The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) (28 page)

Sadie quickly saw that she was not the only lonely individual: Deanna was lying alone and seemingly forgotten at the very back of the truck. Sadie started to push her way to her, but Grey grabbed her with a freshly bloodied hand.

“Tell Neil I need twenty more minutes,” he said, speaking in a low tone directly into her ear. “She’ll die if I can’t tie off this bleeder.”

The request was shocking. Their head start couldn’t have been much more than twenty minutes. “I’ll-I’ll ask him,” Sadie said. She turned and paused at the tailgate, again looking northward, this time not searching for an explosion, but looking for the glow of headlights.

The horizon remained dark.

It was small relief. Neil had the same reaction when she told him of Grey’s request. He was standing on the step-plate, half in and half out of the cab of the fuel truck, sawing like a madman at the chain when she told him. “What? Twenty minutes?” he exclaimed. He stood up straight and looked eastward with squinting eyes.

“The town is that way,” she said, pointing Neil north. “There’s no sign of them, yet. I have Joslyn keeping watch.”

Slowly, Neil turned his eyes from the north. “Ok, good, thanks. And, uh, tell Grey he’s got fifteen minutes and even that’s cutting it way too close.”

Sadie went back to the last truck in the line, however she didn’t say anything about Neil’s time frame. It would’ve been like telling them that Neil had decided Marybeth’s life wasn’t worth anything. She sat on the tailgate and watched as Grey dug in Marybeth’s abdomen while Michael held her hand and their daughter, Anne, pointed a flashlight into the mess.

Fifteen minutes seemed to fly by. A sweating Neil came up a few minutes later; he didn’t bother to climb up into the bed. He said to Sadie: “Please tell me they’re almost done.”

Grey answered for her: “I got two more sutures to go. She’ll bleed out if I can’t get them placed.”

“Fine,” Neil said, giving in, “but I want everyone ready to go the second he’s done. We have a long night of driving ahead of us and we can’t be...”

“No,” Grey said, cutting him off. “Marybeth won’t live through a long ride. There’s no way. Besides, the Duke has a hundred cars that can outrun us; they’ll catch us on the open road. The smart thing to do is to find somewhere to hunker down for a few days and let the heat blow over before we make a run for it.”

Neil opened his mouth to answer, however just then Joslyn let out a cry: “Headlights! There are headlights coming right at us!”

In a flash, Grey was at the tailgate, barking: “Everyone turn off your flashlights.” The lights clicked off and then everyone peered at the headlights coming their way. They looked like very low, twinkling stars to Sadie.

“We have to go right now,” Neil said to Grey. They locked eyes for a long, tense minute—on one side was the veteran soldier, the most deadly man in a thousand miles, on the other a small man wearing an old woman’s slipper on one foot and a purple croc on the other. They each were headstrong in their beliefs: Neil had the group to look after, while Grey was dead set on protecting and saving the most vulnerable of them.

They stared until it became uncomfortable, but eventually, Grey dropped his gaze and nodded. Then there was a flurry of activity as Neil started yelling: “Get in the trucks! Get in the trucks!”

People scrambled to climb into the closest vehicle. It was mayhem, with one truck over-flowing with people while the last one was only half full. To make matters worse, Michael Gates, began bellowing, demanding that Grey be allowed time to finish saving his wife. When Neil only shook his head, resolutely, Michael went mad and began fighting to get at Neil. There was murder in his eyes. He was so wild that Captain Grey was forced to slap a guillotine chokehold on him.

“Get out of here!” Grey yelled at Neil. “Get the trucks moving; he’ll settle down.”

Neil disappeared up the line of trucks where tailgates were being slammed shut and engines rumbled. Sadie waited at the last truck until she was sure that Michael wasn’t going to be able to get away and then she booked it in high gear up to the fuel truck, arriving just as Neil did.

Neil lost his slipper as he climbed in and had to go back for it. He threw it up into the cab and then followed it up; he ended up driving with a socked foot on the gas which didn’t make his ability to operate the weighed down fuel truck any better. The thing lurched and rocked as he fought his way through the gears and all the while the sound of the diesel sloshing behind them was an ever-present reminder that a mistake would roast them both.

But at least the chain had finally been cut away. It made steering the easiest part of that nightmare ride. With the lack of headlights and the intense dark and the desperate need to put more miles between them and the cars racing along in their wake, Neil was taking some serious chances.

They had little choice. The headlights which had started as tiny stars grew larger as the minutes passed.

