The Queen of the Dead Read online

  Vincent smirked. “Did my time in the service. Dishonorable discharge. I don’t answer questions about who I am or what I do.”

  “It matters,” Sergeant Charles said. “You’re both civilians and you’re in a military vehicle. I’m still on an OP, and I guarantee there’re civilians out there who’re more than willing to jump in here without doing all this macho-arguing shit you two are doing. We can argue about it and paint the inside of this tank red, and we’ll be just like those dead fucks out there. I’d like to act civilized and work together. You’re both hardasses, and I could use your help.” He looked down at Vega for a moment, and added, “We could use your help.”

  Vincent plopped down on the bench beside Griggs and stood his rifle up between his legs. He slumped back and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the bottom of his shirt.

  “What’s the OP?” Griggs asked.

  “Same as was it was before: find Traverse. You said he’s still alive, and it’s my job to bring him in. It’s a bullshit OP, but it’s all I got left. We head to Selfridge, which is acting as the Forward Operating Base. I’ll reload and regroup, and get back into this shit.” His eyes seemed to harden into stone. “This isn’t over for me.”

  Vincent said, “You got a ring on your finger. Get back to your family. What’s going on ain’t about one man. One man can’t change this.”

  Sergeant Charles noticed the ring on his finger as if he’d never seen it before. “If the powers above think Traverse can help, then I bring him in.”

  “Vincent’s a family man,” Griggs said. “Take his advice. The guns he’s been selling helped split a lot of families apart, so he’s an expert on the subject.”

  The sergeant put his hands up. “To hell with you. You can’t joke about that crap. I know what it’s like to lose everything. My daughter was one of those kids who wore dark clothing and makeup all the time, only she really did cut herself because she wanted attention from the daddy who was never home—the daddy who moved her from army base to army base. She killed herself because I wasn’t around, and now there’re kids who’re dead because nobody wants to help. You take your fight outside, or you can help me try to do something to make this better!”

  Nobody was expecting the tirade, not even the sergeant. Veins were exposed on his forehead and he breathed heavily while the color drained from his tomato-red face.

  The stress had broken him.

  Running his hands through blood-slick, salt-and-pepper hair, Griggs said, “Let’s save the world. Someone has to do it, right? An escaped serial killer has the cure for the zombies in his blood, and as soon as we catch him, all the zombies will turn back to normal. We’ll go back to our fast-food diets and medicated children. I’m ready. Let’s do this.”

  “It’s worth fighting for,” Sergeant Charles pointed to his uniform. “There doesn’t have to be any other reason than this.”

  Through his hands, Vincent said, “The pig is one funny mutherfucker. Wants to play like the whole world’s crooked when he was one of the most crooked cats out there.”

  Griggs shook his head. “Bullshit.”

  Vincent withdrew his hands from his face. “And then you got these kids going on the internet pulling up your videos. Sex is a part of it. The whole machine, the whole system, it don’t matter. You played a part.”

  It was obvious they were talking just to fill space; none of them wanted to spend time thinking about what was happening, or what their chances were.

  Griggs rubbed his jaw. “Vincent, when I think about what you did out there with those things by yourself, I have to admit you’re a pretty tough nigger. You’re alright in my book, even if one of your AKs is responsible for killing a pregnant woman outside of an elementary school. Hell, that’s just water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned.”

  On the opposite bench, the sergeant watched both men. Nobody moved. Each of them breathed slow, shallow breaths in the tradition of a Mexican standoff. There were no more delusions of law or morality. They’d each tasted the blood of the dead in their mouths, and they were covered in the gore of men and women who’d been ended for all time by bullets from their guns.

  Laughter erupted out of Vincent, whose entire body shook with exaggerated delirium. He slapped Griggs on the shoulder and said, “You smell like piss, but you’re alright for a pig.”

  “You’re both idiots,” Vega grumbled.

