The Queen of the Dead

by Vincenzo Bilof

  The narrow corridor was enclosed with buildings on both sides, including a Pizza Hut. Corpses scampered over cars, but their backs were turned to the Harley.

  Vega looked over her shoulder.

  The horde was still coming.

  Ahead of them, a wall of dead that seemed to be trying to escape the oncoming tidal wave. Vega and the priest were caught in a vise of rotting flesh.

  Over his shoulder, Vega tried to steady her aim and carve a path by dropping a couple deadheads in front of them. Father Joe kept the Harley straight and true while she wasted six slugs trying to hit two targets.

  Something was moving these things. Pushing them forward, motivating them.

  They poured through windows, heedless of any potential harm to their frail bodies. The younger ones stood up more quickly, their youthful bones and muscles not yet shrinking beneath the weight of middle-aged frustrations. There was no room for the Harley to weave through the vehicles.

  She drew the second handgun.

  They wore suits, and they had tattoos. They work flower dresses and they wore lipstick. They were fat and they were bald. They crawled and they pushed. They tripped over bushes and beer cans. Alive but not alive. Summoned from the places they had died, places where they were supposed to rot. She didn’t see their various modes of mutilation. They were the melted pot of American flesh that had died without knowing why.

  Pop! Pop! Pop! Vega waved the handguns in front of her eyes. The Harley rumbled forward through the forest of limbs.

  Men in suits and women in pencil skirts dropped out of the courthouse windows like they were committing suicide.

  Children filed out of a burnt bus.

  Men in tight shirts and women in sparkly clothes or barely any clothes at all lingered around a bar. Their heads opened up just the same.

  They were tightening around the Harley, reaching with open palms. Yellow teeth, baseball caps and expensive basketball shoes, jewelry, cleavage, hair pieces, rotted breath, faces leaning in close, leaning in, pushed together, black mouths opening, hands waving like babies experimenting with fingers.

  Eject a clip from one gun. Empty the bullets from another into faces that dropped or disappeared behind the brief, bright flash of gunfire in close quarters.

  Fingernails dug into her shins, drawing blood. Into her thighs, warm pain, and new scars.

  The bike picked up speed as the street widened. A bit of breathing room to reload both weapons. She holstered one and reloaded, then switched hands and performed the same trick while leaning into Father Joe’s sweaty back.

  Close now. Only two or three miles away.

  Her saliva tasted like bacon and vomit. She spat over the side of the bike and looked again at the oncoming wave. The dead would not be persuaded otherwise. There were bullets left and she could still fight.

  The adrenaline kicked in while the wind scoured her hair. It was as good a moment to die as any. It didn’t have to be for any benign purpose other than death itself. Miles had the look in his eyes when he made his decision, and if she looked in a mirror, she would find the same wild eyes, that same commitment to the abyss.

  But she jerked sideways and the belt connecting her to Father Joe loosened as gravity fled. The city with all its smoke and blood circled around her and she felt the air on her arms, on her face. The smoke from the rear tire and the burning rubber were the only things she could process as reality in that one second.

  She was flung along the hood of a car and ended up on her side, the wind escaping from her lungs. Nothing was broken, but every joint in her body protested when she tried to sit up. She still had one of the guns. Blood seeped into her right eye.

  And they were coming.

  Get your ass up. Get up on your feet and face them.

  “The gas station.”

  Father Joe stood beside her with the other Sig Sauer in his hand.

  “Hit the wiring, and I’ll hit the fuel truck. I’ll throw in a prayer to help.”

  He was insane. Shit like this only worked in movies. In the movies, Bruce Willis might hit a gas pump with a bullet and watch the whole thing ignite, which was damn-near impossible. But a spark from a downed wire in a pool of petro might do the trick. A long shot. A very long shot.

  “Pray,” she said, and aimed for the lights above the gas pumps.

