The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) (3 page)

“That’s because they were people and people are like fucking sheep,” Jillybean said, in a soft, hating voice. Again, the little group around her shared embarrassed looks.

The grin on Brad’s face faded. The little girl was crazy. There was no questioning that now. And that was really too bad, a cute little thing like that would fetch two thousand in the market with no problem, otherwise. Brad didn’t want to know what a man would see in a skinny little runt like Jillybean, he only knew some would pay for her. Even warped in the head they would pay, they just wouldn’t pay as much.

Neil pretended Jillybean hadn’t said anything. He straightened his checkered sweater vest by pulling down on its lower hem, cleared his throat importantly and asked: “So, how much to be escorted through your lands?”

“Two hundred a head,” Brad answered, without hesitation.

Just as quickly, Neil replied: “Too high.”

Damn, that geek is tough
, Brad thought. Aloud he shot back: “One-eighty. It’s really the lowest I can go. I hope you understand.”

Jillybean had been watching intently, an ugly look on her soft features. “That’s a lie,” she said. When she spoke she had everyone’s attention. The little group looked nervous as though she was about to spew more crazy. “He could do it for free if he wanted to or at the least he could do it for just the cost of the gas, but he wants more. He wants whatever you’ll pay him. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s just making numbers up.”

She was exactly right. There wasn’t a fixed sum since the Azael charged the various people looking to cross their territory whatever could be extorted from them. Brad grunted, then leaned over the pommel of his saddle and stared down at the girl. She stared right back, not blinking an eye. “Hey kid,” he said to her in a low growl. “Why don’t you go play? The grownups are trying to talk.”

“And why don’t you go fu…”

Jillybean was cut off as Neil slapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry about that. She hasn’t been feeling quite herself lately.” He turned to the Goth girl. “Sadie, can you take her somewhere, please?”

Sadie took the little girl’s hand. “Come along Jilly…I mean Eve. Come on. Neil’s got this.”

“No he doesn’t. Neil is weak,” Jillybean said, as she was dragged away. “He’ll give everything away.”

Everything? Brad liked the sound of that. It made it seem that one-eighty a head was very doable. He caught himself grinning and quickly looked away, back to where his drovers were circling the zombies just beyond the reach of their eyesight. From this distance, the zombies could only make out the barn and even that just barely. He lifted his spear straight up and then brought it down straight in front of him three times so that the flag on it snapped lightly—the signal for
stand down
.

When he glanced back, Neil had a finger in the air. “Can you give us a second?” he asked. “I would like to confer with my friends concerning the affordability of your services and whether we feel they are necessary or not.”

“Oh, they are very necessary,” Brad said, easily. “You see I know which wells are poisoned and which are not. I know where the mega-herds are currently roaming. Some of these herds take up land equal in size to Rhode Island. And I know what bridges are out, which are guarded by bandits, which charge a toll. Trust me, I’ll save you money and I might even save your lives though that’s not a guarantee.”

Neil went a little green. “Poisoned wells? That’s not so good. We’re just going to, uh, confer, like I said.” The three of them, Grey, Neil, and the woman, stepped away to talk while Brad watched the woman’s backside in her tight jeans.

He guessed they would come back with an offer around one-thirty to try to get him to come down. To that he would reply:
Forget everything else, the rivers are undrinkable and the wells are poisoned. You need me…one-seventy eight
. Eventually they would settle somewhere around one-sixty three a head, but Brad would get at least one-eighty by the end of the trip. He’d recoup his costs in a number of ways. There’d be the repair charges when their trucks would “run over” the nails set deliberately in their treads. Then there would be the water fees, as Brad intended to steer the group into the driest regions where water was strictly guarded. And there would be whatever his boys could win at gambling using marked decks, loaded dice and secret hand codes. And of course, there would be whatever could be stolen when heads were turned.

Brad had a hundred ways to turn heads: easy women, spiked alcohol, a sudden truck fire—theirs of course, but the simplest method of misdirection would be the “sudden” appearance of a zombie horde, one just large enough to drain the group of their ammo which could only be restocked by Brad, obviously at a price…a very high price.

