There was more than just one.
Sitting against the tires of an eighteen-wheeler. Their heads slowly turned toward him.
Back home, in Mexico, they had called him Sangriento Joe. Bloody Joe. In the boxing ring his fists had spilled blood.
He used to do this twice a week during the winter, and then three times in the spring, though he wanted four. He wanted five. So then in the summer, he went six days a week, in the mornings. He rarely slept; all he wanted was to be out here, beating the shit out of the walking dead.
Father Joe grabbed one by the collar of its shirt and punched it in the stomach. His fist passed through wet, globulous matter. His hand emerged through its back, the frail thing resting over his forearm. He could lift it into the air with his arm, and he did.
It felt good. Really good.
The corpse on the end of his arm slowly craned its neck and looked up at him.
The others were looking at him, too.
That wasn’t good.
Something hot pocked into his forearm. At first he thought he was being stung. When he looked at the fingernails that were pushing into his bicep, he quickly withdrew his arm from inside of the corpse that hung on him.
So much for a standup fight.
He didn’t know what was happening, but he knew he needed to act fast.
This is what he had wanted all along.
He stomped at the head under his boot. Eventually, the skull gave way, but he had stopped paying attention.
Father Joe’s head was jerked back, long, clumped black hair snagged in an undead fist. He knelt and reached back for the arm with both of his hands. He had no idea if what he was going to do would work, because it seemed absolutely insane. He visualized himself doing it, and snapped the arm from the creature’s elbow. The entire arm above the elbow separated, his black hair still in the fist.
Holy shit.
It worked.
The attacker’s other hand dug into his wounded right shoulder. With his left hand, he grabbed onto the creature’s remaining arm with his left, tucked his right shoulder, and tossed the zombie over his shoulder.
The severed arm fell out of his hair.
Moving his feet, dancing over garbage and bloodstained cement, he dodged another lunge. He wasn’t sure how many were still standing. The one-armed corpse was still around, too.
His right hook shattered a jaw, and he remembered what it had felt like to hit Traverse. Good. Real good.
So he came back with a left this time, a smooth left uppercut balanced by the right side of his body. The damn thing’s head rocketed off its spine.
Pivoting, he half-turned and shuffled his feet backward, his balance perfect, his posture square.
But he jabbed at the air.
Something crashed into his exposed flank. He tasted dirt.
Smothered in shapes, flailing limbs like the dead branches of a lightning-scoured forest. He cracked through some of those gnarled limbs, snapping bones in his fists, wrenching appendages from sockets and joints. The dirt taste in his mouth reminded him of asphalt that would have been tucked inside the treads of monster-truck tires.
Icy water poured down the side of his body. Not water. Pain. Numbing, sharp pain. With it came realization, and with realization, fear.
There was a chance he might die.
This thought compelled him, igniting a fury of desperation. He grunted and spittle frothed through his teeth. He wrapped his arms, and it seemed as if all sound had been muffled, save the beating of his heart, its rhythm thumping inside his ears.
Losing his balance, he slipped and fell onto the pavement, his heavy body dropping as if his knees had disappeared. This is what it must feel like to realize that you were dangling on the edge of a cliff all along and just when you come to this realization, you let go.
Standing over him, things without skin, things without faces. Now he saw them for what they really were. All this time he had been invincible against them. Even before Mina’s death, the undead did not want him. Now he lay beneath them, broken and bloody, at their mercy.
They had rotted to the point where it was impossible to tell whether they had been men or women. Their race and gender were indiscriminate because they were indiscriminate in their desire for violence. Father Joe thought he should pray, thought he should begin reciting the Act of Contrition, but his lips were still. All he could do was stare at them in disbelief.
Maybe if he looked hard enough he might recognize a few people he had tried to save—people who ended up dead because of him. Look hard, Father Joe, because you deserve to feel all the guilt you’ve been avoiding.
One of them dropped as something slammed into the top of its head.
Then another head rocked sideways with a loud crack. The body wavered like a balloon, and Father Joe saw the big blond man standing there with an aluminum baseball bat. The man measured up his next swing, readied the bat, and there was another crack. A zombie dropped.
Then the third.
The fourth turned to see the blond man.
It dropped, too.
There had only been four.
Lying there on the concrete, blood spilling into his hand, shame flushed his cheeks. He had been helpless because of his own selfishness. He had almost died beating up zombies for fun.
“Nice,” Father Joe said, holding out his hand to the blond man.
“What?”
“The bat. Always wondered if it would work out. Trusted my fists more.”
“Yeah,” the man chuckled because he didn’t know what else to say. He helped Father Joe to his feet.
A familiar face, a regular churchgoer on Sundays. And Tuesdays, and some Saturdays. The big guy sat in the middle of the church, and it wasn’t easy to ignore him. Father Joe vaguely remembered the big man was supposed to play pro football. He had been one of the lucky ones, and he still counted himself lucky.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” Father Joe said.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Maybe. I think so.”
Father Joe looked down. He was, in fact, bleeding.
“Does it hurt?” the football player asked.
“Don’t know. I think at first it did. May I have your shirt?”
