Free The Queen of the Dead by Vincenzo Bilof

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