Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3)

by Bilof, Vincenzo

  “Is she always that bitchy?” the doctor asked about Vega.

  “I hope not.”

  Now they would have to find her. She was a danger to herself and anyone else who had the misfortune of stepping into her path.

  BELLA

  The restless dead would never allow Bella to rest again. The longer she sat with Angelica in the room with the moaning and pounding beneath them, the more reason she had to convince herself she was living on borrowed time.

  She tried to shut out the sound by talking with Brian. The sound of her son’s voice was absent, or it was drowned out by the growing number of corpses and their dreadful moans.

  Sitting across from each other, the two women perspired and waited. They hoped the dead would leave, become disinterested. The moaning signaled a parade of dead that would not stop coming, a soundtrack for inevitable doom. Closer and closer, louder and louder. Scratching, clawing, bumping, pounding.

  But there was no way for them to get up to the room. Part of the decrepit, aged stairwell had been obliterated.

  They waited an hour. Two hours. During the third hour, it felt like all oxygen had been cut off from the room, replaced by the putrescence of the undead legion. The lone window with a view to the opposite apartment building was open, and the dead filled the street and flowed like a river, streaming into the lobby of either building.

  Bella wondered if a Holocaust survivor would have gone insane if they had to endure it again. Surely such a nightmarish scenario never left their minds, just as the genocide of the living was not forgotten. It was conveniently filed away, and its corruption lingered. The trauma had poisoned their souls and murdered their futures.

  Now they faced it again.

  And they could not move.

  Bella was trapped in her own imagination, remembering how everything started. From the phone call to Desmond, to the riots outside her apartment. This wasn’t supposed to happen again. It wasn’t supposed to happen the first time. All control over her own life had been ripped away by an indomitable force of nature, a horrific power that danced through cities like a hurricane that would never lose its strength, or a firestorm that could not be extinguished.

  Bella couldn’t smell her own noxious body odor over the overwhelming scent of waste and rot that wafted in from the window, carried by a slow breeze.

  “You had a son,” Angelica said, breaking the silence between them as if she was surrendering.

  “I have a son.”

  “What was his name?”

  Although Bella wondered why she wanted to know, she had very little strength to participate in banter. This could easily become a frustration game, and while she was used to staying awake for an extended period of time, she could feel herself falling into a pattern of shallow breathing. She tried to accept the presence of death all around her, and the violent end that awaited her. Desmond would never forgive her if she took her own life, and neither would Brian, but there was the possibility now that Angelica was going to ask her for this important “favor.”

  “His name’s Brian,” she said. “He’s still alive. He’s still out here somewhere.”

  The words seemed to ooze out of her mouth, as if she had to wake up her tongue to form sentences. Her thoughts felt like they didn’t belong to her, as if she were in the throes of a drug that was supposed to make her feel drowsy.

  “It’s good to have hope,” Angelica said. “You live because you believe in goodness, in doing the right thing. You believe there still is a right thing.”

  “You don’t have to prove how right you are,” Bella said, because she didn’t want to play the game. “We need to make decisions. The time for talk is over. If you need to overpower me, call me names, go ahead. Say what you need to say to make this easier for yourself.”

  Angelica smirked. “Okay then. I’ll say what I need to. You ready?”

  Bella sighed.

  “You’re acting like a fucking cunt,” Angelica said. “Lighten up. It’s not all that serious. You’re not afraid of death, are you? Because if you are, you might as well jump out the window. If you’re afraid of death, you shouldn’t have had a kid.”

  She was doing it again. Trying to provoke an emotional reaction, but to what end? Get her upset, get her riled up and willing to fight. Suddenly, Angelica was trying to help someone. She needed Bella’s help to survive—Angelica wasn’t a very complicated woman.

  Angelica stood. “Don’t have an answer for me?” She stepped close to Bella and crouched beside her, her wet face and large eyes a portrait of madness.

