The Queen of the Dead Read online

  “Jerome was a nice guy,” Mina said. “Is he dead? What about Derek, or Vincent? Shanna?”

  She peered into his face, and his gaze interlocked with hers.

  “You don’t really care,” Jim said. “You feel nothing.”

  “That’s not true. I mean, partly it is. I know I’m supposed to feel something, or worry about them just a little. My doctor always asks me how I feel about things, like the people I’ve eaten, and I know that I’m different than everybody else.”

  “I think your doctor might be dead, too,” Jim said.

  “Maybe, um, I don’t know. He might be. Patrick didn’t listen to me, and now all these people are dead. I don’t want to be eaten. Patrick would have protected me, and you promised you would protect me, but I should just die. I’m not a good person.”

  “Most of these things are true. I forgive you for not understanding the majesty of what we’ve accomplished together, what we’ve seen.” He stood up and gestured at the scattered corpses that were attentive to Jim’s preaching. “These people made you. You’re a product of their world. Your father, Patrick, all the doctors who’ve worked on you—they’re the ones responsible for this. They created your nightmares. They created this nightmare. A society that wallows in such violence devours itself, and here is the proof. We can help them, Mina. By destroying all of them, we can save this race from itself.”

  Mina shook her head. “I don’t see how that helps anything.”

  “That’s what we’ll figure out,” Jim lifted the plastic bag for her to see. “I have video equipment and batteries. I’d like to test a theory.”

  “I think maybe I should look for Patrick by myself. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “You’ve become a party-pooper,” Jim lifted her up by the elbow. “These clothes we’re wearing are like camouflage; everyone trusts a priest and a nun, especially now. We’ll find you some drugs, and once you’ve eaten, you’ll feel a lot better about things.”

  She allowed Jim to grab her hand and lead her through the maze of cars. She considered asking him about the people whose kneecaps he shattered for her sake.

  ***

  Drowsiness broke her perception into prismatic shapes. There was still looting, and a group of young men accosted Jim because they wanted to rape her, even though she would have let them. Jim smashed their throats with punches and left them to rot in the sun; they were nothing more than a nuisance to him, as were the few zombies that stood in their path.

  Jim let Mina hold the weapon and the video equipment while he dealt death to those who wanted to take from them. Killing in such a way gave him no pleasure.

  They walked down zombie-congested streets, but there were still hardly enough to account for the entire populace. There were entire blocks untouched by fire—streets that yielded nothing more than graveyard silence. It was as if there were people who didn’t know the apocalypse had come, or they refused to participate in the world’s conclusion.

  But it wasn’t over. It wasn’t over until Jim had his way.

  They tried a Rite Aid and a Walgreen’s. Both drugstores had been looted. Jim remarked that even the coloring books had been taken.

  Stomach rumbling, headache imminent.

  Strands of red hair hung in front of her green eyes, damp with sweat. There were people who called out from windows and from rooftops. “It’s safe here!” they begged. Apparently, the Catholic attire attracted attention. Everyone wanted to be saved, even if they drew attention to themselves. As survivors called out, walking corpses were diverted and converged upon the noise.

  There was blood on the pavement but there were no bodies.

  Once in a while, a car barreled down one of the streets. Each avenue became like the other. The birds in the sky floated lazily while the human race sorted out its problem below. The sun baked the concrete and waves of heat shimmered in the air. At one point, Jim dumped lukewarm water over her head and handed her a plastic bottle filled with it. She was more delusional without her meds, and the heat, along with the headache, added to her discomfort.

  Patrick came for her. Patrick wanted her, and she left him there, maybe to die. And she felt nothing.

  A tiny shape darted through the street. Maybe it was Shanna. Or maybe it was a dog.

  Smoke, the breath of dying structures, replaced the clouds.

  She collapsed once, or thought she did.

  Leave me here, she wanted to say. Let them have me, at last. Maybe if I die, it will all be over. Maybe they all die with me. This could all be a hallucination, you know. I know what their teeth feel like, and their hands, so one more time won’t make a difference.

