The Queen of the Dead

by Vincenzo Bilof

  Pop pop pop, a gun fired into the crowd.

  It was just like being outside on the tarmac. Once again, he could hear gunfire and screams while he tried to push his way through the sea of humanity. His size was an advantage, but it was tough to keep his balance as the tide pushed back.

  He looked down and found a boy huddled against the wall, his hands over his face, knees drawn up to his chest. Jack pushed bodies out of the way to get to him. The boy couldn’t be left behind; there was something inside him that needed to make sure the kid lived. He violently shoved people aside to get to him.

  The lights finally winked out, leaving them all in total darkness.

  As the doors to the hangar began to open, Jack understood it was much harder to survive than it was to die.

  He was beside the stairs leading up toward the refueling plane. He reached out with his hand and grasped the nearest set of fingers. He didn’t give a shit who it was, as long as he could take someone up with him. Maybe others would get the hint and hide in the plane.

  Dragging someone behind him, he tripped over the steps, panting on his way up as if he were climbing a mountain. He could smell the rain, along with a rotten smell that swept into the hangar. There was nothing to do but go up, and he dared not look back. If he stopped, he might be dragged back down by the weight of humanity.

  The plane’s door was wide open, and he wondered why nobody had decided to hide inside.

  A man appeared in the entryway. “Hurry the fuck up! Come on!” he urged Jack, extending his hand to help him through the door.

  Jack stumbled headlong into the plane, bracing himself against the opposite wall as he let go of whoever he’d been taking with him. He turned around and watched the door close.

  “Keep that door open,” a woman demanded, “we can help more of those people…”

  “And then we’ll all be crowded into the plane, and we’ll be stuck in the same damn situation,” the man corrected her.

  “Open the door!”

  It was the cop, D. Keefe. Jack had unknowingly helped her onto the plane, and her sense of duty hadn’t been extinguished by the traumatic event.

  “Over my dead body, bitch,” the man replied, his outline barely distinguishable in the cavernous refueling plane. A faint glow of light from the front cockpit was enough to reveal who’d made it inside.

  The other side of the hangar was opening, the hum of the doors accompanying the sound of thunder.

  Officer Keefe wasn’t about to back down. Opposing her, the man stood a little bit shorter than Jack, which made him about five-six, with a medium build and a receding hairline. Emblazoned on his shirt was an iconic album cover Jack recognized right away: the cover of Dio’s Holy Diver album, with a towering, demon-like creature emerging from behind craggy mountains whipping a chain over its head, a priest wearing glasses and bound in chains staring up at the monstrous creature while attempting to keep himself afloat in a raging sea.

  Beside him was a young blonde girl of about ten or eleven, a streak of blue in her nest of thick, wavy hair. An ear bud was tucked into one of her ears while the other dangled from its chord around her neck, an accessory kids wore like jewelry, even though the iPod or whatever she had might not even be turned on.

  “I’m not going to stand here and do nothing,” Keefe said.

  “Then go back out there,” the man said. “You see this girl? That’s Alexis. My daughter. All I have left. Open that door and you kill her.”

  “There’s other kids out there…”

  “I don’t care,” the man roared. “Don’t you get it yet? Don’t you see what’s going on? Look out through the cockpit. Go on! Take a look.”

  Nobody moved. Alexis stared at the newcomers, her eyes flickering to Jack and back to Keefe.

  Jack winced when he heard the thumping on the door. He didn’t want that door opened. It was wrong to be selfish, but he’d been wrong about everything in his life.

  Let them all rot, Jerry’s voice taunted him.

  “Shut up,” Jack mumbled. “Go away and leave me alone. Please.”

  He didn’t feel weird about it, and Keefe was still looking at the man who would do anything to defend his daughter while hands beat against the door.

  “Go look outside,” the man said, his voice shaking. “You don’t have to tell me… I know there’re kids. We know it, and it does us no good to feel guilty.”

