“After that everything changed. You and Brady took me in and I started to think I could honestly stay human. But I was a fool. The Zombie King had corrupted me too deeply and I found myself sabotaging any hopes of lasting peace. When I saw Brady’s paintings, somehow I knew the Zombie King would be interested. I know it must seem odd to you that I would still want to work for him after he tried to kill me. I can’t truly explain our relationship to you except to say that he was very much like my father and I was his daughter. I wanted to please him. I desperately hoped this would bring me back into his good graces. And so I informed him and actually allowed him to visit the paintings personally a few times. My suspicions were correct and he became obsessed with Brady and his plan to rescue his wife.
“It became a type of competition to him. Sara had already evolved into the second stage and showed great promise but he singled Sara out for special development. She became like his queen and he corrupted her as best he knew how. Knowing Brady wanted her made his desire to corrupt her all the worse. He wouldn’t kill you two in the cabin because he wanted to see this played out. As I said, it was almost a game to him. And so he let you two live and let Brady slip into his city.
“All the while I gave him details on the plan. He knew the exact day Brady arrived. Anxious to know if my father was pleased with me, I let myself be captured yesterday. But sadly, I found the king’s game with Brady already concluded. Brady had almost never struggled against him. Brady was easily corrupted. The competition had brought him no satisfaction except a new powerful minion.
“I expected a great welcome. I would finally take my place at my father’s side. But with the king’s theatrics of corrupting Brady so easily concluded, the stage held no place for me. Furious with the disappointment that I am, the king gave me over to be eaten by his minions. He severed our relationship and banished me. But his minions would not kill me for I am still their sister and taste like them. And so I ran and came straight to you.
“And now I realize I cannot be saved. I am neither zombie nor human. Everyone I’ve gotten close to has died. I just corrupt everything around me. I want to die.”
Connor ordered her to stop.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“Nothing of importance. It is this I’m after,” Connor said pointing to an armored vehicle on the side of the road. “Get in the cab and find the keys.” Val rummaged around until she produced them and then Connor had her unlock the back and climb in. “You’re going to ride back here.”
“Where are we going?” Connor made no answer but gestured for her to throw him the keys. The trip gave Connor even more time alone with his thoughts. For the first time in weeks, he thought of his family.
∙ ∙ ∙ • ∙ ∙
After quite some time, Connor stopped the vehicle before their cabin in the mountains. With Val’s story of the Zombie King visiting Brady’s paintings, Connor now feared the cabin would be compromised. He searched the cabin thoroughly but found no enemies. After that, he made sure Val was still in the back of the vehicle and then jammed a large metal pipes between the vehicle’s back doors and the ground. This would keep Val from getting out without quite a bit of effort.
Connor found the generators had failed quite some time ago and everything in the fridge was soiled as a result. He went around the premises and checked on the various livestock. They’d given them all enough food and water to survive. Connor had engineered a system to distribute food and water on a regular basis. But their living spaces were all in bad need of cleaning. The cow stood in almost ninety days’ worth of its own feces.
Connor returned to the house and grabbed some chips. He opened the front screen door and went out on the porch to eat them. In his mind, Connor planned on keeping Val locked up somewhere until he could make a new cure. It would be like Brady’s project to save his wife.
Connor sat for a long time looking at the armored car until a thought came to him. With everything else going on, the idea of Brady’s last painting had completely slipped his mind. With Brady in the state he was, there seemed no harm in looking. Now that he thought of it, the painting woke his curiosity. Brady had been so mysterious about it, Connor wondered if it bore some connection to Brady’s infection.
Connor meant to finish his chips and then go into the bunker, but the painting pressed in on his mind. It had to have something to do with all this. Connor almost sprung up out of his chair and ran across the grass to the bunker entrance.
Flipping on the generators and lights he turned his eyes to the curtain hiding Brady’s last painting. It loomed over him as if reveling in its own mystery. Suddenly Connor felt very small as if he were some adventurer opening a tomb for the first time. Off in the distance hung a mystery drenched in meaning. As if the curtain let out a sigh, some tremor of air danced across the floor and past Connor's feet. Like suspense itself, the deep hum of the generators filled the room.
The other paintings frowned down at him from their lofty walls. Connor never realized how terrifying the room seemed until he stood at its entrance alone. Ghoulish hands twisted heavenwards in their agony as unfeeling callous faces brooded in zombie strength. Though he knew it to be a trick, Connor could have sworn he heard their frightful screams as he moved towards the curtain. As if those hellish voices came to a climax and immediately silenced just as he touched the curtain, Connor heard only the noise of falling curtain. Somehow its fasteners broke loose and the whole curtain came crashing down to the floor with only the lightest touch.
The glorious revelation of its mystery shook him to the core.
Part 5
Out of Madness
After a confusing trek back from their attack in the foothills, Brady and his minions drew close to the downtown area. As he walked, Brady chanced to see a foe hiding out in a building. He stood unabashedly staring at Brady without fear. His skin bore some appearance of being a zombie but also human. Furious at the foe’s reckless defiance of Brady’s territory, he charged the enemy and crashed into him. To Brady’s confusion the foe broke and pieces of him fell onto the floor. Looking up, Brady saw the foe had shattered into dozens of himself.
