The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) (10 page)

It was never just pure melted ice. At that time she still had a few crackers left and a little meat and a package of mixed vegetables that she took from the freezer and let sit to thaw. The freezer had lost all its power long before, just like the rest of the house, but Jillybean kept it packed with ice or snow from the yard, though at that time, the freezer was almost all ice with very little food and the cabinet next to the oven where her mommy kept the cans properly faced and in alphabetized order was empty, save for the dust that always crept over everything.

She had eaten the last of the mustard the week before, holding the spoon before her with a shaking hand. When nothing but air came when she squeezed the bottle, she had taken a knife to it, cutting it down the middle, before licking its innards until the flavor was gone and only yellow plastic was left.

Then her mom had died.

Death held a particular fear for the little girl. In her extensive experience with death, it wasn’t as permanent as she wished. And it was evil. It made dead people evil. Her friend Becca was always very nice but then she had died and took to walking around the neighborhood wearing the same dress every day. Jillybean saw her eat a man. She had been with a bunch of other evil dead people and they had eaten a man who had been running down the road screaming like a girl. He screamed when Becca ate him, too.

That was why she was so afraid that week before her mommy died. Her mommy had lain in bed with her cheeks sunken and her skin like a layer of paint on her skeleton, especially around the deep, dark hollows of her eyes. Her lips were no longer full, but reed thin and always peeled back so that her teeth showed. With her gums receding, her teeth looked very long.

On the day her mommy died, Jillybean stood in the bedroom doorway just as she always did, watching to make sure that her mommy’s chest rose and fell, because that’s what meant being alive. Only, her chest didn’t move that day. For five long minutes, Jillybean stared. She stared and stared and didn’t notice the tears running down her face or the pain that grew inside of her until Ipes spoke from the crook of her arm.

The pain started as a noise in her mind. It was white noise that slowly deafened her with its silence, until it filled her head completely that she couldn’t bear it, and when she finally “broke,” she didn’t even notice.

Her mind broke from the fear. She had been, for some time, so dreadfully afraid that it couldn’t be put into words. Now, she was broken and she was alone. The little girl was alone in a way few people had ever known. Even prisoners locked away in solitary confinement saw their jailers at feeding times and they heard the whispers and moans of the other inmates, but Jillybean was utterly alone. She was alone in a dead house, on a dead street, in a dead neighborhood, in a city filled with dead neighborhoods.

Just then, standing in her mother’s doorway, she knew she would be alone forever. Alone, except for the undead. They would always be there outside her window, waiting to eat her.

Those were the last thoughts she had before she broke.

The pain and the sorrow and the damage of that break went unfelt and unremarked and the only sign of it was when the zebra in the little blue shirt with the words:
Too Cute!
on the front suddenly spoke:
Don’t be afraid to hug her. She’s still your mother and she would never hurt you. Even now
.

Jillybean heard and obeyed. She walked on spider-thin legs to the bed and performed her final duty. She cried at her mother’s passing and cried nearly ceaselessly during the days that followed. Having Ipes around made it tolerable and she grew and she healed but the scar of her break was ever on her mind. There had been no way to know how weak that scar actually was because she always had Ipes.

She had relied on him, even when she had Ram; and she had been smart to. As proof of her wisdom, the strong Ram had died and Ipes was still there. When Sarah had been murdered, putting her body in front of Jillybean, protecting her, Ipes was still there. And when Jillybean had shot the bounty hunter, and when she had blown up the bridge, and sunk the barge and the ferry boats, he was there.

Ipes was always supposed to be there, but then Ernest had pitched him into the river. Just like that, her friend was gone. In that moment, her mind cracked wide open and hate came pouring out in the form of Eve.

Gone was the kind and wise-cracking zebra. Gone was the part of her that kept the silence and the loneliness at bay. Gone was the part of her that taught her patience and respect and caution and love. In its place was this low creature that knew only want and lust and need and fury. It was everything Ipes wasn’t. And it was stronger than Ipes. It was stronger even than Jillybean, as it had just proved.

