The Forsaken - The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Two (40 page)

Everyone in the car was ready to kill the
Marquis when the Angel suddenly called out a series of directions
that took them close to the waterfront. A short time later, Driver
drove through the boarded up entrance of an underground parking
garage. After six dizzying revolutions on a spiral ramp, Driver
drove the Nova up to a wide broken grate set in the foundation. The
Marquis said it was an air intake for the garage’s ventilation
system. It opened on an old sewer and the Maze.

Felon had one hand twisted in the Marquis’
lacy collar. The other kept the .9 mm pointed at his face. The
assassin had immediately barked orders.

“You,” he had gestured at Bloody, “and you,”
he nodded at Driver. “Stay with the nun. Tiny you come with me to
cover him.” He shook the Marquis’ collar.

Tiny had winked at Driver but didn’t even
glance at Bloody. This was something that the dead gunman had
brought on himself, he understood. But since Felon killed him he’d
been unable to control the feelings that once made him a merchant
of death. Whiskey somehow quieted the feelings of helplessness, and
firing his gun had kept him grounded.

The nun was sitting in the Nova blinking.
They were watching as the silhouettes of Felon, Tiny and the
Marquis shrank into the distance. Their footsteps echoed back. The
vaulted brickwork distorted their shadows, thrown by a single
flashlight.

Bloody followed a roaring vacuum inside his
head that was heavy with space and silence. A long echo filled him,
like a gong the size of the earth had been struck at the beginning
of time, and it still rang in his ears. It was distracting and it
got worse every time he came close to his old self. The vibration
would grow in volume.

But drifting wasn’t much better. Faces would
appear on waves of shadow—familiar and strange. When he tried to
identify them, they shattered with a sound similar to that gong, so
he stopped trying. Shocked, empty and alone, the gunman became a
void with eyes.

Then his friends’ muffled voices would bang
and thump into his peace. And all those syllables would rattle
images and memories from the dark places—draw his awareness to the
forefront and the gong would ring again. In time he realized the
gong was what he was, or what he used to be. And the sound of it
was the shape of him. But he was all through with that.

Here was a face in front of him. It spoke a
name, a word, and a sound over and over again. It was an oval face
with receding hair and a bushy black Devil’s goatee.
Motion
.
His mind drifted toward it.
Impact
. His dead body responded
slowly, cautiously identifying the detonation of misfiring neurons.
The face had pushed him. The touch of the living drew him back.
Ringing, his soul identified the words.

“Bloody!” Driver glared at him. “Goddamn! Pay
attention. We got to talk.”

Talk. Walk. Wander. The dead muscles in his
face contracted in a horrible smile.

“There y’are!” The Texan, his friend, lit a
cigarette. “Christ! I don’t expect underground is a happy place to
bring a dead man!” Driver’s eyes searched his face with something
like worry.

Worry?

“We got to talk.” Driver grabbed his arm, led
him toward the front of the Nova.
Clang
!

Pressure. Touch. Pressure. His dead mind
cascaded with electric strands of feeling. His eyes filled with
tears. Driver looked up at him.

“Damn it! Don’t!” His friend leaned him
against the hood, handed him his cigarette and lit another.

Smoke
.
Burn
.
Ring
!

“I don’t like all this shit. I don’t like it
at all.” The Texan blew a thin stream of smoke out. It caught
Bloody’s attention. He watched it drift upward like smoke from a
chimney.
From a cottage, a house, a burning building
.
A
building full of orphans without futures
.
Lives filled with
hate
.

He lifted an arm. It pulled away from his
side like a twist of hardened leather. The cigarette was wet with
Driver’s saliva. Bloody drank it in.
Clang
!

“What the fuck are we doing here?” Driver
started pacing. “This Angel and Demon stuff, Bloody. They’re
fucking with our minds.” Driver nervously checked his armpits for
his guns, dropped his hands again, and plucked the cigarette from
his mouth. “Like them Eyesores wasn’t real…illusions. I read about
that shit.”

“Real.” The word dropped out of Bloody’s
mouth like a broken tooth.

