She could see what was going to happen: the dead were going to wash right over them and leave behind nothing but a pile of bone and gristle. They were going to have to find a way around them, somehow.
The corpses couldn't be reasoned with. They wouldn't surrender. They wanted human flesh, and nothing short of destruction would persuade them otherwise.
Two soldiers stopped firing and ran in separate directions.
"Fall into position, goddammit!" Crater screamed in vain.
Zombies collapsed when their heads exploded, but most of them were jostled by the volley of firepower and kept coming. Bob moved between soldiers and tried to tell them where they should regroup, but he couldn't get to most of them. They seemed hypnotized by their ability to keep firing, as if it was all they knew how to do. They reloaded their weapons and leaned on their triggers. Why didn't they get up and run?
A haggard creature stepped in front of Vega as she tried to reach Bob. Where were they all coming from? The zombie had been an African American woman once, with dark flesh that was already starting to blue, her lips pale, and her weave askew on her head from a struggle or rough sex. Vega slammed the butt of her machine gun into the creature's face to knock it back, and then sprayed bullets into its face.
She could no longer see Bob. Flashes of sporadic gunfire complimented the screams of men who had chosen to die in battle. Grenade explosions near the back of the crowd sent limbs into the air. More corpses stepped in Vega's path, and she didn't hesitate to open up their minds with her philosophy of violence. Another grenade exploded not too far from her position.
The soldiers were completely surrounded. They were fools to stand and fight; their bravado would earn them nothing but death.
Death cries accompanied the sound of war. Men stood and shouted their final curses. One soldier fired and continued to lean on the trigger, unaware that he needed to reload. His battle cry replaced the sound of his weapon, but he didn't see the creatures behind him. They ripped his helmet away and exposed a bright-eyed, youthful face. Fingers dug deeply into those eyes, while other hands grabbed the edges of his mouth and pulled. His screams became choking gurgles and he disappeared into the arms and mouths of the dead.
Vega dropped to one knee and emptied a clip. Bodies dropped. Reload. Press the trigger. Scream at nothing. Reload again.
Vega stood and checked her ammo supply. She was still weighed down by useless ammo for her missing sniper rifle, so she quickly dropped it all onto the pavement. She whirled around and caved in a zombie's face with a short burst from the machine gun. She pivoted and did the same favor to another. And another.
Screams. Firepower. Death. Everything she could have wanted for Christmas without the bottles she could never find the bottom of.
Take a deep breath. Reload again.
Someone had made it to the Stryker. The remote gun swept over the crowd of dead and mowed several of them down, but others hardly seemed to notice they were being shot at. They turned their attention toward the massive tank, and Vega couldn't help but think maybe Bob had been right: the Stryker was a bad idea.
The gun continued to fire wildly. She pushed past several corpses and dove into the bushes that once made up part of the asylum's landscaping. She put her hands over her head as soldiers detonated grenades while they were being ripped apart. Blood and hot pieces of bone rained down upon her. A fragment scorched the back of her hand, and she grimaced, careful not to scream in pain.
Vega rose to her feet and was glad she did. Another corpse had been lingering over her, and it was devastated by a short burst from her MP5.
"Bob!" she called out as a grenade explosion signaled another man's death.
The Stryker began to drive out of the parking lot. It squished several corpses beneath its eight wheels, and hundreds more of the dead followed as the tank drove into the ghetto. The .50 caliber machine gun was firing sporadically. Several undead stood on top of the tank and hammered on the hull uselessly with fists that felt no pain.
Vega stood and lobbed a grenade to buy herself some time, unmindful of the fact that Bob might still be alive. Hundreds of corpses milled around the Humvees, and she needed to reload. By herself, she could move quickly. She could still make it.
She stopped to reload her weapon. Her fingers fumbled the fresh clip and it dropped into the grass. She leaned over to grab it, and the jarring shock to her head caused her to fall sideways against the wall.
"Fucking bitch."
Her vision clouded with stars, and her thoughts eluded her. She knew what was happening, and she tried to take a deep breath. Her body seemed far away, completely detached from her head. She needed to stay awake, no matter what else happened.
Crater straddled her hips and spat while he talked, his combat knife in his fist. "You little whore. You nice little piece of trash. That's right. Look at me."
