The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) (25 page)

“Don’t let Eve kill again,” her daddy warned. “She’ll only get stronger and stronger, until you won’t be anything more than a shadow, like me.” He said this with a sour, sickly grin. “Every day she’s in charge you’ll remember me less and less.”

“No, I’ll never forget you, Daddy.”

The grin made a brief comeback. “Down here you’ll never forget, but up there…I’ll be a distant memory and so will everything I have ever taught you. So, please, fight her.”

“I don’t know how,” she blurted out. His brow came up for a last time. Once more he expected her to have an answer to an impossible question. It was so frustrating! Didn’t he know that she was just a little girl and that she was all alone?

It’s why he’s trying to get you to think for yourself?
Again the voice came to her. Wait, did that sound like Ipes? No, that was impossible. Ipes was gone. He had been thrown in the river and his words in her mind had been thrown right out as well. That didn’t make sense either, but as her father would only make her figure it out on her own too, she decided not to bring it up. Besides, it was too painful.

All at once, she realized she was running out of time. Mister Neil and Captain Grey needed her. “I can think for myself, Daddy, but right now I need your help. Tell me what to do, please, before it’s too late.”

“Fight her every step of the way. If she wants to go left, you go right. If she says yes, you say no. Force yourself into her head and then force her to listen to you. She is all emotion. Hate is powerful but so is logic; use your smarts. Trick her if you need to.”

“Can I win?” Jillybean asked. The other girl was just so big and wicked that the idea of fighting her was daunting.

Her daddy looked up at the twin lamps. “I don’t know,” he said. “But you have to try. Now go and don’t look back.” She was about to ask how she was going to get all the way up there, when her father picked her up and, just like he had when she was a toddler, he tossed her high in the air.

Up and up she soared, yet she wasn’t afraid of how high she went; she was trapped in her own mind. She couldn’t be hurt from falling, she could only be hurt by
her
.

“Which means that I can hurt her as well,” Jillybean said. It was with a feeling akin to eagerness that she missiled straight at the right eye. When she got to it, the eye was the size of a manhole cover. Through it she could see the front office of the school in the late afternoon light.

Not knowing what else to do, Jillybean started to climb into the eye. It immediately clamped shut. “The opposite of shut is open,” she said before she grabbed the inner aspect of her own eyelid and pried it open.

“Hey!” the other girl hissed.

Jillybean saw her giant hand come up, palm first and again the light dimmed as the other girl rubbed her eye. It was working! She was making some sort of difference. The other girl was reacting.

On instinct only, Jillybean leapt out of the eye and into the hand. It was the strangest feeling in the world to be a living thing inside her own body. The inside of the hand was filled with long bones that were as tall as she was. The flesh of it was pale and translucent. Jillybean could see out, although everything was blurry.

The first thing she did was pull the hand back from her eye.

The other girl stared at the hand, holding it out at arm’s length. “Stop it, Jillybean! This is my body now. I control it.”

“Oh yeah?” Jillybean asked. “Then stop this.” Jillybean threw the hand at her own throat and began to squeeze as hard as she could. The other girl tried to stop her by using her left hand to peel back the fingers, however the right was her dominant hand. It was too strong and slowly she choked herself into unconsciousness.

Jillybean’s world went black. Gone were the long bones of white and the pale flesh. At first, she couldn’t see anything but then she was aware of swirling shadows and then, suddenly,
she
was there.

“It’s time to end this,”
she
hissed. “This is my body and this is my life.” Without another word, the other girl launched herself at little Jillybean.
She
was bigger than her daddy and was very strong, but Jillybean was desperate and, buoyed by her daddy’s words, she was filled with the will to fight.

Together, they grappled in the dark. They punched and kicked and pulled hair and bit each other and wrestled in the horrible world they had created. As day passed into night and, as Captain Grey went on his recon mission and Neil fretted the hours away, the two girls fought. For Jillybean, the fight had a nightmare quality. No punch or kick seemed to make the least difference, the other girl kept coming and she grew in strength as Jillybean faded.

It felt like days of endless fighting went by until Neil’s voice echoed through their subconscious: “Jillybean, I need you.” The fear in his voice had the other girl laughing.

With a supreme effort, Jillybean pulled herself from the other girl’s grip. “They need me,” she said. “And that means you need me. Yeah, it’s true. The Duke knows who we are and he is coming to get us.”

She
laughed again, louder. “I know. Who do you think told Brad?” Jillybean gaped at her and the evil laugh went on and on. When
she
could gasp, she said: “I am going to be Lady Eve. Brad promised me a title. Now, who’s the smart one? I just dangled the words:
I can make you rich
, in his ear and now I’m going to be a lady with gowns and servants and horses. I get to have all of that simply by getting rid of Neil and the rest of them. They’re going to be sold back to the River King or the Colonel or whoever offers the most money.”