  She heard Patrick’s voice.

  I want you, Mina. Like I’ve never wanted anything else before.

  Her voice responded. But you had a wife, and two kids. Didn’t you love them, or want them? What about your career?

  Those were things I thought I wanted. I needed them more than I wanted them. People accepted me and I could do my job.

  Mina wanted to touch him. Do you know who the real Patrick is?

  You’ve shown me.

  She was a killer and a freak show. Jim wanted her to believe differently. He knew everything, and nothing could destroy him. She knew nothing about him, yet she followed him down these streets as she inhaled sulfur and ash. The smell of burning rubber on sun-soaked asphalt, glass shattering, gunfire rattling in the distance and stopping abruptly.

  Blinking in and out, fading as the headache throbbed. If she fell asleep without eating, without taking her meds, she was going to feel them. They waited for her in the realm of sleep. Let them take her now and let the torment end.

  A woman with a bloody face knelt at Jim’s feet and prayed to him. Weeping hysterically, she reached for his hands and begged him to bless her. Jim smiled and knelt beside her. He took her hands into his.

  Seconds stretched into somewhere. Smoke blackened the sky.

  Jim was gone. The stores and the cars, the pleading survivors, the sun, the birds—everything faded into a wall of gray storm clouds.

  The headache subsided, and her sticky, oppressive clothes disappeared. She stood nude and pale, shivering in the dark.

  Waiting for them.

  Worms and maggots crawled within their eye sockets. Rotted black flesh remained in patches along ancient bones. There were no eyes in their skulls. There were no tongues in their mouths. They crawled without legs, their necks craning up to look upon her. They encircled her, their number, legion; their desire for her flesh, unquenchable.

  Mina closed her eyes and let their long fingernails crawl along her flesh. She heard the flies buzzing over their decrepit bodies, and she could smell the rot and the leaking pus. Creeping insects scuttled up her bare legs and around the curves of her thighs. Fingertips traced the edges of her hipbones, teasing her with the idea of death. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for them. Their bones snapped and popped as they gathered around her.

  Pressure in both her shoulders caused her eyes to flutter open. Blood trickled out from beneath razor-sharp nails that dug deeper. She refused to scream. She opened her mouth to breathe. Heat flared up one of her arms, followed by the intense pain that accompanies the removal of an entire layer of skin. Her shoulders were undressed of their flesh by hands that knew better. Cold, shriveled lips clamped onto her throat…

  ***

  When she awoke, her first thought was that she was floating on a sea of her blood. Instead, she was staring up at a white ceiling, and she was lying in damp sheets. She wore only a white gown that was unbuttoned, and a pair of white panties that didn’t belong to her. Sweat shone upon her thighs. She brushed a lock of red hair from her eye and saw Jim standing shirtless near a window, his lean, muscular body a mural of scars. He wore black pants, and his fingers were parting the blinds.

  “I need you,” Jim said. “The men who want me think I’m the key to it all. But I’ve always wanted to be with you, to know you, to understand the wonder that is your
mind.”

  Meek whimpering fired her synapses into cognition; she knew what she would find behind her on the other side of the bed. Deep down, she knew what Jim had planned with the video equipment.

  A depressing thought occurred to her: Jim was boring.

  They were in a stranger’s house, and The Artist already had the video camera sitting up on a tripod. In one of his hands, he held a pair of sound-out headphones. He wasn’t taking any chances.

  Her flesh sticky with sweat, she sat up in the humid room. Mina had no intention of looking at the proposed victim. She fixated on Jim.

  “You want me to explain myself?” Jim’s cold gaze settled on her.

  “For once.” Mina swallowed. She wasn’t afraid of him, but she would suffer extreme withdrawal symptoms soon, like Jerome back in the church.

