The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) (12 page)

“I need a drink,” Grey said, gripping the steering wheel with white-knuckled fury.

Neil’s eyes were on the gun he had used to kill Melanie. He was a little surprised to see that the safety was on. Normally, Grey or Sadie had to remind him. “I need to get drunk,” he replied, uncaring that far to their right the sun had barely risen above the edge of the earth. He hadn’t eaten breakfast yet and all he could think was that would make getting drunk easier.

“That doesn’t sound half bad,” Deanna murmured. Her face was red and misty with tears. She sat so close to Grey that no light shone through along the line where their arms and legs warmed each other.

Getting drunk wasn’t just a desire for Neil, it was a need. Just then he needed to turn off his mind and not think about Melanie and how she had screamed his name. Even with the loud rumble of the five-ton’s engine, he could still hear that scream over and over.

But he couldn’t get drunk. People depended on him, people like Melanie.

“Did everyone make it to the trucks?” he asked. “Please tell me that we got everyone out of that damned post office.”

“I was the last out,” Grey assured, but then his brows came down. “Jillybean is the only one I worry about. She was right next to me, but I went on one side of the truck and she went on the other. I called for her, but then you were there and the damned stiffs were everywhere. I’m sure she got in the back.”

“Stop the truck,” Neil ordered, quietly. They were two minutes from the field where he had shot Melanie. The three trucks had left her corpse to be eaten and had driven slowly away with a sudden lack of urgency. “Stop and let’s do a count.”

Again, Grey pulled to the shoulder of the road as he stopped. Neil stood in the door and looked out at the fields before stepping down. The zombies back at the post office had come out of nowhere. The little group had been just waking up when there had been a cry from the guard on duty that someone was in trouble. Unthinkingly, and definitely foolishly, Neil had run out into the field of wheat with the wave of zombies heading right for him.

The fields near them now were empty, save for a few unlimbed stragglers who crawled or pulled themselves along with the use of their arms if they happened to have any, or like inchworms if they didn’t; their desperation to kill was unsettling and Neil’s face took on a sour look.

Fred Trigg had climbed onto the back gate when they stopped. He, too, wore a sour look, though his was of a perpetual nature. “What’s going on? Why’d we stop?”

“Because,” Neil answered, unhelpfully. “Climb up on the canvas and keep watch. Everyone else,” he announced loudly, “get out of the vehicles and line up on the road. I need to get a count.” They did so, barely breaking the natural quiet of the morning. No one spoke, they stood on the side of the road looking glum, all save Jillybean who had struck a pose that suggested she was annoyed with having to stand among the commoners.

Neil was glad she had made it onto the trucks and, at the same time, he wasn’t. It seemed to him that her heart was wicker and all the goodness that had been in her had strained out of it over time, leaving only the sludge of madness and the gristle of hate. He was beginning to feel the same way.

After walking up the line and counting each person with a tap on the head, he stood in the road and stared down at his purple crocs, deciding they would have to go. They were utterly ridiculous. They were comfy and whimsical and showed his good natured side. With a cry of frustration, he pulled the right one off and flung it into the field to their front.

“What the hell happened back there?” he demanded, marching with a quirky limp, managing to appear even more ridiculous with only the one croc on his left foot. His anger was such that no one even cracked a smile. “Who was on watch?”

The renegades refused to look up from the yellow stripe beneath their feet and it was Grey who answered: “Joslyn.”

Immediately, her pert features spun up a look of innocence. “I didn’t do anything wrong. She just came barreling out of the post office and ran across the street. What was I supposed to do? Tackle her?”

“At a minimum, you should’ve alerted someone that there was a problem. What did you do instead?” The spun look of innocence came unwound and she didn’t need to answer for Neil to know she hadn’t done anything. He stood before her and glared, barely able to deal with Joslyn. She was the very picture of laziness; unwilling or unable to move and think on her own initiative. So much like an insolent and spoiled teenager.

Playing the role of disappointed parent, he turned from her and addressed the long line of people. “Does anyone know what was going on with Melanie? Why did she run out of a perfectly safe building?”