In flashes,
she
showed Jillybean the memory of her secret conversation with Brad. It had happened at some point after Deanna had been drugged and before Eve was found dead. The little girl had tracked Brad down to an ugly storage rental facility two blocks behind the courthouse. It had been converted into thirty horse stalls and the air was sharp with the stench of manure. The other girl wanted a horse so badly, she would’ve done anything to get one and a bargain was struck.

The dirty deal shriveled Jillybean’s heart, but it did not dim her mind. Brad shook hands on the deal but his face was full of lies. “You’re not smart,” Jillybean said. “You’re a moron. Brad’s not going to give you anything. Look at his eyes.” The memory was now a shared one and, with Jillybean’s attention to detail, the condescending look was clear as day.

“No,”
she
hissed. “He...he promised. He said I could have my pick of the horses and the dresses.”

“He lied,” Jillybean said, feeling not only smug but also stronger. Jillybean had grown while
she
had diminished slightly. The other girl started to shake her head in denial which Jillybean stopped with a question: “If your places were reversed, would you hand over a horse and dresses and a title to a little, defenseless girl, or would you sell her, as well?”

The other girl’s hands clenched into fists and shook as her face slowly contorted: twisting, snarling lips, a nose that wrinkled in disgust, and eyes that blazed and grew ferocious in their anger. She was huge again and the power rippled off of her. “That bastard! I’m going to kill him. I’ll kill him!”

Dwarfed by the black shadow of the other girl, Jillybean stepped back, thinking:
This isn’t going as planned
.

“It won’t do you any good,” Jillybean said. “The Duke is the one you really should have spoken to. Brad is nothing. But either way it’s too late. You screwed up and now we’re surrounded with no way out. We’ll be sold back to the River King, I bet or maybe to Yuri in New York. You know what they’ll do to us there, right?”

She
knew what would happen and the two of them shivered in unison as very bad pictures flicked into their minds. “You need to do something!” the other girl said. “You’re smart. You can get us out of this.”

“I can, but that means you’d have to give me total control of our body.”

“No way,”
She
spat. “You’ll hurt us or do something stupid like rescuing all of them. No, you just tell me what to say or do.”

Jillybean smiled easily and, without lying, said: “I would rather die.”

In her usual black, Goth clothes, Sadie was able to slip away in the dark from the other members of the strike teams. She wasn’t in the mood to be around people, especially as some of them had been openly questioning her place among them; the name Lindsey had been whispered frequently whenever she passed by. Sadie, who couldn’t close her eyes without seeing the terrified woman’s face as she was being eaten alive, didn’t need any reminders of her latest murder.

She went to look for Neil and found him huddled over Jillybean’s limp body and whispering: “Ipes needs you.”

This seemed unnecessarily cruel and Sadie was just about to admonish him when, Jillybean suddenly stirred. The little girl put her hands out as though she were blind. She felt the things around her: the gym floor, Neil’s sweater vest, her own pink shirt. Her hands played on each with great interest.

It was a few seconds before she pulled her head up and asked: “Mister Neil? Is that you? Where’s Ipes? Did you say something about him being in trouble?”

“We’re all in trouble,” he answered. “We need your help...oh! Jeeze, Sadie, you scared the dickens out of me.”

Sadie had come ghosting up, her black Converse sneakers not making a sound. Under other circumstances she might have laughed at how high he jumped and the way his fingers wiggled like spiders just under his chin, but there was a battle coming and she was in no mood for laughter.

“You’re going too fast with her, Neil. We should find out what happened to her first,” Sadie said. He gave her a pained look, suggesting that there wasn’t time for that sort of thing.

Jillybean made it a moot point by answering simply: “I strangled myself is all.” She started to get to her feet and then saw Deanna lying motionless next to her. “Oh, right,” she whispered as a shudder racked her.

Neil saw it, and grabbed her shoulders and stared hard into her face. “You know what happened to her, don’t you?”

Jillybean took a shaky breath and nodded, then without warning, she yanked the IV catheter out of Deanna’s arm; blood started seeping out of the hole and the little girl pressed her thumb down on it while she jutted her pointy chin at the IV bag. “That’s got morphine in it. That’s what means a type of poison that knocks her out if she gets too much. But I didn’t do it. The Duke gave it to her.”

“Morphine? So she’ll get better on her own?” Neil asked. When Jillybean nodded, he stood up and grabbed her hand. “Good,” was all he said and started leading the little girl away.

Sadie leapt up and pulled him back around. “What about Deanna. We just can’t leave her lying here all alone.”

Neil glanced down at Deanna with a confused look. “Why not? The morphine is no longer flowing. She’ll be better pretty soon. Better than we are going to be if I can’t get a new plan cooked up. Grey’s plan is...is just wrong. We’re not trained soldiers. You know that, Sadie, and you know that if we try his plan too many of us will be killed tonight.”

