Authors: John Skipp Cody Goodfellow
She was going nowhere, until they stopped that motherfucker cold.
She turned to survey the room, looking for some sign, some sense of what was supposed to happen to night. A row of monitors showed a continuous feed of Mathias, still as a portrait.
A big flat-screen TV on the wall behind it played a cable news show. The talking heads were red faced, shouting, pretty much like always.
The other monitors showed snow, but the last screen played what she took at first to be one of his home movies.
Until she realized that it was another live feed.
And the weeping girl facing the camera was Emmy.
“No…”
Picking up Gray’s pistol where Jasper tossed it, she shambled toward the mirror. Almost tripping over cables and her own treacherous feet, she could barely see the real Jake and Emmy for all their doubles.
She had to drop the bat and use both hands to lift the gun up and aim it at the one true Jake.
“Stop,” she moaned, but could barely hear herself. It was like she watched a movie, unable to change the channel with the remote in her hand.
It only clicked and clicked and clicked, every time she pulled the trigger.
Emmy saw Evangeline through the hole in the mirror, pointing a gun and mouthing a silent word over and over.
But there was no salvation there.
Behind her, Jake unbuckled his belt, dropped his slacks, and massaged his cold, dead member. She caught a glimpse of Eve’s apple of temptation, gray and sickly, jutting out between his knuckles in the mirror’s reflection.
There was no temptation there. No lust for him left.
Only fear and revulsion.
It had never been Jake that she loved. She realized that now. He was the worst kind of deceiver: the serpent, shamelessly quoting Scripture, interjecting himself with a swaggering grin between Christ Almighty and her own foolish heart.
In the end, there was only Jesus. Her lord and savior. Her light in the darkness. Her solace in woe. Her life everlasting.
In the end, that was the only choice that mattered.
She closed her eyes, and opened her soul…
…and there he was: her beautiful Jesus, so strong, so pure, so suffused with light. He stood before her, looked her straight in the eye, and there was no withering judgment there.
Just total compassion. Total forgiveness. And total understanding.
As he opened his arms to her.
For Emmy, there was no hesitation. Only shimmering clarity, and utter relief.
She let go of the wall, hoisting herself upward and throwing wide her own arms, as if they were wings.
She felt herself hover for one long microsecond: in defiance of gravity, the ugly weight of the world.
Then her body fell, no longer needed.
And the glass cut her tether.
As it sliced through her throat to the bone.
“HOLY SHIT!” Jake stepped back from the spritzing body, watched it dangle and twitch, impaled at the neck.
It wasn’t just shock. It was the fact that he was
robbed:
robbed right at the moment of truth, with his dick still hanging out.
It reminded him grimly of Frankie and Sugar: the last time he’d been cock-blocked by death. The memory was not a pleasant one.
It made him recall what it was like to be afraid.
He stared at Emmy’s untapped ass, no longer attractive in the least, and instantly checked his boots to see if they got any on ’em. Madness and vanity had long since trumped any ennobling human response, so pity was out the window.
He wanted to laugh, but it just wasn’t funny. In fact, it was fucking repulsive.
Then he saw something even more repulsive.
Himself, in the two-way mirror.
Jake stared, horrified, into his own reflection: his embalmed flesh scratched and oozing, his mad eyes, his stabbed and bullet-ridden body.
“Oh, no,” he moaned, suddenly realizing how badly this would play on TV.
He vainly tried to put some of the ragged flesh back up over the wounds on his cheeks. It flopped back down, as if ashamed to be a part of him.
“No!” Trying again, as if his will could force a better outcome.
Floop
went the meat.
Mouth closed, he could see his own teeth.
Jake turned away from the mirror. This was fucked. This was thoroughly fucked. It was one thing to come back from the dead, quite another to
look
like you just came back from the goddamn dead!
So what was he supposed to do? Shellac his head? Steal somebody else’s? All his life, he’d relied on his good looks to get him through the rough patches, of which there were many.
Now he
was
one of the rough patches. He looked like Keith Richards being run through a cheese grater.
Jake wasted another full minute of eternity, locked in frantic self-pity. Then he heard the sound of glass and plastic shattering from the studio.
And through the hole in the two-way mirror, he saw Evangeline, using his own baseball bat to smash his computers into rubble.
Jake blew into the studio from the hallway door, still buckling his belt, charging right by Jasper and Gray. He had eyes only for the destruction of his legacy, and the records of his miracles.
Evangeline whirled and smashed the camera that had recorded Emmy’s death. The decapitated tripod skated off into the far corner of the studio, while the camera itself sailed into the picture window directly above Emmy’s corpse, splintering the heavy plate glass and flinging cascades of razors into Jake’s bedroom.