He was expecting to hear, as way of rationale, something along the lines of a lover’s quarrel or an argument between friends. Ricky Lewis, who usually spoke for the prisoners that Jillybean and Captain Grey had rescued from Gunner, said: “My guess is she had the shits.” A number of the renegades bobbed their heads in agreement and Ricky added, “I think we ate something bad and it messed with our system, if you know what I mean.”

Three people up from Rick, Jillybean rolled her blue eyes and shook her head with exaggerated sweeps. She acted put out over having to deal with lesser minds. “Wrong,” she said, “We’ve been eating out of cans and unless you shared your can of corn with twenty other people, which you didn’t, then there is clearly something else affecting you.”

She was right. The renegades would usually sit in groups of three or four, each sharing from their individual cans; there was no way twenty people would be simultaneously affected. But if it wasn’t the food…suddenly it clicked in his mind. “It was the water that Brad gave us,” Neil realized. “Damn it!” A second purple croc sailed out into the field leaving him in the pair of clean, white socks he had picked up two day before when the renegades had raided a derelict Walmart. Almost immediately, the bottom of his foot found a sharp rock and he cursed again.

“I don’t get it,” Jillybean said to herself. “Tell me again why you think he’s smart?”

With an effort, given the mood he was in, Neil ignored the little girl. “Everyone back in the trucks!”

Since the trucks would become blazing hot, getting the renegades into them was a process. There were discussions and sometimes arguments over who sat where the day before, and whose turn it was to be near the back where the wind was coolest, and thus, before half of them had seated themselves, fifteen minutes had gone by. Fred, who was still on top of the canvas of the first truck pointed south. “There’s a car. It’s red. I think it’s Brad.”

“Keep your gun ready,” Neil said to Grey. Again, a rock bit his foot and he hopped and cursed. If he’d had a third shoe, he would’ve thrown it as well.

“Maybe you should let me do the talking,” Grey said. “You’re pretty riled up.”

“Good! I want to be riled up. I’m tired of being pushed around and I’m tired of my people dying.”

Grey eyed him evenly, looking the small man up and down. “Do you know what you’re going to say to him?”

Neil squinted at the car kicking up dust in its wake as it blazed its way up to them. High above, a sky loom threaded together white strands of cirrus in long lines. It was pretty and interesting, but the only thing Neil could see was blackness. “I don’t know,” was all he answered.

Brad arrived all smiles over a quizzical countenance. “Where are you going? This isn’t the way. We need to backtrack a bit…because…” The M4 rifle Neil pointed at Brad’s face caused his words to dry up.

“I feel like killing you,” he said, simply. He hadn’t been lying to Grey. He had no idea what he was going to say, but this seemed as appropriate as anything he could think of. “You are my enemy, after all, and what do we do to our enemies but shoot them?”

“Sometimes we blow them up,” Jillybean said.

Neil smirked. “That is very true and if I had a grenade right now, I’d…let’s just say it wouldn’t be pretty.”

Another laugh, this one forced, escaped Brad. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on. Was it those zombies? They weren’t mine, I can assure you. Do you see any of my herders?”

“We lost one of our people this morning,” Neil told him. “She was one of those who drank your dirty water yesterday. Oh, I’m sure you didn’t mean for her to die, but you did mean to make her sick. How much do you want to bet that I will find a case of Pepto-Bismol in your car?”

Without asking, Neil stalked to the Camry. The three silk clad women were standing nearby, looking nervous and, in one case, dangerous. The straggly-haired blonde had a hand hidden beneath the overlapping scarves at her hips. Neil turned on her. “Get your hand where I can see it,” he snapped. “Or else.”

She had him by a head and could look over the top of him easily, still she slid her hands up to shoulder height. She saw the crazy in his eyes.

In the trunk was more water in a cooler, a number of weapons and radios, food, blankets, and yes, thirty bottles of Pepto-Bismol in a cardboard box. He heaved the box out. “Raise your hands if you need some. Brad has very nicely donated some medicine to make amends for giving all of you tainted water. Michael, pass it out.”

As Michael Gates took the box and began to go among the renegades, Brad glared at Neil. “You are playing a dangerous game.”

“I’m playing a dangerous game? Protecting my people is dangerous to you? Wrong, Brad. It’s you who’s playing a dangerous game. Do you think we’re so weak that we will roll over and take it when you poison us?”