  Jack wanted to see. Jerry always talked about this day, and the genocidal dream was a part of his life. Jerry had painted this picture in his head for years, and he needed to see if his brother was right—if the human race was hopeless.

  He was in the cockpit by himself, watching the same disaster he’d seen earlier.

  It was impossible to tell who was who, save for some of the bodies were charred by fire or were missing limbs. The floor of the hangar was slick with blood, on which many lost their footing and fell. Pink, organic shapes were lifted and pulled apart while dripping a thick, syrupy liquid that pooled and seemed black until it was smeared across the floor in red streaks, as if a painter had gone mad with the paint brush before selling his soul to a demonic power for the immortality of art.

  People were kneeling in the blood together, joining in an unholy fellowship—to cannibalize the living. Limbs flailed and random gunshots pinged off the plane’s hull. People, indistinguishable, climbed and crawled over each other, reaching for ankles or mounting from behind. Sporadic fountains of gore sprayed over the rain-soaked heads of the dead. Tattered clothes hung in dark, wet strips from arms and legs like a cloak someone dressed as a witch or Death might wear on Halloween.

  And then he saw Clint Eastwood. Backed into a corner with his guns blazing. Behind him, a cowering shape trembled in his shadow. Gun smoke rose from the revolvers as people reached for him until their face was decimated by a bullet.

  It was the boy. Behind Clint was the boy Jack had seen earlier.

  He planted his hands against the cockpit window.

  “No,” he said, “get out of there.”

  Eastwood was encircled by bodies at his feet. He emptied the shells from one revolver while pointing the other into an approaching face. The attacker stumbled forward and fell into the wall beside the cowboy.

  They might be zombies, they might not.

  “Turn and run, damn you,” Jack said. “Get out, please, get out…”

  He was stuck inside the plane.

  “I need to get back out there,” he turned and found Keefe standing in his way. She pushed him back against the seats.

  “No,” she said. “No way in hell.”

  “Please,” he said, but he wasn’t sure what he was asking.

  The cowboy had saved his life.

  Don’t look again. Don’t turn around and look. It was too late. He wouldn’t make it. The boy was doomed.

  She put a hand on his shoulder and watched through the cockpit. He watched her face contort. Her fingers danced on his thick shoulder for a moment. A flash of lightning from outside revealed the water at the corners of her eyes. She squeezed his shoulder and looked down.

  “Oh, no fucking way,” Jack’s chest heaved. “Fuck no. Fuck no, oh no, no way… no way, man.”

  He was trying to talk, but the words were lost through the screams and the thunder, the terror and the blood.

  VEGA

  “I hope you like rain,” Griggs pointed to the storm clouds.

  It would be nice if he shut his mouth for one damn minute. The sleezeball was more than willing to point out that Selfridge was probably a smoking wreck by now. While she preferred they move silently while weaving through the wreckage to avoid the mobs, he kept working his jaw.

  John Charles took point while Vincent brought up the rear; Vega was willing to admit she was a liability after suffering several blows to the head over the past few hours. They moved like professionals through the haze and fog without squeezing their triggers.

  As much as she didn’t want to be alone with Griggs, she had to confro
nt him about his unreal story. Bob, a trained soldier, had died while Griggs walked away from a man that not even Miles wanted to meet.

  Like so many other soldiers she’d met over the course of her lifetime, it was useless to think about the dead. She had her own place reserved in Hell, right between Miles and Bob, along with Crater and every other soldier she brought down in the name of money and violence. Her faith in God wouldn’t waver; this is what He wanted for her. Her road was paved with blood and sorrow, and even if her fate was to be eaten alive by the undead, nobody survived life. She didn’t need to connect the concept of biblical resurrection to the walking corpses, and she knew it was selfish to think she had a right to decide when it was her time to surrender. Her father had been like God to her when she was a little girl, and he died a martyr for an obscure cause—he fought until the end without making the choice to die, but to live.

  While her head continued to ache and her entire body was wracked with pain, she would move on until the bitter end.