As Jillybean sobbed in Captain Grey’s chest, it was
She
who whispered into Jillybean’s ear:

YOU CAN’T TOUCH ME.

YOU CAN’T HURT ME.

YOU CAN ONLY SUBMIT AND

BECOME ME
.

Grey slept, if “slept” was indeed the proper verb for what consisted of little more than lying in a stuporous heat with his eyes mostly closed, with Jillybean just inches away.

He slept as he had in Iraq during those times when making it back to base wasn’t an option, and the desert, or the back streets of Fallujah was his nest for the night. He slept with a literal eye half-cracked and his mind in a state of “pause.”

When, at two in the morning, Jillybean suddenly stood up, moving with the grace and silence of a stalking jungle cat, Grey’s dark eyes opened a hair wider. He watched her as she stopped over Neil and stared down at him, a sneer on her face. Her eyes were pale zeros in the night, devoid of thought beyond the unpleasant. With a derisive snort at Neil, she left him and went to Sadie and snorted again. When the Goth girl rolled over, Grey saw that it was the baby who was being glared at.

This had Grey on edge, ready to leap up to protect the infant from the disturbed girl. There was no need. Jillybean blinked hard, shook her head once and then moved on, like the specter of death in a wrinkled yellow dress. Where her shadow, inky black, fell across the sleeping renegades, they stirred uneasily, something that seemed to please her and he saw her teeth gleam.

Grey watched her through slitted eyes as she moved about them, pausing over some, ignoring others. She stood a long time over the still form of Joe Gates and then she knelt. When she straightened, a line of silver in her hand caught the weak light in a brief flash.

She then crept to the doorway that led to the front where the now-dead postmen would receive mail and sell stamps and where the Christmas lines would snake and squiggle around the room, held in place by shabby velvet ropes.

The captain stood, following after the little girl, and she was clueless to his presence. She was a genius in her way, mostly on a physical level where she understood the workings and mechanics of both nature and man on a level few adults were cognizant of; however, she was still just a child and her hearing and vision weren’t anything but average, while Grey could be slick as oil when he wished. Soundlessly, he followed her through the front room and lurked in the deeper shadows as she went to the building’s front door, which was propped open by a brick.

Jillybean glanced out at the guard on duty. From his vantage, Grey couldn’t see who it was, but he knew nonetheless it was Veronica, one of the women from the Island. She had never shared her last name with Grey and he had never asked. This was true with most of the women, Deanna included. They acted as though, by being anonymous in this minor way, they could begin anew and that their pasts could be forgotten or ascribed to someone else. He was fine by that.

Grey watched the little girl for some time and, at first, he assumed that she was about to make an attempt at running away. It wouldn’t be difficult for someone as smart as Jillybean. Even in the daytime it wouldn’t be all that hard, but at night it would be a cinch to slip out into the shadows and disappear forever. However, she didn’t make the attempt. After what looked like a whispered conversation with herself that involved very little sound but much moving of lips and gesturing of her hands, she turned back the way she had come.

Instead of retreating further into the shadows, Grey stepped forward. To her, he must have appeared monstrous, dark and of course scary, and so, her reaction was amazing. She dropped into a crouch and within a blink she had the stolen knife out and held at the ready, looking like a trained knife fighter.

Impressed, Grey stepped forward slowly with his hand out. “I’ll take that.”

When she saw who it was, the signs of a quick mental calculation crossed her face and then she stepped back, putting her hand out to find the cracked door, just in case she wanted to run was his guess. “I don’t have to,” she said in a childish voice. Her voice was always childish in its way, young-sounding, but now it had a smarmy, know-it-all quality as well. “It’s my knife and I have the right to have it because...because of the monsters and such.”

“It’s not your knife,” he answered, easing forward. “We both know that you stole it from Joe Gates. Thievery is a crime, Jillybean. We don’t allow thieves in this group. Now, give it to me. I won’t ask again.”