Driver scrutinized him momentarily, and then
continued, “That Felon’s goin’ to get us all killed. Fuck!” Driver
took a deep breath of the damp air. “We already got a mark on us,
you bet. I gotta keep my cool. This ain’t the end of the world.
Jesus! Did you see him? Fucking Felon walks off with old Tiny and
the
Angel
to have a chitchat with the Devil, Lucifer or
whatever the Hell he’s talking about!”

“Hell.” Bloody’s mouth controlled the shape
of the word. It was softer than the first.

“That’s right: Help.” Driver misheard him and
laughed. “Goddamn it, Bloody. We gonna need it.” The Texan shook
his head then smiled up at him. “But you ain’t never been a
worrier.”

Worried
. Worried only once when he
walked up the stairs to the bathroom. Mom had told him to stay
downstairs in his room when men visited, but he walked up fearing
each creaky step. And he got to the top and saw the bathroom door
open. And mom was there on the floor with her throat cut.
Gong
!

“So, off goes Tiny.” Driver’s hands shook on
his cigarette. “Smilin’ like a bobcat with a mouth full of mouse.
Did he tell you what he was goin’ to ask Lucifer?”

More tears leaked past his rotting memories.
“Blood.” His voice was a croak to his dead ears.

“For Christ’s sake, blood? What in Hell would
he be askin’ about that for?” Driver’s blue eyes turned to slits.
“I guess maybe you ain’t all there yet.” He scratched the stubble
atop his head.

Bloody’s mind had opened up like a
subterranean stream. Thoughts and memories sluiced into the
blackness.

“And her,” Driver whispered, peering in at
the nun. She was watching them. “What we brung her along for? I
ain’t a religious man, but that got to be bad luck!”

Gong
!
Bang
!
Gong
!
Bang
! Guns blazed in Bloody’s mind. Flesh burst with the
impact of lead. Blood filled him as a boy died with a bullet in his
heart, as a woman screamed pierced between her ribs and legs, as a
carload of seniors burned by the side of the road. Tiny’s face was
flushed with rape and murder. Driver’s eyes were full of blood. His
own face tingled where the teen scratched while he raped her.

“Bloody!” Driver’s face was near to his. The
Texan’s breath was rank with fear.

“Crime.” Bloody’s dead mouth spat the
word.

“Yeah, we’re in deep this time.” Driver
squinted into the tunnel.

Ring
. Tunnel.
Clang
.
Mind
the gap
. A woman was near the edge of the platform, her back
arched over tight buttocks in denim. A horn blew. She fell into the
path of the subway without a sound.
Gong
. A touch of the
hand. Bitch!

Driver’s face softened looking up at him. “Do
you know, I expect this Goddamned place has made me antsy. I don’t
like ridin’ unknown range, I’ll tell you. I got to remember there’s
a shit load of money waitin’ for us at the end of the trail.”
Driver dropped his head, shook it. “Tiny needs us.”

Us
.
Gong
.
Driver and Tiny
and Bloody
.
Ring
! They’re drinking. A woman is dead in
the alley with a knife in her. They’re carrying on. A guy tries to
pistol whip Driver. Bloody’s cannon takes his head off.

“Shit,” Driver hissed, looking at his boots.
“Now
I’m
gettin’ gloomy.”

“Gloomy.” Bloody’s voice was a papery
rustle.

“You too huh?” Driver looked him over. “Why
not with all this Devil-Angel shit…”

Clang
. Bloody snapped his head
forward, looking around the parking lot. Driver was busy with a new
cigarette, couldn’t see him.
Ghost
. The gunman rode the gong
waves back into himself—away from himself. If they brought him back
again it might be too much. He could not resist so many
ghosts
.

56 – The March

Updike pressed the broad heel of his left
hand to his left eye. Immediately following his speech, a hot
stiletto of pain had begun slowly inserting itself through the
pupil, driving toward his brain. For the better part of an hour it
probed and pried—digging for the center of his being. Before it
found its mark, he was able to pass it off as the result of too
many days of travel and stress. Since the Angelic argument had
ended so long ago, he seldom got headaches, and was unconcerned
about this one, until an hour had passed and the burning needle
sunk home. The pain came on him like a possession—memories
disappeared, sensation blurred, numbed and winked out. He started a
desperate search for painkillers.

Luckily, the army counted a division of the
living among their number, so the dead medics had added various
analgesics to their kits.