She had no choice except to agree. Grey’s plan called for perfect coordination and precision between the seven teams. They would have to fight in the dark and retreat at exactly the right moment for a slaughter not to occur. If any team broke for the trucks too early, it would leave the defenseless renegades open to a withering assault. If teams retreated too late, they would either be left behind or the trucks, crammed with people would be stuck waiting out in the open. If it all came together perfectly it would be a miracle.

At the same time, Sadie didn’t care for the way Neil was treating Jillybean. Once again, he was using her as a tool without regard to what sort of psychological damage he could be inflicting on her.

Neil noticed Sadie’s indecision and guessed, correctly, what it meant. “We need her to get us all out of here. If we can’t get out, nothing else matters because we’ll all be...well, you know what will happen.”

Before Sadie could answer, Jillybean said in a small voice: “We’ll all be dead. I know. Don’t worry about me, Sadie. I know what all this means now. And...and I know I’m not like a normal person. The other girl inside me is like Ipes was, except she’s real mean and can take me over whenever she wants. That’s not going to get better unless I can get all of you out of here. Then maybe she won’t hurt people so much.”

Sadie heard the fatality in her voice. It matched her feelings exactly. They were two young warriors who had gone too far and had killed too much. They were at the end of their ropes and there was still a thousand foot drop below them.

“Ok,” Sadie said. “Let’s figure this out together.” She held out her pinky. Jillybean didn’t smile at it as she might once have done, instead she grimly latched her own tiny pinky onto Sadie’s.

“Good,” Neil said. “Now let’s hurry. Captain Grey won’t like a change to his plans if it means involving you, Jillybean. He doesn’t think you’re strong enough, but I do. I think you’re as strong as you need to be.”

That sounded like a bunch of hot air to Sadie, though she understood. Neil was practically at the end of his own rope and he was quite willing to sacrifice one life to save sixty, even if that one life was as innocent as Jillybean’s...except she wasn’t quite so innocent, Sadie had to remind herself.

Neil snuck them out a side door, making sure to avoid the route people were taking to relieve themselves in the back of the school. In a minute the three of them slipped out into the night and, despite the dark, they crouched next to some bushes.

“Are the bad guys still across the street in those houses?” Jillybean asked.

“Yep and there’s more of them,” Neil said. He told her of Captain Grey’s recon mission and then told her about the battle plan. “I’m afraid of the casualties we’ll sustain. I think if these were trained soldiers Grey was leading we’d have a chance, but they’re just people and too much depends on luck.”

Jillybean gave a shrug. “It still might work...except he hasn’t taken into account any response by the Duke or by any of the other people in this town. They might join the fight or they might lay in wait like an ambush.”

“I’m sure he knows all that, but we don’t have enough guns or bullets to add to his plan,” Neil said. “Nor do we have enough people who are capable of acting as a screening force. That’s why we need you, Jillybean. You talked about a bomb? How would a bomb help us?”

“I would need lots of bombs, but I don’t have what I need to ‘splode them. Has anyone seen my back pack? It has a ladybug on it.”

Sadie had. “It’s in the school’s office area...are there bombs in it?”

Jillybean was quiet for a few moments. Her body was rigid and eyes locked on some unidentified point in the middle distance. “They’re my bombs,” she whispered to herself. “So don’t even say that. You wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway.”

Neil gave Sadie a concerned look over the top of the little girl’s head. Sadie touched Jillybean on the shoulder. “Are you ok?” she asked.

“Huh? Oh, I mean, yeah. I’m ok it was just
her
. It was nothing. She likes bombs and wants to blow them up but she can’t cuz she’s not too smart. Anywaaay...” She let the word draw out as she stepped away from the bushes and stared down at the row of houses across from them. She then turned to look up the road towards the courthouse. After a minute, a grunt escaped her. It was one both Neil and Sadie had heard before.

“What?” Sadie asked. “You have a plan?”

The little girl turned back to them in a slow-motion twirl. “Most of one, I think. I need a few buckets of mud, all the flashlights we can scrounge up, some scissors or a sharp knife, some of that black electrical tape, and someone to talk Mister Captain Grey into giving me a few bombs.”

“Bombs?” Neil asked.

She nodded. “Just a few for…chaos. Is that a word? Yes, for chaos. We need lots and lots of chaos.”

A nervous chuckle escaped Neil as he dropped down to one knee so he could look into the little girls eyes. “Maybe you should tell me the plan first.”

When she explained what had formed in her mind, he laughed, displaying more nerves. Sadie only turned to look out at the town, wondering how many lives would be lost before the sun came up. The number could be well into the hundreds if Jillybean could get her bombs.

