The Queen of the Dead

by Vincenzo Bilof

  Vega shot him a cold look, but she couldn’t help herself. Laughter burst through her mouth and she shook her head. “Jackass. Let’s get off this boat, Sergeant. Say your prayers and hike up your shorts, boys. We’ve got some walking to do.”

  “It don’t matter if we’re good killers,” Vincent said. “We need to be better at living if we wanna survive.”

  ROSE

  A cold, stainless-steel floor lay at her feet, and the walls around her formed a cubicle of reflective silver. The window which led to the room beyond revealed a chamber that was also stainless-steel, though the woman who sat in the other room was bound to her chair with a gag over her mouth, her wide-open eyes staring straight ahead at a television monitor perched on a stand, although only she could see what was on the screen. Above both women, in both rooms, a single light dangled from the ceiling, and its low hum provided the only noise.

  The assassin, Rose, heard the hum clearly. She allowed it to fill the vacuous space in her mind where there was only form. She didn’t judge the woman in the other room, nor did she wonder why she couldn’t see the monitor from her position. She accepted what was, because her mind had been cleansed. She acknowledged her name as nothing more than a label. She was Agent Rose.

  The door in her silver chamber had been rendered invisible by the walls, but Rose could hear it open and close. She was awaiting orders, and now they would come.

  “Agent Rose.”

  The woman nodded her head once. She recognized the tall, veteran officer in his medal-adorned uniform.

  She felt his eyes linger on her for a moment too long. Agent Rose was beautiful by the Western world’s standards, as she was supposed to be. Seduction and temptation were imbedded into her training. Agent Rose had been designed for infiltration and combat; she wasn’t expected to undertake long-term espionage assignments in foreign countries, but rather, she was utilized as a “domestic assault” weapon. She was a corrupter of hearts and souls, and a trained killer. It made no difference if she was supposed to seduce a man or a woman, or multiples of either; her mission dictated her actions.

  For this mission, she was required to attach pink extensions to her platinum-blonde hair. Her muscle tone, breast augmentation, eyelash length, hair volume, and curvature were examined. As always, Agent Rose passed inspection. Now, she wore a tight white blouse and black pencil-thin skirt that passed her stocking-clad knees.

  The officer held a remote in one hand and a tablet in the other. “What you’re about to see is responsible for our current emergency. Before I assign the mission, you have to know what you’re dealing with.”

  He gestured to the room on the other side of the two-way mirror. “You won’t be able to hear the volume because we’re not able to ascertain whether or not it plays a role in what you’re about to see.” He coughed into his fist and glanced at Agent Rose again to ensure she was watching, betraying a lack of confidence in what he was doing, as if he didn’t want her to watch, or he’d seen it before and didn’t want to see it again.

  In the other room, the woman’s brows furrowed as she watched the screen, and she began to writhe against her bonds. Her eyelids were held open by clamps, making it impossible for her to blink or shut her eyes.

  Urine trickled over the edges of the chair after soaking through the helpless woman’s pants. Her entire body twitched and vibrated; blood appeared around the edges of her eyes and slid over her cheeks.

  The ageless colonel looked away, looked to his polished black shoes, and returned his gaze to the woman.

  Her flesh bubbled and cracked open in several places—blood slipped out of her pores. Blood bubbles burst and popped underneath her clothes, as her body shook against the restraints. Trickling blood leaked onto the steel floor, mingling with the puddle of urine at her feet. Clumps of hair slid out of her scalp, her skin tightened and shriveled, wrinkling along her knuckles as fingernails yellowed and seemed to stretch while flesh shrank.

  “She’s decaying,” the colonel pointed out. “The video she watched was a sex film made by a woman named Mina Neely. She filmed herself having sex with a man, whom she promptly ate. Alive. She looked into the camera while she consumed him, and anybody who watches the video becomes exactly what you see here, which means you can’t watch the video. It also means we can’t watch it; we’ve expended… resources in an attempt to document the video’s effects.”

