The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) (11 page)

Thankfully, it was cool under the stars. As he waited on Jillybean, Grey limboed a snap and crackle out of his back with the help of his knuckles and then stopped to listen. Sounds in the night carry easily through the dark. Far away the zombies moaned or growled and seemed nearer that they were. Closer at hand there was a whispered conversation in the dried-out wheat stalks where Jillybean had disappeared.

The little girl was quiet and he only caught segments of what was being said: “That’s not true…They’ll never know…Do you think they’ll blame….Oh, please…have jails, if everyone is good?”

Grey could make nothing from the snatches of words and he was just creeping forward so he could hear better, when Jillybean addressed him: “Mister Captain Grey, sir? Are all the people in Colorado good? Like you I mean?”

“Yes, for the most part,” he answered, hedging slightly. No group was comprised solely of good or bad people. There was always a mix of the ambitious, the driven, the greedy and the conniving, though in this case they were what he would call good. “Why do you ask? Are you worried about fitting in? Because you shouldn’t. You’re a good person. Deep down you are sweet, and caring. You just have to remember that.”

She giggled, an evil sound that sent a shiver down his back. Before he could recover from this, she began hissing at herself to be quiet. If he hadn’t known better, he would’ve bet good money that there were two girls hiding in the bush.

“What if I do something bad?” she asked. “You’ll punish me, right? You just don’t let bad people walk around like everyone else, right? You have jails, right?”

“Not for people like you, Jillybean. No matter what you think, you are a good person. Jail is for evil people, murderers and rapists, people like that. So please, don’t think you’ll ever go to jail.”

More whispering from the brush. “You see, it’s going to be like…you don’t know…seen it myself. They banished her…what’s that mean? …you out of the group…and we’ll be alone.” From what Grey could tell, the Jillybean voice was trying to get the other side of her, the evil Eve side, to be good so they wouldn’t be kicked out or banished.

Grey was leaning in to hear more when Jillybean suddenly appeared. Her yellow dress, muted by the dark, had blended in with the wheat and only her pale white face stood out. He felt a moment of shock, realizing that if she had another knife she could have gutted him. “Whoa, you scared me,” he said.

She grinned and it was the grin of a hungry skeleton; for a second, she was unrecognizable. “I should scare you,” she hissed. “I…I…I…” Her words ground to a halt and there was a confusion of lines on her little girl face, which she forced carefully back into place so that she looked again like Jillybean. “I mean, uh, that I didn’t mean that. I meant that because it’s dark I should scare you.”

“You shouldn’t lie, Jillybean,” Grey warned her. “Tell me what the other person in you wants to do.”

“Hurt people,” she said in a rush and then stood looking about as if expecting something bad to happen. When whatever it was didn’t happen, she let out a breath and went on: “But I told her she’d go to jail or be banished, like that one woman. Won’t that happen?” She asked this as if pleading with Grey to agree. She had her small hand on his hip, her nails, quick-bit near to nothing, made scritching noises on his BDUs.

“Yeah, that’s what will happen,” Grey lied, thinking, incorrectly, that he was helping Jillybean control the evil side of her.

Twenty minutes before the sun broke the horizon, the brick post office had finally reached a point that could be called comfortably cool. By twenty minutes after dawn, the sun was once again pounding down. The rays baked the red bricks and, with the dusty windows capturing the heat, the post office was as hot as a green house.

Grey and Jillybean were the last to stir. The rest sat up, smacking cotton-dry lips and began to scramble for water bottles and warm canteens. A number of the renegades, twenty three to be precise, felt an urgency and began scrambling for the bathrooms. The twenty three, as Neil was able to deduce later, had two things in common: explosive diarrhea and they were the only ones who had bought Brad’s cold water on credit.

Soon the six stalls, evenly divided between the men’s and lady’s rooms were brimming with foulness causing the last woman in line, the sad and disfigured Melanie, to figure something else out before her bowels let go in a rush.

Melanie had been a slave in the River King’s kitchens; it was hot work and sometimes dangerous. The women were weighed every morning with any increase in weight three days running being considered
prima facie
evidence of theft of food. Beatings were frequent and she generally worked from before sun up until just after ten at night; it was bad, but at least she wasn’t being raped.

