The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) (19 page)

“What’s wrong with him?” Deanna asked as the Duke pulled her chair back from the table for her. The courtly gesture was odd coming from the bear of a man.

The Duke waived his hand at the door. “Willy’s not contagious or anything. He’s got anorexia. I know what you’re thinking: but he’s a dude. Seems they get it too. I never knew. It’s sad, but you can’t ask for anything better than a skinny chef. You know he hasn’t been pawing at your food.”

When she was seated, he lifted the covers from the plates to reveal two steak dinners complete with buttered mashed potatoes and corn. There was even a side plate of roasted asparagus. The smell was amazing and she was happy that her stomach didn’t start growling again.

“Well, it all looks so good,” Deanna said. Out of respect for his position, she waited for the Duke to start before digging in. The steak may have been the best thing she’d ever put in her mouth and she chewed slowly enjoying every bite. As she worked to keep herself from groaning in pleasure she wondered what the other refugees were eating. Their supply of canned goods was dwindling and they had been picking over the least desirable choices for the last two days; soon they’d be down to a hundred cans of lima beans.

While the steak was great, the mashed potatoes were only average. They had a sharp tang to them. “The butter is made from goat’s milk,” the Duke said as she swallowed her first mouthful wearing something akin to a grimace. “Drown it with pepper and it’ll taste pretty good. It’s something of an acquired taste.”

Deanna tried a bite with pepper and found he was correct. “Will I have to pepper this as well?” she asked indicating a glass of milk next to her plate. Its color wasn’t exactly the pure white she was used to.

He laughed and then shrugged. “Sure you can try. It’s goat’s milk as well. Sorry, but we haven’t found a single milking cow. Holsteins I think they’re called. I’d give my right arm for a milking cow. Willy does wonders with the goat juice but I sure do miss real butter and ice cream and all of it.” He went on speaking for the remainder of the meal as Deanna polished off her plate. She had a strong hankering for seconds, however her belly was so full that it was uncomfortable and she didn’t want to squish little Emily.

“I’ve talked this entire time,” the Duke said around a mouthful of steak. “Maybe you should tell me something about yourself so I can eat.”

For the next ten minutes, Deanna told about her inconsequential life in Wisconsin and then she began a series of lies concerning her time after the Apocalypse. “Mainly,” she said, “it consisted of a series of lucky coincidences. I met up with a few women, uh, around, Chicago and then we met some more in Ohio and that’s when we found Neil and...” She was about to add Captain Grey’s name, but the Duke’s eyes narrowed and she faltered “...And uh, he told us about Colorado.”

“Where did you cross the Mississippi?” he asked. His eyes were shrewd and glinting.

“Way to the south. There was this guy who wanted to charge an arm and a leg in Missouri, so we went south and found a boat that was still working.”

He drummed his fingers on the table and watched her closely. “Did you see the River King’s compound? In Missouri? Do you have any idea of its strength?”

“No. Neil did all the talking.”

“Yes, about Neil. How does he end up being in charge and not the soldier? That doesn’t make much sense to me.”

Deanna tried to give a simple shrug, however it came across as muscle spasm. She was growing ever more nervous at the number of questions he was asking; if she misspoke in any way there would be trouble. “We had an election is all and, at the time, Grey hadn’t proved himself to the group and so Neil won.”

“But he’s since proven himself? How?”

She blinked and her mouth came open, uselessly. It was so hard to think with the Duke staring right into her face looking for her to trip up in the least way. “He...there...Uh, zombie fighting. He’s really good at fighting the zombies.”

“I’m sure he is,” the Duke said. “Better than Neil, obviously. Which leads me to my next question: Neil has been bitten. Those scars all over his face, they’re from zombies. I’d bet my life on it and that must mean he’s immune and there’s only one place you can get immune and that’s in New York. When were you there?”

“I-I wasn’t. I-I, they might have been, I don’t know, but I’ve never been to New York, not even in the old days.”

His eyes bored deep into hers as he asked: “What about as Sarah? Did you ever go then?”

