The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) (20 page)

They napped while the trap closed around them.

“What were the Duke and the Bone-man talking about?” Jillybean asked the air. She stood in an alley down from the old theater with the strange wording on the marquee that she didn’t understand. She paused after the question and perked an ear, hoping that the
other girl
would answer. When, after three seconds went by and there was nothing coming as way of an answer, she tried again: “Listen, we’re being trapped by the Duke. Can’t you see it?”

Again a pause, but the
other girl
refused to speak. She was hiding inside Jillybean. She was hiding from the truth. “You’re hiding because they’ll know it was you who put Deanna in a coma and it was you who killed Eve.”

I am Eve
, the
other girl
said inside her mind.
I am the only Eve, now. I am the baby, now. I’m the youngest and the cutest and now everyone will only pay attention to me
.

Was that why she had killed the baby? For attention? “What did you do?” Jillybean asked and a shiver went up her spine as she waited on the answer. The voice of the other girl had changed. She spoke in a higher register and there was an affected lisp to her words as if she were trying to sound younger, which she did, though it didn’t make her sound any less evil.

That’s for me to know and you to find out
.

“Why that is so childish!” Jillybean hissed like an angry tea kettle. “We are seven-years-old! We don’t say silly...” She heard the sound of voices coming from around the corner of one of the buildings and a second later there was the sound of glass crunching and the tinny sound of a can being kicked across cement. Quick as a squirrel, Jillybean ducked behind a green dumpster and squatted against a wall that smelled like pee-pee.

“That’s up to the Duke, not me. A hundred rounds apiece is all I’m permitted to give you, Brad.”

Jillybean peeked around the edge of the dumpster and saw the man who had guided them to their current predicament. He was once again dressed as an angel. His armor shone bright and his wings arched tall and beautiful—they did not match the sneer on his face. “First off, you address as me as ‘your lordship’ or ‘sir’,” Brad said as they came into the alley and began walking towards the theater. “I have been made a Baron for this, as you know full well, Jim. And second, I have fifty men coming in tonight and I want them ready to go when this kicks off. You don’t want to be messing around in the dark, do you?”

The little girl, who was naturally eaten up with curiosity, crept after them and, thanks to Brad’s wings, which were large and rustled loudly, she went unseen and unheard.

“Like I told you before,
your highness,”
Jim said, adding a mock bow in Brad’s direction. “You need to talk to the Duke. He only lets me give out so much per person, and if I have to do it at night then I do it at night. We haven’t had an incident with the stiffs in weeks besides a stray or two, so stop wetting yourself like a girl. So, do you want yours now or when your men arrive? It really doesn’t matter to me.”

Brad snapped: “Now, of course. I’m not getting up at three in the morning. That’ll be all you.”

Jim grunted as they came up to a side door. As Jillybean slunk behind an old car, Jim fished out a set of keys from somewhere among his multi-hued scarf outfit. He chose one among them and opened the side door of the theater. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” he said with a wide grin and then walked past a curtain hanging just on the other side of the door.

Jillybean didn’t know what napalm was but she could smell something with a pungent chemical odor waft from the theater. It was so strong that it made Brad’s face squinch. With his eyes at squints he took off the harness that held his wings, leaned them against the side of the building, and then stepped through the door. Rabbit-fast, Jillybean darted from her hiding place and sprinted to the door as it closed. She was twenty feet away but it swung in such a slow, ponderous arc that she was just able to dart inside before it thudded home with a loud metallic thump.

Brad was inches away with only a thick velvet curtain between him and Jillybean. “Is that really napalm I’m smelling?” he asked. “It smells like gas.”

“Duh, it’s jellied gasoline,” Jim said. “Of course it smells like gas. Now, come on. The NATO rounds are all down by the stage.”

A stage where plays and musicals could be put on was thirty yards down a sloping aisle. The two of them tromped down to where hundreds of wood crates were stacked to the ceiling. Jim went to the first crate he came to and pried back the lid. He then pulled a smaller box from the crate. This was made of metal and its lid creaked when he opened it. “Here you go,” Jim said, handing over five smaller objects. “If I can get a signature?”

There was a rustle of paper, but Jillybean wasn’t watching. Like a specter of yellow, she had slunk from behind the curtain and was now crawling on her hands and knees through the theater seating. Why she had followed them through the door, she couldn’t tell. She was acting on instinct.
Something
was happening, something that required more men and more bullets. Even to the seven-year-old that something was obvious. They were going to try to capture the renegades and she was going to stop them—somehow. She was afraid, of course, however the unknown guilt eating her up forced her on.