Brady screamed at him as if to startle him out of his defiance. But the foe only screamed back. Brady leaned towards the foe in an attempt to eat him but found his own actions were only being reflected. Something split in his mind and he realized he saw himself.
With new eyes, Brady peered into the broken glass. As he looked in his own eyes, he had the most curious of thoughts. The first of which seemed to be a disgust at his grotesque appearance. The climax of these thoughts came to Brady like the shape of a ship to a marooned sailor. He appeared to himself, for the first time, as something other than this body before him. He remembered something that seemed to whisper of a purpose hidden inside his mind.
Fearing this clarity would soon pass, Brady pressed his mind into remembering this foreign purpose. Deep in the root-grown cellar of his mind, he opened rusty doors. And like an old warrior, stumbled upon a dusty coat of arms from days gone by. As the warrior dared to touch his armor, pupils focused and heart raced in remembrance of purpose.
There, in the broken glass of a saloon mirror, Brady recognized his own fractured face and took the first step to regaining the fortress of his mind.
∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ • ∙
Between a blood moon and the screaming of a crow, he woke and slept and woke again. His frightful eyes darted back and forth terrified at the horrible faces surrounding him. Like hellish thoughts they pressed in against him on every side. He writhed and screamed against the demons only to find he clawed at the moon. In an attempt to escape, he found himself crashing against a nearby wall before even reaching his full height. The voices bleated against his ears causing him to curl up against the nearby wall for any sense of security. He beat his head against the blood splattered concrete until once again all turned to darkness.
Brady woke with a start. His arm shot up as if from the grave. He found himself
lying flat on his back on a concrete floor. Gloom overshadowed him as was usual in these brief moments of consciousness. His feeble senses dragged him back slowly into his miserable existence. He wondered where he woke this time or what horrible acts he would have committed. To his surprise his surroundings seemed new to him.
He moved about his surroundings and found it to be a decapitated building close to downtown. How he arrived there remained a mystery. Dragging himself over to the broken wall, he looked out across the downtown area. There below churned the zombie sea in its usual tide. To his surprise the more he woke, the clearer his mind became. He remembered his encounter with the third level zombie clearly now. He remembered the sinking feeling he received when the zombie placed his hand upon his head. Straining his mind, he remembered ever further back to before he came to the downtown area. He remembered a trailer and how he had been transported in it.
His mind now raced at the excitement of recalling so much. He sat in his tower of solitude remembering events for the better part of the day. Clarity finally found him for the first time since arriving.
Following the chain of events backwards, Brady came to the inevitable infection. In horror he remembered the two faces above his cage. They had infected him. He became angry at the thought of this nightmare of existence being forced upon him. As evening came, he threw himself against the walls in rage at the two villains. When night came on fully, voices echoed in his mind. They clambered on with terrible reverberations taking all possibility of meaningful thoughts. This only caused him to wail all the harder against the building wishing only to die.
By now a great hunger overtook him. He craved human flesh, but now some soft whisper in his head begged him not to. But try as he might to find the source of the whispering voice, the others drowned it out. His thoughts came crashing down like a disjointed symphony. The hungrier he became, the more he became aware of others around him. Others he never noticed in his building. Ominously these broken people haunted the fractured halls. They all seemed like shards of someone familiar but none he fully recognized. He attempted conversation with many but all seemed unaware of him. Several sat silently in corners with their heads spinning all the way around but never coming off.
As the next few days unfolded, his hunger overtook him to the point of insanity. Days began to blur together into an incoherent mess of bizarre characters and unintelligible chorus. For what seemed like weeks, his eyes could not focus on anything. He stumbled around in a blurry world full of swaying objects. At times his hunger left him rocking back and forth on his feet, clutching his head in his arms, howling curses at the shadows. The splitting duplicity of his mind tore his consciousness apart as he tried to keep the animalistic feelings at bay.
One night, as the visions grew particularly haunting, all the people around him seemed to collide into one shape. Hideous and dark it approached him from the far side of the dilapidated structure. Brady stepped back from the ominous figure as out of the form came the third level zombie looking very much like a king.
“I am prepared to offer you a deal,” the zombie yelled in a voice clearer than any Brady had heard in some time. He brought forward a wretched human creature. His strong muscular frame thrilled Brady. This creature was ripe for the eating. “Kill and eat. Regain your sanity.” The zombie leaned in a little closer to Brady. “I know your hunger is killing you. If you don’t, soon you will be dead and all your plans will be for not. No more nightmares in the dark. Be at peace in your mind before you tear yourself apart.”
The zombie stepped closer and put his hands on Brady’s head. He slowly began to caress the crown of Brady’s head. With little effort, he slid his thumbs underneath Brady’s festering scalp and scraped the top of his skull with his long dirty fingernails as his thumbs glided between his skin and skull.
“I know why you are here. I can feel it in your brain. You can be with her forever. Eat and rejoin my ranks. When you wake again you will be great. Even greater than I. I see you like a star shooting up through the ranks.”
