted. Tell me the truth. She’s in here with me.”
“I preferred you.”
“Hundreds of millions of people. I can feel them. You can’t tell me this is what you wanted. All this hurt. All this rage. I can feel them. They’re out there. Souls or memories… I don’t know what they are. But I am everywhere and I am here with you. I have nothing and everything…”
Words took over. Mumbled words that probably didn’t mean a damn thing. If she closed her eyes she might tumble backward into the darkness. Drown in the cold place that waited for her. A place she deserved.
Carried along the battered riverfront by the dead, her limp body was passed between rotted hands. The riverfront looked like the remnants of a ragtag army of homeless people had made their last stand with the river at their backs.
Rose knew.
Their voices were telling her.
Head filling with their pain.
Could she know everything?
Could she see everything?
The dead homeless men had found a home here in the River. Yes, this is their home now. In the cold, in the dark.
In the silence.
Jim waded through the water, following her path. “I know what it feels like to know that death isn’t possible,” he said. “To go through all these years having shared death with so many others—but my ego won’t allow me to just let someone kill me. Instead, I have become more efficient. I have become more efficient because of you. I thought I could look at the more terrible version of myself, test myself to see if I could destroy that which I could never be. But you brought out the worst in me, and I needed to make you into something that would survive along with me.”
“I almost believe you, but you keep talking about yourself.”
His persona was larger than the entire universe, and it had consumed her, blinded her. Nothing more than a fleshy golem, a creature made of everything and nothing. She could never be unique, never had been. She was an extension of Jim Traverse.
And she wanted it. Hands carried her along the trashed riverfront, and she wanted him to take her, to grab her, to need her.
“How will I prove myself?” Jim asked, and his voice was far away now. “Shall I destroy the world and leave us alone? Total obliteration. A kingdom of the dead. This is what I have wanted to give you. I want to give all of myself to you.”
“Not to me,” she said. “To you. For you.”
“Then I will destroy everything myself,” he said. “I had thought this wasteland would be your theme park. We could have done this together.”
The hands carried her away.
Real smart. Let him try to rescue us.
One voice above them all.
Let us tear him apart. Mina had believed in goodness, but there is no goodness. There is only flesh and blood. Let us have it all.
Why did she play this game with him? When all she wanted to do was be with him, admit that she wanted to live for his philosophy. Everything he said was true, and that was okay. There was nothing wrong with devotion. There was nothing wrong with having faith in one person’s love.
What if he was telling the truth?
If he was telling the truth, then he would kill everyone to get to her.
Nothing would stop him.
He
would prove himself. They could stop pretending and simply be with each other. No murder poetry or icy reflections.
***
Rose journeyed into several dead minds, voices whispering inane desires, last wishes, final confessions before the onset of death.
Rose saw the world through the eyes of the dead, and looked upon the living. Through the eyes of the dead, she found a man in Detroit, a man close by, a man who glowed.
No, he didn’t glow. Not really. There was a warmth to him. There were only a few glowing souls brightening her corrupt nightmare-vision, scattered like beacons across the globe, and there was one here, in Detroit.
A tall blond man, heavily structured body with hammer arms. Solid. She thought of him as solid.
Rose looked at him through the eyes of a corpse. A corpse that would consume his flesh.
It should be obvious; there is nothing worth salvaging in this world, nothing worth saving. Only a few people walking this planet who are comfortable with their own sense of goodness. This is why the human race must be destroyed. Don’t you understand? Look into this man’s eyes.
Rose looked deeply into the blond man’s blue eyes.
He is desperate, and he knows that he is alone. He is a strong man, but there aren’t many like him. Not enough. Not enough to preserve a careless race. We seek perfection. We seek purification. Jim believes in our vision. This is your vision. What you see, what you have always believed, what you have always needed.
Had Rose really wanted to help create a world of suffering and death? It was hard to believe she had been so morbid; Jim was her lover, and his words and ideas were radical, nothing more than the ruminations of a man obsessed with himself. Wasn’t it right to indulge him? To listen to him? To believe in him?
This was her fault. Her confidence in Jim gave him reason enough to pursue whatever hellish, unreal apocalypse he managed to help unleash. She cared nothing for this world, and nothing for this blond man who stared back at her. She cared nothing for a world that couldn’t even give her a name.
She didn’t know her real name. Was it Rose?
The only name you need is the one he gives you. You are all names. You are everything that is dead, and everything that will be dead.
And in whose body was she now? She stared at the blond man with the eyes of the dead, and they were not Mina’s eyes, and they certainly were not her eyes.
Her eyes. A strange idea: she didn’t know the color of her real eyes. Maybe she had never known.
Love is blind.
If only the demon would shut the fuck up.
Memories flooded Rose’s mind. A name floated through her consciousness. Angelica. Brothers. Sisters. Large family gatherings in parks and in basements. Laughter, hugs, smiles. Floral-print dresses. Lipstick. Hairspray. Mascara. Children. An army of children laughing in a forest of legs at a family gathering.
Angelica.
This woman was dead.
The dead had nothing new to say.
The blond man’s glow wasn’t going to save him.
***
The hands of the dead carried her across Detroit, and she didn’t know where she wanted to go. She could control them, yes, but what did she want?
One word came to mind: vengeance.
Against everyone and everything. The world should suffer for creating people like Jim. The world should pay for allowing men like him to manipulate her, control her, bend her soul to his every whim. Fuck the American government and everyone else who tried to engineer this disaster for their own benefit.
