Zombie Ascension (Book 1): Necropolis Now (15 page)

"I'm not going out alone," Rhonda said resignedly. "We'll wait here. I can't face them. They might be slow, but there's thousands of them."

Derek said, "There has to be a bathroom around here. We're going to look around. There might be some food here, too. Maybe blankets. Something."

"I'll go with you," Jim said.

"You're kidding, right? You just told Vincent he could rape the girl if he handed you the axe. I don't trust you, man. And everyone in here better think about what almost happened a minute ago. Really, think about how sick and twisted it all is. We have to be better than those things out there. This isn't an episode of
Survivor.
This is the kind of reality where people die."

Vincent put his hands up. "I'm sorry. I was just kidding, you know. It's just so fucked up, but I got this shit under control. I'll walk with you."

Derek stared at the ragtag group of survivors for a long moment while the little girl, Shanna, held on to him as if he were a beloved toy. He was short but thick with muscle that had betrayed him and became fat instead, though he clearly took good care of himself. He brushed the dreadlocks away from his face and regarded them, and decided whether there was any value in placing his trust in these strangers.

"We'll all take a walk," Rhonda stood up with her shotgun. A little bulky around the waist, she wore brown dress slacks and a white blouse. Jerome could easily see her in a classroom with kids. He was curious to know if she had a family of her own to worry about. She was doing her best to stray strong—she clearly understood that crying about her plight wasn't going to help her.

"We need to make sure the building is completely secure," she said.

"I'll stay with Mina," Jerome said. "I'm not, uh, feeling well. You know."

Jim was clearly slighted, and now the questions would begin. They were going to rely on each other, and everything that must have been running through Desmond's head would start to figure into the survivors' thoughts. They didn't see Jim and Mina in a Humvee, and Desmond overlooked it to make sure they could get to safety. Jim and Mina would have to explain the blood on their hospital gowns, and then of course, they would explain the gowns themselves.

Desmond believed in the goodness of the human heart. Was he expecting Jim to help save him out there in front of the church when there was still a chance? Did he think someone would save him, just because
he
was willing to risk his own life for others out of obligation to a moral code that may have belonged to him alone? Jim had been right to call him a "crusader" in the garage where they watched a woman cry over her child's dead-again corpse.

It was Jim who shot the boy in the head without even flinching.

While the others left the room to look around, Jerome sat next to Mina and put his arm around her. She shivered uncontrollably, although it was incredibly humid, almost airless, inside the church. Beneath the gown, her body felt frail and weak. Her skin was even more pale up close, and too much blood had stained the lower half of her face. How did the blood get on her lips?

He wasn't confident that he could take on the role of his brother and ask the important questions. Their little group of survivors seemed to be made up entirely of leaders who would argue and bicker with one another over contingency plans. Jerome recognized the recipe for disaster among the powerful egos.

"Thank you," Mina said softly.

"You're so cold."

"Yes. Cold."

Her irises were dilated completely, and as they began to shrank, the green, crystalline orbs shone. For a moment, Jerome thought he recognized her. She was a little too thin and pale to be the same girl who used to appear in those porn videos with the cop—the ones that went viral after the actress killed and ate parts of her unfortunate co-star. There was certainly something familiar about her. Her pupil dilation might have been caused by some good drugs.

He listened for a moment to the carnival of torment outside, which included random gunfire, the emergency broadcast siren starting back up again, loud, window-rattling bass from enhanced audio systems, and screams.

Jerome's twisted imagination presented him with the image of his brother's body, a bright, red island of organs and bone. Dead people walked around Desmond while chewing like toddlers that enjoyed their snacks—gratefully, with a sense of exultant satisfaction, their cheeks puffy with meat that took a long time to chew. Bloody hands stuffed more pieces into mouths that labored to keep up with the juicy morsels. They were just people with an appetite for flesh and organs. They had hair and eyes, noses and mouths. They wore fashionable clothes and carried wallets and purses. Some of them wore basketball shorts or sweatpants. They were the consumers; the fast food, credit card swiping, taxpaying citizens who now preferred to eat people. Like Desmond. Of whom nothing was left except his ripped-open torso, every piece of him available to be enjoyed at the leisure of the adoring, needy public. Desmond never wanted to surrender to them. He'd vowed to fight them until the day he died.