Words were difficult, but she managed to groan, "All the same. Always say the same thing. Swearing and calling names…"
"Ha ha ha! Yeah! You're gonna love this sh…"
The top of Crater's head erupted and blood splashed in a thousand different directions, washing over Vega's face and gear. Crater slumped against the wall, his face firmly planted against the asylum. His bloody skull smoked, and his remaining eye stared at nothing.
She tried to turn her head and buck the dead man from her body, but she was too weak.
When she saw the shiny Desert Eagle magnum, she thought about God. The man holding the smoking gun had wavy, salt-and pepper hair, and his sport jacket and tactical vest were drenched in blood.
"Sheeiit," the man said. "Thought he was a zombie. His head sure did explode!" He laughed for a moment. She could see him hook his thumb into a belt loop, his other hand on the gun. He seemed oblivious to everything that was happening around them, as if it didn’t matter. She knew that he was leaning in to get a better look at her.
Vega's savior wiped Crater's blood off her face with his thumb and index finger.
"Girl, I have to say you have the face of a starlet," he said. "Good thing he didn't mess it up."
"Drop the gun, NOW!"
She knew it was Bob, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
"Buddy, I just saved her life," the stranger said. "I'm not dropping my gun."
"You just murdered a damn good soldier," Bob growled back.
Vega's savior chuckled. "Good? He was going to rape this woman. We can stand here and debate about right and wrong all night, but if we don't figure this out in the next thirty seconds, we're meat."
Bob only took a second to think it over. "Help me get her to her feet. Grab that man's gun and his ammo. There, on his belt. We have to hustle our asses out of here."
"Glad to help," the man with the magnum said.
"He was a piece of shit anyways," Bob muttered about Crater. "I'm not surprised."
The two men lifted Vega to her feet, the machine gun dangling from its strap around her shoulder. She tried to tell them about the clip that was in the grass, but Bob must have noticed it, because she could feel the pressure of a new clip being slapped into the weapon. She looked down and saw her savior rob Crater's corpse. He handed the M16 to Bob.
"I prefer my own zombie blaster," the stranger said.
"Let's fucking go," Bob mumbled.
They began to walk away from Eloise Fields and into the shadowed suburbs. Vega was carried only a few feet into the darkness before she could hear Bob ask his questions. "That's not exactly a civilian weapon, or at least a civilian who knows what they're doing with it."
"Stole it from the candy store," the stranger explained.
"Name?"
"Patrick Griggs. I used to be a cop, and now I make porn flicks. You might even know some of my stuff."
Vega wondered if she was hallucinating. She knew the man's name, had in fact watched one of his movies, if he was truly who he said he was. There used to be a redheaded woman in all his films who seemed eager to please him; the girl had been willing to do anything. The way he spoke now, with people dying, seemed surreal. Every word he said seemed to favor an inside joke that only he could laugh at. He could have been making remarks about a romantic comedy rather than an apocalyptic outbreak of cannibal corpses.
"I'm Bob, and this is Vega. We're looking for a man who was locked up in the asylum, and we're going to hit the suburbs. I need to assume he didn't go too far. You can come with us, but I won't let you slow us down."
"I have nothing better to do. Who's your lucky target?"
"Name's Jim Traverse. Killed a bunch of people."
"Yeah, I know who he is. My girlfriend wrote to me once and mentioned his name. She used to be a patient here, too. In fact, I came here to look for her."
"That was your truck," Bob said.
"Why can't we take one of those vehicles?" Griggs asked. "Maybe I'm missing something that's obvious."
"Those dead fuckers will follow like dogs, and Traverse will hear us coming. We need to move quietly."
Vega wondered if his girlfriend was the redhead from his movies. The woman had been involved in a horrible crime, but she couldn't remember what it was. Many of her videos were still available on the internet.
Her thoughts seemed random and out of control. Out of the corners of her eyes, she could see the walking dead closing in around them, while Bob and Griggs talked as if they were old friends sharing a beer together.
Vega could feel strength returning to her legs. She tried to put her feet down on the ground; she stumbled into Bob and once again felt incredibly weak. Bob wrapped his arm around her body and threw her arm over his shoulder so he could lead her.
"Crater…" she tried to say. There was more. She wanted to curse his name for being the prick that he was, but thankfully, his corpse wouldn't rise again. The former detective had blown his head to pieces. She tried to wrap her thoughts around what was happening. There were several things she wanted to say, but when she tried to look up, she saw hundreds of people walking slowly toward them. People who were maimed beyond mortal comprehension.