“STOP!” Jake screamed.
“FUCK YOU!” she screamed back.
Looking for another target, Evangeline turned to the row of monitors, but stopped when her eyes registered what was on the TV screen.
And Jake, amazingly, stopped as well.
On the huge, silent flat-screen monitor, a frantic anchor with tears in his eyes tried to read the news, but his mute mouth moved in the round, frozen expression of a shaken but faithful man singing a hymn.
The supertitles crawling across the screen said it all:
The Dead Rise: President Declares “Judgment Day!”
Both of them stared as the TV cut abruptly to a scene
in a war-torn Iraqi city, and the shattered dome of a mosque, painted in livid red and purple by a smoke-stained sunset. A blinking caption announced that the footage was
LIVE
as a shrouded, still-dead man was carried from the mosque.
At the head of a procession of walking corpses.
Some were robed followers, devout beyond the grave. Some were Iraqi, and even American, soldiers.
All were peppered with shrapnel and gunshot wounds.
All were gray and green with decay.
And all were throwing out open arms to embrace and beg wisdom and mercy of the panic-stricken American soldiers who were, even now, trying to mow them down.
But mowing them down wasn’t working.
Would never work again.
Because the rules had forever changed.
The TV cut back to the weeping news anchor, while a whirlwind of images from around the world played behind him in seeming slow motion.
But the point had been made.
Evangeline started laughing.
“Oh, you asshole,” she said.
“What?” Jake muttered, distracted, eyes still locked on the footage of the rising, walking dead.
“You thought this was all about you,” Evangeline continued, light dancing in her eyes. “You
always
think that it’s all about you.”
“Shut up…”
“But it’s not. And it never was.” She laughed again. “You’re just another narcissistic fuck.”
“Shut up!”
“Don’t you get it? God didn’t pick you. GOD PICKED EVERYONE!”
On the cross, Mathias awoke, lifted his ravaged head, and wailed like a baby on fire.
“NO!” Gray screamed, and tried to get up. “NOOOOO!!!” Still alive, but only for the terror and pain.
Jasper shook his head, stepped on Gray’s right thigh and grabbed it at the ankle, twisting brutally counterclockwise till every bone and tendon popped.
The left leg went next, cracking backward like a giant Alaskan king crab’s, pointing straight up in the air at the obliterated kneecap.
Gray shrieked and blacked out. Mathias’s scream went on and on. On the TV, a dead man wept.
And Evangeline could not stop laughing.
Suddenly, she was not alone in this.
Cancerous shadows oozed up out of the corners of the studio: Jake’s demons, converging and circling around him like cackling carrion birds.
They laughed and laughed, glutted and drunk on all the devastated pride they’d stoked, all the pain they’d harvested from Jake’s insane quest.
It was clear, in that moment, that they’d known all along. Were just egging him on, building up to this moment.
Jake’s gaze went from the demons to the screen, every last drop of embalming fluid draining from his cheaply mummified face.
Watching his dreams die, one by one.
“And you know what else?” Evangeline howled. “Nobody wants to see your STUPID FUCKING SHOW…!”
He came at her, and she swung the bat.
It was aimed straight at his face. Reflexively, he lifted his right arm to block it, was stunned when it connected.
He did not expect his forearm to shatter. But it did, flapping awkwardly in his sleeve.
Jake bellowed, more in disbelief than pain.
Evangeline raised the bat again.
Then his other hand shot out to seize her by the throat. Lift her off the floor.
And squeeze.
Evangeline’s eyes and tongue bugged out, all blood flow to her brain cut off. It sucked the strength out of her next swing, which barely cracked his ribs.
At which point, she began to die.
“YEAH!” he screamed, laying into the moment. It was the only satisfaction he had left: the ability to hurt someone smaller and weaker.
It lasted about five seconds.
Then the ax plowed into his back.
Esther’s deliberate swing neatly severed his spinal cord, just below the shoulder blades. Instant, absolute paralysis set in. And every semblance of control disappeared.
“TAKE THAT, YOU WORTHLESS MOTHERFUCKER!” she shrieked.
Jake’s nerveless fingers lost their grip, and Evangeline’s throat slipped from between them as her legs gave out, and she sagged to the floor, staring up at his frozen frame.
He dangled above her, legs locked, only standing because his wife still held the handle on the blade wedged in his back. Esther tried to yank it loose, but Jake just teetered back with the motion, almost knocking her flat.
Jasper stepped up from behind, grabbed Jake by the shoulders.
“Pull,” he said.
Esther planted a foot in the crack of Jake’s ass and pried the ax free.
