Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3)

by Bilof, Vincenzo

  “I guess,” she said. “Who’re you supposed to be?”

  “I’m older than you.”

  “Okay.”

  “You like punk rock?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, you do. I saw you wearing a Misfits shirt the other day.”

  “Saw me?”

  “Yeah. Your taste in music is shitty. Absolutely shitty. I just came over here to tell you that. Name’s Jim, by the way.”

  He stepped over her legs and walked on down the beach. Was he trying to get a reaction out of her? She didn’t need anyone else’s opinions. She needed to be left alone. There was something wrong with people, and this asshole was a prime example. Trying to get off on a power trip. Good for him.

  Something about him, though. Jim from down the street. Was he the weird kid who had been abducted by aliens? He was home-schooled. He was practically invisible, and that was okay.

  There was no time for a creep like him. There was time to sit in her room and listen to music. There was time to not do homework. There was time to watch internet porn.

  Rose didn’t burn in the sun. She wore a wide hat over her head to shade her body, and she curled her legs underneath her. She watched the water hit the sand for a little while, and was ultimately bored. What was she doing there? Among all the tan, dancing children who waded into the water, and the slender girls with the bikini tops that pushed their breasts to their chins. Rose didn’t belong. But she didn’t hate the beach. Not at all.

  But the skin on her legs hated the sun. She walked down the beach to get a bottle of water from a vendor that was parked on the beach. Hot dogs were there, too. She could smell the fake pork product, and her mouth watered. Junk food. Hot dogs were junk food, and that was okay. She loved junk food. Two hot dogs? One? Why not add an inch or two to her waistline? That way, creeps like Jim wouldn’t talk to her.

  Jim liked hot dogs, too, apparently. He also needed to drink the occasional bottle of water. Standing there, he winked at her. No way she could turn back now, as much as she wanted to. She no longer wanted a hot dog, nor did she want water. She wanted to get the hell off the beach.

  His haircut was lame. A comb-over, as if he were some distinguished, Ivy-league child conditioned for millions of dollars to pass through his fingers.

  “If you came over here to introduce yourself, don’t bother,” Jim said.

  She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

  “I already know your name,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “We’re on the shores of the capitalist wasteland,” Jim said. “Can you imagine what this beach would look like if the Iranians nuked it?”

  “No.”

  “The wreckage just floating on the waves. Beach balls, blankets, bottles of tanning lotion, cell phones, hot dogs. Skulls. Skulls floating on the waves, still able to look at the sky, jaws filled with sea water.”

  She pretended to ignore him, hoping he would stop. She ordered a bottle of water and opened her tiny wallet to produce two crinkled dollars. The vendor’s eyes floated toward her breasts.

  Jim wasn’t looking at her at all when he talked.

  “The apocalypse is so punk rock,” he said. “The idea is rebellious, isn’t it? To think about the end of the world as something that might be pretty. Have you ever read T. S. Eliot? You would enjoy his poetry, I think. But we can’t talk about such a thing, can we? It’s taboo. To think about the entire human race wiping itself out. Giving itself what it wants.”

  Rose sighed, uncapped her water. There was no way to escape this guy.

  “I really don’t care,” she said. “I have to go.”

  “Go where? Back to staring at nothing? Painting your toenails? What do you do in your free time? Do you stare at the ceiling, wondering why you’re invisible? Do you listen to your grunge music and your goth-industrial music, or whatever else you can find that makes you feel sorry for yourself? You have something better to do? Tell me what it is.”

  There was something more he wanted to say; he was focused on her, waiting for a response, and she wanted to respond. He had sucked all resistance from her soul; he was the secret audience for which she had performed her bouts of melancholy. These were things she had always wanted someone to say to her, but it was uncomfortable to hear them. To look into the cold eyes of a dark fantasy.

  His eyes. Cold, narrow eyes. Every inch of his body knotted with muscle; this boy certainly had the free time to train at some kind of physical activity that nobody knew about.

  He was the best-kept secret in town. Maybe the universe. In a way, he was something out of a dream, wasn’t he? Functionally odd. Mysterious. Beautiful. A total narcissist. If he was capable of loving himself so much, there was passion in him. No. His presence was beautiful, and she felt like she didn’t want to hear him, be near him, but she couldn’t imagine the next few seconds without him.

  And here he was, talking to her, looking into her, waiting for her to respond.

  “Don’t you have some alien friends to share this crap with?” she asked, hoping she could finally turn him away. Piss him off just enough to ruin his smooth demeanor and make him mortal. She was uncomfortable. Never before had she felt like she was in danger and wanted to be in danger. The type of damage he could inflict upon her would be felt in her soul, and she wanted him to make her feel that way. He was some kind of promise.

  “Aliens don’t appreciate it,” he said. “Not like you would. Not like you want to.”

  “Don’t ever talk to me again.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  His eyes roved along every inch of her body, and she arched her back while looking at the water lap against the sand. Laughing children splashed each other. Fat-stretched parents waded into the water with their bellies hanging over their waistlines, throwing footballs to each other, drinking beer, eyes draped behind sunglasses. How wonderful the world is.

