He blinked his blue eyes at her, and she wondered if she believed her own words. She was starting to come out of her fugue, emerging through a haze of nightmare and self-loathing. As much as Bill needed her now, she needed to follow her own advice.
“I’m not a counselor,” Vega continued. “I used to go through my own therapy sessions when I was in Spain, but they were called missions. When I was just a grunt. I loved it too much. I loved the action, the killing. I didn’t want to love it, but I did. Drinking and whoring were my meds. More fighting was the only thing that could keep me from drinking. I was never a good person, and I stayed alive because of it. But I’ve seen good people survive this shit around us. Father Joe’s a good man. He kept his head up and kept rolling.”
Bill smiled. “That must be the most you’ve ever said. You finished?”
“Yeah, I think it is the most I’ve ever said. You like it?”
“You missed your calling. Should have been a public speaker.”
“Fuck you.”
They looked around at the skyline that seemed to be missing most of its towering structures. Dust and ash buried cars stranded in the avenues. Hills of steel, brick, and glass blocked other roads. Vega and Bill were standing in a valley of ruined city.
“Somewhere high and defensible,” Vega said. “That’s where Sutter would be. Traverse could be anywhere, but I assume he would want the same thing. That might even be too obvious, but I guess most killers want to be caught, right? Isn’t that what they say about serial killers?”
Bill nodded and looked around at the vast nothing. There wasn’t much of a breeze, and the sun’s light was already searing hot behind a wall of haze. Another long, hot day. They wouldn’t be able to stay on the road for long. They would have to find shelter from the sun, a place to eat their snacks and rest before the sun and heat drained their strength.
Bill’s chin seemed magnetized to his chest. She placed a hand on his shoulder, and his head whipped around as if he’d been ambushed.
“Our zombie friends might know where Sutter is,” she said. “Just like they attacked our neighborhood, they might be surrounding his hideout. We might see a shitstorm of those things in one place.”
“I get it,” Bill said.
She dropped her hand, and she could only hope he got his shit together when their asses were in the fire.
“Let’s follow our noses,” Vega said.
He was dealing with the emotional baggage of his past, and it didn’t mix very well with the present. There was a good chance he might be shutting down, and he might even get the jitters when it came to a fight. She saw it happen to Vincent. It happened to soldiers in the field all the time. A lot of good soldiers didn’t see combat more than once, if at all. A landmine or improvised explosive device, crying children, people who didn’t want to be saved, people who didn’t want any “peacekeepers” on their soil—any one thing could bring the experience crashing down. There were a lot of good soldiers who couldn’t stay in the civilian world, like herself. They signed up for more, or they became mercenaries like her.
She needed the Bill who did everything he could to keep her alive when their temporary haven was raided. She needed the Bill who fought tooth and nail for her.
Now Bill needed her. He needed her to be strong, to put the past aside and overcome the combat fatigue, the lingering shadows, the headaches, the ghosts. She needed to be the hardass she used to be.
What brought this on? His sudden change came right after they met that asshole from the nut house. Doctor Desjardins with all his talk of Hell. For a man who made a lot out of his faith, it was probably difficult for someone like Bill to fathom that such a terrible evil was responsible for extinguishing his future and the lives of millions. If there was a Hell, there must also be a Heaven, right? And Heaven let this happen. Heaven was powerless.
“Do me a favor,” Vega said. “When we see the doc again, remind me to blow him away.”
***
They followed their noses.
And their ears.
Vega felt like they were approaching a vast cathedral in which an entire congregation was participating in a funeral hymn. An odd hum resonated throughout the hazy ruins, and in this silent world, the noise could only mean one thing.
Bill glanced at her several times while they picked their way through the city.
Like a paranoiac looking through living room curtains, she checked her Bushmaster several times, and Bill seemed to be holding onto his shotgun tightly.
They did not speak. They crept through the ruins, sunlight piercing shards of glass and ruin, bright dots capable of temporarily blinding anyone who looked directly into those miniature suns. They moved into the shadows of structures that had become nothing more than ghostly mausoleums in a sprawling cemetery. A cemetery of highways and stone and blood.
How many zombies could there be? Maybe the entire necropolis had come out to play.
There: In the middle of the street, hundreds of them.
In oil-spill coloration, sunlight hidden by the tops of two apartment buildings split by the corpse-ridden avenue. Black. Black and buzzing. As if the undead were an assembly of flies rather than rotting human bodies. The shadows of the damned spilled onto walls and concrete.
Corpses dropped out of open windows, slithering leech-like onto the crowd.
She had seen more than this before. Chasing her and Father Joe. Surrounding her. On the tarmac of Selfridge.
Still.
Her body shivered, but she maintained control of herself. Slipping behind a dumpster beside Bill, she took a deep breath and inhaled the putrid air.
“Those buildings don’t look like headquarters,” Vega said. “Just…” she tried to organize her thoughts.
“I know what you mean,” Bill said. “It don’t look like any place special. This Sutter guy might not even be real. Those things could be there for anybody.”
“And you want to help whoever needs you,” Vega said.