Her fear disappeared in a blink of confusion. She didn’t know anyone named Sarah. Neil’s ex-wife might have been named Sarah, but the stories concerning her were taboo, in fact all the renegades were in a similar position. No one talked much about the early days of the Apocalypse; too many good people had done questionable things to survive.

“I never went by that name, sorry.”

The Duke looked long into her eyes, before he grunted: “Ok, then.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a reward notice that had been handed out to any number of bounty hunters in New York. She read it and exclaimed in a joking manner: “I’m not thirty-six! And I’m not five foot-four, either.” Although the description for Sarah Rivers wasn’t very close to matching Deanna, they had Sadie down to a “T”, including her name. Thankfully, Sadie had been slow to come into the main courtroom and probably hadn’t been seen by the Duke.

“I had to ask. There are rumors about these fugitives. Supposedly, they’re exceedingly dangerous. And I can’t have...”

A sharp pain struck Deanna low down in her guts and she interrupted him by gasping loudly. “It’s probably nothing,” she said, at his look of alarm. The pain was already fading and she smiled as brightly as she could to cover over the grimace that lurked beneath the facade of her pretty face. “Now about that fuel, where were we?”

“You were playing hard to get,” he answered. “Have dinner with me tomorrow and I will consider a thirty-five percent interest rate.”

Twenty four hours was a long time for the group of renegades to sit on their deadly secrets, especially with only the promise of ‘considering’ thirty five percent. “Promise me thirty percent and the trucks fueled tomorrow and I say we have a deal.”

He stuck out a big paw. She shook it as a new pain cramped her belly. The Duke surprised her by standing and helping her out her chair. “Until tomorrow, then,” he said, cutting the dinner shorter than she had expected. She figured that he would try more wine or suggest a walk, or a bath, or something. The most he did was stop her at the door, kiss the back of her hand and look so long into her eyes that she grew uncomfortable.

“Good night,” she said, pulling back gently so that once again her hand was in her control. She left him to hurry downstairs, and all she could think about was what Captain Grey was thinking. The word
whore
kept spinning through her mind.

When she reached the main hall on the first floor where all the peddlers ran their shops she was surprised to see that it was filled with the renegades who were all chatting freely.

She took one step into the hall and then doubled over. It felt as though a hot knife had lanced into her gut. Her forehead glistened with sweat and she could feel her pulse hammer in her temples. Something bad was happening to her.

Sadie suddenly appeared out of the crowd. “You ok?” she asked.

“You have to hide,” Deanna answered, remembering the reward flyer. For a moment the thought of it overrode the pain, but it was only for the moment. She dropped to her knees and grabbed herself hissing: “Oh my God! My stomach.”

“What’s wrong? What happened to you?” Sadie asked, coming down to her level, her dark eyes wide with worry.

“I-I don’t know, but don’t worry about me. The Duke has a reward flyer with your name on it and...” A new pain was followed by a new gasp. Deanna fought through the pain and pushed Sadie away. “The reward is for five thousand. People will kill for that much. So go, get away and hide in the trucks or something.”

People were staring now, and through the gaping crowd Neil shoved his way. What he saw made him pause for a second and stare as well. Then he began yelling at the people around him: “Do you mind! Give her some damned privacy. Go on. Look somewhere else, the show’s over.”

“It’s ok,” Deanna said. “I can get up.” She tried but she was overcome with dizziness. The world began to spin slowly.

“No, stay down and don’t move.” Neil turned to Sadie and whispered: “Get Captain Grey...no. Forget that. Go get Marybeth Gates, and hurry.”

“Why her?” Deanna asked, feeling lightheaded and unsure of herself. As far as Deanna knew Marybeth didn’t have any medical skill.

Neil squatted awkwardly in front of her. “You’re bleeding,” he whispered, shooting his eyes to her pelvis. She looked down at herself and saw that the crotch of her blue jeans was dark with blood. Terror filled her mind to such a degree that she almost didn’t catch what Neil said next: “If Grey finds out you’ve been raped he’ll kill everyone here.”

