The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) (22 page)

Again Jillybean backed away. She continued down the stairs and, again, came to a door. It was identical to the first, only the sound coming from it was different. There was a rushing and a crackling and then screams. An explosion made the metal of the door shudder and heat shimmered at its edges. Jillybean ran.

Down she went, passing door after door, not pausing even for a second to listen at any of them. The darkness grew with each step and so it was she didn’t see the obstacle on the stairs until she was right on it and it was too late to stop. Wood barked her knees and she tumbled across the obstacle, landing on the stairs on the other side.

Dazed, but not hurt, she pushed herself up and explored the wooden thing with her hands. In spite of the fact that it was so dark, she knew what it was. It was a desk. In fact it was the very same desk she had hid beneath when she saved Ram from Cassie’s guards. She ran her hands over it in the dark, remembering the nicks on the wood, the cool flat top, the hollowed area where she had curled up after she had set her magic marble in motion.

A part of her wanted to curl up and hide once again. She even rested her soft cheek on the cool desk. Then she heard the sound of shoes clicking on the stairs above. It was
the thing
after her again! She fled, but her steps were slowed by a memory: the ferocious giant from the school gym had been naked and yet what she heard now was the patter of shoes like a business man might wear, hitting concrete. The fast heel-to-toe clatter, which sounded oddly familiar, was coming closer and closer to her.

A shudder ran up her body making her muscles go weak. Jillybean forced her feet downward where the pale light gave out and all was black. She began leaping down the stairs, each time trusting that there would be concrete at the bottom. Still the shoes came closer and closer.

Jillybean began blubbering as she tried to go faster. Then the stairs ran out and she found herself in a concrete maze. The floors were white and clean; above were evenly spaced light fixtures. Everything was perfect; everything was evil. She knew where she was: New Eden...except where were the bodies and the fire and the zombies. She had destroyed New Eden with a zombie army, only now there was no sign of the destruction.

That’s because you never saw the death you caused
, a voice explained.
This is the New Eden in your mind
.

The little girl spun around; there was no one behind her. Only the stairwell was behind her and the tapping shoes as they hurried to get her.

Again she ran. Just as in the real New Eden, there were corridors branching everywhere, however these corridors ended in doors and next to each was a plaque. The sight of them sapped her strength yet she ran, knowing that she would have to go into one eventually. The man with the shoes was relentless. He was closer now and when Jillybean turned down a long hall she was able to look back and see he wasn’t a man at all.

He was a monster, one of the zombie-monsters.

A scream burned past the blubbering and rushed out of her throat. Blindly she went for one of the doors. She was out of options. It was either a door to who-knew what or turn and face the monster. The doors seemed less frightening, especially the one closest. It was dark and quiet around the edges, in fact there was a coolness whisping toward her tear-streaked face.

Jillybean grabbed the handle and rushed through, slamming it in the monster’s face. It had been a zombie monster and one that, like everything else in this strange world, was familiar, terribly familiar. The closed door stopped him cold. There wasn’t a sound coming from it, not a moan or a tap of shoes or any of the awful banging.

The only sound came from behind her. When Jillybean turned she saw that she was in a forest at night and far away there were screams and muffled gunshots. At first she didn’t know where she was, or when, for that matter. Then she was aware of movement to her right. It was a dark thing, like one of the monsters. The odor wafting off of it was the sickening smell of burnt hair and charred flesh. It was Sarah.

She was lurching along and behind her, darting through the night forest like a sly mongoose was... “It’s me,” Jillybean said.

Jillybean stared at herself in amazement and also with longing. Under her arm was Ipes. Oh, how she missed and needed Ipes. She stared at the little toy until a voice had her swinging her head around.

“Drop the gun.” A man was in the forest with them—it was the bounty hunter! Even with the dark, Jillybean saw him clear as day. The cold eyes, the steady gun hand, the growth of beard; she was so close she could count the pores on his nose if she wished. She was about to kill him. He didn’t know it yet, but he was seconds away from dying...and, so too, was Sarah.