Bill raised an eyebrow. “We ain’t been partners that long, but you got me figured.”
“A real cowboy. Yeah. Why the hell not? We got bullets, guns, and balls. Fuck else we going to do?”
Doctor Desjardin’s voice. He was right behind her. How many times was he going to get the drop on her?
“Don’t turn around. Come quietly so those things aren’t disturbed. We’re going to help you. Get you out of here.”
“Help me? How many people in your crew? I need to know how many bullets I’m about to waste.”
“Please. We just want to help.”
“Then why is there a gun pointed at my head?” Vega asked.
“I don’t exactly trust you. You’re a loose cannon.”
“I can understand the loose part.”
“Let’s just do this quietly,” Desjardin said.
“That’s not my style, Doc. Besides, a slimeball like you wouldn’t shoot me. You’ve been looking at my skinny ass and salivating. Is one round with me part of your finder’s fee?”
Instead of letting him answer, she spun and grabbed his wrist, then twisted his arm around his back. He gasped, and the gun slipped from his fingers.
“How many out there?” she asked, hiding her face behind his head.
“What’re you talking about?”
“How many of your buddies are out there? I’m not asking again.”
“Idiot. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
“That makes two of us.”
She raised the Bushmaster into the air with her other hand and fired a short burst into the sky.
“You’re crazy!” Desjardin said.
“You really are a doctor,” she said. “How many?”
“Fuck you.”
“No thanks. Bill, stay close to me, amigo. They won’t shoot if you’re next to me. They don’t want to risk damaging the merchandise.”
The music of the dead became a loud, savage howl; one united voice that shouted in exultation. They were coming.
The gunfire had summoned them.
“Put your weapons on the ground!” someone shouted from the ruins.
“Close to me, Bill,” she said while trying to circle around a pair of rusting cars.
“Don’t look over your shoulder,” Bill said.
“Copy that.”
“What’re you going to do?” Desjardins said while grimacing in pain. Vega steered him with his captured wrist. “We’re trying to help you. We know where Traverse is. We can help you.”
“Nobody can help me. Not you, not God, not anybody. Your boys out here want a piece of me. Out here raping women, selling them, selling children. You think I give a shit how many I need to kill? You let me worry about Traverse.”
“Oh fuck, man!” a voice said from the ruins. “They’re coming. We gotta bug out!”
Gunfire rattled from the wreckage, and the sun appeared from behind buildings, from behind clouds. Shadows descended. Shadows poured out of the light. Shadows slipped, shambled. Between and over cars. Over mounds of steel and dust and ash.
They came. The shadows came.
More gunfire.
Vega pushed the doctor aside and brought her Bushmaster up. She felt the sunlight on her face. She felt its heat, the warmth. Her body filled with heat. She wanted to close her eyes now, but she did not. She wanted to close her eyes and realize nothing but the light, for this moment was hers. This moment belonged to her death.
She needed an excuse. They gave her an excuse.
Rapists, thieves.
Purpose.
Violence.
Leaning into the trigger, she felt the Bushmaster pulse in her arms, shaking her body. Her mouth opened, and she may have roared, may have shouted, may have cursed God, but she would never know. There was only the sound of the gun.
Bullets filled the bodies of the dead. They turned to look, but it was too late. Through the scope she found thin-fleshed heads and broke them open with short bursts from the gun.
The dry click.
Her hands ejected the clip and slapped a fresh one in. An automatic gesture, a function of her body. She swept the gun over the crowd, trying to locate the sporadic gunfire from Desjardin’s people, but they must have turned tail.
Not like she cared. There were zombies to waste. The Bushmaster took care of everything.
Another empty clip. When she slapped in the fresh one, she looked around for Bill. He was positioned behind another car, and he was trying to get Vega’s attention.
“What?” she asked.
“Desjardins. Across the street. Go get him, and I’ll cover.”
He wasn’t about to cover anything. Three zombies climbed over the hood of the car, pushing each other forward as they spilled over the side, landing beside Bill.
She pivoted, and Bill disappeared in a tangle of rotted limbs.
Bill would fight for her.
“Move your ass!” he shouted.
There wasn’t a question in her mind; he would fight for her, and he had his own demons to overcome. He would fight for her, and so he did. If she stopped to free him, it would only be a matter of time before they were both surrounded.
She hated the decision. Desjardins wasn’t worth it. She had wasted her chance with him before, and she would be damned if she didn’t let that prick scientist lead her straight to Sutter.
In less than a second, she made a decision she didn’t want to make. Such was the life of a career soldier.
Lowering her weapon, Vega charged across the street, glancing over her shoulder one more time at Bill in case she could get a clear shot. No such luck. Bill was mixed up in bodies, but a resounding blast from his shotgun and a splash of brain meat against the car’s passenger window indicated he was taking care of business.
She was in the open and climbing atop a hill of debris. Her feet became tangled in wires and metal, and she had to watch her step. Higher ground would offer a better vantage point and a more defensible position, but she would be exposed to Desjardins and his team. They weren’t going to risk damaging the merchandise.
