The Queen of the Dead Read online

  Lift the baseball bat. Let vengeance reign over all, and let blood fall from the clouds.

  Bodies began to fall, and Jack threw his hands over his head and dropped to his knees. Wet, warm blood splashed his hair and arms. Limp corpses slumped on top of him, and he realized he might become buried in a mound of corpses.

  Jerry would be pissed at him if he died this way.

  Still holding on to his baseball bat, Jack pushed through the bodies as soldiers inside the plane reloaded their guns. They were trying to make room for takeoff, but wave after endless wave of undead crashed against the volley of gunfire. Another turbine abruptly cut out and the dull roar of the engines weakened. Jack could feel the blood rushing through his head, and once again, the screams of the dying were audible over the barrage of never-ending firepower.

  Glancing over a pile of corpses with wide eyes, Jack was sprayed in the face by arterial gore; he turned and saw a bleeding neck awash in blood that was brightened by a surging ball of flame that erupted over the base, flooding the sky with pillars of smoke. A leering face with strips of burnt, black flesh hanging loosely over rows of yellow teeth capped with fillings, opened a mouth full of blood. Lidless eyes peered through strands of haggard hair that remained atop a white skull.

  A shudder purged Jack of all bravado. His body seemed distant, frozen in place by one thought, as he watched the mouth dip into the neck of a quaking, dying human, whose scream resounded above the din of a thousand of the violently murdered, cannibalized victims of an undead epidemic.

  The roar of the plane’s engines filled his ears, while his chilled bloodstream locked him in place, and one thought repeated itself over and over again.

  Hell is real. Hell is real.

  Beanie, the poor fucker, was dead. All the hours they spent contemplating the ruination of the world—hatred manipulating every waking moment, every thought, until they became immune to happiness and pleasure—had lead to this moment.

  Jack scrambled over a mound of blood-slick bodies that were still twitching, maybe still alive or dead or undead—whatever the fuck—the bodies were under his feet and he could taste blood on his lips and smell barbecue sauce and burning meat broiling on a grill. Sweat droplets trickled into the collar of his shirt. Logic had died with the human race and there was nothing else, save the instinct to survive the inferno. The bat was still in one of his hands and he stumbled and struggled, crawling over the misshaped forms of bullet-ridden, chewed corpses (and he dared not look, dared not, never, though his peripheral vision caught glimpses of shiny shapes that could only be misplaced organs or limbs).

  Jack be nimble, Jack be quick…

  Lyrics to a thousand songs tumbled through the current of electrons that collided with emotion and instinct, as bullets sang over his head. He wanted the plane; he needed it to survive the battle, and he wanted to be on it, away from his brother’s mad plan and the utter massacre of their lyrics, their music, and their lives.

  He was going to make it. The plane rotated slowly; a path opened up on the runway, and these three, long minutes were going to conclude with salvation.

  Jack be nimble… Jack be… Jack be…

  “Help, please. God… I… please…”

  A voice choked helplessly through the aural chaos, and Jack paused then, and knew, deep down, that he was never getting on that plane. The soldiers were firing upon the crowd to clear a path so they could escape with their lives, not to rescue the refugees of a slaughtered city.

  Her face was caked with dried blood that could have been red marker, and her yellow teeth were molded into a perpetual grimace as she lay beneath three bodies. Tendrils of curled, black hair, framed her brown face, and Jack hesitated.

  Fingertips clutched at sweaty folds of fabric that clung to his back. Nails raked across his flesh, as the searing fire of fresh pain stretched through the horizontal lines that were carved into his backside. On his hands and knees, he struggled to rip himself away from hands that were everywhere at once. He thought he heard the woman scream.

  Blam! Blam!

  Gunshots, and the hands on his back released him. He glanced over his shoulder, and his first thought was that he’d been reduced to the state of a crawling, weak little dog; Jerry would be pissed if he saw him, now.