At last, she deserved answers.
With billions of people dead, there had to be a way to access the information she needed. If it was so easy to jump into the faded mind of any walking corpse, it stood to reason that she didn’t have to be at Jim’s mercy anymore, or the demon inside of her.
Jim had showed her how to summon the dead and march them toward a buffet of living flesh. How far was her reach?
Rose cast her mind into the vast pit of voices, her senses tumbling through a dark void where images collided; behind every final prayer and plea for mercy, Rose glimpsed Mina. The woman was always there. Mina was everywhere, her physical shape dominating Rose’s perception. A trail of red, flowing hair and the glare of emerald green eyes was in every dark hallway, every field of half-slumbering corpses, every wrecked landscape. Mina was everywhere.
A reminder that she did not physically exist, yet here she was.
Power flowed through her, knowledge saturation shocking her thoughts into silence. Everyone who remained now as a corpse—every walking zombie had a story trapped within their murderous shell. Every story filled her, slithering into the synapses of her own memory and transforming her ability to know and recall. Mathematical formulae, criminal enterprises, discreet love affairs—Rose was barely aware of the dark tide of needless information that pressured her into a state of confusion.
Isn’t it wonderful? the demon asked.
The infernal voice awoke her sense of direction and purpose. Secret government designs. Plans. The political machine’s ultimate dream. Her mind wandered through corridors, a shadowed labyrinth where secrets were doomed to languish, rendered useless forever. Clandestine assassinations. Coups. World-annihilating weapons. Otherworldly technologies.
She was close.
There was so much she could know, and none of it mattered. Rose was a god now. Yes. A god.
The demon’s laughter accompanied the wisps of Mina’s blood hair, trailing through the damnable images.
Only one thing mattered to her. This was personal. Power-be damned; it was useless without a purpose, and Jim’s purpose was not her purpose. No. She was a person trapped in a nightmare, though she had always existed in a nightmare and hadn’t known until now. The realization of her life’s many falsehoods possessed her.
And then, she saw. Men in lab coats gathered in a room with white walls, a swaddled baby girl lying in an incubator. The baby was Mina. The men standing over her—names floated to Rose from somewhere, as her mind filtered through the information. Her mind was an engine, sorting through the data of a billion dead souls that still walked the earth.
Doctor Desjardins. A scientist. But that’s all she could learn. Everyone who knew him or anything about him must have been completely incinerated. Was this the man who engineered the apocalypse?
Information about the Egypt mission filled her mind. She knew the names of the agents who had died and those who lived. Colonel Richards. Of course. He sent her into Detroit to rescue Jim. And a man named Ron Sutter. Was Richards dead? It seemed she couldn’t find his corpse or anyone who had known him.
Sutter. He was still alive. He was here in Detroit at the ruined Grand Central Depot. And Doctor Desjardins was with him along with another name she knew, another name she could never forget.
Amparo Vega.
Sweet, sweet vengeance, the demon said. Remember what it felt like to have that sword push through you? And then our family ripped you apart. Think deeply, and you’ll remember how it all felt.
No.
There was more. More information. She knew who Mina was and what happened to her. She had a general idea what happened in Egypt and in missions before it; the Bubonic plague, World War II, the French Revolution, the final sack of Rome—all of them attempts at manifesting the apocalypse as the sacred powers who controlled the world’s governments created one nightmare after another. Mina was not the first of her bloodline to be bred and trained to destroy the world, only the latest.
I have always been here, the demon said. You might not be the prettiest filly I’ve worked with, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. If you fuck this up, I’ll still be here. I am eternal.
What was the demon called? What could she learn about it?
Don’t even try that bullshit. I’m in here with you. You want to know my name? It’s ROSE. AGENT ROSE.
What could she learn about herself? What was her real name?
She searched deep, casting her ne
t far and wide. Death and desperation filled her; she felt the pain of people who had been ripped apart, hands and teeth digging into flesh. So many people had watched the living dead hold their own dripping innards, undead mouths filled with blood. Death had been violent and terrible for hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
But nobody knew her name. Nobody had seen her before.
She was just Rose. Agent Rose.
But now she had enough names, and she knew where to find most of them. If Jim wanted her so badly, he would have to destroy legions of the creatures he helped create just to see her again. He would have to undo the massacre with his bare hands.
The undead carried her through the streets of Detroit toward Grand Central Depot.
BELLA
After all this time, she wasn’t going to let it happen again.
Bella had to ignore the big blond muscle-head while she charged into the building. Her world consisted of the family that had been in this building. The father with his two little girls that Angelica had been watching.
Angelica was dead.
“She deserved to die,” her son, Brian, said.
“Nobody deserves to die like that,” she said, running down the dark stairwell. What floor was the family on? There would likely be a barricade on the way down, maybe several. Scant rays of light from the hazy sun touched the darkness with shards of brightness.
“You’re going to let her become one of those things?” Brian asked. “Just let her walk around and get another chance to kill you?”
There was no use arguing with Brian, because he wasn’t actually there.
Bella ran through a hallway until she smacked into something solid, a bright flash bursting in her eyes as her head hit a wall. She must have hit the barricade, and her exhausted body was in no hurry to respond to her desire that she get up and keep going.
She lay there for a while. She couldn’t shake one idea: Angelica was dead. The phrase ran through her mind over and over again.
“You’re covered in her blood,” Brian said.
Desmond would approve. He would have risked everything to help Angelica. Angelica had been a monster, in the end; a monster Bella tried to save.
Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) Page 30