She had been released by the River King in the trade that freed the renegades. Because she hadn’t been with the others, she had almost been forgotten and only at the last minute did Deanna remember her. She had good reason to be happy with her new-found freedom, right up until that morning.

The pain in her gut was horrendous, but one look at the mess in the commodes had her spinning away with sweat across her forehead. She turned to the ancient sinks, which were supported by metaled alphabets of exposed plumbing, and considered using the basins to evacuate the steaming mess in her bowels.

The thought lasted no more than a second. The sinks were no use since the smell had her stomach heaving and she knew she was going to explode both fore and aft.

Melanie ran from the room and out the front door, hurrying past a startled Joslyn Hennesy who was yawning away the final few minutes of her two-hour guard shift. In front of Melanie was the dinky two-lane highway they had been traveling on and beyond that a tall growth of winter wheat that stood higher than her head.

“Where are you going?” Joslyn hissed, as Melanie started for the wheat. Melanie did not answer; she had one hand across her mouth and another clenching her bottom. Before the black top was a drainage ditch which she leapt. Then she was on the asphalt and for just a moment, she stopped in the middle of the road where all the world could see her.

She had forgotten to grab toilet paper and she knew she was going to need an entire roll. The pause was for seconds only. It was obvious she wouldn’t be able make it back before her bowels let go. She wondered if she could even make it across the street, and yet the pause drew out for a second longer.

At one end of that endless road, was the sun blasting into her face, turning the world gold. At the other end was the moon. It was resting on the horizon, looking to have landed somewhere at the very far end of Kansas. All around it, the air was a soft, cool denim blue.

Melanie was standing, seemingly right between these two celestial opposites.

It was marvelous, perhaps the most perfect moment in her otherwise dismal life. She wished she could stay and see the pendulum of God swinging around her but her intestines spasmed, reminding her how insignificant she really was.

With a grunt and an: “Oh, my God!” she leapt the drainage ditch on the far side of the road and then she was among the tall grasses of the plains. “Keep going. Just keep going!” She was too close. When she looked back, she could still see Joslyn too clearly and she wanted to put a little distance between them. So she hurried another twenty yards, yanked down her pants, squatted and let go. Despite the pain knifing through her guts, she felt the most immense sense of relief—she
hadn’t
crapped her pants. In her book, and it was the saddest book ever written, not crapping her pants was a win.

Now came the acute issue of cleaning herself up. She didn’t relish the idea of running her bottom along the ground after the manner of a dog on shag carpet, however there was precious little in the way of green leafy foliage around her. The closest bit of green to her was a glossy plant with a few wide sprigs. These plants numbered only five or six and they were far enough from each other and from her to warrant her working herself about in a squat-waddle that was as unbecoming as it sounded.

As she came up to the third of these, all hunched over and, for the most part unseen, she heard running steps and a whisper that carried: “Melanie!”

Embarrassed at her predicament she said nothing, silently wishing that whoever was out there would go away and leave her in peace. The footsteps whickered through the tall wheat to her right. Her name was whispered again and was answered this time by a low groan. More moans followed the first and then the sound of the running steps retreated quickly.

Groans were all around her now and her heart was pounding out discordant notes that made her breathing erratic and shrill. She was caught in mid-squat by a host of zombies. Almost all of them were shadowy figures moving through the wheat. Only the ones that passed within a few feet were clear to her: they had sunken, dead eyes that were so emotionless that they looked like they belonged more in a fish’s head than in a person’s. Their mottled and ugly grey skin was covered in sores and scars, dirt and feces. They sometimes wore the tattered remains of dresses and suits, pajamas or attire that was no longer discernable beyond the fact that it had been fabric of some sort at one time, however, for the most part, they were hideously naked.

A dozen passed within feet of the girl squatting in the wheat, while a hundred dozen pressed forward heading for the lonely post office. Melanie would’ve stayed, hunkered down, but there was the sudden
blat
of engines starting up.

They’re leaving me!
The thought struck her like a slap, galvanizing her into action. She leapt to her feet, hoisting her jeans into place and, without giving a second thought to her state of partial cleanliness, she ran. She didn’t run directly to the post office—that would’ve been stupid even by her standards.