Jake didn’t collapse so much as
tip over
, like a deposed dictator’s statue. Evangeline ducked out of the way just in time, and Jake hit the floor face-first.
“WHO BELONGS TO WHO?” Esther screamed.
The ax came whistling down again: biting deep into his shoulder, severing his aorta, sluicing fluid the color of antifreeze across the floor. “WHO FUCKING BELONGS TO WHO NOW?”
When the ax came out, it flipped him half on his back. Evangeline kicked him the rest of the way.
Now Jake could do nothing but helplessly stare at the mocking crowd, and his own undoing.
This time, the blade buried itself to the hilt in Jake’s rib cage, carcass cracking wide open when she twisted the blade. Putrid freezer-bagged pouches of organ meat erupted, venting clouds of charnel decay.
Esther dry heaved, still bent over, weakly clutching the handle, not quite able to pry it loose. Jasper stood to her right, put his hands on her shoulders.
Evangeline, to her left, winced and dropped the baseball bat.
“Excuse me,” she said. Esther looked up weakly. Evangeline’s smile was grim but true. “I think it’s my turn.”
They locked eyes, shared a moment of understanding.
Esther nodded, let go of the ax.
The demons gathered close around Jake now, kneeling to either side of his head, the better to savor every speck of his destruction. This was their revenge, too, and their demented jackal-laughter all but drowned out the wailing of the dead boy on the cross.
Esther stepped back. Evangeline stepped forward. The wooden handle of the ax still jutted straight up, at the center of Jake’s vision.
Evangeline yanked the blade out with relative ease, savored the heft, wavered only slightly as she brought it up over her head.
Jake knew where the next blow was going to land, even before it happened.
He tried to scream, but the sound was no louder than
a pilot light igniting. He couldn’t see the black sludge and wriggling maggots that squirted from the canyon where his crotch used to be.
But he knew what he had lost.
Then the ax came up again.
Evangeline moved to the right of Jake, and Esther stepped forward, right between his useless legs.
As the world Jake had once hoped to rule shrank down.
To the shadow of the blade.
Falling hard, across his face.
Epilogue
Giving Up The GhostAfter the dying came the living again.
And so it was with the dawn, as it slowly broke over the slaughter house formerly known as the Weston-Partridge Free School and Homestead.
The storm was over, and the pale sun’s groping rays seemed to find nothing moving but the shadows in retreat.
Nothing living, at least.
A shambling figure banged against the black gate, butting into it and turning round again and again. It was stuck inside a tiny loop of senseless motion, with only enough brain left to keep going.
Searching for a freedom it would never, ever find.
Sheriff Bill LeGrange had somewhere to be, but not the foggiest notion of how to get there. Glazed eyes rolling back and forth without seeing, snorting and hacking up curds of gray leakage.
He was stuck forever: banging his head absently against the bars, with nary a thought in his head.
No Millie. No Jesus. No Jake. No self.
No redemption.
But underneath, the emptiness gripped him with a
vague yet bottomless fear that he was—and always would be—in the wrong damn place.In the studio, the volume on the TV was up. It was tuned to CNN, as it had been for the last six hours. So there was no escaping the latest coverage in the ongoing “Judgment Day Crisis.”
Not for Gray, anyway. He couldn’t work a remote to save his life. Which was, unfortunately, no longer an issue.
He couldn’t even get off the fucking floor.
Dead now, but never more miserable, Gray helplessly stared at the yammering shitheads on the screen. Movement had been agony before he crossed over; but this was, if anything, worse. The slightest effort to either side made the bone shards in his arms and legs grind together in brain-scrambling agony.
Weird thing was, he couldn’t be sure if he still really
felt
pain, or just fantasized about it. But one thing was for certain.He was definitely in hell.
And it was worse than he’d ever imagined.
When 9/11 hit, he realized now, CNN and the rest of the news media had it easy. They could just run the same clips, over and over—the Twin Towers, going down—to hammer it home. It was an iconography of disaster everyone could understand.
But this was different, because it was coming from
everywhere.
If there was one central image, it was a dead human face, looking right at you. Only the face kept changing.And there was no one to pin it on. No one to whom it wasn’t happening. No one leering from a videotape, unscathed.
No one to blame but God. Or the Devil.
Or, possibly, ourselves.
On the TV, over the last several hours, thousands of the living and dead alike had filed past him: either crying and praying together, or fighting street to street and house to house. Reaction worldwide seemed pretty well split between the desperate urge to kill and the desperate urge to heal.
As usual, the news ran in circles around the twin poles of its circus tent: the obvious thing
everyone
knew, and the thing that obviously
nobody
knew.The curse—and the peace—of death had been denied us. And nobody had the slightest idea what it meant.