Was any position defensible? The dead had to make the same climb. For an entire horde of them, it wouldn’t matter.
Dumb. She was going to be surrounded.
How badly did Sutter’s people want her?
If only she could think clearly. Battle lust and rage had commandeered rational thought. Her position was not defensible. She stood atop a hill of trash and became a fresh meal. She was also bait; scores of zombies were going to be run into her bullets, and more than anything, it’s what she really wanted.
Not Traverse. Not Sutter.
Combat.
Nobody was going to take this from her.
Dropping to one knee, she positioned herself atop the hill of ruin and looked upon a never-ending field of targets. Bill had told her not to turn around, and she didn’t; there was enough in front of her to look at.
Hundreds of dead people clambered over each other. Zombies struggled over each other in a bowl-shaped crater in the middle of the road, a hole that had swallowed vehicles and shattered buildings that looked now as if they had been dropped from the sky, only to burst into a million tiny pieces. Zombies dropped out of the windows of high-rises like hesitant tears, bodies slapping the concrete and breaking apart.
“Come to Mama,” Vega said, and squeezed the trigger.
Vega’s thoughts disappeared behind a veil of gunfire. She dropped zombies until she was forced to reload. She ripped the undead to pieces until her fingers fumbled around blindly for a clip that wasn’t there.
Unlike any other enemy, they were not afraid of her. Their numbers dwindled, and still they marched. They climbed. They moaned. They came for her, no matter how many of their number fell. They bumped into each other and jostled together, their snapping, cracking limbs a composite of one mass group of rotted bodies.
Time to draw the Desert Eagle. Make sure one bullet was left in the chamber when the time came.
What happened to Bill?
It didn’t matter much. This was her moment. The same moment Miles had, the same one Bob had experienced with Traverse.
But she didn’t draw the gun. Instead, she dropped the Bushmaster and watched them come for her. How funny it all seemed. How unreal. If this was a nightmare, then she deserved it. There were no excuses for the way she had lived her life. But she had wallowed in her depravity. She enjoyed it. What was the difference between her and Traverse? The man had enjoyed killing, made a show of it, and here she was, staring at a mob of corpses. If this was a nightmare, it represented everyone she had killed, multiplied by the hundreds of thousands of people who had lost someone to one of her bullets, people affected by the loss of life she demonstrated.
How many people had she killed on missions? One was too many. One was more than enough. Certainly, hundreds of people had met their end by her hand.
She deserved this.
Let them come. As they climbed the heap of trash, she looked upon them and waited.
Unbreathing, awkward people grabbed her ankles. Dead people. They wanted her. They wanted her flesh.
Fingers dug into her skin, and she looked into eyes that did not have eyelids; wide, blood-glassed eyes. Holes where a nose should have been. Pockmarked skull with a filmy layer of black flesh stretching as a mouth opened wide, skin on the cheeks ripping open. Vega looked into a mouth full of broken teeth. Vega looked into a mouth as hundreds of more zombies came for her.
All she had to do was draw the Desert Eagle.
But she wasn’t moving. She stared into the mouth full of broken teeth.
Vega’s body jolted when the top of the head exploded, leaving nothing but chunks of hamburger brain sitting atop the lower jaw. The body remained upright for a moment, hand still clasped firmly around her ankle, until it slid sideways. Another zombie replaced it, climbing atop its destroyed companion.
Its head exploded.
“Get her the fuck down!”
Why couldn’t she move? Why was she just wat
ching? She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the horde that climbed through the concrete valley. Someone was trying to help her, and after all that adrenaline she had stopped completely, frozen. Her gaze was locked on the wave of undead.
Hands pulled her from atop the pile of rubble, and still she did not turn or look anywhere but ahead of her. Corpses could have been holding her down, but she couldn’t shake the vision of the zombie storm; bodies raining out of buildings, the cresting tide of decaying flesh reaching over the rim of the valley.
Suddenly, her body awoke and began flailing. She did not have control over herself.
“She’s gone over,” someone close by said. “Just get back.”
“We can’t wait around.”
“These bitches are going to taste the hammer!”
A large beast of a man stepped into view, a sledgehammer hefted over his shoulder. He strode over to the edge of the valley and dropped the hammer upon a zombie head, squeezing brain matter through the eyes of a crushed skull. He brought the hammer up again, and dropped it onto another skull.
“I’ve been working on the railroad…” the big man sang as he worked.
Vega stopped struggling against the hands and tried to stand up again, but her knees buckled beneath her. Blood circulation had stopped, and her nutrition-deprived body surrendered.
What was the point? Didn’t she want to find Sutter?
What the hell did she really want?
No, it didn’t matter. Let these idiots have her. She could live to fight another day. Enough time and ego had been wasted trying to resist.
“Dude, we got to go!” someone shouted to the hammer-wielder.
The big man turned around, brain and skin stuck to the hammer as viscera dripped. “Can’t you see I’m working?”
“Huey, enough fucking around. We’ve got the girl, now let’s bug out. Come on!”
Saint Pain (Zombie Ascension Book 3) Page 25