Brad threw his hands in the air and cried: “You weren’t poisoned! That was just plain water, the same as what we all drink on the plains. Yes, sometimes it’s not the cleanest, but it’s not like we have water treatment plants working anymore.”

“And yet you conveniently have a box full of Pepto in your car,” Neil replied, heatedly. The M4 was up and pointed again. “And all this driving around in circles, are you going to still claim that it’s for our own good? Because no one here believes it. Just like with the water and the Pepto, you’re creating a problem where none was before and who is the only person we can turn to? You.”

“Perhaps it looks that way,” Brad answered, standing stiff and angry. “But it is what it is. There are mega-herds. You saw one yesterday for goodness sakes! That was far larger and far more dangerous than what you left back at the post office. I am the one keeping you out of harm’s way. Hell, you can’t even afford the bridge fees to cross over the Platte…”

Neil held up a hand. “There will be no bridge fees whatsoever. It’s preposterous. It’s preposterous for someone to charge a fee to cross a bridge he didn’t build and can’t maintain. It’s highway robbery, pure and simple, and if the Azael partake in such shenanigans then, by definition, they are nothing but a bunch of two-bit bandits themselves.”

Neil was sure he had crossed a line, but he didn’t care. Bullies had to be stood up to.

Brad’s blue eyes narrowed. “Bandits? These are our lands you are crossing! I don’t know who you think you are, Neil, but you are weak. This entire group is weak. If you weren’t, you would’ve gone around the long way where water is scarce as teats on a bull. Down there the people are crazy. The sun has baked their brains and the lack of food has made them into cannibals. But if you’re so tough, go on. I won’t stop you. However, if you stay in the land of the Azael, you will do what I tell you, and go where I tell you, and you will thank me and kiss my ass because I’m the only one who can get you through.”

For a second they locked eyes, neither backing down an inch, and then Neil threw his head back and laughed. “Cannibals! That’s a nice touch. Very scary, but I highly doubt it. It sounds like an old wives tale to me.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me, too,” Grey said, coming to stand next to Neil. “Are you sure you want to go down this road, Brad? I can assure you that you don’t want to mess with the people of Colorado. We won’t take it lying down.”

“Now I get it,” Brad said with a little chuckle. “Now I understand why you talk so tough, Neil. You think soldier-boy here has your back. And you, Grey, you still think the soldiers have the upper hand out here in the west, don’t you? Well, you couldn’t be more wrong. King Augustus has united all the separate bands on the prairie. We have ten times your numbers and, oh yes, we have weapons now too. Nice ones, good ones. And the king has been looking for an excuse.”

Grey was quick to reply: “What do you mean by that?”

“I think you know,” Brad answered. “You know these ‘great’ types. They’re never satisfied with what they have. We’ve heard about how nice your valley is and I’m sure he’s thinking to add it to his domain. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to be the excuse that starts a war.”

Just like the day before, they sat four abreast, Grey, Deanna, Jillybean, and Neil. The air in the cab was stuporous and as still and hot as a swamp. They weren’t moving. Perhaps as revenge for Neil’s uppity mouth, Brad had steered them right into the middle of one of the mega-herds and now they were forced to wait until the edges of it washed over them.

Jillybean had never traveled in the west and had never been in a similar situation back in the days before the apocalypse when cars would sometimes get trapped among a herd of cattle being driven from one pasture to another. It was analogous to the pace but not to the stench. The earthy-manure stink of cows could be eye-watering. The rotting acid wafting up from the undead was overpowering. Jillybean had her shirt up over her face.

This helped to muffle her conversation, though with the others dozing fitfully, it didn’t matter. “I knew Neil would cave,” Eve said. She was picking at her bellybutton and wondering what would happen if it ever unraveled. Would her insides just come gushing out?

He didn’t cave
, Jillybean replied like an echo in her own head.

“Ok, he knuckled under. Either way, he’s soft as that baby’s head. Do you remember when you touched her head and it was smushy?”

Jillybean had a sudden flash of unwanted imagination: her finger stabbing into the soft spot on Eve…the real Eve’s, head. She could feel warm blood gurgle up as the baby’s arms and legs shot straight out. There was laughter in her head, again like an echo bouncing all around so that her blue eyes traced a zigzag pattern in her sockets.