  “You’ve been out there,” Angelica said. “I can guess what kind of shit you’ve seen, because I’ve seen it. I know what the traders do. I know about the men and their guns. I know what’s happening outside of the big city. In the farm towns, the small log-cabin communities. All the good people, the ones who try to help, try to be crusaders and help others—they don’t last. You’re not all that good, are you? Not as good as you pretend to be.”

  Bella stared into those big brown eyes. This had nothing to do with the future, or goodness, or survival. Angelica had probably lived her life on the edge in her prime. Desmond used to talk about how growing up in an environment where poverty and crime were status quo was morally crippling. He had grown up in a tough neighborhood with a drug-addicted mother, but he managed to survive, managed to claw his way to the top. He did everything in his power to help keep his junkie brother Jerome out of trouble, and she couldn’t help but notice how much it hurt him to watch his brother suffer so much, no matter how much he tried to help. Like Jerome, Angelica had probably lived in a world of pain her whole life and didn’t know any different.

  There was nothing for Bella to say.

  “I’m going to live because you’re not going to let me die.”

  Angelica ripped open the door and looked down the stairwell. Bella watched the woman’s sudden surge of bravado wither away as the passion in her eyes disappeared like candlelight snuffed out by a sudden windstorm. Her jaw was locked in place, her posture rigid.

  Damn that woman for being right.

  Bella approached the door and peered into a writhing, pulsing concert of reaching hands and slow-working jaws. Blank eyes and matted, clumped hair. Rotted bone. A cloud of flies lingering over the crowd of broken things. Bella thought of a fistful of moss floating in an ocean of rot. The moaning intensified, as if Bella and Angelica were musicians who finally stepped onto the stage after a long wait.

  The dead had piled onto each other, and they were close to reaching the top of the stairwell. So close that a decrepit hand was inches from Angelica’s ankle.

  An undead fingernail dug beneath a shoelace, and Angelica lurched forward into the pit, her arms flailing.

  Bella followed her in. She landed on top of Angelica, their flesh colliding and falling as if they tumbled through several tree branches on the way down, frail, extended arms breaking beneath them. Bones snapped.

  Bella twisted furiously as if she was underwater, trying to swim against the current, struggling for the surface. She couldn’t see anything except for black and gray—all around her, black and gray, as if all the flesh in the world had rotted into something colorless, and she was lost in an ocean of that nothing, that abyssal shade of terror.

  She pushed through a forest of ravenous dead, and she did not scream. It wasn’t a refusal to scream on her part, but rather, she wasn’t conscious of her own terror. There was only the impulse to push through, to run, to survive. There was no time to scream.

  Bella ripped herself through the shadows and the forms, through the limbs and the voices, and crashed through a door into another derelict apartment. The violent force of her momentum caused her to trip, and the sharp pain in her ankle was enough for her to cry out. But there was no time to linger on this pain, no time to do anything but survive or die.

  When she turned back to the door, she saw Angelica still trying to push her way through. The woman shoved individual zombies and shouted curses
at them, spitting into their faces, slapping them, grabbing them by the collars of their ruined shirts, and twirling them around until she pushed her victim into other corpses to clear a path for herself. The rifle was still slung over her shoulder.

  Bella shouted for her. “Come on!”

  It was past time to close the door, but she waited, for the dead had focused on Angelica who seemed to be doing everything in her power to put herself in their hands. She didn’t acknowledge Bella because she may not have heard, or she didn’t care. Bella shouted again, and Angelica still struggled with the dead. They encircled her, their bones cracking and snapping from misuse, their own ankles twisting awkwardly, their bodies collapsing beneath the weight of their lust for her flesh. A thousand hands reached for Bella, a thousand mouths opened, mouths missing teeth or tongue or jaw. There was no choice for Bella to make. The decision was hardwired into her, but it may not have always been there. When she thought about it later, she would ask herself if Desmond had taught her to behave this way.

  She dashed into the arms of the dead again. Her movements were still dictated by adrenaline or an unconscious power that made it impossible for her to see the imminent danger around her.