“So where are we going?” Sadie asked. “If we stay on this road whoever is back there will catch up sooner or later.”

“I don’t know,” Neil said. He seemed so small behind the wheel—the thing was as wide around as a manhole cover and he looked like a child trying to steer a tugboat. “I really don’t. And does it matter where we go? All I ever do is lead us into one disaster after another. It makes me wonder why I ever wanted this job to begin with.”

Sadie patted him on the arm. “From what I hear you didn’t want the job at all. It was simply a choice between you doing it or letting Fred Trigg lead us. We both know he never could have gotten us even this far. You have to realize that’s the truth, just like it’s the truth you’re still doing a great job despite the circumstances we keep finding ourselves in. I trust you and I think Captain Grey trusts you, too.”

“And what about Jillybean,” he asked. “Do you think she trusts me? Or Marybeth or Becca, or Kay?”

She thought for a moment and then shrugged. “I think they all do in their way. They trust you more than they trust themselves. They’re all afraid to speak up. They’re all afraid to come up with an idea.”

This brought a dry chuckle from Neil. “So you’re saying they trust me because they don’t have any other choice?”

“Yeah...so which way?” Sadie asked, trying to change the sticky subject. “Those guys back there can’t see us. We could pull over somewhere under an overpass or behind a motel or something and they’d drive right by. We have the gas and the food to try to make it straight across country. Or...”

“Or we try to save Marybeth,” Neil finished her sentence. “If we did we’d need to find proper facilities for her.”

Sadie scratched at the dried mud on her cheek before adding: “And we’ll need antibiotics for her and for Becca. We’re not going to find that sort of thing out here on the prairie. We’ll have to chance a city. Is that what you want to do?” The idea made her queasy. New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta...all had been death traps.

Neil was quiet for a long time. Without the windshield, the wind blasted them in the face, drying them out. Sadie wanted to take her nails to the mud and peel it away but she waited. If Neil chose the city route she would need that mud if she had any chance of survival.

At last he whispered: “We going to go to Wichita.” Under his breath, he added: “God help us.”

She ran in the night. It felt wrong. Running was what humans did. Every zombie knew that, and boy, were there a lot of zombies! They were going every which way, stirred up by the gun shots and the lights and the trucks and the horsemen.

Still Jillybean ran. She didn’t have a choice; she had made a decision—the world was better off without her in it. This little fact she had kept from the other girl inside her. Jillybean had lied about jail. There would be no jail for her. She could cute her way out of it and if that didn’t work she knew that given time and a few simple resources, there weren’t many jails that could hold her.

The lie had been a trick for the other girl.
Sh
e didn’t like jail.
She
couldn’t get out of them.
She
wasn’t cute at all and
she
wasn’t smart. With Jillybean
constantly fighting her every thought
she
was scattered brained and couldn’t remember who she hated most from one moment to the next
. She
needed Jillybean to do her heavy thinking for her and yet Jillybean had expected more of a fight from her.

She
wasn’t exactly a stupid girl.
She
was mean and evil but not stupid. But
she
didn’t want to go to Colorado where everyone was good and where
she
might go to jail, and really,
she
did want to see the theater with all the bombs and bullets in it, go sky-high.

That was exactly the kind of mayhem
she
liked.

When Jillybean kept running after she crossing the little ditch that the monsters had made in their endless tramping,
she
tried to stop Jillybean.

This is close enough
, Eve said, with a giggle.
Blow it up
. The desire to see the explosion was so intense that Jillybean’s feet began dragging and the remote seemed to rise up to eye level on its own.

“Not...yet,” Jillybean panted. She was winded from the three-hundred-yard sprint, but she couldn’t stop. There were a slew of monsters in her wake and worse, she saw there were horsemen riding in practiced teams, driving back the other monsters from the courthouse where trucks and cars were being gathered in preparation for the chase. They would be ready in minutes.

Jillybean headed right for them.

Wait, what are you doing?
Eve asked.
You don’t want to get so close
. Jillybean’s feet slowed even more; it was like running through deep water. The other girl began to get agitated.
Stop or I’ll take over again and I won’t ever let you out
.

“You don’t...know how...to work...the bomb,” Jillybean said. Immediately, she felt her feet spring forward, once again hers to command. She angled toward an approaching horseman who had his spear leveled and was knocking monsters back away from the grassy slope that ran up towards the building. Jillybean didn’t have any fear of the man or the horse. Neither was expecting a thinking being to be in front of them.

