And then she could be just like Angelica. Haunting Ford Field with a few guns, scouring the wasteland for danger.
JIM
Through the smoke, the Artist ascended the stairs, careful not to slip on blood, bullets, bodies, or bones. The last shouts of survivors drifted through the Depot.
During his ascent, he wanted to stop several times and look at the mangled corpses; he wanted to listen closely to the final breaths of those wounded men who gasped and bled. He wanted to linger near the twitching corpses of the dead-again zombies.
Rose did this. Directed this.
There was no telling the influence the demon had on her fragile emotional state. As beautiful as this massacre was, she didn’t appreciate it. She had escaped from Jim in a jealous rage, though she would forgive him in time. She would thank him. For everything he did to give her a reason for living.
There was no battle-blood coursing through his veins now. Instead, he was calm, focused. Able to stop and admire the scene.
Breathtaking—the amount of chaos she wallowed in. Faces painted in blood, bodies ripped apart by bullets or hands. Shredded remnants of flesh sticking to the walls or lying in puddles of blood like pancakes floating in a lake of syrup. He walked through the dead halls, the acrid smoke of a thousand bullets offending his sense of smell. Better to smell the blood.
“Over here, Jimmy.”
Sutter. His voice rising through the echoing cries of his dying people, the people who had believed in him.
Sitting on a stack of footwear likely scavenged over the last few months, Sutter rolled a quarter between his fingers. Over and under and over and under and over and under. He still wore his white suit, but it looked like he had been swimming in an ocean of blood.
“That’s a good look for you,” Sutter said, indicating Jim’s nudity.
He had nothing to say to Sutter.
Sutter had gambled to get his attention. He bided his time and thought capturing the soldier, Vega, would bring Jim close. Believing he understood Jim’s tendencies, he used Vega as a curiosity. Jim awakened her and eliminated Sutter’s poisoner, the bone man. While Vega was certainly interesting, Rose had a more vested interest in the woman, considering that Vega had killed her. He awakened Vega to satisfy Rose.
“I do not wish to speak with you,” Jim said. “You are a simple barbarian. The zombies did not come here for you or for me, but they came here because Rose—my Rose—wanted the soldier. Vega killed her once. You couldn’t have known that. I came here for Rose. I did not come here for you.”
Sutter stopped playing with the coin and pocketed it; his jacket was stiff from drying blood. “Jimmy, I don’t think it matters how you got here or why. Shit man, I know you’re a sociopath, and you don’t give a shit about others, but let’s be serious for a moment, okay?”
“I would prefer to end your life and move on with mine.”
“Okay, I get it. You’re going to kill me. Give me a chance to tell you how you’ve lost.”
Sutter was stalling.
“Give me five minutes of your time,” Sutter said. “I guarantee you’ll be entertained by what I have to say. Now, I’m not going to recite you a Homeric in Spanish verse or anything like that, but I’ve got something you want to hear. You forget that I survived Egypt, too. You forget that I know as much as you, if not more. There wasn’t a whole lot you could do while you were locked up in the nut house.”
Sutter used to be a professional; he had a knack for earning loyalty and expending it as a resource. Once, in Afghanistan, he infiltrated a Taliban-controlled village; in the guise of a preacher, he slowly mobilized the entire village over a period of six months and promised them beautiful deaths worthy of Heaven. Almost everyone in the village was killed, but Sutter had completed his mission. An entire Taliban stronghold had been overtaken, but Sutter had fled the village when militants found it and set it afire long after the Taliban lost their stronghold.
Sutter was a man of respect. He had earned his victories. He survived Egypt, and he was here at an important moment in the history of the world.
Jim crossed his legs beneath him and sat on the ground, brushing aside glass shards and a severed arm.
“Can I at least get you something to eat?” Sutter asked, unable to hide the excitement from his voice. “We have some MREs left, I think. I know I’ve got a few bags of potato chips. Better Made chips, of course. Made in Michigan.”