“What’s that say?” Jim asked.

Brad growled, “Don’t be a dick. That says Baron Crane. My title, remember?”

Jim snorted. “This title business is freaking gay. Me, I’d rather have the money. Think about how much those girls are worth and I’m not just talking about selling them back to the Colonel, either. I mean selling them in New York or even to some of the Azael in North Platte. I’m betting you could get a thousand a head, easy, and all you got for them is a stupid, worthless title. That’s funny!”

“A title is better than you think. I am the lord of a town now and I can charge the people there taxes and fees. If the town grows, which it will, I’ll be way ahead than if I just turned them over for the money. Hell, I could be a duke someday and you’ll still be a lowly store keeper. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a ton of things to do before tomorrow’s little surprise.”

His armored boots thudded up the aisle and Jillybean slunk down low, her cheek pressed against the floor, her nose an inch from an ancient Ju-Ju-be the original color of which might have been either red or orange. When the door thunked closed a second time, Jim muttered something that sounded like a curse and there came a grunt and the sound of a heavy box being dropped. Jillybean reached out for the Ju-Ju-be. In the dim light it looked dusty but well preserved like a tiny exhibit from a museum.

Try as she might, it wouldn’t budge. It was stuck to the floor as if it had been fused there. 

“Fifty men at a hundred a pop is...” Jim paused to calculate. “Five thousand. And there are nine hundred per drum, that’s...shit. I hate long division.” He went on muttering numbers for some time while Jillybean worked at the Ju-Ju-be. The numbers prevailed over the candy.

Jim counted out five thousand rounds in increments of fifty and then he left, turning off the lights and locking Jillybean in the dark.

Her sudden fear made the other girl stronger and she said:
We should leave too. You can’t stop the Azael. There are too many of them and their land is too big. They’re not like Yuri and Abraham and the stupid River King. You won’t be able to escape them with a few explosions and a quick getaway. They’ll follow you and hound you and if you do make it to Colorado they’ll get you there
.

“Oh, who cares what you think,” Jillybean griped.

Forgetting the Ju-Ju-be, she stood and, by feel alone, she made her way to the door and then ran her hands up and down the wall until she found the switch for the house-lights.

They’ll see you. They’ll catch you
.

“No they won’t. Don’t you remember all the curtains and the plywood? No light gets out of here, I bet. Now hush so I can figure this out.”

Something was going to happen ‘tomorrow’ which meant they had to get away that night, which meant she had to knock together a plan. She had in mind explosions—her mind frequently went to them. “Though I don’t want to be so close as that other time,” she said, thinking about the time she blew up the barge. Her head had rang for two days after that and her brain had been mushy; she hadn’t even been able to figure out Ernest until it was nearly too late.

She went down the aisle and looked at the crates. They were heavy, too heavy for her to even budge, and the words and strings of letters and numbers on the sides didn’t make much sense. Only by comparing the opened one to the rest did she come to the conclusion that there were bullets in the mountains of crates.

“Humph,” she snorted in anger. Bullets weren’t going to do her much good. But napalm might. She turned away from the stage and followed her nose upward to the lobby where the smell of fuel was headache-inducing. She covered her little nose with the collar of her dress and inspected the silvery canisters which were as tall as she was. On each was stenciled the word: Napalm B, and there were warnings and the symbol for fire. She tried to push one of the canisters and found them to be heavier than the crates of bullets.

“Well, shoot,” she whispered. Because of their weight, Jillybean discarded the idea of using the canisters. What she need was C4.

She began searching. In the lobby with the napalm were big machine guns with barrels longer than both her legs put together and coiled belts of bullets and piles of green objects she took to be bombs of sorts. She ignored these as they seemed unusable by a little girl. In a room behind the concession stand she found part of what she was looking for: boxes of C4 and blasting caps. However, there weren’t any detonators.

“They have to be here somewhere,” she said and then spent the next hour going through every room in the theater and pawing through every box. Her search uncovered all sorts of amazing things, but she did not find detonators. She then spent twenty eight minutes staring at the C4 and the blasting cap, trying to figure out some way to use one to blow up the other without a detonator. The twenty eight minutes were as wasted as the hour had been.