  She sat up then, a wide-eyed, gaunt woman with savage black hair askew over her head, her face smeared with dirt and dried blood. Her uniform had been ripped in a thousand places, revealing dark flesh that had been cut open by needy fingers. Her black bra was visible through the tattered fabric, as well as her meager bust. Still, Griggs was impressed with her full lips and long eyelashes. It had been a few hours since the last time he satisfied himself—that had been with Nikki. His battle-lust had satisfied his addiction, but without the violence and bloodshed, he might start to feel desperate. The soldier who had tried to rape Vega must have been thinking the same thing he was: nobody was going to stop him.

  Griggs licked his lips. Oh yeah. The apocalypse was going to be fun.

  JACK

  Jack thought the apocalypse was beautiful. The glow of firelight revealed a sky covered in the ash clouds of a city that was expunging its last, desperate gasps. Nicotine-stained night, yellow background against the vague puppet show of violent shadows dancing against the roof of the apocalypse.

  Slayer thrashed over the stereo of their stolen truck, the tires squealing straight into the fight of the century.

  This is what his brother, Jerry, had been waiting for. This is what he was supposed to want. This moment was supposed to heal him, bring him closer to a goal he didn’t understand. But his brother did, and nothing else mattered.

  For all the cocksuckers who called him a fat slob, who laughed with their jeans sagging to their knees, their hip-hop crack-headed dreams of being NBA stars while wearing stolen Nike shoes. The dumb bitches who never looked twice into the face of a musical genius because they were too stupid to recognize artistic mastery. They were all dead now, or they were about to be.

  Jack brushed chip crumbs from his black Slayer shirt, while Beanie jumped around in the back, his hand gripping the handle of the katana sword.

  “Hell yeah!” Beanie, their guitarist, squealed from the backseat. “Can’t wait to chop some heads off. Fucking zombies. Wooooooo!”

  Jerry, his fraternal twin with a bald, egg-shaped head and a goatee, was a damn good bassist and an even better driver. He passed the smoldering joint to Jack, who took a long drag and let the smoke burn his lungs until he coughed his cloud into the car.

  “The fence is already down,” Beanie pointed out, laughing while he jumped up and down. “Yes. This is it! Going to kill everything, man! Kill ‘em all!”

  Jack glanced over at his brother and then passed the joint back to Beanie while the F-350 truck rumbled toward the hellish, apocalyptic scene that was Selfridge Air Base. It was truly the ideal situation for their band; for years, they’d trashed on stages in Mt. Clemens, Detroit, and Pontiac, but they never attracted a crowd the size of which battled and died on the runway of the military base.

  “We were born for this shit,” Jerry said.

  Jack would give anything to be home. His brother wanted them to die while killing as many people as they could, and he thought he understood. No. He convinced himself that he understood. He needed to go back and bury their mom. He wanted to hold her cold, dead hand. Everything he’d done for her had come to this; he failed at his responsibility to take care of her.

  “Nobody lives,” Jerry announced. “These meat sticks deserve everything that’s coming to them. They made this world. Remember that. They made this shitty world full of hate and greed. Killing them is the only way to help. They don’t deserve to live. We’ve talked about this. We’ve talked and we’ve talked.”

  Jack nodded because he knew Jerry would be pissed if he tried to argue. The time for argument had passed.r />
  Guitarist, bassist and songwriter, drummer: a three-piece metal band that was dedicated to making the world aware of its own fear-mongering and identity suicide. Jerry didn’t understand any of the lyrics. He just played the damn drums.

  The dissolution of man had been foretold in their lyrics; they had spent so much time pondering how it might go down, or how they could instigate a world-ending war to shatter the elite capitalist pigs and their global market. Fantasies hatched in a basement were written down into verse and sung over thrashing hair to a crowd of uncaring teenagers, who preferred mass-produced Auto-tuned garbage to the artistic growls of starving artists with actual talent. But these were all Jerry’s ideas, ramblings that didn’t seem real. Just talk.

  Jack stroked his aluminum baseball bat and thought about the ocean of blood that awaited him on the runway. His other hand gripped the door’s handle, while he waited for the truck to stop moving so they could get out and unleash pain before being dragged down into Hell with the rest of the human race. Like his brother wanted.