  And she was arching her back for Jim. She wanted him to look, even as she wanted to walk away, never talk to him again. Forget him completely.

  “I don’t want you around me,” she said.

  The words came out of her mouth, and she wished they hadn’t. But it was the right thing to say. What did he want? His eyes told the story. His eyes told her what he wanted.

  Why would he want it, and nobody else? She was on the beach. People she knew from school ignored her, and older men watched her. And then there was Jim. He said he was older, but she wasn’t so sure.

  He thought she was weak and vulnerable.

  “Have a nice day,” she said.

  Rose walked on down the beach, and she could feel his eyes on her. It was okay for him to look.

  VEGA

  No way.

  After everything they had been through. Now she felt something. Now she really felt something. Anger and confusion mixed with the sweat in her eyes, the sweat that dampened her hair, the sweat that chilled her chest.

  Vincent had laughed, and he wasn’t laughing anymore.

  One random corpse. Out of the shadows. So simple. So deadly.

  Vincent placed the Desert Eagle against the side of his head after he wasted the attacker.

  “No!” she said.

  She held her hands out. What else was she supposed to do? He needed to let her talk, to let her come close.

  “Just wait, please,” she said.

  He smiled his platinum smile. “Been waiting. We knew it was coming down to this.”

  “No. Listen to me. Don’t be stupid. We don’t know for a fact that you’ll turn into one of those things. We’ve never seen it.”

  “What’re you talking about? You listening to yourself? You put a bullet into General Masters yourself.”

  She watched a river of sweat flowing around his eye and over his nose. It reached his upper lip. His face did not twitch, and his eyes remained calm.

  He didn’t want to go through with it.

  “Let me help you,” she said. “Let me h
old you.”

  Vega surprised herself with the last request, but she really did want it, and he needed it. They had come this far. To the edge of time, thousands of dead-again corpses left behind in their wake.

  Vincent was not breathing heavily.

  She stepped over the zombie and watched the blood flow from his shoulder wound.

  “Dumbass,” she said. “You’re going to pass out.” She holstered her 9mm and put both hands on his shoulder, submerging her fingers in his bloody wound. He lowered the Desert Eagle from his head. Now his chest rose and fell rapidly.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “Maybe tell me about the best sex you ever had.”

  “Oh yeah. I can do that. This girl I met when I was down in Florida. She came from Barbados I think.”

  “Asshole.”

  “You asked for it.”

  “I hope you turn into a zombie. I’ll hang you from a pipe and use your body for target practice.”

  “Sounds fair.”

  She squeezed his shoulder tightly. His breath smelled like an old man’s unwashed body. Sutter was running around the room, shouting orders, dancing like a coked-out disco dancer who refused to believe the musical genre was dead.

  “You afraid?” she asked Vincent.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “You never held a man who was dying from his wounds, have you?”

  How many times did she avoid that scenario while she was in a combat situation? She hadn’t seen too many people go down in a firefight; would she have held Bob, or Miles?

  “What you’re saying is that I suck at this,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  And she thought of the corpse that had been standing over her, the one that Vincent shot down with impunity. He was right; it didn’t matter who that dead body had once been. It might not even have been Miles. It could never be Miles, anyway, because Miles was gone.

  There was no emotional attachment to a corpse.

  Vincent wasn’t a corpse. She was standing inches from his face. He allowed her dirty hands to touch his wound; she could be making it worse, but they both knew something. They both knew how this was going to end for them. There was no other way. There was no walking away from this fight.

  “What do you want to do?” she asked.

  “I’m not dead right now. I’m here, breathing. Taking up space.”

  There must be a lot of things he wanted to say. A lot of things he wanted to share. Wouldn’t it be better to die suddenly, peacefully? In an explosion maybe. Anything was better than having a moment to think about all the things a soldier might be running from.

  There were a lot of things she wanted to say.

  “It hurts,” Vincent said.

  “Yeah?”

  “No, I mean it hurts I can’t fight longer. I’m going to keep this going, because I want to do something good. Just one time. Really do something good. Fight for everyone else. Not fighting for me. For you.”

  Easily, he slipped into her arms. A long, tight embrace.

  Sutter’s country music twanged in the airless Depot. Vega could taste salt and sweat. Her mouth was filled with blood and salt; her arms ached, her jaw was sore from the constant clenching. Her calloused hands were slick with Vincent’s blood. Her hands were painted in his life.

  What would life have been like if they had stayed together in their little hamlet? What kind of man would he have been if she met him when he was the height of his power?

  Could they have been different people?

  She helped him peel his shirt off, and then wrapped it over his shoulder. The last time she had tended to someone’s wounds, Sergeant John Charles was bleeding on the floor of a strange house. A lot of people who were probably dead now were in that room. Jeremy, Patrick, John Charles himself.

  Now it was just them.

  “I don’t know why I came here,” Vincent said.

  “I don’t think either of us know,” she said.

  Their fingers connected, hands intertwined. Wet, slippery hands. Bloodslick and red.

