Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained

by Meredith, Peter

  When Emily asked Troy if he wanted the same, he shook his head. “Save them… for someone…with a chance.”

  Emily’s anger came back hot and fast. “I don’t appreciate being guilted,” she said, imitating her mother perfectly without realizing it. He looked like he wanted to say something, but then sort of slumped. She shook out eight of the pills and put them in his hand.

  He didn’t swallow them. “Take the bullet out,” he hissed. “Only way…to relieve…pain.”

  It was true. One way or another, alive or dead, his pain would decrease. She almost nodded. “First, you have to tell me what’s going on with Neil. He knows something. Something about Gunner or me. I don’t trust Neil being over there. The way he is now makes him kinda gullible, you know what I mean? He could be agreeing to anything.” Even though Gunner had saved her life, she was still afraid of him and his motives. His eyes were full of lies and deception. But about what? He could have turned her over to the Corsairs at any time. And if he had wanted to take her and do “things” to her, he could have done that as well.

  “Trust him,” Troy hissed between sharp breaths. “He won’t…hurt you.”

  “That’s not what I asked. You can sit there until you’re ready to answer.” She was so close to channeling her mother that she only just managed to stop herself from adding: Young Lady!

  “There’s no secret here,” Zophie said. “All he’s doing is hiding who he is, and Neil said his name already. It’s Captain Grey. What’s the big deal? Is he an old Corsair or something?”

  Emily took a step back from Troy, her jaw going suddenly slack and her mouth forming a long O. She had heard Neil with perfect clarity, but had assumed that he had gotten his zombie-fried wires crossed and had dismissed what he said. But could she dismiss his actions? Or Gunner’s? He had saved her life at the cost of his own, and he had done so without comment, without asking anything of her, without a thought. In hindsight, she saw that he had done so naturally as only a loving father would.

  “He’s no Corsair,” Emily whispered. “He’s my dad.”

  Chapter 14

  Bainbridge Island, Washington

  All that day Deanna Grey inspected the walls of the island looking for a secret entrance, a revolving wall, or a door hidden by illusion. She tapped here and there with a stick, whistled up drainpipes, and inspected every seam and every crack. It was a long wall, which made for a long, wasted day.

  The next morning, she tried a different approach to get at the explosives which she was sure were crammed to the hilt within the walls. She went to the Records Office and poured over everything she could find on the wall. This should have started and ended with the blueprints of the wall itself, except they looked altogether normal.

  She even resorted to holding the separate sheets up to a light, looking for secret instructions. “Might as well be holding these up to the light of a full moon,” she said, tossing the last onto the pile.

  There were seven boxes of records concerning the construction of the wall and she had to wonder if there was an iota of truth in any of them. Jillybean was too smart to label her blueprints with: Insert bomb here. “No, she would have two sets of plans.” One set for herself and one set for the government overseer, which in this case had been Deanna herself.

  Deanna was the first to admit that she had not done much when it came to actual supervising. She wasn’t a construction expert and had relied on a three-man management team. Each of them had been in construction back before the apocalypse, and together they put Jillybean’s plan into place—and now they were dead. Two had died of cancer within two years of the wall being built, and the third had committed suicide not long after.

  She hadn’t thought of their deaths as suspect or conspiratorial at the time, but seeing their names now sent a chill up her back. “No. She wouldn’t have killed them.” Except she might have. This was Jillybean. If the ends were important enough, then the means were wide open. Murder was definitely a possibility with her. “And she had done the autopsies on all three men. God.”

  Compelled to find the truth, Deanna hurried to the clinic. It was empty as she had expected. There were only two other people with any medical background on the island. One was a former nurse who had suffered a nervous breakdown even before Jillybean’s arrival, and had happily taken up motherhood as soon as she could. The other had been a nursing assistant who had been utterly freaked out by an eight-year-old slicing into people with a smile on her face.

  When it came to the health of an individual, Jillybean kept meticulous records. Deanna easily found the files of the three men in question. All had been diagnosed before construction of the wall started. One with lung cancer, one with Hodgkin's lymphoma, and Carl Grasso with chronic depression, stemming from what he described as an endless and losing battle with “the bottle.”

  “Hmm,” Deanna whispered, sitting back. “So, she chose as her managers men who were not going to live that long. At least she didn’t murder them. That’s a relief I sup…” Deanna suddenly remembered rewarding the three men with bottles of aged whiskey at the unveiling ceremony. “Great. Maybe I killed Carl.”

  She left the clinic in something of a funk. The fog sitting over this portion of the Sound had become thinner and didn’t hang nearly so low. Visibility wasn’t more than a hundred yards, which made the sighting of a Corsair boat even more worrisome.

  Wayne French came rushing up, his cheeks rosy, his forehead glistening with sweat, his BDUs far too crisp and clean. “Deanna, thank God! The Corsairs are here!” he cried, pointing back the way he had come.

  Panic seized Deanna in the span of one choking breath. “How-how many?”

  “Just one that we saw, but you know as well as I do that they don’t go about one at a time. There’s got to be an entire fleet out there. Do we fire on it?”