  Angelica may have thought she was one of them, because she resisted as Bella tried to pull her away. Bella clamped her hand around Angelica’s wrist.

  And then conscious thought returned.

  She knew where she was and what she was doing.

  Angelica’s resistance was personal. A part of her wanted to die, or she had vowed revenge against all of those undead bastards.

  When Bella looked into the woman’s eyes, she realized all of these things. She realized the woman she tried to save was committed to her own death like so many others before her, like so many others who had been provoked by a fit of delirium, or a need to inflict vengeance upon the world for dying, for fading, for failing to live up to its promise.

  A rotted hand pushed the side of Angelica’s face and tilted her head back. A mop of matted, thin hair seemed to nearly leap onto her shoulder blade, though it wasn’t a mop but a face. Bella couldn’t associate the attacker as something that had a face, but she knew, deep down, what it was. Reality was suspended for her, suspended in this moment. A moment in which that emaciated head clamped upon Angelica’s shoulder. A moment in which blood suddenly oozed from her shoulder as if the attacker was vomiting blood onto her, as it poured from her fresh wound quickly, running now and soaking through her clothes. Bella still held Angelica’s wrist.

  With her free hand, Angelica grabbed the monstrous hand that pressured her head to the side, but her attempt was interrupted by another hungry creature. Hands seized her arm and twisted it upward. Angelica’s desperate strength wasn’t enough to prevent a hungry mouth from embedding itself into her triceps. The first attacker removed itself from her shoulder, chewing voraciously, jaw grinding, blood dripping from a black mouth, a mouth without lips.

  Bella pulled Angelica into the doorway, where she fell face-first. Bella lost her grip on Angelica, and the undead folded atop her, collapsing onto her back ceremoniously, as if they had expected this, and they had been patient and would always be patient.

  They couldn’t win. Not this time.

  Bella pushed into the crowd, and she didn’t realize that she was shouting. She couldn’t hear herself. Panting and sweating, eyes watering from the perspiration that dripped into her eyes, she pushed and struggled against the dead. They were nearly weightless, nothing but bags of sagging, dead flesh full of rotted organs that were disconnecting from the inside of their skeletal bodies as if computer components were slipping from their wires and slots, machines that were emptying, bodies that were rotting.

  Emaciated faces everywhere. Corpses stumbled backward into each other as Bella pushed. She flailed against the hands that reached for her. Fresh pain from her ankle reminded her that she was human, reminded her that her own life was at stake.

  She didn’t see the hand that grabbed the back of her head, but she felt the nails digging into the back of her scalp. Another hand reached for her shirt and grabbed, pulling her, fabric stretching, ripping.

  With a savage roar, she frantically wrestled with the dead until she was free.

  She could suddenly hear Angelica’s words clearly.

  “Come and get some, you fuckers. Come and get some more. You like how that tastes? Come on! COME ON!”

  Bella dropped to her knee and wrenched the rifle from over Angelica’s shoulder. On her mangled ankle, she lost her balance and tripped over her feet. She scrambled onto her ass and pointed the weapon into the crowd.

  Her ability with a gun was limited. She hated these fucking contraptions. What did Brian have to say about it?

  “Go ahead and criticize,” Bella muttered.

  “Have a taste, you cocksuckers!” Angelica shouted.

  Bella fired, and the gun nearly jolted out of her hands. She wasn’t sure if she hit anything. She pointed and fired again. The blast from the rifle muffled her ability to hear, and once again, the only thing she could understand was the tormented howling of the dead, as if their desire was being communicated from a lost language.

  She saw Angelica’s face, and knew she was shouting.

  There was blood and dark faces.

  Bella fired again.

  She tried to aim through the scope. Fired again.

  A corpse slumped across Angelica’s back.

  Another shot.

  Another corpse dropped.

  Click.

  Angelica had fallen. Her fingers were digging into the floor. Inching herself forward, Bella dropped the rifle and grabbed those desperate hands.

  Chuckling madly, Angelica allowed herself to be pulled out from beneath the undead. Her face and body were a mess of blood.