  Her world at Eloise Fields was one of surety, a place of comfortable routine: Jake Wells would visit and she would talk to him about his girlfriend and his college studies, while passing on compliments from the mysterious serial killer named The Artist. She would take just enough meds to dull the pain she felt in her nightmares; she would observe the undead ripping her to pieces, but she wouldn’t experience the pain. Now, those meds were gone.

  “I listened to you cry out in pain while I sat in my cell,” he said. “I have wandered cold wastelands and scorching deserts. I have killed people in every corner of the world for the United States Government. I killed because they let me, and because I’ve always been good at it. There was no other reason. I took no pleasure in the quality of my work. No pride. For most of my life, vanity has eluded me.”

  Mina looked upon an older man whose beard was more white than black, the curls from his unkempt beard like frayed wires, his bright eyes focusing on her as if he could will her to release him from the rope around his wrists, and the duct tape on his mouth. She felt nothing for him.

  “What shall I reveal about myself, and what shall I keep?” Jim asked nobody, clenching his fist tightly over the band in the middle of the headset that separated the earpieces. “What purpose does it serve to tell you, to confess, to confide? Will it change us?”

  Mina felt the need to cover herself with the gown, but didn’t move. She felt exposed, and her navel was cold. Her thin body had already been seen by Jim; he obviously dressed her, and there was the incident with Jerome. Why was she self-conscious? Where did these grasps at human “normality” come from?

  He shook his head. “It’s useless. When I understood, for the first time, that my life was empty—that I was nothing more than a machine programmed by the system to do its bidding—then I saw mankind’s destiny. An eternal Golgotha, hills and valleys filled with skulls. I fell in love with it. The idea that everything we build, every monument, every success, is ultimately destined for the wasteland… I was inspired. But my tale is long, and my philosophy is one of aesthetics; my dream is the dream that a writer or a painter bleeds when they work. I dream of the ultimate masterpiece. I found you, Mina, at Eloise Fields. I read your file. I know you, and I know what they’ve been doing to you. They’ve been doing it to you since you killed your father. How old do you think you are?”

  She opened her palms and stared hard at the lines etched into her skin.

  Jim continued, “You told me you lived off the streets, but do you remember how old you were when you had Daddy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”

  Mina wanted to talk, and the words she managed to mumble hardly represented the turmoil within her confused mind. “I wanted Patrick. He cared for me and wanted the best for me. I didn’t know what it meant to him. I was afraid of myself, but he didn’t understand and I hurt him. Betrayed him.”

  “You’re suffering from a bout of clarity,” Jim said.

  “The dreams will never go away,” she said. “I should be dead. You should kill me.”

  “Are the dreams a product of your madness, or is your madness a result of the dreams? The question is simple, but you don’t have the answer. How does your hunger drive the nightmares away? Does your psychosis affect the way your body operates, the way it digests food? How do you feel pain while you’re asleep? The doctors at Eloise Fields had many of these answers before they found you.”

  Mina’s hands shook. Everything was wrong. She had never wanted to question these things–she assumed that she was fucked up because she deserved it. Daddy told her she deserved everything bad that came her way. When he put on the zombie mask and unbuckled his belt, she would watch his fingers slide the zipper down while he breathed behind the rubber face. She let him do it because she killed Mommy by being born. It was all her fault.

  “This was inevitable,” Jim continued. “Death is man’s destiny. It is the ascension from chaos into stasis. The evolution of life is the termination point. To quote Macbeth in the Shakespearean play of the same name, it is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Art gives meaning to life. It serves as the ultimate expression of sensation and the subconscious, of desire and madness, damnation and suffering.”

  “I don’t want you to talk no more,” Mina said. “I don’t want your truth. You’re in love with yourself, just like any other killer. Go away.”

  Jim stared at her. Mina could smell piss and body odor, and she wasn’t sure if it was her, or the man beside her. Her nipples rubbed against the fabric of the sweat-soaked gown, and she wrapped a curly tendril of red hair around her forefinger. She’d been in this position before, prostrate before a man who stalked the side of the bed, his hungry glare scanning every inch of her exposed flesh.