The monsters came on, slow and stupid; Jillybean was fast. She darted practically under the nose of the horse. It jerked its head and eyed Jillybean with one big, brown orb. In the dark, the rider didn’t even see her.

Now will you blow it up?
the other girl asked. There was a petulant whine to her voice.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Jillybean answered. “We’re going to hold this entire town hostage.”

Why? What good does that do us
?

“You want to be Lady Eve? That’s small potatoes. We could be a princess. Think about that.” Jillybean felt a sudden hungry longing and knew that Eve liked the idea very much. “Just don’t interfere,” Jillybean warned, “or you’ll screw this all up.”

Silence from within meant that the other girl was fully on board.

As she walked, Jillybean pulled her shredded dress over her head and used it to scrape as much mud off her face as she could. She went unnoticed until she came to the trucks that were filling with men who were armed as if expecting to lay siege to a fortress. They were very large and scary. Most wore scraggly beards and had hair like lion’s manes.

They loaded their trucks, oblivious to the little girl until she gathered the courage to step right up next to the tire of one of the trucks. Only then did someone point at her. Another person exclaimed: “It’s one of them.”

She held the remote up, however it went unremarked upon. Even Brad, who came jogging up to her, didn’t seem to notice it. “I’m surprised you stayed,” he said. “You aren’t too smart.”

“Didn’t we have a deal?” Jillybean asked.

“I had a deal,” Brad said. “You got a lesson in how not to be so gullible.”

Eve, hearing that she had been double-crossed straight from Brad’s lips, bristled and wanted to explode the bomb right then. “Not yet,” Jillybean hissed. She then turned to Brad. “I’m smart enough not to come empty-handed. Captain Grey set a bomb in this town. It’s somewhere really, really bad for you guys. I’m supposed to ‘splode it.”

“And what’s stopping you?” Brad said. Though some of the men glanced around, nervously, he did not seem concerned in the least. Jillybean suspected that, with the escape of the renegades, his chance at being
Baron
Crane had diminished considerably. He might have even been demoted, but what was below baron, she didn’t know.

“I want to renegotiate,” Jillybean explained, in a loud enough voice that everyone around them heard. “I want to talk to the Duke or I’ll blow the bomb and it’ll be on your head, Mister Brad.”

Some of the men snorted with laughter. Others looked amazed that the tiny girl was so composed. She was quite literally surrounded, twice over, by enemies and all she had to protect herself was a little black box. To add to her aura, she said: “I think you know that I’ll blow the bomb up, Brad. I heard you tell people that I’m crazy. I know what that means. It means I’ll blow up the bomb even if you don’t think it’s smart.”

Brad put out his hands and said in a softer tone: “We still have our deal. I was just joking before. I’ve already talked to the Duke and he said that from here on you’re to be Lady Eve. So, if you could just put that thing down we can talk about getting you a tiara.”

His lie was pathetic since he had already sneered at her and it didn’t help his case that a number of the men nearby were sniggering.

“I know you’re lying, Mister Brad and I don’t want our old deal anyways. I want a new one and I want something more or there will be trouble for you and for this whole town.”

Brad shrugged. “Blow it up then. Let’s see what you got.” She hesitated and he grinned. “Here’s the problem with your little bomb. You’re just a one-trick pony. You can’t blow up the bomb because you know the Duke will kill you if you do, and you can’t just stand there either. You look stupid trying to threaten us with a little hunk of plastic.”

He was right on all counts all except her being a one-trick pony. Her ladybug backpack was not only prettier than her old
I’m a Belieber
backpack, it had more compartments as well. There had to be a dozen zippered pocked or meshed-off sections. She kept the things she felt were most handy in the most accessible spots. In a side pocket was a heavy lump.

Switching the remote to her left hand, she reached around with her right, unzipped a pocket and pulled from it a curious item she had picked up at the theater four hours before.

“Is that...Is that a hand grenade?” Brad asked.

“Yeah, it sure is,” Jillybean said. “I have more than one trick, though not like a pony. I don’t think they can do any sorts of tricks. And this isn’t like a magic trick, neither. It’s more like...well I don’t know, a fireworks show.” The rings in all the other hand grenades she had ever exploded had been very tight; she knew there was no way she was going to be able to pull it with the remote in her hand, at least not in the normal way.

She stooped, placed the grenade on the ground and stepped very close to it so that one of her once-white Keds was firmly planted on the ring. With a simple heave of her body upwards, the ring pin came out while she held the spoon on the grenade tightly down with her fingers. Now it was simply a matter of deciding what to blow up.