  Standing over him was a bad representation of a rough-and-tumble cowboy. Covered in blood and sweat, the gruff, black-bearded movie-castaway held a smoking revolver in each fist. Weathered brown cowboy boots that had seen dust and years were covered in crusty blood. He holstered one of the revolvers and reached for Jack with a workingman’s calloused hand. Jack was helped to his feet.

  “The hangar,” the cowboy said, his breath saturated with whiskey. With bloodshot eyes, he nodded his head to a large building across the base.

  The crowd had begun to fill the back of the plane; the ramp was a cluster of gory bodies that pushed each other forward, a rushing tide of dead that chased the living straight into the heart of the troop plane. The soldiers had disappeared within the crowd.

  The hangar was untouched by flame; everyone’s attention had been riveted on the plane. Jack leapt over fallen bodies, and he thought he could hear the woman still calling out for him, her voice choking from fear and pain.

  “Run!” voices shouted. “The hangar! Run for the hangar!”

  Jack be nimble…

  Footsteps beat the cement as survivors emerged out of the chaos and chased down the idea of sanctuary. Several people raced ahead of Jack. He lost sight of the cowboy.

  A massive set of doors enclosed the hangar.

  ***

  The screams wouldn’t stop.

  If Jerry was still alive out there, Jack didn’t want to see him. Not ever again. He let his brother down for all time. Jack was the screw-up. The fat piece of shit who ruined everything. The bumbler. The fumbler.

  Sweat and farts, tears and vomit. Sobbing parents and wailing children. The hangar was crowded with blood-spattered refugees who thought the army would be able to save them. You couldn’t take two steps without stepping on someone.

  A four-engine refueling plane sat in the hangar with a set of metal stairs leading upward to its sealed entryway. The survivors clustered beneath the plane’s monolithic wings.

  The old dude in the cowboy-getup chewed on a toothpick. Jack knew there was no way they could survive in here for long. Food, water, bowel movements… how long would it take before they had to get the hell out?

  His hands trembled, and a part of him wanted to break down and cry with everyone else. The adrenaline crashed through his system; he was sober now, and clear-headed. The coppery blood-smell saturated his clothes like a no-name cologne, thick and headache-inducing. To think, he was out there having a good ol’ time, like it was nothing more than a video game. Beanie with his stupid katana; he was treated like a pizza, his flesh ripped away like cheese, revealing thick layers of sauce. Jack had marveled at the fire; with music thumping and marijuana warming his head, Selfridge seemed like a damn good idea.

  Now, not so much.

  The homeless-looking cowboy saved his life. Why? With so much carnage and bloodshed, why did that man stop to save a stranger?

  Survivors coughed, retched, and argued.

  Jack didn’t know the right thing to say to the cowboy. How many times had someone done anything for him? This man prevented him from filling the stomachs of dead people who hated him when they were alive. The same people who punched him in the stomach in elementary school, and stole his lunches because he couldn’t possibly be hungry—he was already fat. Fat and stupid. Jerry punished the trespassers. Jerry was the judge and executioner, and he might be dead now.

  “Time to get them back for everything they’ve done to you. To us. Let’s kill all these mutherfuckers and we’ll bring our music to the halls of Valhalla.”‘

  “Hey,” Jack said to the cowboy, who didn’t look at him. “Thanks.” He looked around awkwardly when his savior still didn’t look up.

  “Some of th
ese people are bit,” the cowboy said while staring into nothing.

  “I’m Jack.”

  Nothing.

  “What should we do?” Jack tried.

  “Watch,” the cowboy said. “You’ll see.”

  Jack didn’t want to look at the crowd; when others were sad around him, he felt embarrassed and awkward, because he didn’t know what to say or do. It was easier to stare at the floor, even when he was on stage performing with the band; he could get in a zone behind his drum kit, surrounded by sound and rhythm.

  “Hope you got your running shoes on,” the cowboy said.

  “I don’t even get what happened,” Jack said. “It just fell apart. The army should have this shit under control, you know? How’d this happen?”

  “You’re about to find out.”