We never touched her like that, so stop. And Neil did what he had to. You heard what would’ve happened if we had gone around. Cannon-balls! That’s what means they eat people
.

“Captain Grey didn’t believe it, so why should we?”

So you like Captain Grey now? Last night you were vowing to kill him.
In an attempt to try to control the other girl inside her, Jillybean had tried to use the threat of imprisonment or banishment. It had worked to a degree. For a time her hate had slithered into the background.

Jillybean couldn’t understand the girl at all. She was jealous of everything and everyone. She stole constantly and ate like a pig. At meal times, she went from one little group of people to the next, complaining that Neil was practically starving her. The story she told was that Neil would only give her a few spoonfuls on account that she was so small.

She hated Neil to no end and actively plotted the murder of the baby. But for some reason she liked Fred Trigg who Jillybean thought was a jerk—‘jerk’ was just about the biggest putdown in her arsenal. The other girl also hated Sadie, which again was a mystery. Sadie had been the quietest person in camp since the renegades had been freed. It was as though she had retreated into herself, a little every day, until only her big dark eyes stuck out. Sadie seemed to care for the baby and nothing else. Sadly, Neil didn’t seem to notice. He was focused full square on saving the group. Deanna didn’t seem to notice either; she only had eyes for Captain Grey. Wherever he went, she was sure to follow.

“Like that nursery rhyme mommy used to tell us,” the other girl said. “The one about the sheep. How did it go again?”

Jillybean didn’t know. Ever since Ipes had been…she didn’t know if he had been killed or not. He tended to float after all…but ever since he was gone, she had trouble remembering things like she used to. Gone were nursery rhymes and the name of the street she used to live on, and she couldn’t remember what her daddy looked like or what he did for a job. She should’ve known these things.

“It doesn’t matter,” the other girl said. “Daddy is dead. Just like mommy and stupid old Ipes. And like Eve, too, soon enough.”

Do you want to go to jail?
Jillybean asked
. That’s where they’ll put you and they’ll lock the door and throw away the key
.

“Not if I do it right,”
She
said. “It’ll be an accident. Remember the marble from last night…or whenever that was, it’s hard to keep track. But whatever; a marble will do it. All I have to do is poke it down her little throat. She doesn’t even have teeth to bite me!”

A cascade of black laughter fell through Jillybean’s mind, burying her under what felt like an avalanche of bats. Compared to the sound, Jillybean was small and skinny and so very weak. Weak as a shadow and, like one, she matched the color of the strange laughing bats that threatened to bury her. Their laughter wouldn’t stop. It went on and on. It was insane laughter, Jillybean realized, and that’s what meant crazy, cuckoo for coconuts.

Jillybean knew insanity on an intimate level. When she thought about it, she fooled herself with cartoon images of people bonking themselves on the head with a frying pan as little blue birds revolved around their heads. That was the thin illusion that she justified as understanding so that she was never forced into delving deeper on the subject. Deeper would’ve had her envisioning her mommy lying in bed, staring at the ceiling as she wasted into nothing, or seeing the cold look in the bounty hunter’s eye when she had shot him. There had been no humanity left in him. He liked killing. He ‘got off’ on it. ‘Getting off’ was also a subject that she left purposely vague in her mind. Its implications, that all of mankind was so very disgusting and disturbed, was something she felt she had to come to grips with gradually.

If she had delved to the very core of the concept of insanity, she would’ve seen herself with Ipes, harmlessly talking. Harmless, yes, but also insane.

Ipes wasn’t real. He couldn’t talk. He wasn’t her best friend. He wasn’t even an imaginary friend. He was a symptom of her mental disorder. Had she delved deep she would’ve understood these things and she would’ve been forced to admit that she was broken and perhaps unfixable. But she wasn’t ready to admit the truth, mainly because as one who was insane, the truth of the world could never be perceived fully or properly. It was a vicious and infinite circle.

