The Undead World (Book 12): The Body [An Undead World Expansion]

by Meredith, Peter

  Jillybean grabbed another and opened it against her thin chest to keep from repeating the mistake. Next, she splashed disinfectant on her left forearm and took up a new scalpel. It gleamed as if from some sort of inner light.

  Beautiful, Eve said, her voice cutting through the static in Jillybean’s mind that she was just beginning to notice. The static and the numbness went hand in hand. From long experience, Jillybean knew they were a prelude to darkness. If she allowed it to go on, it would overwhelm her senses and she would fall into nothing.

  Yes. Let go. It’ll be easier. Despite the double dose of Zyprexa, Eve’s voice was crystallizing in Jillybean’s mind. Let me worry about all this nonsense. I’ll take care of everything.

  The temptation was great. Jillybean could drop away into that nothingness and hide from her problems and then re-emerge in a day or two in complete innocence. Whatever happened; whoever died would all be Eve’s fault. It was a get out of jail free card.

  “No,” she said, in a whisper of her own. “We can’t. You hear, Eve? We can’t mess this up again. There’s nowhere else to run.”

  What if no one knows? It’ll be just like with Mr. Dunlap. I’ll make the bodies disappear and no one will ever know. It’ll be our little secret. No one cares about…

  Jillybean was weakening but before she could give in, she dug the scalpel into her arm. She meant for it to be a quick, almost painless slice, but Eve was growing in her mind and body. The blade shook, going deeper than she wished. Still, the blood ran like water to puddle on the linoleum.

  With an effort, Jillybean pulled the scalpel out of her arm. She wanted to lay it aside, but her hand was slow to respond and her eyes were fixed on the blood.

  That’s the first step, Eve said, but what about the rest? You don’t trust me, but I don’t trust you. You’ll spill the beans, I know it. You’ll talk. You’ll crumble under pressure because you are a weak, pathetic little thing. But we can keep that from happening. I can help you from ever blabbing again. Trust me, it’ll be for the best.

  Like it was a fork with a heaping pile of spaghetti on it, she opened her mouth and brought the scalpel up. Eve wanted her to cut her tongue out so she wouldn’t ever talk. Jillybean grabbed her own wrist and turned her face from the shining metal. With a jerk, she dropped the scalpel.

  “You’re crazy! And stupid. If they find the body, it won’t matter if I have a tongue or not.”

  Gasping, she grabbed more gauze and started wrapping her arm as fast and as hard as she could. She taped the end down and grabbed another roll. As she wrapped her arm further, pandemonium exploded on the other side of the door.

  “I’ll tell them I cut my arm and didn’t want Neil to worry.”

  Blood was beginning to soak through both bandages. Using her right hand, she squeezed down on the wound and tried to clean up the mess with her left. It was a sloppy job at best and there were still red smears on the floor when she scooted outside. A glance out the window showed people running around.

  She hurried back to Jonathan, who was gagging around the tube. “What are you doing? You’re touching the buttons. Let me have it. Okay. Let’s just give it a moment, okay?” They both needed time to calm down. She was still sweating and her hands shook. When she felt she could go on, she took the controls and moved the camera further on, past the pyloric sphincter and into the small intestine. The ulcers and the bleeding continued.

  “Oh boy. This isn’t good.” She was sure that the same burns would continue on. In one quick motion, she slid the tube out of him and again, he started retching. “Linda!” She didn’t answer and so Jillybean left the clinic and found her assistant gabbing with a dozen others. “Linda, I need you.”

  “The Corsairs are attacking!” Linda cried.

  Jillybean paused for a moment, listening. The bells were still going but there hadn’t been a single gunshot. “Not yet, they aren’t. Now, I need you to give Mr. Dunnam an enema and not just any enema. We need to clean as far up his colon as we can reach.”

  The group around them went silent.

  “We?”

  When it came to practicing medicine, Jillybean was mature well beyond her years and she had no problem speaking to an adult on medical matters as if she were one herself.