“Do not delay,” Jim said.
“Fine, fine. Just trying to be nice.”
Sutter rose from his throne of shoes and boots, and then stretched in front of an open window. “What did you think of the music? I thought it was a nice touch. I figured a guy with your poetic sensibilities might find irony in it somewhere.”
“I was not amused.”
“Fair enough. I know Richards was trying to help you, because he tried to reach out to me, get me involved. We were the baddest dudes this country has ever sent into the field to do wet work. We really were.
“Anyway, let me get to it. I know you’re impatient. I think about the past a lot. Not in a regretful way, but I like to reflect. All of us were criminals long before the government rehabilitated us, remade us. We were perfect. You murdered an entire family, and this was after you had been tortured by an old lady for a little while. I know you killed those people because you wanted Rose. I get it. Things have a way of coming together. Since you were good at killing people, you were trained to become a professional killer. Same thing happened to me. A boy, like you. Worked at a country western bar in Alabama, stalked and killed two good ol’ boys who didn’t like African Americans. Anyway, you and I were recruited. Same with Richards. They had this Egypt mission planned for years.”
“I know all this. You’re wasting my time.”
“I’m getting warmed up. Anyway, I think about this stuff. They took that girl, Rose, and pretty much burned the memories from her head. Meanwhile, they were still breeding the Egyptian bloodline. Mina was the last one. So they eventually dumped us into Egypt, hoping we would wake up the beast. Hoping Mina would become a conduit for all the power they ever wanted.
“But you wanted to do things your way. You just couldn’t help yourself. They knew whoever survived was going to have a taste for it. Richards decided he was going to help them. That guy was an asshole. Richards should have known you were going to erase him.”
A revelation was forthcoming. Sutter had gambled his philosophy, his meandering, bumbling thoughts, to show something he thought important to Jim. Meanwhile, Rose might be confronting Vega; Rose would be blinded by her emotions, and Jim had no idea how well-trained Vega actually was.
But Vega couldn’t destroy Rose. The idea was ridiculous. Rose’s consciousness was forever. Jim had won. Continents had become abattoirs. Entire government buildings had become charnel houses. The great cities of the world were ash and dust.
Jim unfurled himself and stood. Time enough had been wasted.
Sutter turned to him.
“This is a love story,” Sutter said. “You want to be with your queen at the end of the world. And then you’ll become bored, like you always become bored. You’ll become bored, and you’ll wander around, hoping for a challenge. There won’t be anyone left to appreciate what you’ve helped create. Nobody will care. You can make all kinds of art, Jim, but you’re just another kid scratching on paper with crayons. Nobody will see your art, nobody will appreciate it, so nobody will care. And if nobody cares, is it art?”
Outside, a tank rolled over the field of corpses, crunching bones and flesh beneath the treads. Who could it be? Sutter had played his cards close to his chest, and now there was a surprise in store.
“I imagine you would be a good chess player,” Sutter said. “But damn, that’s a sexy-looking tank out there. Is it yours?”
Jim didn’t care about the tank because nothing would stand in the way of his inevitable victory. Sutter’s words about art resonated, and it was hard to discount the veteran soldier’s
wisdom.
If nobody was left to interpret art, or perceive its creation, then art could not exist.
Poe and Baudelaire had both appreciated suffering the love of women and existing in a nightmare designed by their own souls. Their lovers could twist and contort their mental process, serving as muses one moment, and then crippling all creative energy the next with their derision or disapproval.
Georgia Cone had pointed to Shakespeare’s words with withered fingers, sucking air between her teeth. She taught Jim everything important about life and love. She taught him everything.
Jim watched the tank approach the Depot.