Neil tugged her shirt. “You coming? We’re going to go talk to Grey.”

She followed them inside and stood silently in the shadows as Jillybean smiled up at the gruff soldier. He only glared at Neil until Jillybean explained what she had seen in the Duke’s private apartment.

“Morphine,” he whispered. “Yeah, that sounds about right.” The little girl then began to explain her plan but Grey stopped her. “Was it also morphine that killed Eve?” he asked.

Jillybean jumped a little as if someone had snuck up on her and screamed in her ear. Her lower lip started to shake as she whispered: “Yeah. It-it was morphine, too. In her bottle.” Her eyes were wet and the tears began to pool. Those blue orbs were filled with guilt and they silently begged Grey not to ask any more questions concerning the baby’s death.

Sadie quickly stepped forward, putting herself between Jillybean and the tall captain. “We understand, honey. Don’t we, Mister Captain Grey, Sir?” She caught his eye and he nodded gently.

“Yes, I-I think I understand. Uh, so you have a plan, too? Why am I not surprised?” Have you heard mine yet?”

“Yes,” Jillybean answered in a shaky voice. The relief on her face was obvious. “Mister Neil told me and...and it was good, I guess, only it sounds like one of them soldier plans. And those are real good ‘cept we don’t have any soldiers, you know?”

Grey acknowledged that he did know this and added: “And how does your plan differ?” Jillybean spoke for five minutes. When she had finished he said: “Damn, that is good, but I don’t see why we need so many bombs, just one will do the trick. If we move one of the canisters of napalm down among the bullets they’ll cook off and it’ll be suicide for anyone to go outside. The only problem is how do we get into the theater to set it? I can’t pick a lock and if we try to hammer down the door they’ll swarm us.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Jillybean said. “The back door is open. Before I left I stuck a rock in the locking thingy. You know the little hole on the door jamb where one part of the lock goes into the other? With a rock in there it can’t lock.”

“Seems like you thought of everything except how to remotely detonate the bomb.” Grey said. “If we can’t do that, we might as well forget that part of it and hope everything else works out.”

Jillybean took her newly found pack off her back. She pulled her battery operated car:
Jazzy Blue
from it. “She’s remotely controlled with this little thingy. If we hook up the blasting cap to the receiver unit in the car it should work, though I don’t know if it will. It’s just a guess. And I don’t know how, neither.”

“Lucky for you, I do,” Grey said, taking the car from her. He turned it over a few times but it was obvious to Sadie that he was dwelling on Jillybean’s plan rather than actually looking at the car. Finally, he said: “We’ll go with your plan, Jillybean. We’ll call it
Operation Broken Arrow
. We’ll need to reconfigure the teams into groups of two each and they’ll have to be given their new instructions.”

“I’ll take Jillybean on my team,” Sadie said quickly. She loved Neil and would die for him, but he had become so toughened by the constant pain of their journey that she knew he would use Jillybean up if that was what it took to escape. “Someone has to look after her.” Jillybean took Sadie by the hand and smiled up at her and Sadie smiled back, though it was with a queer feeling. She was holding the hand of a murderer.

Then again, she was one as well.

Grey gathered the others and, to their immense relief, he told them about the change in plans. “I want everyone ready to go as soon as possible. You will need to be dressed and ready to move out when I say the word.” The renegades went right to work while Grey came up to Jillybean and Sadie. “I’ll need the remote control,” he said, holding out his hand.

“I want to come with you,” Jillybean countered. “I want to see how you connect everything.”

He shook his head. “No. I’ll tell you all about it when we’re safely on the plains tomorrow. Right now I need your help here. If you could use your brains to rig up a stretcher for Deanna, that would be great.”

Jillybean blew out a big sigh of disappointment when Grey took the remote controller for the car and left. Sadie nudged her. “Come on. We have to get ready and we have to figure out how to make a stretcher.”

“That’s easy,” Jillybean said. She pointed at a small stage stood at one end of the gym. Where two large flags, the Stars and Stripes and the state flag of Kansas, hung from wooden poles. “You can use them. There’s a heavy duty stapler in the office area on the second desk on the right. All you got to do is staple the flags to the poles. I’m going to go with Captain Grey.”

“No,” Neil said, pulling her back by the ladybug bag. “You will obey orders, young lady, just like the rest of us. If you sneak up on him he might shoot first and ask questions later.” When Jillybean hesitated at the idea of being shot out of hand, Neil gave Sadie a quick look that said:
Watch her!

Sadie understood. There was no telling what Jillybean would do when she wasn’t being closely watched. Thankfully, all she did was pout and argue with herself. She also threw her yellow dress over her pink outfit and then shredded it up. Then she slathered herself with mud until she looked like something that had crawled out of a grave. Sadie did the same until she was practically unrecognizable.