  “Well, you. It’s sorta-kinda a one-person job. Also administer Polyethylene glycol 3350. Double the suggested dosage. I want whatever’s burning out his digestive tract out as fast as possible. Also get him to guzzle milk if you can. If he can’t, we’ll have to put in a new tube. Tell him that. I need to find out if I need to prep for surgery.”

  She had just taken a step away when Linda asked, “Will goat’s milk work?”

  This froze Jillybean in her tracks as it triggered what felt like the echo of a memory. She turned slowly back to Linda as she struggled to grasp something that was just out of reach. When it wouldn’t come, she shook her head and said, “Goat’s milk? Uh, yeah, I guess. Sure.”

  An image of a glass of goat’s milk hung in her mind as she jogged towards Puget Sound. It disappeared as soon as she saw the Corsair boats. There were a dozen of them, sweeping across the grey water. A dozen ships did not equate to an invasion force and yet there was something chilling seeing the elegant black sails spread like giant batwings.

  “It could be the advance squadron,” Chris Truman was telling a group of men squinting from beneath the shade of an elm.

  “Or they’re a distraction,” Eddie Sanders said, licking his lips nervously. “What if the real attack is coming from the west side of the island?”

  Everyone looked back as if they could see ships through the intervening trees and hills. All save Jillybean, that is. She could easily picture the map of the island as it sat on a wall in the governor’s office. “And no one would’ve seen them fifty ships coming up the channel? No. If you’re worried about a sneak attack, you should look to the north or south, with them coming from the south being most likely cuz no one’s gonna suspect that way.”

  “How would they sneak attack us from the south?” Chris asked with something close to a sneer in his voice. He was always leery of confronting Jillybean even over something so obvious. “You can’t get to the ocean from the south. The Sound dead ends…right?”

  “Yeah, it does, but if they were smart, they would’ve sent in a buncha ships last night out of range of the searchlights. Then, while we’re all staring out here, they attack down wind.”

  Now everyone looked south, but only for a second. Eddie ran a hand through his ginger hair and said, “You don’t look too worried.”

  “I don’t think they’re too smart. I gotta go. See you guys later.” Her stress dipped slightly now that they all weren’t going to be killed by the Corsairs. It jumped up again as she noticed that the two gauze bandages she’d put on were now soaked through and blood was beginning to trickle down her wrist.

  She clamped a hand on the wound and hurried for the clinic. Behind her someone called her name, but she ignored it and put her head down and went as fast as she could without running. Once in the clinic, she went right for the supply closet and ripped away her bandages.

  “Jillybean!” It was Sheriff Perkins.

  The little girl grabbed a second roll of gauze and hurried for the bathroom. In the stall she wrapped her wound once more even as more blood was seeping upward. Quickly, she drew her sleeve down and went to wash her hands just as the sheriff barged inside. Jillybean caught a glimpse of her own face and saw the sweat and the guilty look. She tried a smile but it wasn’t much better.

  “I’m almost done,” she told Perkins.

  “We need to talk,” Perkins answered ominously. “Down at the station.”

  At this, Jillybean’s mouth fell open and she could only make gulping noises in the back of her throat in response.

  “Jillybean!” Linda called from Jonathan’s room. “We need you.”

  “Excuse me.” The words were nothing but a whisper. Her day felt like one heart attack after another. She was lighthea
ded going into Jonathan’s room and seeing him vomit goat’s milk and blood didn’t help. She started to slip sideways when Neil caught her. “Oh, hi,” she said, weakly. “When did you get here?”

  He’d been keeping an eye on Perkins and had been more nervous about her than he was about an invasion of Corsairs. He set her on a chair. “There you go,” he said, giving her a smile. Even with his many scars, she saw it was a nervous, guarded smile. He turned to the sheriff. “So, what’s all this fuss about?”

  Perkins’ long face was drawn into a grimace at the sight of the pink froth. “It’s about a bloody knife, blood-stained clothing, and a missing person.”