The zombie knelt down to look directly into Brady’s eyes despite not having eyeballs himself. “What says you?” The zombie waited a while, peering deep into Brady’s eyes. Eventually a wicked smile came over his face and he began to laugh when Brady’s eyes showed no signs of recognition. “You don’t know do you? You can’t even remember why you’re here.” Brady slinked back desperately racking his brain to remember. “Look at you. Look at what you’ve become! You’re suffering all this misery and can’t even remember why you endure it. You are the most pathetic thing I think I’ve ever seen. You cling to this tower like a desperate man dangling on a rope. Have you not even wondered why?”
The creature laughed again at his own cleverness. “Savoring your stay in the dark city? Are you finding your luxurious hotel worthy of your torturous journey here? I came here attempting to persuade you to join us. But now I see it is inevitable… and useless. If this is as free and powerful as your mind can be, you are worthless.”
Brady sweat under the pressure of the situation. With a great effort of will, Brady broke through the wall in his mind. His eyes grew wide as his mind opened up before him. The memory of a good Val and Connor came rushing back to him. Things long forgotten came to him. And then his mind grasped Sara. He stood from his kneeling position and yelled at the king.
In complete defiance of the king before him, Brady used the new clarity to reach into the minds of others. He saw them now like stepping stones leading to his one desire. In an instant, he shot out through nearby minds and collided into Sara. For the first time since arriving, he saw her in his mind. He looked on her half-eaten face. The exposed teeth. Her horrific expression. She seemed to him such a pitiful thing.
As a man might grab an object, Brady snatched her mind and brought it to himself.
∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ • ∙
Sara left the swirling ranks below and entered Brady’s building. She had felt a second heart beating louder than the first. Throbbing new commands. Beckoning her to a nearby building. The heart she did not know. But its intensity she could not deny.
She stepped into the destroyed building and passed between its empty doorframes and charred halls. Like a star, the heart burned with a brightness just beyond her reach.
When she rounded the corner and saw it face to face, her instincts confused her. The starlit heart burned like the face of a god. But in direct opposition to it, the new king’s face seemed ignited in an altogether different and defiled flame. Its mouth spoke blasphemy in the exact verbiage of the enemy.
The hideous corruption of this abomination could not be allowed to spread. Sara took it upon herself to end it. Seeing how weak and human it was, she guessed that would not be difficult.
In fury she lunged for it and easily toppled it over. Starting with the skin on its chest, she began to tear and eat. Her lipless teeth bumped up his rib cage as she scraped the skin into her mouth. Even though it still bore a hint of zombie in its taste, she gulped down the bloody flesh. She dug at the thing’s shoulders and peeled off strips of flesh like ribbon. Her grubby hands brought the skin into her mouth.
This, her favorite kind of meal, burst a little blood as she clamped down on the strips of flesh. She let the blood move around her mouth and in ecstasy let it linger on her tongue a moment before she swallowed. Fresh and new. With more passion than an alcoholic, she shot out her tongue and licked up all the blood that seeped out her lipless mouth.
The taste of the blood imprinted itself on her mind and like an addict she had to return to her substance. Like a vampire, its taste intoxicated her and drove her mad. She clawed at the skin with her gnarled fingers and bit into the mouthwatering, bloody flesh.
A great command like a shockwave burst from this defiled king’s heart. It exploded so powerfully, it knocked Sara back onto the floor. She watched in horror as it went out into the ranks of her companions. As it landed in their minds, a new madness overtook them and they killed their sisters and brothe
rs.
In her mind, Sara killed this disgusting king but when she ordered her body to comply, she found it altogether unable. Her limbs could not bear the weight of their flesh much less her mind’s intent. Her hands hung like foreign objects to her as they rested lifelessly on the floor disobeying her. She screamed at them but found her voice to be unlike herself.
Her body, for some unknown reason, threw itself against the floor. Her head fell over the ledge and she looked upside down at her precious brothers and sisters below in the street. When she looked on them, they seemed altogether different. The more she stared, the more they seemed like hideous monsters of which she was not one. Their once friendly faces descended into nightmares.
Her head knocked against the ledge and soon bumped along the rough floor of the building. Her mind desperately grabbed at anything that might tell her what happened but found only shards of insanity. Her world sank into a blurry black and white recollection of a memory of a dream.
Outside, where brothers and sisters killed each other, she felt the influence and domain of the first heart. It pressed in against her like heat. It grew so intense Sara forced her once disobedient arms into a posture of defense.
The two hearts, unable to tolerate each other, clashed like titans in the churning sea of the lesser minions. From the ground Sara watched them bleed and fight. The only things of color in an otherwise black and white world. The gods battled without regard to those around them. Many blows sent minions flying through the air like splashes of water.
In a deadlock the two pressed against each other. Focusing all energy into their struggle, the minions slowed and eventually stopped their bickering to watch the hearts. As if a great light burned in a forest, the minions stood like trees to witness the flame. Their long shadows stretched out behind them dancing against the ground and buildings.
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