  A pause in the country music allowed their ears to adjust to a new phase of silence. An uncomfortable moment as people looked around, surprised to see they were still alive. Sutter’s ragtag group of fighters.

  Vega heard the wet slurping sound, and when she looked over at the group of people who were huddled together on the ground, she realized why she had overlooked them the first time. Why she hadn’t actually noticed what they were doing, huddled their closely. They were just hanging out, maybe praying together, or reloading their weapons. No. No, that wasn’t it.

  Their mouths were colored red, stark wetness slopped against skin-faded skulls. Rotted mouths chewed stringy meat strands, teeth working. Pieces of food slipped through toothless gaps. Singular strands of hair that had grown out of those death-shriveled heads were stuck together, soiled by blood. Four of them. A fifth approached as if surveying what the others were up to, a card game, perhaps? The fifth paused for a long time, arms hanging as if they had never functioned before. No electrical synapses in the mind’s engine fired those nerves to life, until now. Until now, when the fifth creature, altogether sexless and rotted, dropped to its knees and allowed its hands to disappear inside the open chest cavity of a fresh cadaver.

  “We have to go,” Vega said.

  He didn’t resist her, didn’t slip into some melancholy, defeatist mode. Instead, he allowed her to help him stand. They were on their feet again, together.

  Mean Magda’s mop of tangled gray hair lay on the floor, her body being devoured piece by piece.

  Sutter walked over, stood behind the five zombies, and pumped rounds through his shotgun. Heads burst, skulls full of meat popping open. Steaming chunks of skull like broken slices of a ceramic bowl dropped into Mean Magda’s open chest cavity. The headless corpses slumped over as if they had been nothing more than battery-operated toys that were broken for all time.

  “The freight elevator,” Sutter said, digging around in his jacket pockets for more shells. He calmly loaded his shotgun.

  His timing was perfect. The music started up again, and a slow crowd of people shuffled over the piles of corpses that had barred their way. A wave of people pushing aside a coral reef, eroding a barrier erected to prevent the water from flooding a city. The dead had already flooded this city. Some of them did not have eyes. Some of them did not have mouths. Arms were gone. Hands, tongues, missing. A few of them crawled, their legs mangled during the previous firefight. Here was a crowd that moved with an intent that was natural to their tendencies; they moved forward because they saw the living, and they wanted to consume the living.

  Doctor Desjardins had mentioned these things were spawned from Mina’s version of Hell.

  No matter how many they destroyed, the zombies kept coming. Here they were again, stepping atop each other, crawling, lumbering, moaning. Vocal chords were stretched to the limit as the undead wailed; a funeral procession of boisterous dead lamenting their own deaths.

  Heads rolled between shoulders. Rib bones protruding from fabric, as if they were built of wood that had snapped and cracked; mangled bodies moving forward, moving, moving.

  Vega was up. Moving.

  Someone screamed.

  Someone fired a gun.

  The country music disappeared. Vega was trying to hold Vincent, push him forward. They were running through a herd of people, and she couldn’t tell who was alive or dead. There was no point trying to figure it out. Run with the herd, and keep your eyes forward. Every face was covered in the grime of war and terror; blood, dirt, dust.

  They ran beneath windows. They ran through a bright corridor. Feet stomped, marched, pounded. Vega wouldn’t be able to see anything if she turned around; she was surrounded on all sides by shoulders and faces.

  How many people did Sutter have?

  Was Vincent going to turn into one of those things?


  Was it better to…? Would she be doing him a favor if…?

  Just keep running.

  The toxic smell of bones, this was all the reminder one needed to know that ruination was everywhere, and absolute. Death right on their heels. Death everywhere. Death in physical form. Death coming fast.

  Tumbling forward into the freight elevator shaft. Sudden darkness, speed of ground escaping underfoot.

  She reached for something, anything. For that brief moment, solid footing gone completely from beneath her feet, the idea of prayer popped into her head.

  Fuck that.

  Fingers grabbed metal, wire. Fingers held on tight. She trusted these fingers. Dust in her eyes. She blinked it away and held on. Held tightly. Hugged the wire.

  Vincent?

  Vega whipped her head around and watched the bodies fall through the door— falling, falling, screams following them down into the dark.

  A shadowed figure in the doorway, barely standing upright, a machine gun in his hands. She knew it was Vincent. He waved to her in the dark, and turned his back to the light.

  Rapid-light flashes of gunfire illuminated the elevator shaft and dropped down into the darkness, fading. Vincent did not scream.

  It was all she could to do hang on. Hopefully, the gunfire would continue forever. The gunfire would never stop.

  She wanted to look up but could not. There was something else in her eyes besides dust.

  Squeezing the elevator cables, she listened and waited. It should never have come to this. No. Never. Vincent was supposed to survive. Nothing could stop him. Nothing could destroy him. Life would never get its paws on him and drag him down into the graveyard that was Detroit.

  “Onward Christian soldiers!” Sutter shouted from somewhere, his voice an echo.

  The flash of light from the firing machine gun disappeared in the dark pit.

  She squeezed the elevator cables harder. Hugging them close, wringing the cables in her hands as if she could choke answers from them, or forgiveness, or redemption.