  It wasn’t lost on her that she would pass the way they had come; they escaped in the Stryker only to walk right back through the mess. While they wove in and out of the shadows with the humid air causing everything to stick to their sweaty bodies, she knew they would walk past the same battle she and Vincent had waged together. The same place where Shanna…

  Time to take the long way around. An apocalyptic labyrinth. They scanned the ground for weapons, including firearms that may have been left behind during the fight. They managed to find a few scattered knives; Vincent came up with a machete that he was able to stick into a few skulls while they continued their backward journey to his weapons cache.

  They were thieves of life; stealing moments of breath in a city where the dead reigned, a city where oxygen had been choked from the gutters and expunged in clouds of smoke and ash. There were no more screams, no more gunfire, or loud music. The same silence which greeted her in the morning when Bob was still alive resumed its lordship over the wasted metropolis.

  Every time they slipped through a crowd of them, she couldn’t help but wonder again how it happened. The dead were slow and confused; they stared at the concrete or at the sky. They shuffled after stray dogs and cats until they bumped into a car. Trapped inside of locked vehicles, they slapped their gory hands against the windows. A sad species, with sagging shoulders and their bodies in various modes of ruination as if an epidemic of leprosy, not undead cannibalism, swept through Detroit.

  Their smell corrupted the saliva on her lips. She swallowed dry lumps through her throat and had to remind herself she had fought in the desert; she survived in Afghanistan with little complaint, but this was different. The dead walked over broken glass or stood around in their bathrobes or basketball shorts, their Lebron James jerseys or their Detroit Tigers hats, their dusty dress shoes or their sagging jeans. Their scent shifted between stages of putrescence; her nose couldn’t become comfortable. Rotted meat barbecued on a charcoal grille, vomit composed of jarred pickle juice and spoiled milk, feces wrapped in seaweed. It was almost enough to keep her stomach from growling. It was almost enough to keep her mouth from salivating for want of water.

  John Charles stopped them; he peered around a corner and waved Vega forward to take a look.

  She could hear the classic rock music in the street and wild hollers. Standing on the balcony of a rundown apartment building was a bunch of middle-aged rock ‘n rollers, drinking Milwaukee’s Best and rocking out to Creedence Clearwater Revival. In the street below, a group of zombies were reaching up at the sky, their bodies swaying as if they were listening to the music, their faces locked on the men above them.

  The men were opening their wrists and taunting the corpses. Blood droplets riled up the dead, their hands clawing at the brick, their mouths twisted into pained grimaces as if they were being poked by hot coals.

  “I don’t get it,” John Charles said.

  “Neither do I,” Griggs poked his head in. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  It wasn’t any of their business. There was no time to watch the human race go crazy.

  Four men, wearing baseball hats and slamming forties, pouring the cheap beer down their throats, taunted the corpses below. Two more men crowded onto the balcony with a woman in their arms.

  “…I ain’t no fortunate son!” CCR howled from a cheap stereo.

  John Charles was holding her arm.

  When they threw the woman over the balcony, the zombies broke her fall, her scream a short-lived scratch on a record, drowning out the music long enough for the beat to resume as if it never happened, her mouth and throat ripped open by hands that seemed to come from everywhere, even out of the walls. Her flesh was turned inside-out, blood popping out of her body while bones cracked under the power of a crowd’s eager strength.

  She knew what was about to happen, maybe even before John knew it. Maybe he’d been waiting for it to happen; he stopped them to watch because he wanted an excuse to unleash his anger, or fight for a sense of outmoded morality.

  He jumped from behind cover and swept his M16 over the zombies without a second thought to what the men on the balcony might have. A damn stupid move, but he was fast and pumped full of emotion and testosterone.

  The men upstairs were pulling out their own heavy-hitters, and she was already moving.

  A mist of gore sprayed the brick wall.

  Vega rocketed into John’s chest, pushing him behind a car while bullets kicked up dust and rock where he’d been standing. He hadn’t seen their guns. He wasn’t even looking.