She might have had a genius level intellect, however there were canyon-sized holes in her knowledge base. On some level, she knew she needed electricity to work the blasting cap, however electricity fell into the same category as magic. It made things work, but how was beyond her. She had somehow been able to piece together the idea that the potential energy in batteries was the same as electricity, but she didn’t know how to get it out of the batteries and into the blasting caps. Of circuits she possessed zero knowledge and of wiring she possessed only fear because even she knew that electricity could “zap” you if you touched open wires.

“I need Captain Grey,” she said and then was struck by a pain in her stomach. It was the acid of guilt. She suddenly pictured the Bone-man’s lips moving as he talked to the Duke. She had seen his lips form an “M” and she could hear the echo of a word:
mor-something
. They were talking about the poison in Deanna. The answer to fixing her was in Jillybean’s head. She just had to trace the lines back to…

Stop!
the
other girl
demanded and then shut out the memory so that it was now only a memory of a memory. It was like slamming an iron door on a straw house. Jillybean wobbled on her coltish legs and put a hand to her cheek. It felt as though she had been clubbed on the top of the head; her vision played in front of her as if she were standing on the deck of a boat and the world had turned to fluid and bucked under the effects of an invisible storm.

It was a second before everything turned solid again and she could stand straight. She tried to call up the memory of the Bone-man talking to the Duke but now it was misty and cloudy and distant. She still had the guilt, however. She had done something wrong, or knew something wrong, or she was wrong in some way. Wrong and evil, that was her. She was warped and broken and unlovable, Jillybean was sure of it.

But she was still needed. She had a job to do and a family to help. That meant she had to go to Captain Grey, look him in his eye and ask for his help to make the bombs so she could save the renegades once again, so she could save what was left of her family. Men like the Duke didn’t understand love and family. They understood explosions, however, and the bigger the better.

As much as Jillybean’s world had lost focus and she saw things as large and vague, where nothing seeming to fit with anything else, Grey’s vision was narrow as the edge of his dagger. He had spent the two hours that Deanna was with the Duke in a state that was somewhat like his own coma. Things occurred around him, people spoke and walked here and there and generally carried on living, however he had only existed much like a tree might. He stood and the minutes passed in an ageless, timeless fashion.

Then he saw her looking pale, but otherwise unharmed. He could tell by her demeanor that she had remained…pure? It wasn’t the right word for a woman who had survived on The Island, however it was the right word for that moment and for that girl. She had refused the Duke, he could see that. She had remained steadfast and true—to herself and to Grey—at the risk of everything else, including her baby. 

The others didn’t understand. They were weak. They still saw Deanna and all the other women who had been sex slaves as whores, however, Deanna was different. Grey had known it from the very start. She had been prickly at first and that was because she was trying to sort things out, to find her rightful place, to understand what honor meant for her. Unlike the others she had grown and as she had, she’d become so much more than she had ever been. She was no longer simply a creature of beauty, something to be gawked at or worn as arm candy. She was a woman with pride and regal bearing.

Or she had been.

Now she was a soft creature, vulnerable and precious. Grey watched over her constantly and his face was a carven mask of anger. Sorrow wasn’t his lot. When Eve had died, he had been furious, not mournful. His first thought had been: who had screwed up? Who had failed in their duty of watching her? Who would pay when he found out the truth of her death?

He was furious, and figured that sorrow would come later, but so far it hadn’t.

“It’ll be a weight on my soul when I die,” he whispered. And that too he would deal with when the time came. When he stood at those pearly gates, he figured he would let it all hang out then. That would be far down the road he hoped, both for himself and Deanna.

Once more, he worked the blood pressure cuff and, once more, he felt pain at the extremely low reading.

“Not so good?” a voice asked from the doorway. It was the Duke, bearish and burly. Grey took a long breath before replying and then found he didn’t have any words to answer with; he was simply too angry. He was almost certain the Duke had done something to Deanna, just what, wasn’t clear.

The Duke stared down at Deanna, ignoring the soldier as he gnashed his teeth. He then had the temerity to reach out and touch her foot beneath the thin blanket of green wool. Grey contemplated taking that hand off at the wrist. He could have his knife out in a blink and it was sharp as a razor.

“Her blood pressure is fine,” Grey finally answered. “A low blood pressure can be expected as she fights off the poisons in her body. If they haven’t killed her yet, they won’t.” This was true of most poisons. The body filtered them through the liver and gradually the person got better…only Deanna wasn’t getting better, and strangely, she wasn’t getting worse, either. Medically speaking, that wasn’t normal. Grey’s greatest fear was her dangerously low respiration rate. She took eight meager sips of air every minute.