  It was important not to think about her wounds. Don’t think about her condition. There must be hope.

  Bella slammed the door shut and locked it. Immediately, she felt heavy thuds against her back.

  Angelica was up and bleeding from multiple wounds, yet she stood behind a couch and shouldered it forward.

  “Barricade the door you stupid bitch,” Angelica said, leaning into the couch. When it slid into place, she collapsed against its arm.

  With dead bodies piled up on the other side of the door, they might have bought some time.

  Time?

  It was time to breathe. Time to sweat.

  Thumping against the door.

  Bella crawled to Angelica and ripped a blanket off the couch. Angelica’s head shook, and her lips quivered. She looked like she was in the throes of a paralytic fever.

  “Don’t you dare say it,” Angelica said through her clenched jaw.

  False assurances. Fake smiles. Bella wasn’t one for dishonesty, but still she tried to wrap the blanket around the wounded shoulder. She grabbed a couch cushion and unzipped the fabric from around the foam core.

  “My back, too,” Angelica said. “It’s everywhere. You’re wasting your time, like a dumb nigger.”

  Thumping against the door. Like a clock, ticking down. Time slipping away. Seconds.

  How was the woman still awake? There were too many wounds.

  “Mom, why do you care?” Brian asked.

  Bella shook her head and grabbed another couch cushion.

  “She would have let you die. She was going to trade you for elbow macaroni.”

  Bella shook her head again, wiped her blood-slick hands against her pants, but it was useless. There was too much blood. Blood everywhere.

  “I had a son,” Angelica said, her voice cracking. “I had two sons. A daughter. A husband. Brother. Mom. Dad. Uncles. Cousins. I had a lot of cousins. Friends.”

  Bella propped her against the side of the couch and removed her shirt. She wrapped it around a wound in Angelica’s calf.

  “I didn’t live here,” Angelica said, her voice weakening in the throes of delirium. “I went to find them. After they came in through the windows. They went r
ight through the glass. So many. Through the glass.”

  “Save your breath,” Bella said. “Just shut up for one minute. Stay with me.”

  “Ha. It doesn’t hurt. I saw everyone. Jews. Spics. Wops. Faggots. All of them. I saw them. So easy to live if nobody else is alive. So easy to live if you see everyone as something. A thing. Just a thing. Like a nigger.”

  They stared at each other now. Bella’s hands, darkened with blood, stopped working. Her hands rested on Angelica’s thighs.

  “I would have just left you,” Angelica said. “You can’t help yourself. You can’t. You’re so pathetic.”

  Control was gone, replaced by pure emotion.

  Bella’s entire body shook. She could smell the blood, the sweat, the rot, the city. Pounding. Pounding. Pounding. The door quaked against the doorframe. The knob turned. Moaning. Moaning.

  Angelica smirked.

  Bella slapped her across the face.

  And then slapped her again.

  “You’re all I’ve got, God damn you!” she said. She didn’t know why she said it. She didn’t know if she even felt it or what it meant.

  Weak and nearly breathless, she buried her head against Angelica’s chest and hugged the broken body.

  Why now?

  She sobbed uncontrollably.

  This didn’t happen when Brian left her.

  “Because you don’t think I’m dead,” Brian said.

  “Shut up,” Bella said through her tears, her words muffled against Angelica’s warm, wet skin. “Just leave me alone. You’re dead. You’re dead. You’re not coming back and you’re dead. You left me. You left me before, so just leave me.”

  Fingers gently stroked the back of her head.

  “They never leave us, Bella.”

  She couldn’t stop herself from this emotional disintegration. Adrenaline crashed, and she just wanted to lie forever in the arms of a dying woman. A dying woman who said her name for the first time.

  “It was always this way,” Angelica said. “Always. We just needed to get our asses kicked to figure it out. To learn we could become this way. Without any shit to hold us back, without anyone to tell us we’re right or wrong. But that doesn’t mean we have to die like little bitches.”