“But I wasn’t raped,” she said. Suddenly her head lolled to the side as if her neck had turned to rubber. “I didn’t have sex at all,” she said in low mumble, the words feeling like marbles in her mouth. Nothing was making sense just then, however it seemed important for her to get that point out though she couldn’t remember why. The world was beginning to dim. She was barely able to add: “This is because of my baby. I must be spotting.” It sure seemed like a lot of blood to be simply spotting but since her eyes kept closing and her brain was well past foggy, it was hard to tell.

Neil stared down at her in shock. “You were pregnant?”

She wanted to say:
I am pregnant
, only it came out in a mumble and he didn’t seem to hear. The next thing Deanna knew, Marybeth was there, kneeling in front of her, wearing a face full of motherly concern and then she saw Captain Grey sprinting down the hall with his med bag slamming into people.

Deanna wanted to tell him that she hadn’t done anything wrong but she slipped away into the deepest sleep of her life and, as she slept, Captain Grey could do nothing except wait helplessly as Deanna’s body expelled the tiny person that had been growing inside of her. Emily was dead.

The news of her pregnancy, her now failed pregnancy, was all anyone could talk about and it was generally considered a tragic but natural occurrence right up until Eve was also found dead, swaddled in her blankets.

Although Deanna’s bleeding ended around midnight she went into a sleep that Captain Grey called a ‘coma’ and she did not wake up. In a show of generosity, the Duke gave three bags of Lactated Ringers for Grey to administer intravenously. He also had some rooms cleared out in an elementary school just down the street, where the renegades could stay.

Deanna was laid out on a cushioned couch in what had once been the principal’s office. Grey never left her side that night except once to use the bathroom and once more when Eve was found dead and even then he refused to leave Deanna unguarded by anyone he didn’t trust. He planted Neil in a chair, held him down as though he had glued him there and needed a few moments for the glue to set, and then, growling like a wolf, Grey told him not to move under any circumstances. “Even if the building catches fire, you don’t move a damned muscle. Is that understood?”

Sadie spent the sleepless night huddled in a pile of corn in the back of one of the trucks. When the sun rose she peeked out long enough to ask a bustling Neil how Deanna was doing. He only shook his head, gravely. When she asked how he was doing, he only stared outward like a painting of someone sad. He seemed altogether flat and without depth. She hugged him, but wasn’t capable of more. Her face was tear-streaked and her hands were without proper nails; she had chewed on her nails and torn at them until the cuticles were bleeding.

Despite the fact that he cried almost constantly, Neil was everywhere, doing anything that would keep him from thinking about Eve and Deanna. He was jittery and easily agitated. His eyes were red as a demon’s and his voice was tight and high. As the night progressed, he grew hoarse until he could only grunt and point if he needed something. As leader, there was much to be done. The renegades kept him on his toes. At word of Eve’s death, many went into hysterics and babbled or cried in fear, thinking that the Duke had poisoned them somehow. Others vowed revenge and began plotting, but most of them just stood around gossiping and gabbing.

These talkers were the most dangerous as they rarely checked to see if there were ears listening in the dark. Neil was kept from grieving over his daughter or sinking into a depression simply because he lacked the time to even come to grips with another death.

This left Jillybean alone for most of the night. She had ‘woken’ a little before midnight to find herself standing next to the couch where Deanna was lying motionless. The little girl blinked and looked around, completely confused at her surroundings. Her last memory had been of when she was prowling about the Duke’s quarters in the courthouse building. There had been many doors, most of them locked.

She remembered hearing a murmuring which she had followed until she had found the Duke’s suite. Slow as a turtle she had eased the door back and seen the Duke and Deanna standing very close, talking. Neither saw her and she listened to the strange conversation until she was struck by something so much more urgent than just their chit-chat—it was the smell of something cooking. Forgetting Deanna and the Duke, Jillybean had scampered along, sly as a fox, dodging the occasional guard or wandering man or woman of the Azael, until she came to the kitchen.

The kitchen had once been a break room with little more than a fridge and a microwave, however the Duke had added an electric stove and, beneath a curtained window, a barbeque grille. In the room was the most interesting man. He was spindly and hunched, seemingly made of bone more than anything else. It was as if his skeleton was too big for his body. He reminded her of a praying mantis, but a conniving one. He had secrets that he mumbled to himself as he cut up potatoes and chopped chives and onion. Sometimes he laughed as high as a girl and then poked at whatever vegetable he was reducing to its basic elements.