The football player didn’t hesitate. He ripped the shirt off his back, bunched it up, and handed it to him. Father Joe pressed the shirt against his side and admired the other man’s musculature.
“Either you’re doing steroids, or I’m doing something wrong,” Father Joe said with a smile.
“You’re a bit old to be out here,” the football player said.
“True. Weren’t you supposed to play ball? For some team in Canada, right?”
“Close,” the football player said and extended his firm hand again. “Name’s Bill. Bill Bailey. Was going to play in Detroit. Practice squad, but it was something.”
“Yeah, that was something to look forward to. You still get to have fun beating people up.” He nodded to the pile of dead bodies.
“I just happened to be in the right place. Just doing my job.” He pointed to the pickup truck loaded with garbage in the bed.
This man wasn’t here for action; he was just doing his job, trying to work for the neighborhood’s welfare. Bill wasn’t out here risking his ass for the sake of vanity. And why did he have to mention “beating people up?” This guy was no more of a Neanderthal than he was, probably less so.
“Thank you,” Father Joe said, and he had to tell himself not to look down or away. There was no reason to be embarrassed just because a man saved him from getting his own ass chewed up. “I’ve seen you in church almost every service.”
“Yeah. I always try to make it.”
“You’re just a devout man, then.”
“What do you mean, Father?”
“Well, you come a lot. I don’t know if you’ve been to Confession. If there’s something troubling you, come and talk to me. I see a lot of people. I don’t mean to say that I’m busy, because well�
� look at me, I’m not so busy I don’t make time for myself. But anyway, if you need to talk, I’ll listen.”
“So, uh, what now?” Bill asked.
Father Joe didn’t understand the question at first, because he was expecting Bill to begin a rambling, horrible confession.
But when he noticed Bill kept staring at him, he figured it out. The shirt was almost soaked through with blood.
“You think they’re carrying a disease?” Father Joe asked. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
“You obviously still want to live because you’re pretending it didn’t happen, um, Father.”
“And you’re worried I’m going to ask you to do something to me, right?”
“No. That’s a sin. I would never do that.”
Father Joe laughed. “Okay. Yeah. A sin. To end the life of someone who is living on borrowed time.”
“I’m going to leave it up to you. I won’t stop you from hurting yourself, but I can’t do it for you. No way.”
“I doubt we even need to be thinking about it.”
“I can’t let you back into the neighborhood,” Bill said as Father Joe began to walk toward the truck.
“Really? I’m going to help you take care of the garbage. Then we’ll see.”
Just like that, Father Joe walked away. Just like that, he headed toward the truck, bleeding into Bailey’s shirt. With enough pressure, the bleeding would stop, the pain would subside.
Inside the truck was a bottle of Crown Royal, only a shot or two was left. He removed the shirt from his body, peeling it away from the clotting blood, and poured the alcohol over his wound.
Father Joe clenched his teeth to keep himself from making any noise as he rinsed the zombie bite. Here was his ego in play again. After doing everything he could through the years to leave the man he was in Mexico in the boxing ring, he had almost completely become that man all over again. A boxing match smells like the end of the world, only he didn’t know it until now.
When he closed his eyes and felt the sun’s warmth upon the fresh wound, he remembered Kathy when she had emerged from the lobby of the retirement center, her arms outstretched, a bright smile on her face. She was ready to run far, far away. And she would. She would go far, far away. Because she had believed in him. She had believed that Father Joe could protect her.
And the boy. Macon.
The old man in the wheelchair. Frank. Dead on the freeway. The wheels inside his heart stopped turning.
The other woman. Rose. He carried her through a mob of the dead, and the soldier, Vega, had skewered her with a ridiculous katana (didn’t Vincent still have it somewhere?). Why? He was never sure. But he had tried to help Rose.
Sergeant John Charles. He knew him only briefly, but had been thankful the man gave his last remaining breaths to protect them.
Jeremy. He never saw what happened to Jeremy, but nobody saw him again.
Nor did anyone ever see Mina in the flesh, or her boyfriend, the detective he met only briefly.
And General Masters? The batshit-crazy prophet? Vega had shot him. The man had been chewed up, and Vega shot him because she was convinced he was going to transform into one of those dead things.
But when did the transformation actually occur? There was something special in such a germ that would activate specific brain patterns and initiate the desire to eat living flesh. Why did they have to eat people? What kind of crazy, lab-engineered germ would reanimate the dead, and then cause them to eat people?
And there was the moment he had stood outside the church for the first time, when he first came to this neighborhood. He had stood with Vega and Vincent, and there was a look in Vincent’s eyes. “Dead bodies in there,” he had said, and that was it. Vincent didn’t come inside. In a hallway, a dead man lay slumped against a wall, and a woman in a small kitchen had been butchered, her blood smeared on the walls, organs missing. Father Joe knew it used to be a woman because he saw the clothes which had been separated from her body before the mutilation.
Vincent had said one word about the whole thing: “Traverse.”