  Her body was already on fire from pain. Her joints were stiff. She felt her bloody skin stick to her clothes. If she hit her head in the fall she would’ve been in a coma. Every bullet counted. Every pull of the trigger was her life.

  A hole was punctured in the fuel tanker and petroleum spilled onto the ground.

  She could see them again. Out of the corner of her eye, the glare of sun caught by a candy-red corvette blurring the oncoming, inevitable shapes.

  Sparking wires dropped from the top of the gas station terminal.

  Click. The clip was empty.

  “Run!”

  If dragons made a sound while breathing, it would have sounded like the gas station’s eruption. Woosh! She felt the heat on the back of her neck and saw the orange glow reflected on the rear windshields around her. Her legs moved in slow motion. The gun slipped from her fingers.

  She looked back and saw it, a fireball blooming into bright sky, smoke slashing across that perfect expanse. Shapes passed through the fire, their bodies crumpling without protest, their cause expiring only when they did.

  “One more mile,” Father Joe put a hand on his shoulder. “Do you believe in miracles?”

  “You weren’t praying,” Vega said.

  He chuckled. “Were you hurt in the fall? I hit a… speed bump. More like a torso.”

  “You’re not carrying me, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. “If you don’t like girls, then I don’t need your hands on me.”

  He removed his hand. “I never said I was a virgin. Only that I swore an oath.”

  Father Joe reached for the collar around his neck and ripped it off.

  “Frank was right. About a lot of things. If I remove the collar, I’m still a man of faith. I’m still me. But I’m also just a man, a sinner who continues to sin. There is goodness worth sinning for.”

  “I’m glad we got that out of the way,” Vega said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to walk…”

  One mile.

  ***

  They ran. Lungs burning, heat rising, they ran. The tide of dead had been slowed, and there was a mile to make.

  More cars were jammed together on 21 Mile Road, and corpses flooded through the base’s gate from all directions. The fence had been trampled over and the museum planes looked like they were covered by an army of black ants.

  “Holy…”

  Vega stood in a truck bed with the priest and watched thousands of people pour into Selfridge. She’d been an obstacle in their path, nothing more. It could’ve been the entire state. It could’ve been the entire world.

  “Take my hand,” Father said.

  All the pain, all the death, all the bullets—the smoke, the fire, the blood, the fear. Shanna. Bob. Miles. Vincent. John. The crazy-ass general. Maybe Jeremy. Maybe Griggs. Frank. All the countless faces she’d put a bullet into, all the gore she’d stomped through to get to this point, trapped in this fight that didn’t have an end. No matter how far she ran. No matter where she tried to hide.

  She felt it now.

  “Our father…” she choked, “who art in Heaven…”

  She squeezed Father Joe’s hand, and he said the words in Spanish. She switched to her native tongue, and they said the words together, watching the overflow of dead flesh and stream over the tarmac of the once-mighty base.

  There were no more prayers, no more questions of forgiveness or mortality.

  The dead moved purposefully, groans forced out of their stomachs with the release of putrid gasses and rotting insides, reminding Vega of half-asleep churchgoers humming along to the hymns. They moved like monks attending a ritual that each would see only once in their lifetime.


  This was bigger than the zombies were; if Traverse possessed an important secret, then this had to do with him. He was on the base, waiting to complete some penultimate enterprise that would damn those who’d survived the initial massacre.

  The world wasn’t dead yet, but someone wanted to put the nail in the coffin.

  Father Joe led her into the crowd, though she wanted to test the waters as if jumping into a swimming pool for the first time. They joined the crowd smoothly, swept up by the current of rotted flesh and twitching bone. Father held her, his arm around her waist as they walked with the corpuscular congregation. They shuffled without hurry, careful not to disturb the orderly procession, the undead dirge roiling up from those who hadn’t been disemboweled.