Jillybean watched him, hoping that he would step out of the room long enough for her to snag something to eat. That was stealing and she knew it was wrong and yet
the other girl
was demanding it. In her heart, Jillybean knew she would probably have done it anyway without any encouragement from
her
.

Then the Duke came and Jillybean shied back, hiding behind a well-worn couch where there was a village of ancient gum wads next to her head. She tried to keep from touching these as she listened to the Duke. He said things, she was sure. She saw his mouth move and his lips clap together, however the words drew out into a long, slow motion groan and when she would blink her eyes, the lids closed as slowly as the passing of a day …and then she found herself next to Deanna’s bed with Captain Grey asking her a question.

“Huh?” she replied, wondering what time it was and where she was.

“I said, can you hand me the stethoscope? It’s the thing with the ear-buds right next to your hand.” He seemed put out by having to ask twice, but it wasn’t her fault since she didn’t know where her hands were, let alone what was beside them. She looked down and saw the stethoscope and knew it and its use. She also saw the IV lines and the fluid bag, and the blood pressure cuff and the thermometer and the other medical odds and ends and each she described in her mind and categorized. She could understand these things at least.

She handed over the stethoscope and watched as Grey used it in conjunction with the blood pressure cuff. She saw the needle on the glass face of the cuff moving along as though it were a second hand on a stop watch, but then it jumped and started a hitching descent down to a point where it went smoothly again, going slower and slower.

“90 over 60. Not good,” Grey said and Jillybean understood this only to a degree. The first hitch of the needle had occurred at the 90 mark where it began to jerk until it had hit the 60 at which point it had gone smoothly down the rest of the way. What the numbers, 90 and 60 signified beyond ‘Not good’, she didn’t know.

She asked Grey and he answered and the knowledge of blood volume and the various repercussions of too low and too high registered on her memory, however she couldn’t have repeated a word.

For some reason Jillybean had a great fear inside her. It ate away her insides and made her tummy ache. At this point, only Deanna was known to be sick. Eve was dying and no one knew. She had been given her bottle by Veronica and had her diaper changed by Joslyn, and had been sung to sleep by Anne Gates, who was well known for her soothing voice, and she had been watched over in the back of the first truck by Marybeth Gates, who was standing guard anyway.

And during this Jillybean was afraid and didn’t know why. She stayed with Grey for an hour before Veronica burst in with the news of Eve’s death. Veronica looked like she had been stricken with some disease; she was all white and her eyes were these big balls that were wet as stones that had just been pulled from a lily-pad-covered fishing hole and stuck in her sockets.

“Eve is dead!” she cried.

This started the renegades on their various paths of mourning or revenge or just plain yapping. Everyone seemed to be doing something, all save Jillybean who followed along behind Captain Grey after he had set Neil on watch over Deanna. Jillybean was just an afterthought to him. She was just a shadow, and she felt as useless as one. The baby lolled in Marybeth’s arms. She was perfect as always except she was white, just so awfully white and she didn’t move, even though tears kept falling on her face.

Normally, Eve would have grabbed the tears and inspected them, because everything was so interesting and curious to her. She had always looked on the world and everyone in it as a wonder and an experience to enjoy.

With his mouth clamped down like a vice and his eyes ferocious in anger, Captain Grey took Eve from Marybeth and undressed her and opened her little mouth and looked in, to see her soul, Jillybean supposed. That she was dead made no sense to Jillybean and her own lack of shock over it made even less sense. It was as though she had expected it which was only possible if she had known…

“No,” she said. Standing there seeing the baby looking so beautiful and lifeless at the same time, Jillybean felt as though there was something in her throat fighting to come up. It had all the characteristics of a bull frog. It was squirmy and alive and it kicked, demanding to get out and breathe once again, however, it wasn’t a bullfrog jumping up her throat, it was only her dinner which had been green beans and three spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup. It all went onto the ground except a little which spattered wetly onto her sneakers.