  This was such a shocking sentence to hear on the relatively sleepy island of Bainbridge that it stopped Jonathan’s nausea in a blink. He sat in a hunch, stooped over a bucket, staring. Next to him, Linda had an eyebrow cocked. She wasn’t nearly as shocked, since she had heard all sorts of rumors concerning the little girl and had seen her talking to herself enough times to know she wasn’t right in the head.

  Once more a wave of static-filled numbness washed over Jillybean. She was becoming disconnected again. Perkins was clearly smarter than she let on. She was connecting the dots very quickly. How soon would she discover the chunks of Kevin’s body stashed in the lockers?

  Maybe it’s not Kevin she’s talking about, Eve suggested. Maybe you killed someone else last night, too. Maybe you went on a killing spree and there are bloody corpses all over the island.

  That couldn’t be. That was impossible…except maybe it was. She had killed Kevin, so who’s to say she hadn’t also killed Norris Barnes, whose expanding plaid-covered belly looked as though it would pop like a balloon if she took a knife to it, spilling great, slick hoses of intestines out onto the floor.

  Or maybe she had slit open Rosanna Landeros who always dressed in dour grey. She was a perfectly angular woman whose brown hair was exactly straight. It was as if she used a T-square to cut her bangs, and the single eyebrow that crossed her forehead from end to end was too straight to be natural. Maybe Jillybean had run her scalpel right across the top of that eyebrow before peeling off her face like the rind from an orange.

  And what about shy, mousy Shelley Deuso, who was too timid to speak to more than two people at a time and who trundled a wheelbarrow past Neil’s house every morning at exactly seven. Jillybean pictured pushing Shelley to a quickly dug grave that was so shallow it barely held her bleeding body when Jillybean dumped her in. Had she been still alive and moaning as the dirt came down on her? Had she crawled out only to die a few feet away, face down in the dirt? Were there ants even then forming a conga line into her open mouth?

  “I think it might be better if we talked about this somewhere else,” Neil said, seeing Jillybean go bone white. “But not the jail, that’s inappropriate. Jillybean just might have a, uh, a you know, an explanation.”

  “For a missing person?” Perkins asked. She gave a smirk, suggesting it would be an explanation that would be hard to swallow.

  Neil folded his arms across his chest. “If she’s innocent…I mean, because she’s innocent, how would she be able to explain the whereabouts of Kevin?”

  “I didn’t mention who was the missing person,” Perkins said, raising an eyebrow. She wore a “gotcha” look on her face.

  When Neil had a back and forth like this, he generally got better over time. “Angela said her husband hadn’t come home last night. We both know that if Kevin is missing it probably means he’s in some sort of alcoholic coma or he and Angela had another fight. A bloody dress doesn’t mean anything by itself…”

  She unzipped the bag again. “But it’s not by itself, is it?” The knife was on full display for everyone to see.

  “You really think a girl of Jillybean’s size could kill Kevin with a knife? The only way that could happen is if she found him drunk and then what would she have done with the body? Has anyone found a body lying around? No.”

  “I found a wheelbarrow in a weird little room of hers at the school. That room isn’t right. You know the one I’m talking about?”

  “Uh, maybe. There are a lot of rooms and maybe she was using the wheelbarrow to move supplies. You ever think of that?” He was about to go on when Jonathan vomited again. “Like I said, we should talk later.”

  She shook her head. “And give her time to come up with excuses? No. It’ll take her two seconds to explain this.” Perkins shoved the backpack at Neil. She then stood over Jillybean, looking giant-like to the frightened little girl.

  “I-I cut myself,” she squeaked. “I was peeling an apple and the knife slipped. I didn’t want Neil to worry so I put all that in my backpack to throw away but I forgot b-because of Mr. Dunnam.” She pointed at the man, who had a long string of pink saliva running from his lower lip to the bucket.

  “You cut yourself? Really? There’s a lot of blood on your dress for a simple cut. And where is this cut? Huh? Did it heal already?”