Jerome could no longer deny it. He didn't have to look outside, because he could see it all happen inside his mind, where he was used to escaping. It was his secret hiding place, the fortress which protected him against pain and sorrow. But his refuge had been infiltrated by the idea of his brother's horrendous murder.

"I thought he was going to live forever," Jerome said.

"Your brother?" Mina asked, and Jerome nodded. "Maybe he will."

"There's so much blood out there. I think maybe I'm dreaming this whole thing, you know? I'm going to wake up. I've taken some heavy shit before, but this is the worst I've ever been."

"I've lived this for most of my life. I've always seen… horror."

"You're from the nuthouse, aren't you? Not too far from here… Eloise Fields?"

She didn't answer, but instead looked down at her gory gown. More thumps hammered on the church doors.

"We're going to die here," Mina whispered.

"They can't get to us," he replied because his brother would have said it. "We'll be safe here."

"The killer's in here with us, and we're trapped inside with him."

VEGA

No matter how many people she watched die, or how many screams she heard, there was only the mission. She was a mercenary, not a hero. She was a soldier without a country, a paper warrior, the plaything of corporations and governments. Whenever Vega wanted to stop, Bob was there to remind her there weren't enough bullets for everybody.

There wasn't enough firepower to save the world.

The more they walked through fiery streets, the more surreal the experience felt. They walked unmolested, drawing the attention of wayward corpses while they walked. The slow, shambling corpses couldn't keep up with them, even though the soldiers walked unhurriedly, conserving their energy for the moment where they might be forced to run for their lives.

Vega watched as a gang of dead—or living, she couldn’t tell—men ripped the clothes from a woman who crawled on all fours along the concrete. The woman cried so hard she grunted like a pig. Vega watched as a man with a shotgun stood in front of his gas station and took aim at several people who just kept coming, no matter how many times he missed his shot.

The more she saw, the more she began to understand.

Zombie-infested Detroit was safer than the Afghan desert. Here, you just kept your head down and marched. It was nothing more than a devilish party that lit up Detroit's streets, a conflagration of violence. Music genres battled with each other between rounds of gunfire. She recognized rapper Eminem announce, "Welcome to Detroit City," and she heard a Jimmy Page guitar solo as clouds of smoke parted to reveal a glowering population of uncaring stars.

Vega felt as if she'd truly descended into the tenth level of Hell.

The fires added to the summer heat, causing sweat to trickle down the length of Vega's back, though this hardly made her uncomfortable. Breathing was the tricky part. While everything burned, she was careful not to take deep breaths and inhale the rolling smoke which coiled around the street corners and wrapped around hastily abandoned vehicles. Car alarms joined the city's emergency siren in the sorrowful funeral dirge. The streets became hidden behind a wall of smoke and glowing flame.

Bob stopped once and slid into the driver's seat of a car. He turned on the ignition and searched for a radio station while Vega waited and nearly thought about asking him why they couldn't just take the car. It was a rather silly idea, considering it was almost impossible to navigate through the maze of burning Fords and Chryslers.

News reporters argued with each other over the airwaves, but she didn't want to hear them. This world was her punishment. For all the people she killed in cold blood without flinching, for all the forgotten Sundays in which she cried herself through several bottles of whatever alcohol she happened to have on hand in another anonymous motel room. Entire days would disappear from the calendar, washed away by the ocean of tears and conversations with her dead father.

Then there was the first time she worked with Miles. His roguish charm and devil-may-care attitude rubbed off on her the first time they dropped out of a plane together over Afghanistan. He was reviled and hated by the other people in their crew, but they were the only ones to make it out of there alive, and only because he came back for her.

After sleeping with Miles the first time, she thought she would hate him if they went on another job together, but she was mistaken. He was just as lost as she was, with his own audience of demons greedily rubbing their hands together in anticipation of his death. He was a damn good soldier in the field and did whatever it took to get the job done, but for everyone else, he was a royal pain in the ass. It turned out that Bob was the only field commander Miles was willing to trust.