  Pretend like it’s a video game. That’s the only way. He wasn’t actually going to kill people. Just the zombies or whatever they were. He’d killed so many zombies when he played Left for Dead and Call of Duty that killing them now would be a piece of cake.

  It felt like he was about to jump off the high-dive. Climbing up the ladder was easy. Standing at the edge of the board was for madmen and show-offs.

  Hundreds of people scrambled like confused rats while machine guns rattled; civilians clamored desperately for helicopters that lifted off from the base. Piles of tangled corpses twitched and writhed in mountainous piles, creating valleys where the living and the dead stumbled into each other. Firelight and acrid smoke filled the sky, painting the base in shades of amber and scarlet. Humvees with mounted machine guns sat with idling engines among the spent bullet casings that had settled like confetti. Screaming victims were surrounded and brought down by packs of the hungry dead.

  Jerry jerked the wheel sideways and spun the side of the truck across the pavement, slamming into a group of deadheads. Blood splattered against the windows while Beanie whooped and hollered.

  “You gonna do this?” Jerry looked to his brother with a suspicious glare. “You’re not gonna pussy-out on me again, are you? You better fuckin’ take care of your shit out there. If it’s black, white, Chinese, Latino, Jewish… you take care of the muther. Got me? Don’t matter if it’s one of them deadheads or it’s still alive… we do what we’re supposed to.”

  Jack looked away. “Sure. Yeah, I got it. Kill everybody.”

  Through gritted teeth, Jerry sneered. “You don’t survive, you hear me? Kill, kill, kill…”

  Jack, the drummer for Coincidental Genocide, opened the passenger door and let the crumbs slip out of the folds of the XXL shirt while Slayer slammed the soundscape through the truck’s speakers. In his basketball shorts and slippers, Jack unfurled his long brown hair from its rubber band and quickly found his first victim.

  Before he took his first swing, a fireball rolled into the sky.

  He heard a song when his feet touched the concrete. Not by Slayer, but by Coincidental Genocide. He heard his brother’s lyrics:

  Fireball made by these hands

  burn the living burn the dead

  burn them all so we can burn forever

  pyro bloodbath smoke the meat

  fireball in the eyes

  of our future

  eyes of our future

  eyes of our future

  A military troop transport plane with two engines on each wing came to life, its power adding to the blood and screams, the pleas and the begging, the gunfire and the murder. Jack watched as hundreds of people raised their hands in supplication and attempted to race for the plane, where armored troops waited in the open bay door; they swept their weapons over anything and anyone who came near.

  He didn’t feel like moving.

  If only he’d stood up to Jerry and denounced this crazy idea. But it was too late. He was knee-deep in blood and death, and he was supposed to contribute his share of violence.

  Hands reached for his face, and Jack didn’t think twice, nor did he bother to look into his victim’s eyes when he swung the bat. A body crumpled at his feet.

  With white-knuckled fists gripping the bat, as he swung in an arc, smashing teeth and bone. Jack’s arms vibrated from awkward strikes, and pain burned through his shoulders. Clumps of hair were stuck to his bat with blood-adhesive.

  It was time to go home. Now.

  He might’ve killed someone. Not a zombie. A person. A living person.

  If he thought about it, he would join them. If he hesitated, if he didn’t move his feet, if he didn’t turn around and run as fast as he could…

  And they were everywhere, tripping into each other, grappling; the dead wrapped their arms around the living and embraced them like relatives greeting each other at a reunion. Nobody could tell who was alive or dead. Blood splashed into the air, the swimming pool of writhing, screaming people bleeding into the sky and upon each other. Clothes ripped and flesh was torn from bodies by hands, both living and dead. A mural of a Roman orgy, blood oozing into puddles from falling bodies. Women and children screamed, some of them being raped and brutalized, while the attackers were being eaten, and then, in turn, the victims were eaten.

  It didn’t seem real. Maybe it wasn’t.

  Jack looked, and the bat might’ve disappeared. He forgot he was holding it, because all he could do was stare at the pregnant woman who lurched forward, tripping over a man who crawled, a man who wasn’t screaming in pain, but rather tried to push himself up with hands that hung from twisted wrists like limp noodles.