  “This is what you wanted all along,” Mina added. “You wanted the video. You played with Jerome and all the others to make me happy, and you did some of it out of boredom. You kept me from Patrick so you could have this.”

  With his fists clenched to reveal the veins and tendons of his arms, a beam of pale light slanting in through the blinds shaded half of him in darkness, the other in gold. His eyes were invisible in the stuffy room.

  “You’re a poet,” he whispered. “If I knew what love was, I would experience it with you.”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter if I want to or not,” Mina said.

  “Correct.”

  He placed the headphones over his ears and returned to the foot of the bed. “We’ll do it my way. No need for you to strain yourself. Just lie there and do as you’re told, little girl.”

  She shuddered when she heard him speak her father’s words.

  Jim turned on the camera and placed it on the dresser. “I have to teach you a lesson,” he said. “You’re a murdering little bitch. You killed your mother. She was so innocent and beautiful. She gave her life for you, and I want you to show how grateful you are to be alive!” He roared with her father’s voice, plucked from the files he knew all too well.

  She cringed, put her fingers into her mouth, and sucked on them. She knew what Daddy wanted. He was vicious, but he meant well. He would play nice with her if she showed him how much she loved him, how much she appreciated the care he gave her, the food he put on the table for them to eat. She knew how to love him.

  Her fingers slipped down to her hips.

  “Look into the camera, silly girl,” Daddy said. “Keep your eyes on the camera. You don’t want to upset Daddy, do you?”

  “No, no, I don’t want to upset Daddy.”

  She could only hope that he heard her through the headphones.

  He produced a large, serrated kitchen knife, and Mina realized Daddy wanted to be a little dangerous. She had felt the cold edge of the weapon against her throat before; he would make her beg for death.

  The knife was used to cut into the fleshy thigh of the man beside her.

  “Don’t worry,” Daddy said. “He’s a paraplegic. Poor man’s been hiding out here just waiting to die, and you’re going to help him, my silly girl. Keep your eyes on the camera. Don’t close them or I’ll show you what the monsters do. You don’t want that, do you?”

  “Don’t let the monsters come out, Da
ddy.”

  She could hear the knife grinding through flesh and the man’s violent scream through the duct tape.

  “I’m not hurting him,” Daddy said. “There were some drugs I found at the drug store that prove… quite useful. He will live for a while, but I want to get the most for my money. Besides, he won’t need his legs for anything.”

  When the sticky blood splashed over her face, she opened her mouth to let more of it in. She tasted it on her lips and tongue, and her body trembled. She closed her eyes, and then remembered what Daddy had said. She should know better than to disobey him. After wiping blood out of her eyes, she refocused on the camera.

  “Be a good little girl and eat the food I give you,” Daddy said. “I work hard to provide for you. Show me how grateful you are.”

  With eager hands, she reached up for the meaty leg. When she took a bite and allowed the warm blood to fill the back of her throat, she thought about Jerome and the pure relief he would have felt when he had his fix.

  A long time ago, Patrick had asked her if human flesh tasted like chicken.

  The gown was painted in red gore as more blood rained upon the bed. She held the leg with one hand and buried her face into her meal. With her free hand, she waved it through a puddle of blood as if she were swimming.

  “Eyes on the camera!”

  Daddy was still cutting; tears streamed along the victim’s cheeks. Mina chewed on tender flesh, thankful for the opportunity, pleased at how much Daddy was willing to care for her and see to all her needs.

  Ecstasy washed over her, a shower of gore that was endless. She met the camera lens, and when the ringing in her ears commenced, she remembered everything. The fateful day she betrayed Patrick and they were ripped from each other forever.

  Gravity failed and she slipped backward into freefall. Time and motion were stranded on the shores of reality as the presence invaded her mind again.

  Yes. You have been delivered to us. Your soul belongs to us. We are everywhere, in the flesh and the sin. The rancor and the lust. The disease and the cure. Through the lens of the unreal, the real is connected. Your nightmare is our fantasy.