Bob and the porn guy quickened their pace. Both men were soaked in sweat and blood.
Dead people emerged from the shadows. The sky burned. Nobody was left alive to scream or fight. The entire city seemed to be following them, dragging twisted ankles and broken legs.
They'd crossed over to a suburban street; the neighborhood was composed of homes that could have belonged to a postcard from a fiction writer who dreamt of Armageddon before the dead conquered the living.
Together, the trio turned and made their way across the street. The city's flame had been swallowed by the abyssal darkness—nothing here seemed to burn. Vega felt like a tourist observing ancient ruins or the ramshackle homes of an Afghan village.
She wondered how much ammo the three of them had together and how much time it could buy them.
Her head rolled back on her shoulders, and she looked for the stars that twinkled out of existence as dawn threatened to murder the night.
JEROME
He was convinced that he was still asleep. The walls of the church throbbed, and his stomach burned as if he swallowed a match. When his eyes opened and he awakened to find himself alone beside the dusty pews, his eyes never opened—he was simply awake, stepping from one realm of thought to another, one dimension of existence traded for something less preferable. The conflagration of noise hadn't existed when he drifted off to sleep. He remembered thinking that the end of the world was oddly silent. He had been thinking about Desmond—yes, his brother, who was dead. Eaten alive. His flesh consumed.
The dead seemed to forget that survivors were grouped inside the church. Unlike the movies, where the corpses were drawn to human flesh like bees to honey—an analogy which rambled through Jerome's mind, bees and honey, bees and honey—the dead were easily distracted. They couldn't smell living flesh from miles away, no more than any living man could.
But now they thundered on the church doors. They scratched against the walls. Jerome could hear them, and he knew he was no longer safe.
How long had he been asleep? Where was everybody?
Shouting and screaming within the church were a revelation: he had been forgotten in the midst of some other chaotic moment. The dead may have found their way inside.
If he could be anything like Desmond for one moment, he would warn the others about Jim. He believed Mina's story, as strange as it was.
Jerome worried about the little girl, Shanna.
His bones ached, and needles of pain in his skull made him feel more alive than he had in days. The only way to drive the pain away was to get another fix. Maybe Vincent could help him somehow.
Jerome steadied himself against the wall and walked deliberately toward the source of rage that echoed throughout the entire church. Whatever was happening had drawn the dead to their sanctuary. A woman screamed, as if the dead were murdering her, her flesh ripped from her bones by human teeth.
He could hear Derek shout, "Let us in there, you son of a bitch! Let us in!"
The scream confirmed Rhonda was in pain. "My arm! Oh please, God have mercy! Don't hurt me anymore! I'll do anything…,” she sobbed uncontrollably, while fists pounded on doors. Jerome felt like the entire world was shaking around him, and it was all he could do to keep his balance.
"Let her go!" Derek roared.
Jerome found them in the hallway. Derek shoulder charged a door while Rhonda begged and cried. Vincent stood back with his gun in his hand, shouting curses. Where was Rhonda's shotgun?
Sweat slipped into Jerome's eyes, blurring his vision. Bile burned the back of his throat, and a wave of nausea caused him to stop against the wall and wait for it to pass. Was he the only one who remembered the shotgun? He put his hand out to stop Derek, but nobody seemed to see him. Shanna sat against the opposite wall, her face buried in her hands.
"Wait," Jerome said weakly.
"Back up nigga!" Vincent put his hand on Derek's shoulder. "I'm about to shut this mutherfucker down!"
Derek fought him off. "You might hit Rhonda! JIM! DO YOU HEAR ME? LET HER GO, DAMN YOU! DON'T DO THIS! WE HAVE TO BE BETTER THAN THE MONSTERS!"
Jerome heard the shotgun blast and watched the door explode in shattered wooden splinters in slow motion. Derek jerked backward and his chest and stomach seemed to be covered in red paint. He shook his head back and forth, his dreadlocks waving around his face, and he stumbled backward into the wall and slumped into a pile of mortally wounded man. Shanna screamed louder than Rhonda did.
Jim poked his head out the hole in the door. "You're all rather ungrateful, I must say. I'm doing my best to contribute to our survival."