  A heated argument near the front of the hangar caused several people to rise. A hush fell over the crowd as everyone watched.

  “We don’t know that!” a middle-aged man wearing a shirt and tie stood in front of a weeping woman. “Leave us alone! Just back off!”

  “She’ll turn!” an aggressive voice shouted back from the crowd. “We can’t let that happen. It’s better to take care of it now!”

  “It’s my wife. Please, just back off!”

  Others joined the debate. “It’s not your decision to make, man! You couldn’t do it if someone you loved were bit.”

  “Who’s gonna do it? Who can kill this woman? We’re not a bunch of animals…”

  “If she becomes one of them things, we’re all fucked…”

  “You do what’s best for everyone. Get out of the way!”

  “Who’s gonna do it?”

  “My wife! You can’t! Let us leave! We’ll just go…”

  “Not in front of the children!”

  “They’ve seen enough. We’ve all seen enough.”

  “We’re gonna have fun with her first. Get outta the way!”

  Jack was crushed in a vise of humanity, as he rubbed elbows and shared sweat with a fearful mass of flesh. He found the cowboy and pushed people aside to stand beside him.

  “I can’t see anything,” Jack said. “What’s happening?”

  “Nothing,” the cowboy said.

  A scream caused the entire mob to surge forward toward the fight. The cowboy wrenched Jack aside before he could lose his balance and tumble headlong through the wave of chaos.

  “This is the way it is,” the cowboy said. “You gotta ask yourself: do I care enough to save them from themselves? Is there something worth saving? You decide, big guy.”

  “What?”

  “Decide,” the cowboy repeated, “should they be saved?”

  Jack shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”

  “We’ve got seconds left. Seconds. Save them or watch them die.”

  When he ended up one breath away from his own doom, he had looked up to find a hand stretched out for him. A hand he’d been waiting for all his life. The hand that should’ve been Jerry’s. What did the cowboy want? Why would he leave this decision up to him? All along, it had always been Jerry, the brother he feared, the brother he never wanted to disappoint. His paragon of power might be dead, and there were only seconds… seconds…

  “Help them!” Jack said.

  The cowboy pushed through the crowd. Jack felt as if a terrible burden had been lifted from his shoulders. He had to look out for himself because nobody was alive who gave a damn about him or even knew his name. Should he be sad about his brother’s death? He wasn’t sure he knew what to feel, or how. Nothing made sense anymore.

  A gunshot jarred everyone into a shocked silence.

  “Forget everything you ever knew about living, if you still want to breathe.”

  It was the cowboy. He alone spoke, and as the crowd shifted, spaces cleared between shoulders. With a revolver in his fist, the grimy cowboy with the scarf around his neck and spurs on his tired boots stood in the center.

  “There is no law save the one we make for ourselves,” the cowboy announced. “We must assume there will be no more help, or hope. The gun in my hand is the only law that matters. It’s the only rule that applies. You saw what it did out there, and you see that it nearly killed everyone in here. Look around you: everyone you see is still alive. We’re not the things out there, but we can become them. Or maybe we already are those things. Sure seemed like it a second ago. Do you think it matters anymore how this started? What’re we gonna do about it? Shit, that’s what. They bite us and we become them. Someone has to stand up and make the bad decisions if we’re going to continue. Someone has to be the bad guy. If we don’t want to be any kind of group, then we might as well go back outside. If we kill each other in here or out there, it makes no difference.”

  Someone piped up, “We can do this. We can work together. We come up with some plans, maybe cast a vote…”

  The cowboy chuckled. “Democracy, huh? You think that gets shit done? Those things will be crashing through the doors while we’re sitting around debating. You wanna talk it out? Think it over?”

  “So what do we do?” someone asked. “We just let you run the show? We don’t know you. Nobody in here… I mean… look around… we don’t know each other.”

  “I don’t have your answers,” the cowboy said. “I ain’t leading this horse and pony show. You’re the ones who got the answers. If someone takes the lead, it won’t be pretty. People will hate, and plot. People will think they can do better. We all got a chance at power, a room full of leaders and people who know right from wrong, people who know they’re always right. One group? Smaller groups? Maybe we walk outside and find out.”