  Jillybean drew up her sleeve to show the gauze wrapped around her forearm. To her eye, the blood looked a little too red to be seven hours old. “Do you want to see the cut? I was thinking of teaching Linda how to suture with it.” She got up and went to one of the drawers in the room. Among the neatly arranged cubbies was a pair of surgical scissors. She cut well to the side of the injury and then lifted up on one end. The gauze stuck, just as she knew it would. She grimaced as she pulled the bandage slowly from the wound and a trickle of blood seeped down to her hand.

  Perkins looked confused and a little upset by the blood, and she wrinkled her nose at the laceration. “Okay, I guess.” She didn’t look happy. “I have to say it just seems like you’ve been sorta acting very odd to me. But I guess you’re a little odd.”

  “Which isn’t a bad thing,” Neil said, putting effort into giving Jillybean a smile. He didn’t believe her for a second.

  8

  Neil knew for a fact that she hadn’t had a bandage on her arm earlier that day. What was more, he knew her guilty look better than anyone. He had seen her at her best and at her very worst. Luckily, she was somewhere in the middle at the moment.

  “I think I should be looking after Mr. Dunnam, now,” Jillybean said, trying to reassert her authority. She gave the two adults a shooing motion and they left, both looking perplexed but trying to hide it.

  When it was just Jonathan and Linda, the older woman asked in a hopeful voice, “You’re going to assist with the enema?”

  Jillybean was just opening a nonstick bandage. “Hmm? No. I gotta find out what he ate. That’s what’s mostest important right now.” She started to leave, but stopped in the doorway. “Oh, and give him some Reglan, IV 20 milligrams. For your puking,” she told Jonathan.

  She left an unhappy Linda and an even unhappier Jonathan behind as she went back to her mini-lab. She eyed the jug sitting on the counter. It was beginning to stratify as the sedimentary particles settled on the bottom and the lighter gastric juices rose to the top. As much as she wanted to delve into the jug and start gazing at everything under the microscope, she feared she’d be still there searching for the poison long after Jonathan was dead and buried.

  There were just so many: snake venom, heavy metal poisoning, insecticides, ricin, sarin…there was even something called “heartbreak grass.” None of which she’d be able to recognize under a microscope, and she lacked the know-how to use the various machines at her disposal properly. And even if she discovered the source of the poison, how likely was it that she would have the antidote on hand?

  “We’ll treat his symptoms,” she said, coming up with the only plan that made sense. “And we’ll also clean him out.” By this she didn’t just mean his digestive tract. She would filter his blood as well. Thankfully she had taken the time to learn how to operate a dialysis machine. Although it looked severely complicated, she found it all rather straightforward.

  Once she had him hooked up, she saw the bag of garbage sitting in the corner. In all the hubbub, she’d forgotten it. She w
as just reaching for it when there was a shout from outside. Even with the unpleasant enema done, Jillybean could see that Linda was looking for any excuse to get out of the room.

  “You wanna go see what’s going on?”

  Linda jumped at the chance. She’d been a nurse at the clinic for two years and this was easily the worst day she’d ever had. She was still shuddering from the enema, and that was with Jonathan waddling his way to the restroom. If he had made a mess in the bed, she just might have walked out for good.

  Just stepping out of the clinic, she could see the gossip flowing. People were going from group to group, sharing what seemed to Linda like the choicest gossip. She hurried over to the nearest group. “What happened?”

  Chris Truman, his injured arm completely forgotten, said, “The Corsairs took Willy Keating and Ted. They were out fishing this morning and they got snapped up.”

  “No way,” Linda answered, properly horrified at the idea.

  “Oh yeah. And they’re demanding our boats in return for them.”

  Linda stepped back, her delighted horror extinguished. “All of them?” Her survival instinct, which had laid semi-dormant since the wire emplacements had been constructed, suddenly woke again. For a large part, the island depended on the fishing boats and their hauls. As she wasn’t one of the two men, she didn’t think their lives were worth even one of their seventeen boats.

  “They want five, not including the one they already took from us,” Chris said. He’d repeated this eight times in the last eleven minutes, always with the same outraged expression.