The little girl tried to scream a warning, but not even the sound of her breath could be heard.

“Sarah Rivers,” the bounty hunter pronounced in a voice as dry as dirt. “And Jillybean. You got the baby. Very impressive.”

“You can’t have her!” Sarah hissed.

“I can have anything I want and what I want now is Sadie Walcott. Where is she?”

Jillybean saw it all playing out before her: they’d waste the last precious seconds of their lives going back and forth uselessly talking and then would come the murders. In seconds Jillybean would be staring into the hole in the bounty hunter’s skull. There would be a tunnel rimmed with blood, with walls of scorched brain. Before, when it was dark and hard to see, the sight of it had driven her into a catatonic state. What would happen to her now when every horrific detail was blown out of proportion? Would she fall straight into a coma like Deanna was in? If so, what would happen to her when the monster with the tapping shoes found her?

She wasn’t going to wait around to find out. Terror had her by the heart, and she fled from the murders. The forest grew wild and thick so that she hadn’t gone far when Sarah was murdered. Jillybean stopped as sadness took her breath and crumpled its spiky fist around her heart. She stopped for only a moment. What was coming next was far worse. She was on the verge of murder and she was dreadfully afraid that she would feel the amplified sensation of carnal joy at killing that rat-bastard. That exciting sensation had been there, inside of her and now the entire world was going to know that part of her had enjoyed the feeling of power that had come with the murder.

There had been lust buried in her heart. When she killed she was no longer the helpless little girl who cowered and cried and needed grode-ups to feed her and care for her and keep her safe. She was powerful when she killed, and she secretly liked it.

The first gunshot sounded and Jillybean whined and clawed more desperately at the foliage, practically swimming among the grasping vines and supple branches. IT would happen any moment and the world would know. She was so frantic that when her hand came down on a doorknob, she thought nothing of it and pulled.

She found herself back on the stairs. Above her was the desk squatting like a flat-backed turtle in the dark. It had grown immense; the scarred edge of it was now a cliff rising high above her. Below her were inky shadows. They looked thick and deep, like the ocean on a moonless night. She knew the shadows would engulf her completely, but with no other choices she started down, one step at a time. First her worn Keds slipped beneath the shadows and disappeared and then her bruised-up shins and her knobby knees.

Cautiously she swam her hand in the shadows; they were cool to the touch and otherwise harmless. She went down until the black covered her head and she was blind. Her splayed hands wove patterns in front of her to keep her from running into anything, only there wasn’t anything to hit. She went down the stairs, oh so slowly, until she reached a landing and her foot struck something soft but unyielding.

Reaching down she felt around, puzzling out what was on the landing. It was mushy with something hard beneath—it was a face! Jillybean pulled her hand back, afraid that she was feeling one of the monsters, only there was no moan, and no movement of the thing at her feet, and it didn’t have the rotten garbage smell of the monsters.

“I should see if whoever it is, is alive,” she whispered, trying to talk herself into the action. She didn’t really think someone was just sleeping down there in the dark, however, she was desperate to find a friend in this weird world. “Hey. Hey you,” she said, giving the body a poke. Silence greeted her. A second time she reached out, this time to give the body a shake because she knew that sometimes a person needed that sort of thing to wake them.

Her hand felt something odd, something soft, meshy, and faintly oily. Careful as always, Jillybean pulled back and then tentatively explored the substance. It was hair! Not her kind of hair but hair from a black person. She had never known many black people—Chris and Amber in school; and Donna, Steve and the fellow with the U shaped afro from back in Philadelphia, and there was Ms Shondra who had become a Believer. That was about it except...

The memory came to her in a snap.