  A long period of awkward silence followed. There were scattered coughs and long stares. Somewhere in the hangar, a man wept.

  “You killed that poor woman,” someone said.

  “Everybody knows what’s right,” the cowboy repeated. “I don’t know a damn thing.”

  The cowboy stepped out of the center and the crowd parted for him to return to his isolation. He leaned against the wall and holstered his revolver. With his arms crossed, he twirled the toothpick between his teeth while murmurs in the hangar reverberated in that confined space.

  Jack didn’t know what to think. Once again, he realized he was standing against the wall in gym class, waiting for that moment when he would be the last one picked to play, or maybe not picked at all.

  “Who are you?”

  They waited for the cowboy to answer while he twisted the toothpick between his teeth.

  “Clint. Eastwood.”

  MINA

  The first order of business of the day was Jim’s experiment. Mina was amazed at his intellect, and there was a part of her that wished she could be as smart as he was.

  Jim didn’t share the plan with her; she was supposed to hide and wait while he gathered materials for his “special project”. This involved sitting behind a car while Jim tinkered around in an electronics store. She sat beneath tree branches that reached over the avenue, casting shadows that swayed through the slow wind. If it weren’t for the occasional scream drifting into the street, it would have been just another lazy summer afternoon, with the empty serenity of a Sunday in which everyone stayed indoors with their air conditioning cranked up. The street smelled like barbecue and diarrhea.

  She already discarded the zombie-priest she had tied to her waist after leaving the church. He was getting a bit heavy.

  The epidemic had extended beyond the borders of Detroit; she was sitting in the middle of Gratiot, a main street running through the city that connected several cities in Macomb County. This section of the street near Detroit was separated in half by an island down the middle for traffic moving east or west along the corridor.

  For as many abandoned cars that burned or had crashed into others, there weren’t many corpses walking around. It seemed as if everyone had quit the apocalypse; they fled into their homes and locked their doors, abandoning the streets to the violence of the h
ungry dead and the rioters. The barricade set up along the East Pointe-Detroit border had only been three cop cars, and the former policemen were still walking around the position they once defended, staring up at the sky with glassy eyes.

  The suburban streets and all the other main roads that connected to Gratiot didn’t have the benefit of a police barricade. Detroit’s scant resources had been over-extended in vain. The county’s cash-strapped force had been thrown into the meat-grinder for nothing.

  Her mind was running amok. Her thoughts didn’t feel as though they belonged to her.

  More than twenty-four hours passed since the last time she took medication.

  Her stomach rumbled. It was time to eat.

  A long shadow blotted out the sun, and Mina’s heart skipped a beat.

  Attired in his bloody priest attire, Jim stood with the shotgun he’d stolen from a dying soldier and a plastic bag in the other hand.

  “There was somebody hiding out in there,” Jim said. “Sorry for the delay. I left them inside with their kneecaps shattered. I was thinking of you. You must be hungry.”

  “I’m not so sure.” Mina shook her head. “I wanted to be with Patrick. We were supposed to be together. I just left him, and I don’t know why. You’ve been so nice to me and I’ve had fun. After everything I told you, I don’t understand what’s going on… I caused it all. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I didn’t want Jake to die, although I always wanted to eat him.”

  Jim knelt beside her. His square-jawed, all-American look could have been the plaster face of a mannequin in a preppy-clothes mall store. There wasn’t a mark on his face, and his eyes were always halfway between thoughtfulness and daydreaming, as if each object he looked upon was worthy of philosophical inquiry. A strand of brown hair that was combed neatly over the side of his head slipped over one of his eyes, and he smiled.

  “Dearest Mina.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve inspired me. You’re my muse. Without you, killing people isn’t as fun, and neither are the zombies. There’s a link between what you’ve experienced, and what I’ve seen in Egypt. It’s not completely your fault. You can’t help what you are.”