“Where do we go from here?” Sutter asked. “It’s the question I always ask myself. I think I’m a practical man. I mean, I think it’s great that love played an important role in everything that happened. It’s nice to think about. Let the whole world burn for love. But you don’t know what it means to love anything, Jim. Surely, you figured that out a long time ago. You’re a fucking murderer. You’re a KILLER! How could you love anything? To you, it’s about possession. It’s about expression. It’s about trying to understand yourself while you keep telling yourself that you know exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.”
No man could understand the importance of Jim’s mission. As he watched the tank approach, rolling over the remains of Rose’s emotional distress, he considered a world without artists, a world in which he was the only one with a unique vision, the only person with something interesting to say.
In his cell at Eloise Fields, these considerations were never far from his mind. He understood his vision of the apocalypse as a manifestation of his selfish tendencies, but none of it mattered. Out of chaos would come permanent stasis; the creation of a realm that did not harbor foolish ideas of good or evil. The complete annihilation of all the inadequacies of the human race. Everything, in time, was reduced to ash, even thought. Memories. Emotions. These things meant nothing. There was no point to anything, save for the purpose which an individual might create to help give them a reason for living. Children, love, God, Buddha, money—these were nothing in the hurricane-eye of inevitable death. Everything decayed. Everything was replaced or ruined.
Sutter slapped him on the back, a gesture Jim didn’t see coming.
“Quit beating yourself up,” Sutter said. “You didn’t cause this. It was going to happen. We’ve spent our entire existence dreaming up ways to destroy our own civilization. Hell, we’ve become pretty good at it.”
“You have thought about this deeply,” Jim said. “I have not spoken with anyone on the subject in quite some time. I have not encountered a deviant opinion, one that is informed. Richards thought he knew well enough, but he was deluded. We did not want the same thing.”
Sutter stroked his beard and watched the tank. They could hear the engine over the immense silence that now settled over the Depot. After the battle, the silence felt stifling. Jim knew this feeling and loathed it. It was the feeling that followed every major conflict in which blood was shed. It was the feeling that haunted those who were both relieved and anxious; the battle was over, and the warrior had survived to fight another day, but it seemed unreal.
You realize that you’re not dead. You realize that you’re still breathing. There are so many others around you who are dead, who are maimed. You’re not among them. You have survived. You were nervous a few moments ago—afraid, violent, inhuman. Maybe you were the absolute best definition of a human, doing everything in your power to stay alive in a fateful conflict. And then, adrenaline crashed. Quiet. You listen to your own heartbeat. You think about what you could have lost. You wonder what you have won.
“I think we’re like-minded people,” Sutter said. “We’ve seen what people refused to believe. We’ve seen what people fear most. We came back from Egypt with it. It was like a curse. And we see it in front of us. We see it in front of us, and we feel alone. You want companionship, a friend. I just want to kill you. But it’s kind of funny, Jim. It’s funny that we saw Hell, and we haven’t seen Heaven. That’s what I look for. That’s what I’ve been trying to find. If there is Hell, then there must be Heaven, right? Isn’t Hell the antithesis, something that can’t exist without its opposite? Wasn’t it created as an act of rebellion against Heaven, against goodness? What does it all mean? We didn’t meet Satan. We didn’t meet any fallen angels. What we saw was worse than anything we imagined.”
There was undeniable wisdom to Sutter’s rambling, but patience has its limits.
“You truly don’t understand,” Jim said. “The folly of this species is incredible. Nothing will ever change about the nature of man. Centuries will not change the way we think or feel.”
“You took that right out of a Thomas Ligotti book.”
“I’m surprised you know who that is.”
“Why’re you surprised? We’re all chasing our damnation. Hell is what we want. We want to ruin ourselves and acquire pity. We want to ruin ourselves and find redemption. Redemption and salvation mean nothing to us if we haven’t fought for it. If you’ve killed everyone, there is no redemption for you. There is nothing. And these things that we’re talking about are just ideas, and these ideas don’t exist if we don’t exist.”
Sutter walked away from the window and removed the coin from his pocket. Once again, he rotated it through his fingers and watched its movement.