Blow up Brad
, the other girl suggested with sickly eagerness.

“What do you think you’re going to do with that grenade?” Brad asked.

She shrugged. “I dunno, ’splode something? That’s what it’s for.” A man tried to slip around behind her using the dark as cover, however she was deeper in the gloom than the others and her night eyes were sharp. “I’m going to blow something up,” she said to him. “You should be running away.”

The man stopped, measuring the distance between them and sizing up the girl. He clearly didn’t think she would use the grenade. “You should stop him Mister Brad,” she suggested. “And you should tell those people to get out of that truck.” A jut of her chin indicated a black, Ford truck with an extended bed.

Brad looked like he had swallowed something slimy and that it was crawling around in his belly looking for a way out. “Why?” he asked. His eyes kept flicking to the grenade, to her face, and to the truck. His tongue was like that of a serpent’s, it flicked out to lick his lips every half-second or so.

Like a pitcher on the mound with a runner on first, Jillybean looked the man, who had been trying to creep behind her, back to where he had started. She then grinned up at Brad, feeling distinctly unlike herself. Here she was with two bombs and part of her—not the evil part that called itself “Eve”—wanted to just light the place up.

She couldn’t, however. She had two goals that night: stall the Duke’s men long enough for her friends to get away, and to live, free if possible. That meant she had to talk to the Duke and not to Brad, who was only a second rate fellow in the Duke’s employment. And he was a liar. Jillybean didn’t like liars.

“Why am I going to blow up the truck? Why of course to get the Duke’s attention. I have to talk to him about some things that are very important.”

“Then start talking,” a voice boomed.

Jillybean knew that lion’s roar of a voice. She felt like a mouse before the man as he stomped across the pavement toward them. He was in such a towering rage that even the grenade in her hand seemed miniscule before him, as though it would only make a popping sound, and blink a little light and dribble a touch of smoke.

He glared fiercely and her voice escaped out into the night. She opened her mouth but not even a squeak slipped from between her lips. “Well?” the Duke demanded. After a second he glanced at Brad for an explanation.

“She’s one of
them
,” he said. “She’s a bit delusional.”

“And is that a real grenade?” the Duke asked.

Brad’s insult lit a fire under Jillybean. She thrust the grenade out toward the Duke. “Yes it’s real and this is a remote control for another bigger bomb. Captain Grey planted it and it’s somewhere special in the town.”

The Duke’s heavy brows came down pooling shadows where his eyes should’ve been. Jillybean hadn’t seen anything so scary since she had been thrust down into her own mind. The reminder woke the other girl and she took that moment to hiss:
Kill him! Let the spoon go on the grenade, count to three and throw it at him, then run. If they chase you then set off the other bomb
.

“I can’t,” she whispered. The truth was that killing in cold blood like this wasn’t something she could do. It ran contrary to her nature, but not that of the other girl.

Then let me!
she
demanded.
I’ll gladly do it. Think about it, we can kill the Duke. He poisoned Deanna, remember? And he tried to capture everyone. He’s evil, Jillybean. He’s more evil than me. He should die. They all should die. They should burn.

Jillybean was shaken by the voice. It was so filled with the hunger of hate that her teeth hurt.

This quick conversation passed in between blinks of an eye and the Duke was only just reacting to the idea that there was a second bomb in the town. He turned again to Brad. “What’s this about a bomb? Is she for real?”

Brad paused, letting his shrewd eyes bounce to each of the dominant figures in the night. Jillybean guessed that he was looking for the least advantage. “If I had a guess, I would say that she is not lying. There were reports of someone slinking around the town earlier. The soldier with them seemed capable of planting a bomb.”

“And they would leave a little girl to detonate it?” the Duke asked. “That seems very far-fetched.”

The logic of this had Brad second guessing himself. Always helpful, Jillybean raised her grenade hand. “No, they weren’t going to have me ‘splode the bomb, but there was an issue with the range. They were too far away to use the remote and Mister Captain Grey couldn’t come back because he was needed for the wounded and Neil was the leader and Sadie was…well, she is my sister, so she couldn’t go and so I said I would come back to blow up the bomb on account I had been bad.”

Her honesty was enough to convince the Duke. “And so why haven’t you exploded the bomb?” he asked. “You’ve had plenty of opportunity. Have you had a change of heart? Or are you chicken?”