Someone, she didn’t know who, asked if she was ok, but she couldn’t answer beyond a croak that was again so much like that of a frog that she wondered again if something was alive within her—something more than
the other girl
, the other
evil girl
, that is.
She
had done
something
. Jillybean knew it, and yet when Grey rounded on her, took her by the shoulders and demanded in a harsh, angry tone that she tell him what she had done, Jillybean lied.

“I didn’t do anything.”

Anything that she could remember, that is. All she could truthfully remember was the weird Bone-man and the Duke, and the overheard whispered conversation and then everything went black as night as the
other girl
took over. Jillybean told herself that all she knew was the black of her mind and the strange and scary silver lines that went down into the darkness where she was terrified to go because down there was…what? What was down there?

Everything
, a voice whispered in her mind. Yes, everything, and everything encompassed far too much for one little girl to handle. Down there was where she kept the mind pictures of how her parents had died and how Ram had been turned into a disgusting monster and then drownded while chained to the boat that Jillybean had sunk. And down there was the memory of Sarah, blackened and horrible; Sarah had stood in front of her and had taken a bullet meant for Jillybean.

In the cool light of day, she remembered these things sure, however they were passing memories and faint. Down there in the black of her mind, the memories were strong and the pain of them stung and tasted of poison. They were waiting deep down there, waiting for her; waiting to drown her if she ever went to explore.

And memories weren’t the only things down there.
Everything
encompassed every fright and fear and tear and scream and horror she had ever experienced. Down there was where every monster that had ever reached for her with their diseased hands, lived. It was where she hid the pain she had caused and the blood she had spilt and the flames she had lit that had roasted living flesh. And down there was where the secret knowledge was kept. Down there was where she kept the knowledge that she was a killer.

She had killed people but hid the fact from herself by stuffing the knowledge deep into the black. Consciously, she barely remembered pulling the trigger of her little gun and killing the first bounty hunter and the same was true with how she had killed Ernest. And she couldn’t remember at all the sound of the screams as the ferry boats went up in flames, and the memory of the guard on the barge being blasted into bloody chunks when she had blown it sky-high was simply gone.

But down there the feeling and the noise and the pain were perfectly preserved. It was all there in
Technicolor
, as was the scary, joyous, powerful feeling which had accompanied the killings. And down there was…was…perhaps it was where her memory of killing Eve was laid out all perfectly preserved in the hateful black of her mind.

It was best not to think about ‘down there.’

“I didn’t do anything,” she had repeated, to which Grey had grunted like bull and then turned back to stare at Eve as if he could see through her white skin and see what had caused her death. Jillybean grew uneasy just in case he could. What was in the depths of Eve’s mind? Were there hidden pictures there as well and was one of Jillybean doing something she shouldn’t have? A shudder that was hidden by the night wracked the little girl.

I didn’t do anything
was both the truth and a lie. To Jillybean, the
other girl
was a real, live person, just as Ipes had been a real, live stuffed animal, just as the zombies were real, live monsters that would eat you. The
other girl
had done something, but she had done, whatever it was, using Jillybean’s body and for that, the little girl was wracked by guilt.

Like most everyone else, she didn’t sleep that night. The only person who did was Deanna and she didn’t wake in the morning like a normal person would.

Captain Grey was haggard and bitter by first light. He didn’t see evil in Jillybean; he saw it in the Duke. The soldier would curse under his breath and bunch his muscley arms whenever the Duke came in to check on Deanna. To Jillybean, Menis looked genuinely concerned. “You will have to stay until she is better,” he insisted.

The morning wore away and Jillybean grew bored and restless. Wracked by an unknown guilt, she had an urgent need to be away from people. She slipped from the school, unseen and walked around the town and saw immediately that something had changed in the town—there were more people, a lot more people than there had been the day before. They were all men and they carried guns. She also saw that the monsters who walked in their endless circle around the town had multiplied. They were now a wide and deep river of odiferous, rotting flesh.

No one else seemed to notice. The renegades were busy. Neil wandered around the school in a daze trying to comfort everyone when it was clear he was the one most in need of comforting. Grey was busy watching over Deanna. This mainly took the form of him holding her hand and staring at her. Sadie was busy hiding in the back of the corn truck, and the rest were bleary-eyed, yawning or busy napping after the long, stressful night.