“It makes a difference,” Louis said. “I’m… I did it because we had nothing… because we’re not fast-food slaves or cashiers, man. We’re not monsters for taking control of our lives…”
“My nigga,” Vincent squeezed his hand.
“Just tell me… I helped run this thing we put together… we made it…”
“You ain’t got to worry ‘bout that now. Sit back and relax. Close your eyes and remember your momma. Remember what we did. Hold on to it. Hold my hand. Hold tight and don’t let go. Put this up to your chin and I’ll count to three.”
Louis shook and the tears flowed freely over his cheeks. “Oh, my God, oh, my God…”
“One.”
The gunshot was deafening in the confined space.
Vincent stood with his smoking AR-15 and wiped his associate’s blood off his face. He didn’t turn around to look at Vega, but he spoke to her in words that had waited for years to pass before being born from a tired violence.
“Left them all to die,” he said.
“Letting it go,” Vega began, “is like dying. Everything we worked for disappeared. Up in smoke.”
“Up in smoke. Funny you say that. You know my story. Come up from the dirt. Told myself I was never going to be no waste of breath. Started hustling and set up my little kingdom of crack and guns. All I did was make it easier for everyone to rot.”
He straightened his shoulders and faced her. “Saw this nigga at the church. Name was Jerome. Boy was on some fucked-up shit.
My
shit. Saw his brother die to help keep us alive and I saw a lot of my brothers die out there to keep
me
alive. I had it all. The house in the neighborhood where all the white breads live. I was no different from any real estate hustler. I owned blocks. I owned souls.”
He was quiet for a moment, so Vega said, “What’s there to say? You need a shoulder to cry on? You need to look somewhere else. If Traverse was heading for Selfridge, he’s already there by now, and if the base is wasted, we’re walking right into our deaths anyway. We all know it.”
Vincent licked his lips and nodded his head. “I needed to hear that.” He turned back and regarded Louis’s corpse. “We did business together. He worked for me, waxed people. Shit. I’ve killed people. I don’t feel nothing when I pull the trigger. It’s business. A transaction, that’s all it is. Customer management.”
“This is a punishment, then? This is Hell? This is what we get for everything we’ve done? Not buying it.”
“Me neither. Now I think about it, you know. Shanna. Maybe a year ago, I wouldn’t have chased after her in the first place. Maybe in another year, I would’ve kept looking. I don’t think I’m softer. But it didn’t have to go down that way.”
“We’re not talking about it. Regrets are a waste of time.”
Vincent smirked. “I regret nothin.’ I don’t know why I agreed to help you out there, or why I saved your scrawny ass.”
“You make a girl blush. When it comes down to it, what you just did with Louis, you’ll take care of it. You’ll pull the trigger on me.”
“The deal goes both ways,” Vincent said.
Vega looked at all the guns and realized it was the fruit of his labors; weapons of war that would get into the hands of criminals or gun nuts, people who were afraid their rights would be stripped away. He wouldn’t have cared where the guns went or what they’d be used for. How many children were gunned down, or lovers murdered? By extension, how many deaths had Vincent been responsible for? He dealt in death, and it was a cold business. His thoughts of Jerome, Louis, and Shanna, only meant he was trying to find a heart within himself, a reason to keep on going. He was human after all.
“I need a minute,” Vincent rubbed the top of his head in frustration. “Been cooped up in that tank. Gotta listen to the pig run his mouth. I feel like this is when I’m supposed to apologize for all the shit, when I’m supposed to make peace or beg my dead Mama for forgiveness.”
She waited for him to continue.
“Might as well apologize for breathing,” he said.
“A year ago, I wouldn’t have gone running around to save one kid either.”
They both waited for her, now. She wasn’t finished.
“I never asked you if it was Shanna,” Vega said. “I never asked if it was really her. It could’ve been any girl and I would’ve thought it was her.”
Vincent looked at his hands. “You asking now?”
“No. I’m not asking.”
He stared at Louis’s dead body. “You were trying to find your peace. You done looking?”
Vega shrugged. “I’m used to smoking and drinking my way through life. I pray to fucking
mirrors
, Vincent. What kind of peace are people like us supposed to find? That’s like asking the Devil to renounce Hell while he’s sitting in a whorehouse.”
Vincent looked at his feet and shook his head. “Griggs…”
“We’ll both keep our eyes on him.”
“Cool. What kind of piece you want?”
“Choices… hmmm… a pair of Berettas, or something similar? I sure had a nice sniper rifle a few hours ago… I would love you forever...”
“I got no problems keeping a lady pleased.”
***
Blood poured down the shower drain like grapefruit juice. No matter how much or how hard she scrubbed, there was still more.
She had laughed at Bob when he had gore in his beard.
Half of Miles’s face was missing.
In the past, there had always been alcohol and tears. Bouts of raving prayer and forays into the night with men whose faces and names melted into each other. Later, there was Miles. There was God.
Another mirror after a shower. Wipe away condensation with a towel.
Her head pounded away. Her black hair was a tangled mess, her eyes hollow caves. She looked like a refugee escaping an internment camp where everyone who believed in the healing power of violence was segregated from the natural world.
General Masters stared back at her through the mirror with his broken smile. He waited for her in the future if she survived another day. She would be just like him.
It was time to weep, but she lost the sound of her tears in the sound of thunder, as the house vibrated with its power.