  In the glory of sunshine the crowd moved with all the rush of a caffeine-junkie fugue; thousands of people without their Starbucks or Tim Horton’s, most of them wearing their best jewelry, useless relics that had defined entire lives, the impetus of labor and time. Timecards had been punched to buy the shiny black loafers, drug deals negotiated to buy big silver chains that were draped over thin, tattooed necks. Kneecaps and ankles twisted because years of misuse had worn away their strength; they surrendered to the pavement and the sun, and other members of the mob tripped over them, creating awkward moments of chaos among the swaying bodies. Cold, wet flesh slapped against Vega’s face she lost her balance in the priest’s arms. They were a ship coursing along a stormy sea, rocked by the hungry waves of dead flesh that lapped against them.

  “How many missions for you, Vega?” Father Joe asked, his voice collected and smooth as if he were sitting across from her at a nice restaurant and he was the confident bachelor.

  The zombies didn’t look at them; their focus was centered on whatever damnation-infused goal drove them forward.

  It was a question she didn’t have an answer to, and she knew it would take her some time to figure it out. He was doing it to keep her calm, to keep her eyes out of the bright sun, to keep her from retching while the foul aromas of murder and rot made her eyes water.

  “My name’s Amparo,” she almost whispered, her will to breathe ravaged by the presence of the horde.

  “They called me Sangriento Joe,” he said. “I was a boxer. I grew up near Ciudad Juarez. I’ve outlived most of the kids I grew up with. I know because they were dead when I was still there.”

  She wanted him to talk. She searched the faces for people she recognized; maybe Miles hadn’t been completely destroyed at the Renaissance Center. Maybe Bob hadn’t been finished off by Griggs. She could look into the bloodstained visages that looked like bad Halloween makeup jobs, sloppy and chaotic, slashes of blood crusted over teeth and seemingly finger-painted over the blank canvases of fleshless skulls. If she stared hard enough, she’d find the first man she killed, cut down by her machine gun while she was behind the cover of a wall in Kabul. It happened quickly, and with the hail of bullets over her head, there was no time to recognize what happened. The man had simply been killed with no fanfare, no final words, and no goodbye kiss to a child or a wife. She hadn’t even seen his face. She kept firing at bodies, at flesh, and the casual moment of combat, the fusion of adrenaline and purpose, was not unlike going on a theme park ride for the first time, only to jump back in line right after.

  The faces around her were the ghosts of the slaughtered, the specters of shadow and the victims of an insatiable lust for violence. Vincent and a thousand others who represented questions she could never answer. A criminal with no memory of the crimes she committed.

  “I don’t know how many people I’ve killed,” Vega said. “I don’t really care, either.”

  “You’re thinking about it,” Father said, “now it matters. You’re not shaking, and you’re not cold. You’re not even afraid. If I let you go, you could disappear into the crowd, float away from life.”

  “Father, I want to survive this, but I can’t change what I am. Don’t waste your breath.”

  The tide of corpses was moving too slowly; she wanted Father to carry her right through them all and straight to Traverse. After he was dead, she knew what she would do next: keep fighting. Keep killing. Because somebody had to, and it was all she could do, all she was capable of. This fight wouldn’t end with the death of one man. Were all these dead fuckers just supposed to drop dead when Traverse was cold?

  Her arms hugged the priest’s broad body. She didn’t want to let him go.

  “Father,” she hesitated, looking into the frozen faces of dead people who were fixated on a subconscious need they couldn’t possibly understand.

  “I’m here for you,” his big hand rubbed the black hair on her tangled scalp. “Tell me. Tell me anything now. Tell me anything and everything so you know it… so you can feel it now.”

  “Do you blame yourself for what happened?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “I did what I could. I did what was in my power. Better to do everything than nothing. I’m not a martyr… I just have that whole guilt bullshit I’ve been dealing with. And I haven’t had a beer… in a while.”

  The priest began to tell her about the time he killed a man in the boxing ring. The sweat poured into her eyes without resistance, her eyelashes fluttering. The wall of dead flesh blocked the breeze, and the sun pounded relentlessly, the morning assault baking the exposed bodily fluids, and organs not bled into the ground or stuffed into the mouths of the dead race they had joined upon admittance to the realm of the deceased.