Brad would get his pay. The trip wasn’t going to be a good one for these renegades. All sorts of accidents were going to befall them and with each incident they would come to need him more and more. He would bleed them dry.

“So what do we do?” Neil asked. He had his ass on a bale of hay or wheat or some such long, yellowish grass. When it came to farming, he was generally clueless beyond the fact that seeds went into the ground and then you watered them. All he knew was that there was something poking him where it shouldn’t. He gave his rear a shimmy to the left and said: “Do we try to skirt the land of the Azael or do we go with Brad? I, for one, don’t trust him.”

“Neither do I,” Deanna agreed. “First, he wants to take us prisoner and, then we’re supposed to be all chummy with him? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. I say we go around.”

Captain Grey slid a creased map from his cargo pocket and opened it up. He tapped the town of Battleboro. “We are just north of here and we need to get here, Estes Park. That’s a thousand miles on a straight line. If we go around, we add another thousand to our trip, give or take. A lot of that land will be hot and very dry, but water won’t be our biggest problem. It’s the lack of fuel. We have maybe six hundred miles worth in our tanks, and that means we’re going to have to scrounge, which means fighting the stiffs. The longer route might be more dangerous and it will definitely mean we’ll burn through our supplies as fast as if we traded them to cross.”

“So you’re saying you think we should cross with Brad?” Neil asked.

“No,” Grey answered. “I’m just giving you the facts so you can make up your mind. You’re the leader here, not me.” He suddenly smiled and then chuckled as if the idea of Neil being leader was humorous.  Neil glared and Grey laughed harder for a moment before saying: “It’s not you, Neil...ok, it’s a little you. I was just picturing when you said:
We fight!
It got all quiet and you should have seen Fred Trigg. He was ducking behind Mike Gates like a kid hiding behind his mother’s skirt.”

Deanna didn’t share in the laughter. “They were all like that,” she groused. “I was embarrassed for you, Neil. After all you’ve done for them, they cowered and let you hang out to dry. Jillybean was right, they’re like sheep.”

They were like sheep in a way, Neil had to admit. After so many days of being hounded and persecuted, the renegades had a haunted look about them, as if they were on the verge of giving up and accepting whatever crap that came their way without a fight. Neil wasn’t close to giving up, and couldn’t understand why any of them would want to. So, things hadn’t gone according to plan and perhaps their lives hadn’t been a picnic, but what had they really lost? To Neil, the damage to Jillybean’s mind was the biggest loss the group had sustained while escaping from the River King. Strangely, the injuries to his face didn’t concern him, while the deaths of Big Jim and the cage fighters registered only a passing sadness. Constant death had inured him and had turned him cold.

But they all needed Jillybean. She squatted next to the back door of the barn, her knees jutting, frog-like from beneath her yellow sundress. Without Ipes clutched in the crook of her arm, there was an air of loneliness about her. Sadie stood near, rocking Eve who was going through a bottle with her usual quiet concentration, but no one else got too close.

Neil had made sure to keep Jillybean away from the others as much as possible. Few knew that Ipes was gone and that there was something evil taking up residence in her mind. She was hard to put up with, changing personalities in a blink, or more often than not, living with both going at the same time.

There were times when he would look at her and see plots and schemes bubbling up behind her blue eyes. In the three days since she lost Ipes, her eyes had changed. Gone was the innocence. Now, they were devoid of emotion, except hate, that is.
If looks could kill
…how many times had he heard that old cliché? With Jillybean, it seemed true. Half the time she looked his way, Neil was sure she was actually contemplating his murder. He tried to laugh it off when it happened, and yet, at the same time his balls would try to crawl up into his body.