He had no idea what poison caused that. There could be other possible causes. An infection of the blood could be at the root of her problem. She wouldn’t have long if she was septic. He started wondering about the possibility of a blood transfusion. In these primitive conditions it could be as dangerous as doing nothing.

The Duke stared at the woman for a long time before he patted her leg with a familiarity that was well out of bounds, and said: “I will check on you later. Perhaps after dinner? I’ll have something set up…I mean sent over.”

“That would be great,” Grey said, without the least sincerity. There was no way he would eat even a cracker if it came from the Duke. He had given very strict orders for the rest of the renegades concerning the same thing. After the death of Eve, Grey knew they would follow the order.

When the Duke left, Grey turned Deanna’s wrist over and checked the time on her watch. She wore a Rolex, silver with diamonds studded around the face. In the old world it would have gone for over thirty grand, now it was virtually worthless except as a gadget that displayed the time. It read 2:31 in the afternoon. That was a bit of a shock. He went to the window, pulled back the curtain, and blinked, shielding his face against the brilliant light.

With the perpetual zombie threat, his first instinct was to hide from the light and yank the curtain back in place, however the light was warming, not just for his skin, but also for his soul. He hauled the couch with Deanna on it over to the window so that the sun fell on her—it accented her pallor and he was still grimacing over it when Neil came in.

The small man stared at the woman, his cruelly disfigured face set in stone. “No change.” He said this as a proclamation not a question. “This isn’t
her
doing.” He meant Jillybean and again it wasn’t a question. “This is
his
doing, I know it. But why? Did she refuse his advances? If so, I say good for her.”

“Yes.” Grey couldn’t say more, he lacked the energy. Neil stood for some time and looked as though a cramp had him by his soul—he was sort of hunched in on himself, a gnarled little gnome with the weight of the world on his back.

“We need to leave soon,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before someone accidentally lets it slip about who we are.” He caught Grey’s eye in an even stare. “We need to leave soon...no matter what.”

Grey felt a new fury build.
No matter what
, meant either leaving Deanna behind, or taking her with them. In the state she was in both would likely kill her. Grey wanted to slap Neil’s face, but there was no way he could. Neil was doing his best. In fact, he was doing a great job as leader, Grey thought, however the work had taken a huge toll on him. The horribly tough decisions he was making almost daily seemed to have sapped the warmth and compassion out of him. He was great but also terribly cold.

Neil stared down at the woman he was sentencing to death for a long, slow minute and then left.

Seconds later, Jillybean tapped softly, a sound that was almost a secret in itself, and then she edged her way in through the partially open door. She had traded out her yellow dress for her pink jeans and a pink short-sleeved shirt. On her back was her Ladybug backpack; it swayed heavily.

Like Neil, she stared at Deanna, and just like he had she seemed to undergo some sort of physical pain at the sight of her. She went green and the dark circles beneath her eyes looked like bruises. She rubbed her chest and then turned her chin slightly, saying in a low voice: “I won’t, I promise.”

“You won’t what?” Grey asked.

Jillybean jumped like someone snuck up on; her eyes twitched with guilt. “Nothing, except I’m just aposed to talk about the bombs and nothing else or
she’ll
come back. You know who
she
is, right?”

Grey knew.
She
was the nasty, imbalanced creature which resided in the little girl. Perhaps,
she
was even evil. Perhaps
she
had something to do with Eve’s death. That was a hard concept to swallow. Seven-year-old girls were never evil. In the movies, sure, however in real life he had never heard of a little girl such as this committing murder. Even a girl with this many mental issues. But who else could have killed the infant? The truth was that anyone could have, yet Jillybean was the only one with even a hint of a motive. The
she
inside her hated the baby. It was a well-established fact.

Then again,
she
seemed to hate everyone.

Grey didn’t know the truth. He, along with everyone else, had been in a state of shock and hadn’t really considered all the ramifications of Eve’s death, nor had he assigned guilt, though he leaned heavily toward either the Duke or the little girl. Both were dangerous.

“Ok,” he said, clearing his throat, “we don’t have to talk about anything but the bombs. May I ask what bombs?”