More calculations made her eyes dart and her brow crinkle. Quickly, she came to realize that no amount of genius would allow her to keep the knife. “Ok, here.” The knife was out, extended. In the dark, it was pale, its edges blurry, its point
seemingly
dull. She stood relaxed and yet Grey had seen how fast she had stepped into a natural fighting stance. He didn’t and couldn’t trust her.

He had seen too many soldiers with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Most of these men had the form of PTSD called
Play The System Disorder
. It was the version which every serving soldier had seen a hundred times, but never talked about. This version involved a lifetime of receiving “disability” pay from the army for a diagnosis that couldn’t be seen, and as long as the money kept flowing, was practically impossible to cure. Grey was embarrassed to be associated with a person with that form of PTSD.

Then there was the true version, the very sad, real version. It was unpredictable and frequently led to deeper issues, although he had never heard of it deteriorating in the way it was happening to Jillybean.

There was definitely something more serious going on with her than PTSD, which usually presented with headaches, night terrors, depression and anxiety. Jillybean’s mental state was worlds beyond that. Before he had met Jillybean, he never believed for a second in multiple personalities. Truly, he thought it was all a load of psychiatric bullshit, but Ipes had been an eye-opener. The stuffed animal had been completely real in Jillybean’s mind. For her, it was a distinct and separate individual, complete with its own personality, its own manner of speaking, and in many cases, its own memories.

Having the stuffed animal speak through the little girl had been definitely strange to the arrow-straight and rational thinking army captain and at first he thought it had been nothing but a bid for attention, only the zebra and the little girl didn’t seem to care about attention. They cared and feared for their lives and the lives of their friends. That’s what had driven them to step boldly into one dangerous situation after another and, with each intense adult step, the damage to the little girl’s mind had grown.

Grey had worried over her, fretting that she was taking on more than she could handle. He had watched Neil drive her and, perhaps use her, especially when he became leader of the renegades. Neil was determined to see them safely through to Colorado, but at a cost that Grey didn’t agree with. These were adults relying on a seven-year-old who had already been through way more than any child should. It wasn’t right and, for his part, he wanted to keep her far away from the least hint of danger…unfortunately that would mean locking her away in a windowless room.

Even in Colorado, where the mountains held back the larger zombie hordes, there was still danger. Raiders were constantly nibbling on their borders and stray zombies made hunting as dangerous for the hunters as the deer they stalked. And then there was General Johnston’s insistence of carrying on a knightly and Christian image.

Grey agreed that if mankind had a chance of rising above anarchy and the inevitable return to the dark ages where might made right and evil flourished, then “goodness” had to triumph. For it to do so meant someone had to stand up to the worst of mankind, it meant fighting, it meant death.

It meant that Jillybean would always be one step from bloodshed but, if he could keep her that step away, Grey would do it. The Estes valley, thirty miles into the Colorado Rockies was the best chance she had. There was danger, yes, but there were also soft green fields she could run in, and icy cold lakes stocked with bass and rainbow trout where she could paddle little boats, and the air there was as clean as when God first breathed it onto the earth. She could fly a kite there and be nothing but a kid once more. There she could be happy. There she could grow and heal. There she could be whole in body and mind again.

But to get there they had nine hundred miles of danger to traverse, starting with the two feet that separated them and the six inches of razor-sharp metal at the end of her hand. Joe Gates was always sharpening his knife in an attempt to demonstrate to everyone that he wasn’t a boy, but rather he was
a man in training
.

Jillybean had an adverse effect on him. Here was a tiny, strip of a girl who could blow up bridges and boats, and break people out of jails and to whom everyone looked the second things got sticky. Yes, she was clearly crazy, but she was also a genius and dangerous. She was a powerful force, not just in the group, but to the peoples of New York, and New Eden, and to the River King, and if the people of the Azael weren’t careful, to them as well. Jillybean’s very presence had made Joe bold and reckless and yet these traits went mostly unrecognized because Jillybean was always center-stage.

