A thousand concerts of rap and heavy metal music accompanied the mad dissonance. As screaming men and women were dragged across the concrete by their ankles, Vega did all she could to avert looking at the horror, but she could hear the tormented wails of victims who were being devoured alive. She heard Ted Nugent's guitar grinding through an open window in a room above her head. A businessman fired wildly into the street until a thousand hands pulled his face back from the window, the gun still firing.
Vega's mouth opened wide. The most horrific thing she remembered from the catastrophe of 9/11 was the people who leapt from the upper floors to their deaths, the bodies forever suspended in free fall within the realm of her memory. She saw it then, in the pulsing, living firelight of the city's dying skyscrapers: Bodies falling out of the sky.
"Fuck," she whispered and looked away.
***
They hid in a gloomy tavern. Fortunately for them, they were the only occupants, though there was plenty of broken glass. Both of them moved to secure the building, moving several chairs in front of the main entrance and the rear door.
The adrenaline, and emotional, crash weighed them down. They had been running for their lives from unimaginable terror; they had fled through a hellish realm of blood and fire, and they needed this moment of normality.
Bob already located the Jack Daniels and began pouring it generously into two glasses, spilling some of it across the bar as his hands shook He didn't bother asking Vega what she preferred to drink, and she didn't care. The faint flush of flame from outside illuminated their moment of reflection.
Bob quickly poured his second glass after throwing back the first in a handful of seconds. Vega coughed and slammed her glass down for another round. Bob obliged. They clicked their glasses and took the second down together. The warmth was welcome to her throat, and she closed her eyes and let the world spin.
He poured a third for himself, and Vega shook her head. He shrugged and knocked it back.
"Miles," she said.
Bob stared at the glass. "We should say something."
"He was a soldier. A damn good one. A partner. Teammate."
She saw him then: Twirling his combat knife. Making a joke in her ear while fucking her. Sweating against her body. Boredom between contracts satisfied with forays to the gun range or the gym. His head buried in a mountain of cocaine with a shit-eating grin on his face.
Bob stared at her for a moment. She could feel her chest rising and falling, and though she knew it wasn't fair to be mad at Bob for everything that was wrong with the world, he was the perfect target for the intense conflagration of emotions that boiled out of her, emotions she hadn't experienced in years.
Her eyes wanted to cry, and her entire body heaved forward against the bar, but she held herself against the tide of emotion, the rage which seized her in a fireball of consequence and action. A good man was dead, and had given his life for nothing. No cause, no revolution or rebellion, no political ideal.
She squeezed her eyes shut and choked out a sentence. "I loved the M25. Damn good sniper rifle."
"Too cumbersome," Bob noted while slamming another glass onto the bar in front of her and filling it. "Slow you down. Those fuckers out there are slow, like Night of the Living Dead slow. Yeah, I said it. It's real, you know. This shit's happening. Here we are. Just the two of us. We've got options."
She looked at her tattered gear.
"It was a close call," he said. "The elevator, the lobby… the street. We haven't been here an hour. But we're still standing. We still have a job to do."
"You're the boss," she said weakly, staring at the glass.
Bob laughed awkwardly. "Can't get a signal on the headset. Evac is unlikely. After we grab Traverse, we'll have to hump it to Selfridge Air Base. With or without our target, that's the way out."
"So we do it," Vega turned the glass of whiskey with her fingers. "I ain't got anything better to do. No picnics with butterflies and flower dresses. Got some bullets and some guns. Fuck else am I supposed to do?"
Bob changed the subject by spreading out a map of the city in front of them. "We don't have far to go."
"He's ex-military," Vega remembered the facts about Traverse. "It sounds like someone figured out a long time ago what the hell was about to go down here. Our employers gave us gear, dropped us in, and wanted us to pull out one nutcase in the middle of this… there's a reason why they want him."
Bob poured himself another drink. "You expect me to know? I'm an old, expendable gun. They tell me what I need to know to get the job done."
"So who hired us?"
"Some crackers in suits."
Vega grabbed the glass in front of her and downed it. "You're a lying piece of shit. It wasn't that long ago we were sitting in Toronto watching the news, and they showed a sick man attack a security guard in a bank. Remember? Where's the armor? The forces are spread so thinly over such a wide area, but they concentrate a large force for the VIP evacuation? And where's the air support? How long before they decide there's nothing worth saving here? This thing fell apart in a matter of seconds. You're not answering any of my questions, Bob, and I'm getting pissed."
He sighed and stroked his bushy white beard. "Shit, United Nations, I don’t know what to say. I'm just a grunt, like you. They didn't tell me anything. If I were a gambling man, I'd wager they knew it was coming. They knew there would be a lot of casualties. The hard part is nailing this place down. It's not exactly a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. They have to block freeways and side streets. These people walking around out there died, right? So it wasn't isolated to one person. It's an outbreak, and our target, Traverse, is linked to it. He has something to do with it. They're waiting on us to pull him out."
"But the military didn't make Traverse a priority, or else he would have been pulled out already."
"They couldn't spare the troops," Bob said. "They don’t have a damn clue what's going on. Traverse is like a shot in the dark. As soon as the shit started, there were a couple guys who remembered the nutcase and decided maybe we should pull him out, just in case."