  The colonel handed her the tablet. Rose noticed that the woman in the other room wasn’t dead; her skin had blackened, and maggots appeared in the ears and atop the scalp, curled, writhing noodles that fell off and landed in the blood-and-urine pool.

  “She’s dead,” the colonel continued, “scientifically, anyway. Her body is suffering the effects of rigor mortis. Her bodily fluids are contaminated with a virus… we can’t…”

  He brushed his hands through his flat brown hair and swallowed.

  “You really have no idea what’s going on out there…?” he asked, his voice shaking.

  “I don’t watch the news, sir,” she said.

  He straightened and cleared his throat.

  “There’s more data on the tablet,” he said. “When we recovered this video from a house in Grosse Pointe, it was already too late. A psychologist had watched the video, and he attacked someone, who in turn became one of these things, but a little less dead-looking, of course. Less crispy.”

  She turned on the tablet and looked at a series of faces that were accompanied by biographical data, including past missions, skills, and assets. All of them were career mercenaries, some of whom she recognized. Bob Fields, Amparo Vega, and Chris Miles had a notorious rep for being bloodthirsty.

  “This isn’t technically a black op,” he said. “The mission is classified because there isn’t a mission. The White House and the military have their own security measures in place. This mission is funded by private sources.

  “Your mission is to acquire a specific target and escort him to Selfridge Air Base. We’ve already sent two teams in, but we’ve lost contact. The vehicles we used for the mission are all tracked, but most of them have remained stationary at the target’s last known location. When you browse through the mission data, you’ll see that two vehicles have moved. We’re operating under the assumption that our teams have been retired.”

  She scanned the mission summary, which included a series of videos that would provide a visual of Detroit, where she was supposed to be dropped.

  When she saw the bio on the target, she heard the colonel say the name. She heard the name, but didn’t hear the name. She stared at the screen forever.

  “James Traverse. Your former instructor.”

  The only memory she couldn’t bury. She believed him dead for the past few years because he never returned from Egypt to fulfill his promise. She never thought she would see that statuesque face again, the dark hair combed over his forehead, his lips lingering between a smirk and a scowl.

  Jim had survived the Egypt mission, but had gone AWOL shortly after. He became a killer; roaming across the country and murdering random civilians. He was apprehended by Bob Fields and Nick Crater; he was sent to Eloise Fields in Detroit, Michigan, where most of the vehicles were now parked. Eloise Fields was an asylum.

  Jim was still alive.

  They could have asked her to hunt him down when he went on his initial killing spree.

  They didn’t trust her before, but they were desperate now.

  Why didn’t he come back to her?

  Why did he break his promise?

  It was easier to believe he was dead. Easier to believe he was KIA and would never return.

  “This is beyond my skill set,” she said. She never turned down a mission before, because they only assigned targets that could be seduced and destroyed.

  “Explain.”

  “My area of expertise doesn’t include rescue missions in a war zone,” she said. “Detroit, according to this data, is in the hands of hostiles. I’m an assassin, sir.”

  She
glanced into the other room at the creature that resumed life when it should have been dead; nearly fleshless and hairless, it stared at the two-way mirror with bulging eyes.

  “You don’t have a choice. We’re dropping you into Detroit, so I suggest you take the mission.”

  They needed her for the mission because nobody else was left, or because it wasn’t a sanctioned job. They left Traverse to rot in a loony bin, only to want him back, after spending years chasing him. An entire city falls apart and they want to pull out a single madman.

  None of that mattered. Jim was alive.

  “I will complete my objectives,” she said. “After I review the data, I will acquire the target.”

  While the dead thing struggled against its bonds in the room across from her, Rose could only think about Jim. The memory of him remained.

  ***

  Shirtless and lean with muscle, Jim stared through the window in Beirut’s twilight glow. He watched the traffic while Rose stretched over the bed and watched his fingers play with the drapes, his eyes searching for nothing.