A frying pain sizzled. Steam rose out of the room behind Jim.
Rhonda had stopped screaming.
Jim's expressionless face focused on Vincent rather than on the moaning, dying Derek. His face cracked into a smile and rows of neat, white teeth were exposed between his red lips. "You would do well to wait until I'm done here. I thought you a rather interesting man, until you threw in your lot with Derek. He's still alive, I see."
"Rhonda lied to us," Jim said. "Her weapon is fully loaded, and I found it odd that she was able to use the weapon so well. I learned she was actually a police officer who abandoned her partner. She was undercover, coincidentally, and she was looking for someone named Vincent Hamilton. Did she scream too loudly? I hope she didn't wake the dead."
Vincent's chest heaved and he kept his gun pointed at the floor. "You're a dead cracker."
Jim, who Mina had referred to as an artist, turned to Jerome, his eyes black and narrow, a sheen of sweat above his upper lip. Not a single hair was out of place on his head. "Jerome, I would like for you to find Mina. I'm doing this for her, after all. Bring her to me."
Jerome's stomach growled as the smell of frying meat reached his nostrils. His hands twitched and his nerves rejected his desire to walk.
Jim disappeared back into the kitchen. Vincent knelt beside Derek.
"It's okay," Derek choked out his words. "You have to do it, Vincent. You just have to die to be… one of them. Do it, please. I won't be one of them."
Jerome struggled with his next steps. It was all he could do to stay upright. Mina had been right about the man, and Jerome was too late to warn anybody. If he hadn't been so damaged from the drugs, he would have had the power to do the right thing. He could have saved lives.
Vincent struggled with his new responsibility. He wasn't the heartless street tough he pretended to be. He tapped his forehead with his gun and stared wide-eyed at Derek's decimated body.
"You have to take care of Shanna," Derek said, his eyes momentarily flickering to Jerome while the druggie passed.
He wanted to lie down and die. It was the only way to escape the nightmare his brother had left him in. What was the point of Desmond saving his life? Jerome couldn't get a fix—how could he survive?
Waves of noise assaulted his ears, and he cringed with each painful step. Shanna's sobbing followed him down the hallway. His face itched miserably, and he leaned against the wall while he walked.
He could smell the cooking meat, and he thought of ham.
Mina emerged from a flight of stairs, and she was leading another person behind her by the hand; a tiny old nun in her habit, her head leaning against her shoulder because there was a large hole in her throat.
"Oh, hi Jerome," Mina stopped and the nun swooned on her feet. "I was just bringing some friends up from the storeroom. This is Sister Beatrice. She's a zombie. Father James is downstairs. I couldn't bring him up because Sister Beatrice ate his legs."
Jerome didn't know what to say. Now he knew he was dreaming. He was a slave to his own decimated consciousness.
Mina led the nun past Jerome and down the hallway. Shanna's scream intensified.
"Ain't no way!" Vincent shouted. "Get away from her! Get away!"
Mina let go of the nun's hand. "I just thought we could all be friends. Why not let me eat you, Vincent? Or maybe you could help me find Patrick."
"Close your eyes, sweetheart," Derek choked out his words to Shanna. "Vincent, take care of it. You have to take care of it."
Shanna shot to her feet and ran down the hallway past them. Mina stepped aside and allowed the nun to walk toward Vincent, who looked from Derek to the nun, and then back again.
"Do it," Derek moaned.
Vincent blew the dying man's brains out against the wall. Derek's head slid to the side and the blood on the wall glistened with chunks of brain. Vincent pointed his gun sideways at the nun and blew a hole through the back of her head. The nun crumpled, and Vincent shook his head frantically.
"Fuck fuck fuck!" There were tears in his eyes and he leapt up and down like a petulant child. "You stupid bitch! Damn it! FUCK!"
Jerome held his stomach and leaned against the wall. Derek was dead. Mina was insane. Jim was a psychopath. Desmond was dead. All of these things somehow made sense. They were acceptable facts, because he could have anticipated them if he weren't a fragmented human, a rendition of his brother's likeness.
He closed his eyes while his head spun around the stars. Shanna still screamed, somewhere, beyond rainbows and realms best left undiscovered. Tonight, a little girl might die. Vincent shouted and cursed, and Jerome couldn't help but smile. Yeah. Maybe Vincent could get drugs.