Father Joe felt like he had stepped into the middle of some personal war between several people, all of whom he was only loosely acquainted with. He knew just enough about Vega to know that her addictive personality and self-loathing were never going to go away, and that she wouldn’t be happy until she died in a barroom brawl or in the arms of an angry mob, living or undead. Vega had told him a few things about Traverse before, but she had never met him herself. Vincent had met him and said little.
Opening his eyes, Father Joe was nearly surprised to see that the sun was still up. How much time did his memory devour?
“Thought you were going to help me unload?”
Father Joe turned around to find Bill, shirtless, sweaty, standing in the bed of the truck, heaving junk into the sinkhole.
“Working on my tan,” Father Joe said. “I’m starting to feel like I’ve been living in the lap of luxury lately, and I gotta keep myself humble.”
“The lap of luxury.”
“That’s my pity story. Everyone’s got a pity story. Maybe not. I don’t know. I grew up poor, a poor little Mexican. Liked to fight. Liked to feel sorry for myself. Where I come from, you either become a priest or a bandit…”
He often quoted that line from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but now it felt off somehow, as if it didn’t belong, as if the movie had never existed, and nobody would ever, possibly, understand the reference but him. Or he was just getting old.
Bill stopped shuffling garbage around and crouched. The back of the truck smelled like a ditch full of dead homeless people. There were body parts in there from people who had committed suicide, people who had found solace in needles and pills. A lot of people asked for the Last Rites of a loved one before the head was removed; people tended to hack the entire body to pieces.
Not all the body parts made it into the truck.
Once, he had seen a body stripped almost as soon as he stopped praying. The suicide had been a woman who had lost two children. There were stories about her desperation, her breakdowns. Father Joe wished he had seen her before she took her own life. The former mother’s entire scalp had been removed, and her hair was still vibrant enough to be traded somewhere, for something. Father Joe couldn’t guess for what or why. Who was out there looking for such things? Wouldn’t food be the hottest commodity good?
But there were more and more people moving into the neighborhood. Nobody knew exactly where everyone was, who everyone was, or what they could do. Ammunition seemed to be the more prominent currency. It was cold metal, and it served a purpose.
“How does it feel?” Bill asked.
The priest wasn’t sure he knew how to answer the question.
“I think it hurts,” he said.
“I can’t do anything for you.”
“I knew that.”
“Well. Shit. I feel like a damn fool thinking about this.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t?”
“Don’t think about it. Don’t let me go back into town. You won’t ever be comfortable if you let me come back. If we both guess wrong a lot of people might be hurt.”
Bill nodded. Looked away. “What would you do? If we were sitting differently. If you were me, I mean.”
The big football player seemed to be keeping his distance, as if he had something he desperately wanted to share but refused to even think about it, a skeleton he kept locked in a closet in the basement of his soul. He wanted to trust Father Joe, had probably always wanted to trust someone with this secret, but he was afraid of the secret. He was afraid to feel whatever emotions he refused to feel.
Father Joe could relate.
He looked at the football player. “You’re asking if it’s right to let me back into the down and possibly endanger others. Or maybe it’s right to kill me right here and now, before I can spread… the zombie disease, whatever it is.”
“You don’t think it’s
a disease.”
“I didn’t say that. And that’s not what you care about right now.”
“True.”
“Could you kill me, if that’s what you thought was the best thing?”
“You make it sound like it’s no big deal. Like killing is simple.”
“A lot of people are used to seeing death around here. You’ve probably seen it, too. I’m sure you’ve had to do some hard things, make difficult choices, to stay alive.”
Bill looked to the sky and chewed on his bottom lip. “I don’t see why we have to change the way we think, just because all kinds of bad things have happened. You talked about that at mass, once. You said we can’t forget to be human, even if everything around us seems like it’s not human. Not humane, I mean.”
Father Joe could respect this man. He was strong and wanted to do the right thing, but he couldn’t decide what the right thing was. Everyone needed guidance, but Bill wanted to be a guide.
“I think I should make sure you’re okay,” Bill said. “Check on you from time to time.”
Father Joe remembered John Charles. “I saw a man who was sick. A soldier. Didn’t know him for a long time, but he was bit. In his leg, I think. Never found out what happened to him. I don’t know how or why some of these people keep dying. I don’t understand fear. It’s a weakness because I don’t know what anyone is dealing with.”
“Yeah. I get it.”
Bill resumed shoveling garbage.
He was reminded of the last time Vega spoke to him. Just a couple days after Father Joe began settling in, he was in the church kitchen trying to scour the walls of blood, working without a shirt on. He used his forearm several times to wipe sweat from his forehead. Scrubbing blood in the glow of candlelight. A little less than a year ago. Or had it been longer?
Like a ghost she had walked through the church corridor, because he hadn’t heard her. His mind wandered to the letter from Father Cassidy to thoughts of the mysterious woman named Rose. Who was right? What did he know? What actually happened? There was a chance he was close to figuring it out, but he wasn’t sure if it mattered.
“How do we know we’re not dead?” Vega had said.
Looking upon her slender body in the doorway, surrounded by the blood of a woman Traverse had murdered, he wondered if she would ever fully trust him.
Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) Page 9
