Is this what Thierry Mulch wanted?
Mulch had destroyed everything I loved, everything I believed in. He’d left me a dead, soulless man doomed to endless, meaningless movement. I started hoping that he or some anonymous street predator would appear in my path at last and blow my head off with a shotgun, or crush it with an axe.
In search of that kind of predator, I walked into the worst neighborhoods in DC, desperate for an end to my suffering. But street after street was empty. Everyone had gone inside.
Some internal guidance system brought me later to a known crack and meth house about twenty blocks from my home. I walked through the living dead in that place, seeing the open sores on their skin, the sunken eye sockets, and their rotten teeth, envying the way some of them were drifting on their drugs and others were so far gone that reality didn’t register at all.
One filthy woman who looked older than my grandmother but was probably a few years younger than Bree glanced up from her glass pipe when I stopped in front of her. Her nose was gushing. Her lips were split and bleeding.
“Whaddya want?” she demanded.
“I want to die,” I told her.
“Join the club, honey,” she replied, cackled, and went back to smoking her glass pipe.
“I have money,” I said to her and four or five other people who were lying around in their various stupors. “I want to die.”
Pulling a roll of bills out of my pocket, I held it up and asked, “Who’s brave enough to kill the zombie?”
Several people lying on a mattress stirred and came alert. One guy in a ratty T-shirt and grimy hair looked at the money hungrily. “How much?”
“All of it,” I said dully.
I heard a gravelly voice behind me say, “I’ll take that deal.”
Then I heard a faint whistle as something swung violently through the air before cracking against the back of my skull not far from where Carney had hit me. Everything exploded and I fell into the deepest darkness I’ve ever known.
Chapter
107
I wanted to stay there in that darkness, surrender to nothingness.
So there was no joy when I came to with a searing pain in my head and realized to my dismay that I was still alive. Lying in the filth in the crack house, suffering the second blow to my head in several days, I felt the room swirl like a ship in a whirlpool as I begged God to end the pain, to take me back down into that blackness that had been such a relief.
Opening my eyes, I had trouble focusing for several long minutes. Everything just kept blipping and slipping by me like one of those filmstrips we used to watch in elementary school. When I finally was able to stop the room from spinning, I thought it was empty except for that woman, who looked a hundred years old. She was passed out a few feet from me, twitching, drooling, but still clutching her pipe and butane lighter.
Reaching around the back of my head, I felt coagulating blood and a nasty knot where I’d been hit. The money was gone. So were my shoes. But my wallet
and badge had been placed neatly beside me.
Getting to my hands and knees, I felt woozy, sick, and the room reeled like a kite in a gale. I fell back on my side, fighting off the urge to puke.
“Why do you want to die, Alex?” a voice asked.
I knew that voice, though I couldn’t place it. My head felt ten times its size and pounded when I turned it toward a dark corner of the room, where a gaunt young woman with close-cropped bleached-blond hair, dark makeup, and several nose piercings was looking at me, a lit cigarette dangling from her lips.
For several confused seconds I had no idea who she was. Then she rolled her head at me as she exhaled her drag of smoke, and I knew her.
“Ava?” I grunted.
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “I’m Bee now, like the bug.”
“Bee,” I said, hanging my head and closing my eyes.
“You shouldn’t be in a place like this,” Ava said.
I opened my eyes, seeing two of her. “And you should?”