  It was his idea to make her job more complicated. Her targets lay beside her on the bed, a man and a woman, both spies who worked for different agencies. Neither spy knew the other practiced the art of espionage. Rose managed to seduce both of them, and asked them to let her friend watch.

  Jim had watched.

  Afterward, they had sex between the nude corpses.

  Her classified mission had become a pleasure-cruise of pain and sensation. This was the last time they would be together, and he wanted it to be memorable.

  “We’re supposed to have a conversation now.” Jim’s voice was disconnected from emotion, as it always was. “It’s going to be a conversation about our past and our future.”

  “We’re both going to repeat ourselves,” she said.

  His trademark smirk appeared. “They haven’t needed me for a field operation in three years. They’re sending me to die. I’m not useful to them anymore, and the men on my team are supposed to die too, I’m sure. The best killers are like beasts. They can’t be tamed forever, so it’s better to have them killed on a mission they can’t complete. It’s how things are done. They’ll kill me before I’m beyond their power.”

  Jim was the only man she knew who had something interesting to say. He was Sun Tzu reincarnate; he conceptualized war and violence as systems of belief rather than actions.

  “This is a time for honesty,” she said. “Say it now or say it never.”

  “I thought you were going to be the one,” Jim said. “I always believed they wanted me to train my replacement. But I guess they can still use me before throwing me away. I asked you to at least let me know when they gave the order to kill me.”

  “I don’t owe you anything,” she reminded him. “You told me yourself there’s no honor in murder, no glory in battle.”

  He sighed and sat on the edge of the bed, his hands folded into each other with his elbows perched on his thighs. “How many times do I have to say you’re not like other women? Sometimes I wonder if you’re human.”

  She wanted to trace his scars with her fingertips, explore each curve of muscle with her lips as if she’d never been there before. Each scar had its own story, a myth born of blood.

  “You want to see if I’m going to cry over you,” Rose sat up between the corpses. “That shit annoys me, Jim. I think we’re past the test phase. I’ll ask you a question so you can get over me faster: do you want to live?”

  “That is the question, isn’t it? Why would I accept their mission? I guess maybe we can run away together and have babies, live on top of a mountain and watch thunderstorms. But I’ll be with other expendables; I’ll be with the best killers. You understand…”

  “The best soldiers are licensed serial killers whose targets are picked for them,” she finished his thought. “Again, we’re repeating. Say something new before I get bored.”

  “They know who I am,” he continued, “and I can guess who will be going with me. Whatever the mission, someone will have to come back alive.”

  “And then you’ll run forever?”

  “I wonder what I can become. They want to see if I’m too old, or if I’ve become slower. I want to know what I’ll be like after I complete the mission. I wonder if I’ll become the untamed beast. Maybe I’ll start picking my own targets.”

  “You’re not one to become predictable.”

  He looked at her for a moment, and then began to speak in a confessional tone. “You’ve already read my file, or else you wouldn’t have let me break you into pieces so many times. You know I’ve read yours. This is a time for honesty, right? You know about the woman who taught me how to live. Georgia Cone. Taxpayer money couldn’t keep her in the sanitarium. Lost her son in Vietnam. She only knew he was a special operative—I figured out who he was, later on. A neighborhood woman, lonely old bat, seduced me with a plastic rifle. Told me she saw me playing outside and thought I might like the toy. She broke most of the bones in my hands and feet once. My ribs. Shoulders. Gave me blowjobs and called me Michael. Showed me video footage of Vietnam over and over again. My name was Michael for six years.

  “Georgia Cone was a retired teacher, so she loved reading Shakespeare to me. Especially Titus Andronicus and King Lear. I forgot who my parents were. There was only Georgia. Ms. Cone taught me you can live only when you know how to die. You can live when you master death. We’re all killers, waiting for the excuse. It’s the fatal flaw of our species.”