She had been on these very stairs, hiding beneath the desk waiting for the magic marble to drop. There had been two people with Ram—they had been black and one had been a woman. She had fallen...or had she been pushed? Jillybean couldn’t remember; she had run at the woman with a black sweater held out and there had been an explosion and a flash of blinding light and then...

“She died,” Jillybean whispered. “I didn’t know...I didn’t mean it.” The little girl pulled her hands back and clutched them to her chest. She was kneeling before the body of a woman she had killed. Her fingers were entwined and, had there been light, it would have looked like she was praying over the woman. She held the position for a few seconds until guilt had her scrambling back up the stairs.

“It wasn’t my fault.” She pleaded with the dark as she ran for the door. At the handle, she paused afraid of what was on the other side: the bounty hunter’s murder. That seemed far worse than the accidental death of the poor black lady and Jillybean hesitated, uncertain which way to go. It was then she heard a sound from the bottom of the stairs where everything was black and there wasn’t even the pale, silver light of the moon to see by.

At first she thought it was the dead coming back to life to have their revenge on her, only just then she heard the clack of shoes on the stairs. Right away she threw the door open and ran into the forest, only the forest was gone and she was in a large room with cages lining the walls and only a narrow walkway between—this was the River King’s jails. The cages were filled with people she didn’t recognize. She couldn’t recognize them, because they were all faceless. They were blank entities. Unknowns.

“You killed me,” the first said to her.

“I-I don’t th-think so,” she stammered. “I don’t know you.”

It reached for her through the bars, its long arms ending at blackened fingers. “You killed me,” it repeated. “On the ferry boat. There was an explosion and a piece of metal went into my back. It cut my spinal cord and I was paralyzed. I could only watch as the fire came closer. It began to cook me and I could only scream. First my feet and then legs, but the worst, was when my hair caught on fire and my eyes melted.”

Again Jillybean could only sputter: “I-I d-din’t mean it. I-I was j-just trying t-to help my friend.” Slowly she moved away from it. Then, from behind her, the door she had just come through opened with a long dreadful
creeeeak
.

With her face cringing and her eyes popping tears, Jillybean rushed away down the narrow corridor between the cells, holding her arms in to keep them from being grabbed by the grasping hands. She passed a dozen cells on either side and only the last one on the left sat alone and empty.

Behind her was the clacking of the shoes. It came on steadily, without hurry. He would get her, eventually, she knew that, however her eyes were drawn to the cell and she paused in front of it, wondering why it was vacant. In all this crazy world it was the one thing that didn’t fit and the spare empty room gave her a sinking feeling in her stomach as she looked into it.

There was something wrong with the cell. It shouldn’t have been empty and it had a trappy feel to it. So she ran past it to a real door at the end of the long room.

It had an empty plaque next to it. The knob was gold and when Jillybean reached a shaking hand to it the metal was warm to the point of being hot. “It’s the ferry boat on the other side, isn’t it?” She could picture the boat roaring in flames, shuddering from explosions and tilting as it began to sink. Would she find Ram on the deck, chained by the neck and grey and yucky as all the monsters were? Or would she see the people she had killed, trapped below the waterline, crying helplessly as the water rose on one hand and the heat cooked them alive like a chicken in an oven on the other.

Horrible visions swept her imagination and yet she still found herself turning the gold knob. As she did, excuses started sprouting in her mind as to why she had sunk the boat—she had a million good reasons, but underlying each was the fact that a part of her wondered what a sinking boat would look like. She’d had a queer desire to light a fire, one that was bigger than any bonfire imaginable. That desire was wholly primal and imprinted into her subconscious as it was in nearly every thinking being yet there was a tremendous sense of guilt that came along with it.

It turned out not to be the ferry in front of her, nor was it the bridge going up in two thunderous explosions, nor was it the barge disappearing in a huge fireball and a concussive aftershock that turned her brain practically inside out. And nor was it the white hot blast from the fuel tank in front of the hangar where a thousand monsters were converging on Mister Neil and Sadie.