"Is there another reason why you took this job? Why you dropped us into the meat grinder?"
"Traverse is behind this, or at least, he's a part of it. Crater and I went looking for him years ago. Traverse was hiding in the states after some job he pulled in Egypt. The guy was high priority, but all he left for us was a trail of bodies to follow. For years. And then, out of nowhere, he let himself get caught. Chopped up a few people and recited some poetry to the cops."
"So that's it!" Vega sat up. "This is personal, isn't it? You couldn't catch him before, so now you risk our lives—you get Miles killed? For this?"
Bob straightened his shoulders. "This guy can help…"
"Help what? What the fuck are you saying? Miles is dead, damn it! Look around you! This wasn't what we had in mind when we said we wanted a mission."
He growled at her. "A lot's riding on this. We meet up with Crater, or I leave your skinny ass here. Either way, Traverse is mine."
The rage overcame her, and she overturned chairs and tables as bright red fury encompassed her vision. How could she let herself be betrayed so easily? Her own selfishness was partly to blame for taking the mission, and there wasn't a thing she could do about it. Her training had saved her, and Bob had been there to bail her out, but she couldn't imagine a connection between Traverse and the living dead. None of it made sense, and she was helpless, no matter how good of a shot she was, or how much firepower she had.
"Those fuckers are dead, Bob!" she shouted. "Don't you get it? We can’t win this! We can't fight against every single person who lived here! They want to… they want to eat us! They won’t stop. They were on fire, and they kept coming!"
"Let me know when you're done with your temper tantrum. I saw the same damn things you did. I'm not writing songs about it, and I'm doing all I can to keep my shit together."
"You expect me to believe you? After what you
've put us through? You want trust? This is Hell! This is Hell on Earth!"
"You might be right about that," Bob shrugged.
She couldn't bring herself to look at him. Outside, the slaughter continued, as people screamed and useless bullets were wasted on the uncountable legion of undead. She shivered for a moment as she remembered the pain Miles must have endured when that dead thing bit into his face. She could only imagine what it would feel like to be devoured alive. As much as she loathed and distrusted Bob, she needed him.
Covered in the blood of the dead, she knew she couldn’t face the world outside by herself.
"What else do you know?" Vega muttered.
"What I know and what I believe are two different things," was his frustrating reply.
"More bullshit," Vega spat. "Miles is dead because of your personal shit. I know you didn't do it for the money, because money means nothing to you. You weren't lying about that. But I can't put my life into your hands."
Bob shook his head and smirked. "You got somewhere to go? Something you're itching to do? Get it through that thick skull of yours, darling: this is it. End of the world, biblical crap. We're in the middle of it. Traverse is the key, but you don't have to believe. All I need is your gun."
They heard the quake before they felt it. The soldiers dropped and covered their heads while a skyscraper agonized over its fate. Once again, Vega remembered 9/11. She was still young then, and when she watched the second tower crumple into the New York's street, she wondered what her father would have said.
Vega looked up at the windows as the flame which lit up Detroit was obscured by a cloud of ash and dust.
It wasn't Miles that popped into her head, but another name, and along with it, the photograph of a smiling black girl, a child lost somewhere in the fire and pain.
Shanna.
DESMOND
Desmond swerved the car to avoid a cluster of corpses and struck the back of a camouflaged Humvee that was driving in reverse.
He thought time skipped over a few seconds. He took his hands off the wheel and might have stopped breathing. The sudden jolt stopped his adrenaline completely.
He stared for a long moment over the dashboard. The city's emergency siren howled as a group of corpses crowded along the street. They were still in the ghetto among boarded-up crack houses and piles of rubble.
"Shit," Desmond said while staring straight ahead at a pair of old women whose bloody nightgowns were evident in the stolen car's headlights.
Somehow, he was still alive.
He remembered the Ambassador Bridge, the thundering chopper overhead, and the soldiers racing to secure the bridge from the unreal threat. Nothing made sense. Everything after the bridge had become a blur. His phone didn't have a signal, and he'd seen so many people screaming helplessly against the slow mob…
"Hey."
Desmond snapped back to reality. He blinked a hundred times and looked at Jerome, whose lips had turned blue.
Was his brother still alive?
His heart raced. No, it couldn’t be…
"Hey," Jerome said again. "You alright?"
"Yeah," Desmond nodded. "You hurt?"
"I don't know. Maybe we should move."
He felt silly for wondering why the air bag hadn’t activated. He looked again through the windshield at the bloody old ladies.
They were dead.
He licked his lips and said, "If we don't move, we're going to be Happy Meals."
Jerome's mouth moved slowly over his words. "Man, I think those are zombies."
Desmond couldn't help but laugh as the brothers stepped out of their car. He said the word, tested its reality by naming their nightmare. "Zombies."
The corpses slowly encircled them. He glanced around to find an opening through the crowd.
The doors on the Humvee they crashed into suddenly opened. A tall, lean man with a perfectly square jaw and swath of dark hair over an actor's unblemished face stepped from the driver's seat; he wore a hospital patient's gown, as did the red-haired woman who slipped out of the driver-side after him.