“We just fought an awesome battle and survived,” Sutter said. “Now I know there is a Hell, and now I know that I experienced something very cool when I was alive. I don’t know how I would feel if I knew there was nothing waiting for me when I die. I used to be an atheist, but Egypt changed everything for me.”
“I will not spare your life,” Jim said.
“Good. I would be disappointed if you did.”
“We are a speck of cosmic dust, and it is in our power to destroy ourselves. We have used all of our power to make it happen, and we used Hell as our excuse. But there are questions that cannot be answered.”
“Whatever,” Sutter said.
“You traded people for guns, ammunition, food. You’ve murdered hundreds of people. You made all of these people believe in you, die for you.”
“And so what? Actually, you’re wrong. These people died for themselves. They didn’t die for me. They died because they could. I never wanted to stop you or Richards. Shit man, all I wanted to do was kill zombies and fuck bitches. I’m a mercenary. I own a yacht, a surfboard, a house in Venice, a house in Madrid. I’ve partied with the best strippers money can buy. I’ve seen every level of depravity imaginable. And it still isn’t enough for me. Most of the time I did things just because I wanted to see if I could do it. Kind of like building a sand castle and then destroying it.”
Sutter might be able to handle himself in single combat, unlike the priest, Father Joe. Sutter was intriguing and would prove to be an exciting opponent.
But he was walking away.
“I can see why she likes you,” Sutter said. “You would have been awesome as a porn star. Could have made a good living doing it. Which reminds me: you know I invested money in Patrick Griggs, right? The dude who used to be a cop and became a porn director? The guy who made Mina’s video? I was his investor.”
The big man in the bloody suit stood beside the open doors to the freight elevator shaft.
There was a lump in Jim’s throat. A gust of cool air tickled the back of his neck, even though it was a humid, airless day filled with blood and rust.
“I don’t have any romantic notions about death,” Sutter said. He let the coin slip from between his fingers. Jim watched it plummet to the floor. “I had a lot of fun, man, I really did. Mostly because of you. The last few years have been great. Anyway, gotta go. It’s more fun to see you disappointed right now, because you want to fight. A minute ago you were about to walk right past me, but now you’re going to miss me. Maybe it will help if you knew that I won, and this is how I claim my prize.”
“Don’t.”
With that, Sutter disappeared into the darkness, and his laughter followed him down the elevator shaft.
MINA
The smell of Father Joe’s car was the first thing she noticed when she woke up. The second thing she noticed was that she was a skeleton.
Not exactly an entire skeleton, but half of one.
A scented deodorizer hung from the rearview mirror, a maple leaf that made the car smell like pine. Mina hadn’t been outdoors much in her lifetime, but she recognized the smell of pine, and it reminded her of peace. But she wasn’t exactly sure what peace was.
A crude thing made of nothing but bone, Mina looked at herself and realized how neat it was that she was actually inside a skeleton. Didn’t she die recently? She would probably die a lot more if she kept trying to interfere with Rose and the demon. Better to stay away; at least zombies wouldn’t tear her apart every few minutes. She had that going for her.
But that wasn’t a guarantee.
She was inside her head, and inside of Rose’s head. She was inside the demon’s head. She shared a lot of heads.
Father Joe was in the driver’s seat, and the car was parked in front of Rose’s house. She recognized the house because she remembered thinking how nice the neighborhood looked.
The priest was trying to screw her left shoulder into its socket.
“You’re kind of like humpty-dumpty,” Father Joe said, as if putting together a skeleton was an everyday routine. Especially a skeleton that he talked to, a skeleton that knew it was a skeleton.
She wanted to talk to him. When her jaw moved, she felt a sudden rush of warmth to her appendages, and the warmth flooded her stomach and loins. In the blink of an eye, or the inhalation of breath, there was skin on her bones, and she wore the white night gown that she had worn while wandering Detroit; she had been wearing it the first time she met Father Joe.
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