The group didn’t need to know any of this, although Neil wondered whether it would really matter. They were all very pro Jillybean now. Regardless of the fact that it had been Neil and Deanna who had freed Captain Grey and the cage-fighters and it had been Sadie who had found the secret pontoon bridge that had been instrumental in gaining the release of the renegades, their rescue from the hands of the River King had been chalked up totally to Jillybean. The thinking went: if the rescuers needed rescuing, then the ultimate rescuer was to be given credit. And this hadn’t been the first time she had rescued them. Strictly speaking, they held her in awe and, if she had been only a little older, she could have been queen of the little group.

It was a scary thought to Neil.

“Sheep or not, I still have to figure a way to get them to safety,” he said. “So, I have one vote for going the long way and one for the short. That’s just great. I was secretly hoping to just go along with whatever you two wanted.”

“It’s not easy being the leader,” Grey said. Suddenly he clapped Neil on the back and added: “I’ll be honest with you, when you were first elected, I figured I’d be running the group, using you as a figure head, but I underestimated you. So far you’ve proven more capable than I gave you credit for.”

Neil went a shade of...the color was indescribable except to say his disfigured face wasn’t helped by the blush of red beneath the yellowed purple. “Thanks...uh, that’s nice and all, but that doesn’t help me decide which way to go. The wrong choice could mean we’re screwed.”

“We might be screwed with either choice,” Deanna said, trying to be helpful.

It wasn’t helpful. Neil wished he had more time to think through the situation, however, the horseman was getting impatient, sighing loudly, and the renegades kept looking at Neil, expectantly. All of them, except for Jillybean. Gently, she reached out and picked something up and brought it to eye level. It was a butterfly with wings of orange and black. It flapped its wings in an easy, lazy manner but did not fly away. It sat on the fairway of the little girl’s palm, looking contented.

Out of the blue, Jillybean slapped her other hand down on the insect, crushing it. She then peeked her hand back so she could see the destruction she had caused. There was a smudge of orange and black on one hand and in the other was the crushed butterfly. It lifted one of its once beautiful wings slowly and then died.

Neil had seen his share of senseless killings since the coming of the apocalypse but this was one of the worst. It seemed to him that two innocent creatures were killed by the single blow.

“If I were leader, we’d take the shorter path,” Grey said. “So far, I’ve found that the further we go the more crap and the more evil we have to deal with. I don’t trust Brad, but I think the most he will do is screw us on the cost. He’s not going to ruin his ability to trade with the people of Colorado.”

Deanna raised an eyebrow at this. “Do I need to remind you that we thought the same thing about the River King?”

“That was different,” Grey answered her. “The River King knew who we were. This guy doesn’t. As far as he knows we’re just travelers heading to Colorado. As long as that’s all he knows, he has no reason to try anything untoward.”

“Maybe,” Deanna said.

Grey gave her a shrug. “Yes, there’s always a “maybe,” or a “perhaps,” but we can’t live like that or we’ll get nowhere. If we go with Brad, what sort of bargain can we strike?”

Neil watched the two, quietly. Their conversation had as much to do with the obvious vibe between them as it did the question of the route. Both were almost formal in the way they spoke to each other, as if they were afraid of hurting the others feelings by disagreeing with them. From Neil’s perspective their courtship, which neither would ever admit was actually happening, was comically sad. Grey was so chivalrous and deferential concerning what Deanna had done to survive, that he was nearly robotic around her, while she wrapped herself in such a stiff, crooked form of feminism that her tone of voice practically screamed:
Don’t touch me!
to any man who came near. Yet neither could hide the look in their eyes.

They both so clearly wanted to give up the charade, that there was a sort of office pool going on among the renegades. The first public display of affection won the prize: the last can of Dinty Moore soup. Neil had 7pm, five days from then and he liked his chances. 

Neil considered the likelihood of a good bargain with Brad and said: “We’re not in a good position to bargain. We have slightly more than two-thousand rounds of ammo and slightly fewer than nineteen hundred cans of food, and not enough fuel to get to Colorado going straight through. It would help if we lost two of the trucks. It’ll be pretty cramped, but if we take all the diesel from one of the five tons and the Dodge pick-up, that’ll extend our range by about twenty-five percent.”