  She had his wrists pinned, and the bastard bucked like a bull; she thought he was going to draw his sidearm. But he had enough of his shit together. Just enough.

  “What the hell?” she asked.

  “They can’t do that,” John wasn’t breathing hard at all. His eyes searched hers for confirmation of humanity. He was doing the right thing, and he wanted to hear it from someone else.

  The white boys on the balcony were firing. She looked over her shoulder to see Vincent and Griggs waiting in the shadows. What would they do? This was their chance to abandon ship.

  Griggs had the sour face of a man who’d been inconvenienced beyond his imagination. Gritting his teeth, he shouted to the men on the balcony, “You guys are having one hell of a good time. Mind if we join you?”

  “The big party’s tonight!” one of them shouted back. “We’re just gettin’ started. Why don’t ya’ll come out so we can have ya over for lunch?”

  John Charles was one hell of a shot. Only one of the corpses was still standing. A skinny guy with a mop of blond hair. A large hole in the top of his chest revealed the wall behind him. He might have been one of the lucky ones to get shot or eaten by only one zombie.

  “Not hungry,” Griggs replied. “Just passin’ through and shooting things, you know? One of those kinds of days.”

  “Did we see a nigger girl out there with you?” one of the balcony boys asked.

  “Yeah, some bitch in army gear, with the other guy,” one of his friends added. “Those army fucks let this shit happen, and now they want to start stomping around acting like they own this?”

  “We’re having a good time,” they kept on talking. “I bet she’s like the other girls. Wants to come up and have a beer with us. We got guns, and we’re all soft and cuddly. We’ll protect her for a few minutes. Then we’ll give her the same treatment every piece of meat out here gets.”

  Vega looked into Vincent’s eyes and decided she trusted them. Whatever Griggs had up his sleeve, Vincent was in on it.

  One of the balcony boys fired another wild shot at the ground.

  “Come on out and have some fun,” one of them said. “Come with us to the real party tonight and get twisted. Your army pal’s got a nice gun, and we figure we could use it. Sumbitch killed all the dead fucks.”

  Griggs nodded. “Yeah. I suppose it’s a pretty nice gun. Problem is, he forgot one.”

  The former detective stepped out
from cover, aimed his gun, and shot the zombie square in the face, while Vincent rolled from behind him into a crouching position with his AR-15 and opened up on the balcony boys. Two of them fell over the top and landed on the ground below them in the blood and flesh of the dead.

  Gun smoke. Silence.

  “I have to say,” Griggs looked at his gun, “I like mine better, Sarge.”

  Vincent still had his weapon trained on the balcony, just in case someone else showed up.

  Vega let John up. He brushed himself off and looked at the pile of bodies beneath the balcony. One of the men was still crawling around in the bloody meat.

  “What the hell was that about?” Griggs asked John. “Thought we weren’t a rescue team.”

  “We didn’t rescue anything,” John said, his eyes focused on the crawler.

  But there was more he wanted to say. This wasn’t her fight, but something only he could figure out. He’d been cooped up with Crater inside the asylum, and he was sitting in the tank for a while—he didn’t witness what she saw outside when she was running through the streets with Bob.

  Vincent dropped his eye from the scope while John approached the crawler. Where was John’s training? This was a suburban combat zone. He was looking at the wounded man with the curiosity of an archaeologist approaching an alien artifact. His guard was down, the M16 held in one arm as he walked with his head high.

  “I don’t get it,” John stood over the dying man. “They just… fed her to those things…”

  “This is the best humanity has to offer,” Vega said. “These are the people who’re left. They’re not much different than us, John.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” John mumbled. “This isn’t supposed to happen.”

  Griggs crossed his arms over his chest and laughed. “We done here? We got places to go, people to shoot.”

  “This is bullshit,” John turned on them, angry as if it was their fault. “I’m not going to sit back and watch this. Where’s the decency? The law?”

  Vincent was standing beside her. Only she could hear him say, “I gotta feeling Griggs would’ve been doing the same thing.”