The bulk of the meds resembled hardware
supplies. Treating injuries of the dead was relatively simple. A
broken bone was glued and screw-nailed back together, a chest wound
required some fiberglass and resin. But the alienation felt by the
dead was not exclusively theirs. For years, disaffected living
converts had joined the cause. Good intentions, sympathy for the
dead and their care may have provoked many of the living to join.
But word of the Apocalypse held incendiary meaning to some. Many
wanted to join the ranks of the dead for the final
battle—literally.

Sparks flared across his vision in the
offending eye when he pushed against it. The technique caused a
minor cessation of the pain, and created a synaptic disorientation
that took his mind off of the worst of it. The painkillers he’d
taken had done little for his discomfort.

Stoneworthy could tell that something was
wrong, but he respectfully accepted Updike’s assurances that the
minor annoyance would soon pass. So the dead minister spent his
time moving among the troops, spreading the word, keeping the faith
firm. The difficulty of their goal could not diminish its glory.
Updike had walked with him for the first four hours of the march,
but the pain had forced him to climb into one of the dozens of
jeeps that his forces had acquired.

The army consisted of infantry, for the most
part and was spread out over several miles. They had managed to
find, and scrounge a large number of trucks and other off road
vehicles to carry supplies and armament. Many of the antiques
predated the Change, but were constructed before the computer age
and so could be fixed with wrenches and solder. He had discussed
the difficulties of moving such a large force on foot, but his
military commanders were not concerned. Their pragmatism said that
the availability of fuel would have been a problem—so eliminate the
dependence before it begins. As it was, with the four hundred or so
trucks and vehicles, they would have enough difficulty.

Moving an army of some 150,000 on transports
would consume the available supply of fuel in a day. Fuel became
scarcer with every mile you traveled from the City of Light.
Besides, they joked, his army was dead on their feet already, and
wouldn’t be tired out by the march. Updike had been around the
military mind enough to know its inner workings. Such black humor
was a way of making sane men accept insane things.

He had climbed into the jeep that carried
General Bolton. The soldier claimed he had been killed during the
dead uprising of ‘11. His battalion then was sent in by the failing
U.S. government to quiet a loosely organized rebellion of the dead.
Some four thousand of them had run amok in Old Chicago after the
local city council had erected its umpteenth “dead only” sign. Like
many among the living in those days, Bolton had underestimated the
strength and determination of the walking corpses.

Bolton had laughed. “Jesus did we get it bad.
Turns out that dead men do dry out, yes. Given time. But not all
dead men come apart easy. See, it was still the early days and lots
we didn’t know. If a dead man soaks himself in oil or some other
preservative, well, his skin and muscle turns as tough as rawhide.
And are they strong! My group ran into about fifty of these chaps
in a blind alley. They butchered us. I must have been in Blacktime
when the truck ran over me.”

Despite his constant exposure to the dead,
Updike’s first meeting with the dead general was distracting. Most
of the man’s hair was gone and the skull was crisscrossed with
rawhide stitches, reminding the preacher of a baseball. His entire
skeleton was severely damaged because his face turned on a left
incline of some forty-five degrees and his right shoulder and arm
was eight inches lower than the left.

“I don’t hold a grudge though,” General
Bolton had said swelling with pride. “It was the same guys who cut
me up that put me back together.”

The General rode in the back of the jeep
beside Updike, studying a laminated topographical map. Occasionally
he would grumble to himself and jot a note in a pad. Bolton smelled
of shoe polish. Many of the dead soldiers drank it, claiming it had
revivifying properties. Updike suspected it just kept the body
tissues from drying out. Bolton’s lips and teeth were black because
of the habit.

The preacher pressed on his throbbing
eye—sparks flew across his memory. With his free hand he dropped
two tablets in his mouth and swallowed them with a drink from his
canteen. He retreated from his headache into the past twenty-four
hours. It was a whirlwind of activity: packing up, preparing the
long march, planning the route, and assigning officers. With food
and water required for only a small percentage of the force, the
army was able to get underway without delay. Always Updike was
impressed by Stoneworthy. The dead minister was charged with the
light of Heaven, never pausing, moving tirelessly among the dead
army encouraging and helping.