Even there, in the dead of night, Jillybean held the group’s fate in her hand. Had Grey not been so vigilant, who knows where she would be now and what she would be doing? The knife had been stolen for a purpose. A gun could’ve been just as easily picked up, but guns were loud killers, while knives were quiet ones. Guns were for defense from the zombies or the wild men of the world, but a knife was for slitting throats in the dead of night or gutting a man in his sleep.

With the night throwing its dark arms over their shoulders, and wrapping them in shadow, the two stood closer than fencers. Grey could see her sizing him up, judging the distance between them, considering, perhaps, the ramifications of not handing him the knife but instead driving it into his guts and giving it a quick twist.

He saw her lethality, knowing that, had it been Neil standing here, she would have lunged into him, piercing his flesh with the metal thorn and laughing at him as his blood crowded out of him. Grey saw this, but stepped forward anyway; her crazy was no match for his size, speed and skill. She saw his eyes and the fact that he stood ready to snatch the knife. She was too smart to make the attempt and her hand opened so the blade sat on her palm.

Still, he didn’t trust her and took her wrist first.

“I was just borrowing it,” she lied, as he whipped the blade away out of sight. “I had to go to the bathroom and I don’t like the ones in here. They’re very, extra stinky. Even Jil…I mean everyone thinks so.”

“How about I escort you somewhere outside then? I’ll keep you safe.”

“Sure.” Her smile was another of her bad lies.

He led her to the front door and cleared his throat, so as not to startle Veronica. The woman jumped anyway. “You’re early Jos, but if…” She choked on her words as she saw Grey, but rallied with a smile. “Are you checking up on me or looking for an excuse to get me alone and chat me…” Again her words faltered. This time because she saw Jillybean. The girl might have been considered a good luck charm and a genius, but she was also strange and off-putting. When she looked at a person with her sharp eyes, few of the renegades could stand before her. They joked, when she wasn’t around, that it felt like they were bugs beneath an alien microscope when she looked at them. They felt naked and their secrets laid bare.

“She has to use the bathroom is all,” Grey said. “Is it clear?”

“It’s hard to tell. There’s a herd nearby,” she answered, keeping her voice low. “When I came on shift, William said a herd of zombies was moving through, but I don’t know. By the sounds of it, they stopped moving. Listen.” The three of them held their breath and the night became alive with sound: cicadas mostly, but there was also the distant moan of zombies as pervasive as the dark.

“Probably a mile off,” Grey said. “Anything closer?”

“A gang of them tromped right in front of me a half hour ago. They went that way.” She pointed across the highway where more derelict farmland sat. It was practically all they had seen during their long day of driving.

Grey thanked her and then he and Jillybean walked off in the opposite direction she had pointed. The little girl was uneasy with him so close and snuck her eyes up at him every few steps. He directed her to a field of winter wheat that had gone unharvested and was grown tall, but was now browned from the endless sun. “In there.” He gave her back a nudge and considered giving her a warning against running away but decided against it. She knew as well as he did they were in the middle of nowhere and that running meant death from starvation or thirst or the zombies.

At one point in the endless turnings that Brad had led them on, they crossed high over a wide, shit-brown river that had been chugged full of stiffs. There were more of them on either bank, thousands more, maybe even tens of thousands more. Brad had stopped the Toyota midway on the bridge, went to the edge and hooked a shoe on the lower bar of the guard railing. He had waved an arm in a grand gesture and said: “That’s why you hired me.
T
hat horde there is just a small one. Some go for miles in every direction. And look at that water. The waters are spoilt like that all over the prairie.”

It had been an impressive display of propaganda that had quieted some of the talk that had been going around during that long hot day.

It had been oppressively hot in the trucks, and the shut up post office had been little better, though it was as safe as Brad said it would be. Despite its supposed safety, Brad hadn’t slept there. He had claimed a need for gas and had driven off at sunset.