She was covered in so much gore that Desmond immediately thought she was one of the dead. The driver also seemed dead because of his stone-face expression, although the assault rifle he carried was enough for Desmond to believe he was alive.
Another gory figure clambered out of the armored truck, the head tilted over a bloody neck, his armor splattered with crimson.
Desmond was frozen once again by the unreal terror. He knew better than to look directly at them, but it was too late.
The dead stretched out their arms. Their mouths opened over jaws with missing teeth. Their hands twitched and their eyelids fluttered. They smelled like marijuana and expensive cologne. They wore expensive, unblemished shoes or they scraped against the concrete in sandals. Some of them were clothed in athletic shorts or jeans that sagged around their ankles. Still others were completely charred, burned husks that moved like forsaken wraiths or oil-dipped flamingos.
Desmond's analytical mind couldn't help but note that most of the creatures scrambling after them were dead black people.
Jerome still needed help from his drug problem; he steadied himself against the side of the car. Desmond pointed to a gap within the surging creatures. The shadows played tricks with his perception because there didn't seem to be any light for miles. But there was no time to think; he had to run. Jerome still wanted to live, and depended on him. He had to be the big brother once again.
"We can do this!" Desmond shouted.
The two bloody white people from the Humvee followed closely behind as Desmond charged forward with Jerome.
A strange thought occurred to him: just this morning, he was drinking coffee and poring over the paperwork for the porn director's lawsuit. Desmond had been wondering how a man could descend into such a mad state of mind. The former detective once had a beautiful wife and a nice home. What savage instinct compelled him to make sex flicks?
The world was a different place then it was twelve hours ago.
The gore-soaked woman's scream overpowered the whine of the emergency siren. Desmond glanced over his shoulder at her and almost asked her name. He recognized her thick red hair and gaunt, starved face, but his mind couldn't recover her name.
An orange glow highlighted the edges of the rooftops. The sky seemed to shake, and the light brightened. How could they escape this hell? How could they ever be safe again? Where was the military?
Most importantly, how did it happen? Desmond knew that if you uncovered the motives behind an action, you could understand and overcome. He was the type of person who always needed a goal, and while he ran beside his brother breathlessly through the ghetto, he knew he was going to survive this catastrophe.
"Strength in numbers," a voice spoke from behind him.
The two people in their hospital gowns were following. The stone-faced man waved a machine gun at Desmond.
He could hear the woman sucking back her tears while she breathed in ragged gasps. No matter how slowly the creatures moved, more and more of them appeared from out of the shadows.
A volley of gunfire on the next street lit up the night.
They rushed through a war zone. The combatants seemed to be soldiers of the apocalypse; they blasted rap music from vibrating systems that rattled the dust from the nearby window panes of old brick houses, firing their illegal weapons at everything that moved.
"Help me!"
Desmond could filter through the noise because survival was paramount, but the desperate cry of a mother, a cry that seemed to foresee the deaths of children, stopped him cold. His own mother cried in the same fashion when her crack dealer came to collect money that was owed her, and when she didn't have it, he pistol-whipped her into a corner of the living room while Desmond and Jerome watched, the younger brother's hand clasped firmly in Desmond's.
Without hesitating, he jogged in the direction of the scream. He didn't look back to see if the others followed.
<
br /> Inside of an open garage, a large black woman wailed while a toddler circled around her. She kept backing away. Her baggy breasts hung in a black tank top without any bra; the woman wheeled around in a circle on her toes while the child continued the strange game.
Desmond's stomach churned, and when he stood inside the garage, he reached down and twirled the little black boy around.
A head of curly black hair. A polo shirt with red and yellow horizontal stripes. Dark flesh that was tainted by a powder blue discoloration. His left hand was missing all of its fingers except for the thumb, leaving bloody stumps below the remaining knuckles. With eyes that did not blink, the boy stared at Desmond as if waiting for him to do something.
The woman screamed louder.
When the boy took a step toward him, Desmond backed up and put his hands out as if that might prevent the dead child's aggressive hunger for human flesh.
The tall survivor with the machine gun and waxy face sauntered up to the boy, pointed his gun at its head, and pulled the trigger. The boy crumpled to the ground.
Wisps of smoke curled around the gun's barrel. Outside, in the street, the gunfire stopped. The emergency broadcast system stopped.
Desmond looked up from the dead body and into the face of the mother, who knelt on the cement next to what was obviously her son, her entire expression a mask of despair, the mouth hanging open, the eyes closed, cheeks wet with tears.
"These niggas are staying dead!"
Desmond watched a group of survivors rush up the street toward them, led by a thuggish, slender man in a tank top with a handgun in his fist, his jeans sagging over his waist. Desmond shouted at them, and several corpses that had been confused by the arrival of the new group turned on their heels as if trying to decide who might be tastier.
There were four of them, all of them of dark complexion. There was the thug, a thick-waisted woman with short hair, a shotgun, and a white blouse, and there was a lumbering man with dreadlocks whipping over his face and an axe in one hand, while in the other, he clutched the tiny fingers of a little girl.
Zombie Ascension (Book 1): Necropolis Now Page 11