The post office sat at a crossroads which had been laid out with a compass in mind. Some altogether useless road ran north-south and another, the one she had paused on not ten minutes earlier, went precisely east to west. She chose this second one and ran parallel to it, hoping to avoid the zombies and at the same time get ahead of the slow rumbling trucks. Never in her life had she run so fast…and all for nothing.

Fifty yards behind her the five-ton trucks crossed the drainage ditches and drove out into the wheat with their horns tooting and guns blasting any zombie that managed to gain a handhold somewhere on the trucks. Immediately, Melanie stopped and, while the wind ran in and out of her, she waved her arms and jumped up and down. She didn’t dare scream, but she did cry, silent, miserable tears.

The three trucks had spread out, though only so much. Like the tines of a fork, they plowed three grooves into the wheat heading north. They were looking for her, but in the wrong place.

Weeping in fright over the idea of being left behind, she ran north waving her hands, praying to be seen. After another fifty yard dash, Melanie was staggering and her chest was heaving. She couldn’t have screamed for help if she wanted to; the tears had never stopped.

Then by some miracle, hands were pointing her way and the truck on the far left heeled far over as it turned as sharply as it could. In the front seat, she could see Neil pointing at her as Captain Grey drove. She waved and for some reason Neil jabbed his finger angrily in her direction.

Was he mad that she had a case of diarrhea? That was ridiculous! As if to give credence to the wild thought that they were angry with her, the five-ton turned slightly, chugging on a course that would cross her front thirty yards ahead of her. She was so surprised that she didn’t move, not even when Neil swung an M4 up to his shoulder and pointed it right at her.

Her eyes bugged and she stared unblinking until Neil started to shoot right at her! She could hear the bullets crease the air as they zipped by, some of them so close she swore they passed through her hair. With a scream, she broke in stark terror away from the truck with more bullets chasing after. She didn’t make it more than thirty yards before exhaustion caught up with her and she staggered, tripping in a chuck-hole and going face first into the dirt.

There was more shooting from all over the field. Alarmed and puzzled, she glanced over her shoulder and saw the truth: Neil hadn’t been shooting at her. There were zombies all over the place; some were charging right down on her, the lead ones falling at her feet and at first she assumed they were stepping in chuck-holes as well, but then she saw the blood. It was skipping off the zombies, hanging like a mist, dimming the morning.

Melanie’s body reacted while she was still cringing and screaming. Her feet dug at the dirt and her legs pistoned; she was up and running. At first she ran for the safety of Neil’s truck, however every zombie within reach was converging on it, making it seem like some great green beast. It shuddered over the zombies, its engine roaring and sparks of fire coming from its windows and out the back. She shied away from it, her mind swept by fear and confusion. Nowhere seemed safe to run but just standing there was worse.

More zombies were breaking through the wheat and suddenly Neil’s gun was quiet; he was going through the motions of reloading. She broke to her right. It was no more safe than anywhere else. Zombies charged her and she ran in an arc and always more were in front and the ones behind got closer and closer.

Closer, closer; right behind her. She could hear them moaning excitedly; she could smell the rot and decay wafting from their hungry mouths; she could feel their fingers reaching for her, tangling in her hair. “Neil!” she screeched at the top of her lungs.

The field was all mayhem and death. The three trucks were turning ponderously towards her, but the undead were closer, so close that her shirt was being pulled back, stretching across her throat, slowing her as if she were running in a nightmare.

“Neil!!!!” The scream rose above the chaos in the field. It was everywhere and heard by everyone. Its terror-filled sound engulfed Melanie’s mind as she was dragged down and teeth tore into her flesh. She didn’t fight back. There was no point. She was too weak and there were too many of them. Her only hope was that Neil would rescue her.

He came charging up, half his small body hanging out the square of a window on the passenger side of the truck, a black rifle in his hands.

“Save me,” Melanie begged, one arm outstretched to him, the other was having the long muscle of the bicep being torn off and fought over.

Grimly, Neil saved her. He shot her; her brains blasted out of her head like a stick of butter being struck by a mallet. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.