But that sure didn’t stop them talking.
Gray didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as he watched Larry King and Wolf Blitzer welcome undead pundits into roundtable discussions. (A series of emergency “town meetings” were scheduled to run in the next twenty-four hours.)
It was refreshing to see them all off their talking points, shitting directly into their pants; but painful to watch them still miss the point and flail around in the clinch.
Questions like “How can we stop the dead from rising?” and “How might this affect U.S. foreign policy?” were almost as useless as the endless commercials.
Dear God, the endless fucking commercials…
Gray understood the function of media in crisis. When the drooling idiot-child that was the collective human psyche got awakened from its slumber, the media’s job was to pat it on the head, offer it candy, and reassure it that the malls would still be open in the morning.
But he tried to remember: did the whistling ads for “Bob” and his penile enhancement keep running through Hurricane Katrina? And did they really want to say
this apocalypse is brought to you by Enzyte?Evidently, they did.
Oh, yes, this was certainly hell.
Mathias started wailing again. Gray turned his neck—the only thing that didn’t hurt—toward that stupid piece of shit, and yelled, “SHUT UP!” for the one hundred thousandth time.
Those assholes had cut him down before they left with what was left of Jake, but couldn’t pry him away from the cross he’d hung and died on. The brain-damaged bastard clung to it still, wrapped around its base, piteously whining like a deserted dog.
Every so often, he would turn to Gray, staring through the gaping stigmata holes in his palms at his passion play’s captive audience. With no recognition whatsoever.
And that—beyond the pain and death—was probably the worst. To be stuck here, surrounded by retards. Endlessly bearing witness. And unable to strike back.
“SHUT UP!!!” he screamed again, unable to believe that things could possibly get worse.
Then the giggling demon returned.
“Oh, fuck me,” Gray moaned.
From somewhere far off, as if the studio was an airplane hangar, he heard her delirious, unhinged trill.
“Hey, Gray! You ready to party?”
Suddenly, she appeared before him.
Suddenly, he remembered who she was.
Her name, as if anyone cared, was Crissy Nailor. She was just some mouthy jailbait bitch Jake hooked up with back in L.A., when he still had a band. She’d got on his nerves in record time; and when Jake dumped her, she’d threatened to go to the cops, so Gray was only too happy to take her out with the trash.
Some people just had to be dealt with. It wasn’t personal. Why was she pushing
his
shit in?“Oh, I’m pushing your shit in, all right,”
she cooed.Demon Crissy hovered close enough that the drooling bullet hole in her forehead spilled phantom gray
matter down his shirt. Her tongue flicked out and grazed his face with an icy tingling, like frostbite.“That’s why I brought over some people,”
she whispered in his ear, then roared,
“And they JUST CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU!
”Sugar was first, her charbroiled face cracked open in a blackened grin. Her eyes bubbled and ran down her cheeks, but he could still feel her looking right through him.
Frankie was next. He looked like a sandblasted side of beef jerky. Even his ghost could not recover all the layers of flesh he’d left on the pavement Gray’s car dragged him down, or his pretty-boy bleach-blond scalp, which a vulture had carried away as Gray dug his grave.
Gray screamed.
There were more, many more, lining up behind. Sugar’s mother. His own father. The first little boy he’d killed. Dozens of victims, from a lifetime of violence, all gathered here together to celebrate his doom.
He couldn’t even count the whores.
And somewhere toward the back of the laughing crowd, he swore he saw that fucking
patrulero
, ready for a little Mexican payback at last.“Are we bugging you? Are we bugging you?”
Crissy howled out loud.
“We’re not TOUCHING YOU!”But she lied. They were going to touch him plenty.
Gray’s hell was just getting warmed up.
In Jake’s bedroom, Emmy’s body lay splayed across the bed with her hands across her bosom, and her chin tucked down over the gaping trench in her throat.
Jasper and Evangeline had lifted her off the broken glass and left her to awaken, but she slept on: her features composed and sedate, her bruised and battered body empty and unmoving.
And in the living room, the wreckage remained.
But the fire had finally gone out.
The dirt parking lot in the front yard was empty, but for Mathias’s sedan. Esther’s car, Jasper’s truck, and LeGrange’s cruiser were long gone. Only the fleeting dust devils whipped up by the rising heat stirred outside the Connaway house. Not even the decaying swing set creaked.
High above, a halo of circling vultures seemed to echo and mock the symphony of screams and terrible laughter that came from the studio.
Or maybe they just cried out in pity for the world they had inherited, where the dead would no longer lie still to be eaten.