ROSE
Her knees against her chest, she lay curled against the brick while looking into the shards of glass near her hand. Raindrops formed tiny puddles along the concrete, where a thousand mirrors stared up into a dark heaven where no light could bend shadow into form. Nature inhaled; there was nobody to stare into the eye of a storm.
Platinum blonde hair with pink extensions straightened to a fine luminescence just beyond the earlobes, a tight black dress that accentuated every curve, a vertical zipper through the center of the outfit was the perfect tease. Large hoop earrings and enough makeup to make an Egyptian whore melt gave her the story she needed without needing to say a word.
Her weapon had already been ripped from her hands. All she had left was the wristwatch that contained the tracking data for the vehicles used in the mission.
Hostiles were everywhere.
She’d been dropped near the Stryker tank that had been stranded in the middle of a suburban street. The vehicle was out of gas, so she had to presume that whoever used it last might still be alive. The second vehicle had last been used a few hours before the first one she located, and it was parked in the middle of another suburban street only five miles away. Her best bet was to make her way to the asylum.
Thunder cracked overhead and shook Rose to her bones.
She removed the silly heels from her feet and grabbed a shard of glass. Scattered raindrops pattered on the concrete, and she walked through the alleyway and back onto the street. Corpses lingered everywhere in the smoky haze, their shapes indiscriminate, and their hunger absolute.
Jim was out there.
She was in a wilderness filled with thousands of cannibal savages. How could she hide from the entire population of a major metropolitan area?
How would she find a needle in a haystack?
Why was Jim so important?
He never came back for her because he was a liar.
She crouched low behind a car and picked out her target; a stumbling blonde college student wearing a Wayne State University T-shirt because she’d likely been hanging out at home, studying for an exam that would determine whether she was going to be a success or a total loser. The girl’s entire left side had been someone’s meal; exposed rib bones emerged through the tattered shirt and her arm was missing.
She slammed the shard into the creature’s eye and twisted it through the socket. Her hands were on the dead woman’s shoulder, and she watched as raindrops slipped over her cheeks like the tears the woman had shed out of fear and rancor, before most of her was devoured, along with her dreams and her past.
She robbed the corpse of its New Balance walking shoes. Her dress wasn’t going to cut it, but she couldn’t afford time to stop into a darkened store or strip down an entire corpse. The dead were silent and relentless. One of them might be just around the next corner, its body animated by a grotesque power.
Rose stared at the sky for a moment, frozen by thoughts that were supposed to have been cleansed from her consciousness. Mortal fear had been banished by her training and conditioning, but none of her training involved a world teetering on the brink of collapse. She was a stranger in Detroit, and for the first time in her life, she didn’t know her enemies.
They wanted her; man and woman, child and invalid, they wanted her. With twisted ankles and broken knees, they pushed through the debris to taste her flesh. They fell and clutched at the pavement with their fingers, ripping fingernails and strips of flesh in their moment of need without feeling pain. She watched them approach, helpless against the dread they inspired within her chest. The assassin backed against a brick wall, colored in the non-color of a bleak storm. Lightning cut jagged scars through the atmosphere and she saw their teeth and their eyes. Their bodies made the only sound until she could feel the thunder shake the dust from the windowpanes around her.
The thunderstorm was the funeral dirge for this race of mortals. There was only this moment. The past would remain scrawled on the walls to be unearthed by a greater race of men, or it would wither and die. It would all rot. The spiders crawling through the dust and steel would rule the world.
She would have to find Jim among the dead.
They expected her to bring him back alive, after he’d broken his promise to put his life against hers in a final dance.
***
Sheets of rain slanted through the spaces between cars, between buildings, between the clustered mobs. She could run from them. She could move faster than they could.
Guns were everywhere. She managed to find herself a shotgun and a handful of shells on a bloody passenger seat inside an Escalade. With the shells stuffed into the front of her dress, she climbed over cars and pushed her way through hundreds of reaching hands without firing a single shot. She knew what was at stake. If she stopped moving, she would die. If she stopped running, it was over.
The suburban streets were more manageable without the clutter of police cars and clouds of smoke. The undead were spread thinly between the houses, no matter which neighborhood she found herself in.
The Humvees scattered in front of Eloise Fields were surrounded by piles of bullet shells; the shells reminded Rose of flowers dropped down the center aisle by a flower girl at a wedding. She crouched behind a truck and watched the meandering corpses wander through the smoking wreckage of a helicopter that crash-landed in the middle of the parking lot; a pickup truck was wedged into the asylum’s front doors. Piles of corpses attracted clouds of flies, while puddles collected the blood and turned the parking lot into a lake of death. Stray guns littered the pavement, and dead mercenaries, clad in their heavy armor, lay face down with holes in their heads, their limbs chewed to the point of disintegration.
The wheels of a shopping cart clattered along the concrete and voices drifted through raindrops.
“Throw everything into this one and we’ll come back for it,” a woman said.
“Just drive it back,” a man suggested.
“Bring those things with us? You haven’t learned much, Vincent.”
“You load, I’ll protect you.”
“Protect
me?
I’m a helpless little girl all of a sudden? I think I’ll be protecting
your
ass.”
“It was meant to be a joke.”
The woman responded with mock laughter. Rose peered through the windows of a Humvee and found herself looking at one of the mercenaries who’d been dropped into this suicidal meat-grinder. Beside her was an African American man who had the doors of another Humvee thrown open so he could load it with guns from the shopping cart.
If they knew something about Jim, it was worth risking her neck. She was supposed to locate the mercs, but she’d be damned if they would get in her way.