“That just might be enough to get us to Colorado if we go straight through,” Grey said.

“But it won’t help us with food or ammo,” Deanna said. “If we figure we’ll go through three cans of food per person per day, a three day trip will cost us about five hundred and seventy cans, leaving us with only thirteen hundred to bargain with. Add that to our entire load of ammo and that only comes up to about fifty-five per person. Brad won’t go for that. There’s no way.”

“Which brings us to our main sticking point: how would we pay for the trip with Brad? Given enough time we might be able to scrounge for the fee, but that could take weeks or even months. What about your general?” Neil asked Grey. “Would he help us? Would he cover what we’re short by?”

A pained expression crossed Grey’s face. “He’s pretty old school and thinks people ought to take responsibility for their own lives.”

“We would pay him back, of course” Neil said. “If we have to borrow anything, I would take the debt on, personally.”

Grey shook his head. “No. It’ll have to be on me. Brad won’t believe that we’re good for it unless I put my honor on the bargain.”

What about my honor?
Neil wanted to ask. He didn’t; he only sighed and took a long weary look outside. Which way to turn? The short and, hopefully, quicker route with a man that none of them trusted or the longer, possibly more dangerous route around the southern border of Kansas and then along the spine of the Rockies where who knew what awaited them?

Brad watched the deliberation, leaning on his pommel; he spat in the dust of the barn when he saw Neil looking at him. It was a calculated move: a show of nonchalance coupled with intimidation.

Neil was no longer so easily intimidated. He turned away as though he found the move without interest and found his eyes immediately drawn to Jillybean; there was still the smear of orange from the dead butterfly on her palm. She was staring slack-jawed at a barn post, seemingly in a trance. There was no way of knowing if she was locked in a mental battle with the evil thing within her or just drooling like an idiot. He suspected the mental battle as the most probable. Idiot was not a word suited for Jillybean.

“We go around,” Neil said, the decision coming to him in a flash of intuition. The danger of going with Brad was clear and obvious. They’d be sticking their heads in the lion’s mouth once more where a slip of the tongue would doom them. By all appearances the Azael were thieving gypsies at best and bloodthirsty pirates at worst. In this case the unknowns were not nearly as bad. After all, the renegades knew how to take care of themselves around zombies and they knew how to scrounge for supplies better than anyone.

Deanna looked relieved, while Grey only nodded, his feelings, as always, carefully hidden. Brad could not hide his disappointment. “Damn it, Neil. You’re being an idiot. The way around is far more dangerous than you can imagine. The Texans…you don’t want to deal with them and the bandits in New Mexico won’t just rob you blind, they’ll rape the women in front of you. I’ve heard stories.”

“Regardless, we go around,” Neil replied. “So, if you’d move your little ring of zombies, that would be great.” Brad tried once more to change Neil’s mind, but the smaller man could not be moved. Only after Neil said: “I have spoken,” and then made a show of leisurely re-buttoning his brown checkered sweater vest. Only then did Brad kick his horse off in an angry canter.

The moment he was gone, Neil turned to Grey. “We need to consolidate everything into the three best trucks. Transfer the fuel and food and anything else you think we might need. Get a crew together to help. Deanna, spread the word that we’re safe, at least for the moment, and that we’re going to be taking a slightly longer route.”

In twenty minutes, the food and fuel were transferred and the renegades briefed. They were ready to go, but it took much longer for Brad’s people to nudge the zombies off the main road. The zombies milled around like the mindless beasts they were and it was an hour before Neil thought it was safe to go. During that time, Brad came back and kept up an insistent chatter about how foolish he was being.

“We will see,” Neil said.

“Yes, you will,” Brad replied.

The three five-tons were now crammed with people, food, water and ammo. There was little room for anything else. Grey drove the first truck and next to him sat Deanna. She was somewhat of a permanent fixture at his side now. Next to her was Jillybean, her feet resting on a box of 9mm NATO rounds, her eyes watching the running scenery as though she were committing it to memory, and Neil guessed that she was.