And so it dawned on her to ask the questions she could never have imagined asking before. Miles had always played the role of asshole while she hid behind her gun, pointing it wherever she needed to so she could earn a paycheck and forget about who she really was.

"They’re all dead," she said. "Everybody… is dead," she watched as humanity's resistance failed around her. "All the big guns are manning the barricades around the city, trying to contain it. They knew they couldn't save this place. They
knew
. None of these things are military. That means they didn't even
bother
coming in here."

Bob stared at the radio and nodded to himself. He ran his fingers through his thick white hair. "Something like that."

She understood, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she was going to die. The little girl, Shanna, was going to die.

Bob just sat there in the driver's seat, staring at the radio with his Benelli shotgun across his lap.

Who was he to decide their lives for them? Who was he to use them for money, when they hardly gave a shit? All they wanted was a job, not to be dropped into a shitty horror film.

"You motherfucker," she spat. It felt right to point the MP5 at him. She could see herself blowing him away, then and there. She could leave Detroit and get another job—they might even set her up on the barricades. Bob didn't deserve to live. Not after what he pulled.

"I don’t blame you for wanting to do it," he said. "I'd feel the same way."

"Miles is dead you fat fuck!"

He looked at her then, his eyes red with fury. "And he did it on his own terms, didn't he? What the hell do you think you'd be doing right now? Or tomorrow? A week from now? I know that look in your eyes. Miles had it too! You got a death wish, and you don't give a damn how it happens. You're a killer, for fuck's sake. This is what you do! If you weren't a soldier, you'd be in a prison. In fact, I was waiting for the day I would find you locked up somewhere or dead in an alley with cum on your lips. What difference does any of it make?"

Her hands did something she never saw them do: they trembled violently, betraying her self-control and battlefield professionalism.

"Go ahead," Bob nodded at her gun. "You point a gun at someone, you better be prepared to pull the trigger."

She knew the rules of war, but for the first time in her life, her emotions controlled the trigger finger.

"Damn you…" she gritted her teeth together and took a step back as Bob peeled himself out of the car, the shotgun hanging harmlessly from his hand.

"I could have taken the job by myself," he said. "A three million dollar payday. If I found Traverse before anyone else did, I would be paid. But I brought the best in the business with me, to help me."

She shook her head while taking another step back. "I can't… can't do this. There's nothing left for me after this. Don't you get it?"

"For people like us, there's only war. I could have told you this job was going to pay a quadrillion dollars, and you could care less. Where do we go from here? You tell me, Vega."

Everything inside of her shut down all at once. Her knees wobbled, and when she closed her eyes, she could see them all again. The mangled, half-eaten corpses twitching their way along the burning streets of a city where children slept, a place where millionaire athletes competed for championships, a place where money couldn't be printed fast enough to repair the damage of a corrupt city council and its failed mayors. She sank down into the concrete, and she could no longer feel the gun in her hands. Smoke obscured her from the greedy eyes of the dead, but the imminent danger they represented to her passed. There was no fear of death, only fear that everything that could
possibly
be good in the world ceased to exist. All along, all she ever wanted was for a better place to thrive outside of her own disgusting life. As long as there was hope and love, there was a way for her to exist on the fringes of morality. 

Her finger slipped from the trigger of the gun, and her arms fell at her sides, her knuckles dropping to the cement. Along with Bob, she was in a crystal ball of smoke and fire, and nobody, nothing, could see them. The radio continued to play from within the car, voices vehemently rallying logic and reason as the arguments against what was really happening. She opened her eyes and tried to find the stars beyond the smoke.

Bob lifted her. "I'm still here with you. Stop hating yourself for one goddamn minute of your life. Give yourself a reason to keep going. If you die because you're giving up, it would be a waste of a nice body. If you don't want to be a soldier anymore, maybe you can shake your ass for dollars on the stage. I'll support you."

He was trying to make her smile, to lift her spirits as he lifted her unresponsive shape.

"Leave me here," she said into his ear. "I'm done."

"Bullshit. You're just feeling sorry for yourself, like always. I'm taking you with me, whether you like it or not. We don’t have far to go. Maybe two miles. We're close."