Just then, sitting in the cab of the five-ton, she saw neither the truck nor the blazing hot July day outside it. She was in the dark of her mind with a crazed laughter taking the form of strange flapping things that resembled ebony books opening and closing on their inky bindings or uneven bats made from a blackness that was deeper than true black—they were shadows of a shadow. They fell on her softly, but thick, like night snow. She couldn’t see or think straight with it covering over her and only her fingers stuck out stretching for air or thought.

The strange, black webbiness was a mass that gave under her feet, so that any pushing resulted in maintaining the status quo of her being nearly buried. She panicked, afraid of being swallowed up for all time in the darkening depths of her own mind, where thoughts and memories faded over time, becoming thin, transparent and then, patchy and partial, until they disappeared altogether.

She didn’t want to disappear. There were things she had to do—though what, she didn’t know. And there were people she had to save—although who was lost on her. And there were battles still to be fought—although against whom she was afraid to know. And she had a life still to live, but she didn’t struggle for her life, it was her fear that caused her to spaz, uselessly. But then a voice spoke:
You’ve tried pushing up, have you tried the opposite?

The voice was calm and came from the blackness where her thoughts went to die, and that was strange. Jillybean stopped struggling and looked down into the black and saw that she was wrong; it was not altogether black. There were silver lines as thin as a spider’s silk descending downward. She had no clue what they were and she really didn’t want to find out. This dark, more than any other dark scared her. There were whispers down there. Haunting sounds just on the verge of being understood.

They were puzzles to her, fear-filled ones, because they weren’t just puzzles, they were the flagstones of a path and although she didn’t know where that path led, she knew it would lead to bad stuff. Hard stuff. Stuff she couldn’t handle. Stuff that could turn her catatonic—that could turn her into a useless vegetable. Stuff that would make her like her mother: dead before she died.

But there was also that voice in the dark which upset the teetering deck of cards. The voice had been pleasant. Did that mean there were also pleasant things down there? Or was it all more shadow and fakery? Was the voice fake? Was it a lie? The problem with being insane, even just a little insane, was that nothing could be studied and known for fact because there were no facts that the mind couldn’t warp for its own good or its own destruction.

Still the voice was warm and reminded her of someone. And it caused her to think beyond her panic.
Have I tried the opposite?
she asked herself. She had kicked out with her feet but that had been like trying to gain purchase on a cloud. The opposite of push was pull, she decided, and so she began pulling the black webby stuff down. It came down in sticky strings like damp cotton candy and soon her face was out of the black and into the void of her mind.

“Why would pulling work when pushing didn’t?” she asked aloud. The words stopped the echoing, flat. Excited she looked up and saw twin lamps of a pale hue. They were the color of bluebells on the first of May. This thought sprung another and soft words floated up from beneath her:
I’m a May Flower
.

She had said that to Ram before he died, when they were in the cleaning store where a heavy black smoke was billowing from the fire, making the room blistering hot. They thought they were going to die but they hadn’t. The memory was just as clear and crisp in her mind as an autumn leaf fresh from a leap off a branch.

Jillybean smiled and felt her face work. Above, the twin lamps crinkled. Those were her eyes! Eyes ready to see and a mouth ready to work. How strange. She had never seen herself from the inside before. Normally, when she was taken over by Ipes or this new, nasty girl, she was just a vague notion in her own mind that would come and go, sometimes running the body and sometime riding along as if in the back seat of a car. This was different and somewhat exciting. It was like putting on a turtleneck sweater. There was endless cloth and tunnels going off at angles for the arms to poke through and then there was the long passage for the head and the odd fear of suffocating that always came with it and there was…

“No!” the mouth spoke with sudden, angry authority. “No, you stay in there,” the other girl said.
She
was suddenly there in the construct of Jillybean’s perceived reality.
She
was a giant with a giant’s hand.
She
took a train-sized finger and poked Jillybean down back into the black just like
she
would poke the marble down Eve’s throat.

Jillybean tried to fight. Mindlessly, she battled in the inky black nothing, straining against nothing, and receiving nothing as a result. As before she tried pulling but it was only panic, not thought, that drove her limbs. She only sank lower and lower, until she was too afraid to move anymore and there Jillybean waited, held in place, not by the strange cottony blackness, but by that which created it. It was the same force that had created Ipes and the nasty girl running her body. It was the insanity of fear.