  Rose needed to touch him again, needed to place her hands on his shoulders and massage the tight muscles while moonlight played with the shadows on the floor of their room. Instead, she watched him stare at her body. He was poised like a gargoyle, silently vicious and invincible.

  “We’re already dead,” Rose offered. “Killing ourselves with machines. Plugging ourselves in until we’re always plugged in, and the human race dissolves itself for the sake of evolution. More technology until we become the liquid network itself and find immortality, and then there will be no more need to work, because Utopia is the disintegration of the mind into eternal code.”

  “Harlan Ellison wrote a story about it,” Jim mused. “We doom ourselves with prophecies because we’re ultimately predictable. What if I can show the species how to live, right before it dies?”

  “I want to ask predictable questions,” she said. “I’m still a woman.”

  His gaze released her and he looked away. “Questions we never asked until now, the end. A time for honesty, right?”

  The questions had formed themselves in the dark. She wanted him to answer honestly, but she was willing to settle for a lie just to believe it. She’d never believed in anything until Jim showed her what she already knew. Her mind had been wiped clean of the past so she could become the monster, a superior human; she understood her responsibility to decide the fates of men by reading dossiers and getting paychecks she would never spend, save for moments of silence in remote places where she could wipe her mind with meditation and solitude.

  She didn’t want him to deny her, but she needed him to say it.

  She wanted to hear him say “yes.”

  “Have you felt love? Do you know what it is, or remember it?”

  “If the question’s predictable, then I already have an answer, don’t I?” She could feel him smirk, although it was hidden in the dark.

  “I’ll never see you again. I don’t know if I have the power to kill this memory, because you’re inside of me. You helped make me. I’m your design, your daughter, and your student. I know I’ll wonder, and I can’t. I can’t let it weaken me. Don’t say I’ll get over it. The first time a woman falls in love damages her forever.”

  “And you said it,” Jim noted. “The word. The emotion.”

  “I didn’t know I was going to say it.”

  “More than anything else I could want, I want to kill you. I want to know if I’ll feel anything when it happens. I want to know what I’ll see in y
our blood. That’s the answer, the only one I can give. The only one that’s honest.”

  He knew how to make her aware of her body because he was a tantric god of sensation and pleasure, and her thighs chafed now. Like the arms of an anxious cricket, her thighs rubbed themselves together, her legs moving beneath the blanket. His words entered her and played with her spine, flooding her head and lips with warmth.

  “Come back for me,” she said. “I want the same thing. I didn’t know it until now, but I want it. We’ll meet on a beach at sunrise or twilight, or maybe we’ll find a thunderstorm and meet upon a plain, while a tornado haunts the roads around us. Come back for me because I can’t let anyone else try. Come back for me so I can be the one.”

  “The only commitment we can make to anyone,” Jim nodded. “One of us will kill the other. You want me to promise. To swear by… the inconstant moon?”

  “I read Shakespeare, too,” she sat up. “Yes. Swear it. Swear by chaos and pain, change and torture, mortality and emotion.”

  “Remove my limbs and set me on fire,” he said.

  “Crack open my neck and drink me while I’m still warm.”

  “Listen to the tears of the innocent for the sound of my voice.”

  “You’ll be back for me,” she said. “I’ll keep this memory alive so I can wait for death. I can wait for you.”

  “After I come back from Egypt,” his hands traced the outline of her legs beneath the silk, “I’ll come back for you. You’re the only one who can save me.”

  JACK

  Comforting the weak. Stopping the speculative voices. Listening to the madness of those who’d witnessed death. Clint Eastwood nodded his head and smiled, or held people close and let them weep onto his shoulder. Soldiers stared at their guns while questioning what they’d seen. Children slept on the laps of strangers, their hair matted with blood that wasn’t theirs. The cowboy listened to those who needed someone to talk to, someone to comfort them. The cowboy wasn’t telling anyone that things would go back to normal; he never said, “It will be okay.”