quickly in her mercenary experiences, and this experience diluted her senses, her thoughts.
One poster featured Kurt Cobain sitting on a stool wearing ripped up jeans, hair over his eyes. How normal. How simple. How easy it was to understand this girl. She obeyed the designs of an archetype. Another poster was David Bowie, the Thin White Duke in his 8o’s mode. Bowie wore his thin suit, his torso like a perfect triangle tucked into fabric, his blond hair like a fire brushing against an evening sky, or in this case, a stage. He was on a stage, singing into the microphone, leaning forward into the camera lens.
“Perhaps I have not made myself clear,” David Bowie said. His mouth did not move, but it was Bowie’s voice speaking to her from the poster. “Perhaps you shall consider my insatiable lust for genocide something archaic, something spoken in Latin or broken into Homeric verse. Ah yes, demons are old things, ancient things, speaking dead languages. We have not evolved. Evil has not evolved. I am not evil. I’m nothing more than a spirit who thinks we have something in common. We both want to kill everyone. I think that’s a special bond. I’ve replaced Mina. Used her up. But I still need her body. And let me speak from a more contemporary perspective: I will degrade you, spit on you, urinate on you, torture you, speak to you in the accent of a Spaniard roasting alive on a stake during the Inquisition. I will be whatever I choose to hurt you, over and over again, but I don’t have to do much. You see, you are used to hurting yourself. Your soul is already ruined. I don’t have to do anything but sit here and enjoy the show. I will be whatever I need to be. You are mine, and I shall eat the living with Mina’s nightmare.”
Falling again. David Bowie had talked to her. None of it made sense. None of it was in the least bit horrifying because it was too absurd. Yet, she was going through these delusions, suffering them uncontrollably.
Another delusion. She was in front of a window that looked into a church. She watched a man walking between rows of polished mahogany pews. Candlelight shades of light crumbling shadows against sharp walls. Father Joe limping, muttering to himself in Spanish. Father Joe, the emotionally unstable priest who had saved her life, carrying her through a crowd of zombies.
There was something wrong, and she could feel it. No. She could smell it. His presence was like a bright beacon floating at the edge of a calm oceanic horizon, and his scent was forever, like the ocean’s salty smell. The ocean didn’t smell salty, did it?
Father Joe was hurt, and she could hear a thousand more thoughts, a thousand more voices. Screaming voices. Hurt voices. Tear-choked voices. Children. The elderly. Infants. Everybody. Everybody at once. Everyone who had ever lived. Everyone who had died. Everyone who had been killed by Mina’s nightmare-epidemic.
Show Father Joe how much you miss him.
Rose didn’t know who said it, but the voice was louder than the rest.
Inside of her, somewhere, an ocean moved.
FATHER JOE
Always the best part of his day, out here in the quiet. The garbage hole was a few yards behind him, and he liked to sit on its edge and look down into the community’s waste pile. He liked to watch the twitching corpses that he had thrown down there when he was done with them.
When he was done with them.
Father Joe had removed his cassock and stood among the freeway’s ruined vehicles with his muscle-tight body. He climbed onto the roof of a car and surveyed the area.
There. Just one of them.
He rubbed his thick beard. How long since his last shower? Everyone alive stank. If someone was clean they would obviously come from somewhere else, which happened once or twice. They walked down the street like tourists, and there was the possibility that maybe one or two of the zombies that had walked into the neighborhood were actually living people.
Which only meant
One poster featured Kurt Cobain sitting on a stool wearing ripped up jeans, hair over his eyes. How normal. How simple. How easy it was to understand this girl. She obeyed the designs of an archetype. Another poster was David Bowie, the Thin White Duke in his 8o’s mode. Bowie wore his thin suit, his torso like a perfect triangle tucked into fabric, his blond hair like a fire brushing against an evening sky, or in this case, a stage. He was on a stage, singing into the microphone, leaning forward into the camera lens.
“Perhaps I have not made myself clear,” David Bowie said. His mouth did not move, but it was Bowie’s voice speaking to her from the poster. “Perhaps you shall consider my insatiable lust for genocide something archaic, something spoken in Latin or broken into Homeric verse. Ah yes, demons are old things, ancient things, speaking dead languages. We have not evolved. Evil has not evolved. I am not evil. I’m nothing more than a spirit who thinks we have something in common. We both want to kill everyone. I think that’s a special bond. I’ve replaced Mina. Used her up. But I still need her body. And let me speak from a more contemporary perspective: I will degrade you, spit on you, urinate on you, torture you, speak to you in the accent of a Spaniard roasting alive on a stake during the Inquisition. I will be whatever I choose to hurt you, over and over again, but I don’t have to do much. You see, you are used to hurting yourself. Your soul is already ruined. I don’t have to do anything but sit here and enjoy the show. I will be whatever I need to be. You are mine, and I shall eat the living with Mina’s nightmare.”
Falling again. David Bowie had talked to her. None of it made sense. None of it was in the least bit horrifying because it was too absurd. Yet, she was going through these delusions, suffering them uncontrollably.
Another delusion. She was in front of a window that looked into a church. She watched a man walking between rows of polished mahogany pews. Candlelight shades of light crumbling shadows against sharp walls. Father Joe limping, muttering to himself in Spanish. Father Joe, the emotionally unstable priest who had saved her life, carrying her through a crowd of zombies.
There was something wrong, and she could feel it. No. She could smell it. His presence was like a bright beacon floating at the edge of a calm oceanic horizon, and his scent was forever, like the ocean’s salty smell. The ocean didn’t smell salty, did it?
Father Joe was hurt, and she could hear a thousand more thoughts, a thousand more voices. Screaming voices. Hurt voices. Tear-choked voices. Children. The elderly. Infants. Everybody. Everybody at once. Everyone who had ever lived. Everyone who had died. Everyone who had been killed by Mina’s nightmare-epidemic.
Show Father Joe how much you miss him.
Rose didn’t know who said it, but the voice was louder than the rest.
Inside of her, somewhere, an ocean moved.
FATHER JOE
Always the best part of his day, out here in the quiet. The garbage hole was a few yards behind him, and he liked to sit on its edge and look down into the community’s waste pile. He liked to watch the twitching corpses that he had thrown down there when he was done with them.
When he was done with them.
Father Joe had removed his cassock and stood among the freeway’s ruined vehicles with his muscle-tight body. He climbed onto the roof of a car and surveyed the area.
There. Just one of them.
He rubbed his thick beard. How long since his last shower? Everyone alive stank. If someone was clean they would obviously come from somewhere else, which happened once or twice. They walked down the street like tourists, and there was the possibility that maybe one or two of the zombies that had walked into the neighborhood were actually living people.
Which only meant
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