  Not a video game.

  Her blonde hair stuck to her face in bloody clumps, her imbalanced steps making her look like a drunken penguin. It was just red paint down the front of her maternity dress, torn to reveal the bumps and bruises of a violent struggle. Her right breast wasn’t missing. Her teeth were all in the right places. Her tongue hadn’t been ripped out of her mouth in mid-scream. No. She was okay.

  When she tripped and fell forward, he wanted to bend down to pick her up.

  Another fireball touched the sky.

  Her hand reached for him, and her mouth opened. She was tangled in a mess of limbs atop the crawling man.

  Take a deep breath. Walk away.

  In the blink of an eye, the masterpiece of terror beheld. Jerry’s fantasy came to life. His orgasm of vengeance, and Jack Mender, the weaker brother, was helpless against its power, as he’d always been. The co-conspirator of nightmare, Jack was nothing more than the validation of this reality. Without him, Jerry wouldn’t have done it. This was his fault. Jerry’s prayer to infernal powers had manifested itself at last. Those stage performances were supposed to be rituals, and Jack was just the drummer.

  Just a dumbass drummer with a baseball bat.

  “Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about!”

  Beanie’s voice.

  Beanie jumped up and down while the edge of his katana blade was embedded in the thick neck-flesh of a three-hundred pound black man, whose clothes had been ripped away, his stomach a black, gaping mouth bordered by bloody rib bones. Beanie was trying to wrench the blade free, but his wide eyes told the story: it was stuck.

  “Let it go, moron!” Jack screamed at him. He’d told Beanie the stupid sword would never be able to cut through vertebrate like it always seemed to in the movies.

  “No!” Beanie held on, circling with the corpse in a macabre dance as more dead people approached. “Give me the sword, damn it. Give me the sword.”

  The sword was still embedded in the neck of the fat, waddling black man, his rib cage exposed like a set of sharp teeth. There could have been a hundred of them, or a thousand of them; they ripped Beanie away from his sword, their hands opening his body as if it were a packet of ketchup. He disappeared among the gore-stained faces.

  With his chest rising and f
alling, Jack watched his friend die.

  Jerry’s voice rose above the war-storm, and Jack found him standing atop three corpses, his boots submerged in shiny blood. “Let’s get to the plane, brother! Everyone’s going! We can inflict serious terror on these motherfuckers! We’ll be the last thing they see before they die!”

  That was the plan. Yes, the plan.

  Jerry waved him forward while his hatchet dripped blood onto his camouflage pants.

  He followed his brother through the crowd toward the plane, which had stopped moving through the impossible throng, the rotor blades cutting through a red cloud of gore and bone. One of the engines sputtered as hundreds of corpses were ripped apart by the blades, bone fragments popping like microwave popcorn, spraying into the air and bouncing off the plane’s hull.

  Jack pushed people aside while he attempted to catch up with his brother. He was out of breath and his lungs burned, as he inhaled poisonous smoke from a million fires. When the thick crowd ahead of him barred his path, he remembered the thrill of being at his first Slayer concert and how hell-bent he was on pushing ahead to the front of the stage.

  They weren’t going to move. They might not even be alive. They smelled like blood and wet shit. They… they…

  Heads turned. Faces, plastered with pale blue or red face paint, some teeth missing, tongues rolling through waterfalls of blood through someone else’s dream of Niagara Falls, or a vacation never fulfilled in paradise or Hell, turned. Faces, with eyes that did not see or understand, or maybe did not realize, or maybe did not… move… crusted with grime and veins, pulsating, menace etched into the framework like a toddler who repeated words they often encountered. Yellow teeth and black, tar-encrusted teeth. The smell of yester-year’s rotted food, perhaps the dried turkey and cold gravy, the wind of the destitute.

  The faces turned. The faces belonged to the dead, one identity forever shared, forever mired in blood and violence, meat and death.

  “Oh yeah,” Jack breathed through his mouth. “Yeah… okay… let’s do this shit… let’s do this… yeah…”