  The story of manslaughter and the old man who might’ve been the eldest man in Ciudad Juarez, or perhaps he didn’t exist at all, which was more likely, rolled off the priest’s tongue with the sun beating down. They swayed together between corpses, and she half-listened to his story while searching the dead faces for memories. For hints of the past, but the past wanted nothing to do with her.

  She was afraid for her life, but she wasn’t afraid of them. Grotesquerie and mutilation, blood corrupted by disease, or narcotics, or mental dysfunctions catalogued and medicated. There was nothing to fear from the human race ripped inside-out, the internal mechanisms that had defined their lives exposed to nature to rot until ash and dust conquer the world at last. The evolution of the species. The depressed, the arrogant, the impoverished, the wealthy. The sum of derangement and normalcy, conformity and individuality.

  The miasma of history in chewed limbs and creaking bone, putrescence and tattered clothing. There was nothing to fear from these.

  “Prayer to God is like talking to a therapist,” Father said. “It holds the same power. We speak and no real answers are provided. Answers are revealed and granted through action.”

  “If you died now, you’d be satisfied?” she said, clinging to him.

  “It’s a feeling we should always have,” he replied. “Any moment, we might be called away. Some people spend that last moment text-messaging, and some spend it in the arms of a lover.”

  What did Vincent want? What did anyone really want? It wasn’t this. Whatever it is, it sure as hell wasn’t this.

  Death has been redefined, and nobody envisioned this.

  They would have to conquer death.

  A storm of flies accompanied the pillars of smoke that rose from the museum; piles of the dead had collected on bloody hills of limbs and flesh, fabric and bone. They looked like nothing more than mannequins being moved, bulldozed out of a warehouse; manufactured bodies thrown away carelessly. The herd thinned over the airfield, though there were more obstacles for the dead crowd to struggle through, including wayward shoes and bullets, baby strollers and machine guns. The entire county had tried to push through the base’s perimeter for the safety network only a barrage of gunfire could provide; those left behind had become this second wave of refugees—the undead, the wasted, and the murdered.

  Wherever they were going together, not all of them would make it. Broken knees and twisted ankles dropped hundreds of them.

  “We stay with the tide,” Father Joe said, releasing her because t
he crowd spread out over the base. They could move freely, but they had to be careful not to get stuck against a wall of bodies and the roving horde.

  “Don’t let them sweep us through,” Vega said, pulling him by the hand between the walking dead. “It’s like we’re not even here. They don’t notice us.”

  There was an intelligence, or some directive, behind this epidemic.

  If they weren’t careful, they would get pulled into a meat grinder.

  She led Father Joe to an open hangar where a refueling plane had been left behind. The damn priest better not ask her if she knew how to fly it; civilians always assumed that a soldier knows how to fly a plane, like a war hero in a bad action film.

  The zombies were filing through the hanger; the place smelled like a slaughterhouse and most of the blood hadn’t dried yet. The former boxer had the same idea she did, and followed her into the plane.

  Both of them plopped down. They stared at each other for a moment, covered in sweat, their bodies heaving while chasing breaths. Vega remembered a moment just like this with Bob when they managed to get into the Eloise Fields. She had grabbed that crusty old bastard and shared a laugh with him.

  There was no laughter this time. There were no more words. They had confessed their sins and here they sat, the redeemer and the damned.

  “You need to learn how to drive a damn motorcycle,” she said.

  “And you need to learn how to shoot,” Father said.

  Her reaction to him outside had been strange, but now that she found herself alone with him in the plane’s dark, she wanted to move away; he didn’t need any more opportunities to pry her open. She had enough cathartic moments in the past few hours to last a lifetime.

  Exhaustion was taking its toll. Her headache was returning in full-force, and too many hours had passed since she ate anything. Some bad hamburgers at Vincent’s gun shack grilled by John Charles on a George Foreman.