The cruiser tooled down an empty, dusty desert road, past open land that seemed to spread forever.
In the distance stood the ever-popular billboard that invited all comers to answer the question:
WHAT WOULD JESUS DO
?Beyond it, there seemed to be one hell of a pileup. Hard to tell how many, at this point. But certainly not less than a dozen.
The radio continued to squawk, a panicked voice at the other end drowning out the automated 911 operator.
“…come in! For God’s sake, somebody, please…!”
Deputy Peet turned down the volume, not ready to respond quite yet.
She was pale, her chest held together by the bulletproof vest she’d found in the trunk—now that the horse was out of the barn, so to speak—and half a roll of duct tape.
Even with the A/C blasting, the vanilla-scented crucifix air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror couldn’t quite overcome the sickly sweet scent of decay, already wafting off her in the quickening daylight.
Be that as it may, she had a job to do. She wasn’t quite
sure what that meant anymore, but she figured she was about to find out.If there was any order left to be preserved, she would do what she could to help that happen. That was what she’d signed on for. What she believed in.
And none of that had changed.
The closer Peet got to the wreckage, the more the dead became apparent. Mostly unrecognizable human slushies, up front, though even the severed limbs and skid marks kept twitching or crawling, like they had somewhere to go.
She slowed the cruiser to a crawl as she came up on the first wave of destruction, then pulled off the shoulder, half into the sand.
Now the moaning and screaming grew louder.
As the wreckage got vaster and deeper.
Past the twelve vehicles that had actually collided—in stages, evidently, based on the progressive ripeness of the smoke—past that, there were another fifteen cars, trucks, and vans that were merely skewed all over the road like tailgate partiers in a parking lot free-for-all.
Most of them with doors wide open.
Most of them with many bullet holes in the doors.
This was where the still-walking, still-brawling, blood-spattered dead slammed into each other and yammered and screamed, unable to let go of the nonsense that had brought them all here in the first place.
It was tragic, but there was nothing to be done. At least nothing that she could do alone. There were too many. Too many of them armed. And dead as she was, things could always get worse.
The scrawny corpse in the white snakeskin cowboy boots took a .45 shot at her head. Thank God his eyes were missing, or it might have actually hit. Then three mangled metalheads took him down by hand. Some high notes ululated, went on and on and on.
Peet looked up just in time to see the shadowed silhouette of the burned girl before her: shivering transparent on the gravel shoulder, holding up her cindered hands as she begged facelessly for mercy.
But the cruiser passed through her like the vapor that she was.
Nothing to be done about that, either.
And then—as if even God recognized the urgent need for comic relief—a huge, smoldering sasquatch of a man stumbled past and ran off into the desert, clapping his hands and whooping with glee as he chased after a blind tortoiseshell cat.
Peet shook her head, rolled her eyes, and laughed, watching his tattered army shirt flap in the breeze. It was the first laugh of her afterlife, and it felt fucking fantastic.
She didn’t feel the need to radio in a report on this. The poor desperate dispatcher had enough on his plate.
But it was definitely time to check in.
“Peet here,” she husked into the handset. “Hit me.”
The cruiser kicked up a rooster tail of dust as it fired up its lights and sped off for the highway. There was, unsurprisingly, plenty left to do, for both the living and the dead.
And it was always nice to be needed.
In the desert, you can lose anything. Make it disappear, never to be seen again.
Maybe that was why so many of the world’s great and not-so-great religions had been born there. It was more than the scorching sun, the chilling moon, the visionary madness and blinding rage that seemed to thrive in such merciless places.
The desert was full of secrets—God’s, Nature’s, and Man’s—only some of which would ever be found.
That was certainly the idea this morning.
On a barren hill overlooking a vast expanse of sand, a lonesome hanging tree stood barren and defiant. From a distance, it looked like a hand rising up from a grave.
At its foot, a handful of survivors both living and dead stood before a small hole in the sand. There were a dozen such holes that had been recently dug and filled, over a quarter-mile spread with no pattern to link them.
But this one was the last.
Jake’s severed head stared up at them from the bottom of the hole, mutely pleading with tearful, flyblown eyes. He looked so scared it was almost heartbreaking, till you remembered who he was, and what he’d done.
There was no fucking way on earth that Evangeline was going to kneel before this grave. Not even to piss in it. And she’d seen more than enough of his sniveling, now that he was down, to last her the rest of her days.
The good news was, he’d finally learned how to say basic phrases like
I’m sorry
, and
I love you
, and
please.The bad news was, that didn’t quite qualify as redemption, no matter how many times you wrapped your ugly mouth around the words.