She seemed surprised by the question. “Why, the bombs we gotsta build is all. They should be big and remote-controlled like the last ones and I woulda done it myself only they didn’t have detonators and I don’t know how to make any. I saw a lightable fuse on a cartoon once and that might work on account of all the napalm they have. Napalm is what means gas-flavored jelly. I don’t know about the jelly part but boy, is it stinky.”

Her words came shooting out of her causing Grey to struggle to catch up. “I guess by ‘they have napalm’ you mean the Azael?” She nodded to his question and he continued: “And why do we need bombs?”

Jillybean leaned in close. “Because they plan on getting us and selling us to New York. I heard Mister Brad talk about it with this guy named Jim. Only it’s Mister Baron Brad now. Baron is what means like a little duke, I think. Anyways, he knows who we are and bombs are usually the answer to these sorts of things, only like I said they didn’t have no detonators. They just have C4 and blasting caps and wire and Napalm in these big steel jugs and they also have bullets, like a million of them...I mean a quarter of a million of them...but that may not be right. I think I dreamed...that...”

She trailed off looking confused.

Grey sat back considering her words and, for the moment, Deanna was forgotten. She was just a long thin bundle under a blanket. “If Brad knows who we are and he knows our past, then why hasn’t he done anything about it yet?”

“I don’t know if I can answer that on account it’s not about bombs and I’m aposed to only...Oh...Ok. She says I can talk about that. I think it’s because they don’t have enough fighter men, but they’re getting more of them now. You can see them outside.”

A quick turn of his head confirmed Jillybean’s story. Across from the school were a number of small homes that had their doors boarded over and their windows heavily curtained. There were faces in the windows and as soon as they saw Grey looking, they withdrew and the curtains swung back. Up the street was a park and, in the shade of a large maple that sat at the park’s edge, were three men standing together, smoking. They kept a steady gaze toward the school and their hands never left their weapons. Grey was sure he had never seen them before.

Jillybean seemed to read his mind. “They’re new. There are all sorts of new people. They just come trickling in. They’re going to trap us.” She stared out the window, her blue eyes unblinking and seeing far away.

He eased Jillybean back from the window and let the curtain fall, dipping the room back into gloom. There was a single kerosene lamp sitting on the desk; next to it was a triangular block of wood. On the front of it read:
Principal Bobby
. Grey flipped it over so the nameplate faced down; he could not comprehend the notion of attending a school where the principal allowed children to call him Bobby; the very notion was repulsive to his character.

“I need you to tell me everything you heard and saw about Brad. Even small details. What he was wearing, where he was going, what he smelled like, anything.”

She held nothing back, or so it seemed to Grey. She prattled on, going into an amazing amount of detail. The only time she stumbled was when she recounted the mountain of crates around the stage. “I think it was a quarter of a...mill...yun.” She paused again with a faraway look. It lasted only a few seconds and then she went back to talking as if the break hadn’t occurred. “I don’t even know what that is. I know what a ba-jillion is. That’s what means a whole awful lot.”

“Who said that about the quarter of a million?”

Her eyes suddenly blazed and a sneer swept her sweet features into an ugly cast. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said, around the sneer.

“Jillybean!” Grey snapped, forgetting for a moment the woman in the coma next to him.

The little girl blinked herself back to normal...what passed as normal at least. “I can’t talk about that.
She
won’t let me.
She
won’t let me cry, neither. When I think of Eve it hurts but
she
gets mad.
Sh
e says I was born a lonely child and that Eve was never my sister and Ram was never my uncle and Sarah was never my mom, and Neil was never my father. I only get to have
her
.” Her expression suggested she didn’t like the arrangement very much.

“Ok, ok,” Grey said with his hands out, trying to calm the little girl. Her voice was brittle with conflicting emotions; she seemed on the verge of a mental collapse. “Just finish telling me what you saw in the theater.” Jillybean spoke for ten more minutes and then came to an abrupt end with her failure at making a bomb. “I don’t think a bomb will work this time,” Grey told her.

He was in difficult situation. He wanted to act quickly, before any more of the Duke’s men showed up. A simple plan formed in his mind: he would take Neil and William Gates, Ricky and two of his crew of ex-cage-fighters and storm the courthouse. With the element of surprise, they could be in the Duke’s chambers within seconds. The major problem with this was that the only proof of any wrong doing on the part of the Duke was based on the word of a seven-year-old and not just any seven-year-old, but one with an obvious mental disorder.