A wayward corpse stumbled into the front bumper, followed by three others. They regarded the soldiers silently, watching their movements and laboriously turning in the direction the soldiers fled.

The smoke and dust were so thick they were practically invisible, mere shadows slipping through the fog of war. Her ripped, urban-combat camouflaged fatigues were covered in ash and dust.

While Bob dragged her through the street, she looked up occasionally, found the night sky above, and wondered if daylight would expel the foul horrors from the world.

They walked past one of Detroit's three casinos. Poker chips were scattered throughout the street and money floated along currents of smoke. Near the top floors, men and women hung from the windows, their soulless bodies swaying in the night. A couple of the corpses twitched in the breeze.

A heavyset security guard waddled toward them with a group of other corpses in tow. The guard’s eyes had been ripped out of their sockets, and the nose and lips had been chewed off. The fleshy, tree-trunk thighs had been reduced to tattered cloth and strips of hanging flesh. A pair of corpses crawled along the pavement, most of their likenesses—everything that defined them when they lived—had been cannibalized. They scaled the concrete with raw fingertips, dragging entrails and vertebrate while they moved, motivated by a hunger that couldn't be satisfied.

Lumbering, awkward people kicked stray beer cans as they walked; with scattered greenbacks sticking to their bloodied flesh like band-aids.

The concert of car alarms died as car batteries gave up. Flames cracked with tendrils of heat flickering over the concrete.

They
walked over glass.
They
sat in groups, huddled against blood-painted brick, shoving gory chunks into their mouths. Silence followed
them
.

Armless skeletons dripping with blood, tripping over their own feet.
They
were no longer husbands or wives, sons or daughter, brothers or sisters.
They
were no longer Republican or Democrat.
They
were neither atheist nor devout.
They
were unified at last by a common goal, and nothing would persuade them otherwise.

"Look at me!" Bob held her face in her hands, and his eyes stared right into hers. All around them, the dead shuffled sleepily toward them.

"We'll die right here, right now, if you want to," he said. "Is this what you want? Just lie down and let them have their way with you? Is that what you've been preparing yourself for, your whole life? To just give up? Huh? Answer me, you bitch!" He slapped her hard across the face, rocking her head between her shoulders.

He lowered her to the pavement. She knew what he was trying to do, and she blinked and looked around her. The dead were closing in.

Bob shook her. "Your ass is gonna be a goddamn snack, you hear me? Is this what your God wanted for you? He gave you life, and you think
you
can decide when it's supposed to end? Look at all these self-serving bastards! You're just like them! Who do you think you are? Amparo Vega, you're going to die!"

She laughed then, a manic cackle that emanated from somewhere deep in her stomach. Her entire body quaked in Bob's hands.

She could hear the dead getting closer, and she didn't need any divine intervention. She remembered only that she would be following in her father's footsteps—selfishly deciding it was over and leaving others behind. Maybe, just maybe, she could save someone's life.

Maybe Shanna needed her.

Vega grabbed Bob's shoulders. "On your feet, soldier!" she growled at him.

She was back.

Bob shoved one clumsy corpse out of the way; the creature wobbled on its heels while the soldiers raced past. Vega wanted to lean into her gun's trigger and mow them all down until not a single damn one was left standing. She knew she needed to save the ammo, but the injection of adrenaline into her bloodstream made her want to fight the war against the dead all by herself.

She could see them for what they really were, at last. Hundreds of them walked down the streets while fire raged over their heads, billowing out of windows. They claimed dominion over the city, while the living had become trespassers.

Together, Vega and Bob ran.

Along an overpass, she didn't stop to look into the hellish traffic jam below her and wallow in the despair and self-pitying of a race gone mad with violence and depravity. She would have seen the rays of light that spilled from the headlamps of forsaken cars, their windshields cracked, exhaust spilling from tailpipes, music left blaring to supply the soundtrack to the silhouetted figures, black, charred bodies that were crushed between cars or confused by the maze of metal. Cars randomly exploded as fire spread to fuel tanks. Skeletal husks of metal financed by major banks and built by bailout money smoked alongside fleshless corpses that stumbled through the genocidal haze.