Maybe Mina was a drug unto herself.
***
Jerome's body shuddered while his smile stained his lips. The inside of his eyelids became orange fireballs, burning against his retinas, and yet, he remained. Stoned or hopefully stoned. His mother admonished him for being a piece of shit. His brother asked him how he was doing and gave him money because he didn't know what else to do. Push the needle in. Surrender to oblivion.
Shanna screamed for years, while Jerome's smile touched opposite oceans. He was a man between walls, or at least, he was a man made up of walls. Without such a discernible border, he was nothing. Boundaries defined him.
His eyelids seemed to open of their own volition. He was curled up on the floor near a puddle of blood. He stretched his aching neck and glanced down the corridor to see Derek, only a few feet away from him, lying against the wall as if he were asleep. The big man was covered in gore.
The lights were off, yet sunlight filtered in through every open pore and through each door's cracks. He could smell breakfast cooking somewhere. Flies buzzed around Derek, yet the dead man didn't seem to mind because there was a hole in his head.
Jerome stood and stretched. A nun lay dead in the hallway, face down, forgotten. Blood and rot mingled with the smell of meat. Jerome felt alive and awake, his body responding in ways it hadn't before he passed out.
"Desmond?" he called out. His throat was parched. He needed water, and he needed to eat.
After shaking his head several times to clear the cobwebs and rubbing his eyes for several seconds, he walked down the hallway again. He'd been there before, in another lifetime. He had a headache but he hadn't been drinking; of this he was sure, because he wasn't a fan of alcohol. Drugs were another thing altogether.
Now it all becomes clear.
The crack house. The nude woman eating a guy who was just minding his own business, trying to escape life by exploring a variation of death. Running. A moment in a garage. A dead boy. A church. Desmond's corpse opened and exposed for the sun to burn. A church. Mina. Something impossible and deadly in the middle of a shaking church. Vincent shouting after a crying little girl.
"No," Jerome uttered a single word of protestation against the fucked-up world. "No! Desmond! I'm still alive!"
A face poked into the corridor from one of the rooms. A statuesque man who may have lived during the fifties or during the Roman Empire. His black hair was combed neatly to the side, yet his unblemished, shiny cheeks were cherubic and firm.
"You're finally awake!" Jim shouted at him. "Breakfast is served! I worked hard to make dinner for you last night, and you rudely passed out. I forgive your lack of manners, but only if you're willing to grace us with your presence. Thankfully, Mina was hungry last night, and was able to make sure we didn't have leftovers. Considering that we're in the middle of an apocalypse, you should be grateful for every meal you can get. Come on!"
Jerome stepped over the dead nun and walked past Derek. His entire body shut down momentarily; he froze as fiery pain surged through all of his limbs and along the length of his spine. He gritted his teeth and planted his palms against the sides of his head. There was no escape from the pain of living. A spider scampered along the ceiling above him, and he knew, beyond a doubt, that he needed another fix and it wasn't going to come anytime soon.
The tiny kitchen included Jim standing over a pan with cooked chunks of meat idling in grease, waiting to be consumed. The walls had been slashed with arcs of blood. The entire room had been painted with red stains that dried and crusted over in places, creating rainbows of red; scarlet, crimson, and ruby—even the ceiling had been touched with the Kool-Aid stains of blood. The kitchen could have been the size of a small bedroom or a large bathroom: there was only the stove, a dishwasher, fridge, and four tiny cabinets.
Jerome had a difficult time understanding exactly what was lying against the fridge, but he took a long second look. Piles of skeletal limbs still clad in yesterday’s tattered clothes were piled on top of one another. The skull had been scraped free of flesh, while the fillings in the teeth were touched by a ray of red light, which poured through a tiny, rectangular window that was positioned over the sink, a window splashed with blood. The room was stuffy and damp—the kitchen wasn't immune to the effects of the humid, sticky morning.
A mane of red hair poked out of the mess. Mina was wrapped in Rhonda's skeleton.
Although he hadn't eaten anything in days, Jerome's stomach rejected liquid chunks, and he turned outside of the door as his entire body heaved. When he finished, he could still smell the kitchen's gory horror; feces mixed with blood and body odor.
"Well?" Jim planted his hands against his hips. A bloody axe rested against the wall near Rhonda's shotgun.