  Say the word and go from a cold war to a hot one with the pull of a trigger. And if the Corsairs were diplomats with news about her daughter? “No. Not yet. Though we should move to a war footing. I want a full muster. Everyone eleven and up will report. How long will that take?”

  “Two hours or so, but what about the council? Shouldn’t we meet first to make it official? If I begin the muster and they vote not to go to war, we’ll look pretty stupid. And we might start a panic.”

  Deanna didn’t like how pale he had become and how his right eye twitched at her, but she was downright shocked at what he was saying. There were Corsairs in the Sound and he was worrying about starting a panic? As far as she knew, it was the perfect time for the people to panic. She did not have that luxury. She couldn’t give in to the feeling that had her heart racing and her throat constricting. She had to retain her composure and assess the situation from a political standpoint.

  There were two questions that had to be answered: Was her Chief of Security having second thoughts about the necessity of going to war? And would he vote against her in the council?

  If he did, the others would follow suit one after another. There was even a chance that Veronica would as well. If that happened, there was a possibility that Andrea Clary could force a “no confidence” vote on the council and with her pushing “Peace in our time,” it just might pass. In a snap, Deanna would be ousted as Governor.

  Do I dare calling for the muster? she wondered. Do I dare not to? The Corsairs were coming no matter what and the only way to fight them was if she had the full backing of the council and the people. Judging by Wayne’s nervous demeanor, she guessed that she would have neither.

  “Maybe you’re right about holding off on the muster. Double the patrols and set the council meeting for this evening. We can always bump it up if we see more boats. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in Jillybean’s school.” Wayne raised an eyebrow at this, but said nothing. Just as he turned to go, Deanna remembered something about him. “You helped to build the wall way back when, right? Do you remember if there was anything strange about the construction?”

  “You mean with the materials?”r />
  She shook her head, letting her long blonde hair swing freely. “No. Just how it was built. Did you find the process strange?”

  He shrugged, his shoulders suddenly looking small and weak, his neck thinner than it had. The sight of a single Corsair boat seemed to have shrunken him. “Maybe a little. It was Jillybean’s project, so there had to be some strangeness, right? We had different groups going here and there. Every day we would be at a new section. At the time, I thought it was chaotic, but it was brilliantly chaotic. She was like a conductor sending people in a hundred directions and only she knew what was really happening. Still, in the end we got the wall up and faster than I thought possible.”

  “Okay, thanks,” she said, wearing her politician’s smile. Brilliantly chaotic—that had always been Jillybean. Deanna was now convinced more than ever there were bombs in the wall.

  Wayne was anxious to go and she sent him off at a run. She then strode briskly to Jillybean’s school. It was easily the most frightening place on the island—there was a reason that the windows were barred and the doors were chained shut. The moans of the undead could be heard from outside. They reminded her that she had forgotten to feed them.

  “I’ve been a little distracted,” she muttered as she unlocked the massive Yale padlock. She cracked the front door and listened for a few moments, afraid that the creatures might have broken their chains and were now roaming the halls. As far as she could tell, they were still secure.

  Afraid that assassins were still hounding her, she left the lights off as she stepped inside. It felt like a mistake. She didn’t believe in ghosts or haunted asylums or any of that business, or so she told herself as her flesh flared with goosebumps and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. It wasn’t just the shadowed gloom and the long doleful moans that had her heart going. There was something of Jillybean’s madness hanging in the air.

  From the age of eight on up, she had come to this nearly empty building and had done things.

  For the most part, they were secret things; experiments mostly, and some had been extremely beneficial to the community. Jillybean had also done some other things that few people knew about. Even Deanna didn’t know everything. Only Neil was in on all of her dealings and when Deanna pressed him too closely, he would just shake his head and just say, “It’s best if you don’t know.”

  Now she had to know.

  On tiptoe, she made her way toward Jillybean’s labs, but one missed step sent an old Coke can clanking across the floor. The beasts went mad, their furious roars echoing up and down the empty halls, making Deanna cringe. She knew there’d be no shutting them up… “Unless they’re eating. Yuck.” As much as she didn’t want to, she made her way to the boy’s locker room, and as always, the giant creatures were an assault on the senses. Their roars made her ears ache, their overpowering stench made her want to vomit, and the sight of them made her want to run and hide like a child.

  The largest of them was over ten feet in height with shoulders that were as wide as a kitchen table and arms that were fabulously long and unbelievably strong. The chains holding it in place could anchor a destroyer and yet, they looked as though they were bending as the creature tried to get at her.

  “Don’t be like that, Stumpy.” It was Jillybean’s nickname for the monster. “Just eat your food.” For the most part, his diet consisted of whatever leftovers Jillybean could scrounge. She received daily deliveries from the fishermen who piled fish heads, guts and tails down a shoot. The three schools donated expired food and scraps, and farmers were quick to hand over the moldy remains of what they couldn’t sell.

  The zombies were fed by the shovel-full. They screamed in fury the entire time Deanna was in the room, but forgot about her the moment she walked away. The sound they made when they ate was so revolting that Deanna stuffed her fingers in her ears as she made her way to Jillybean’s office. Most people would have used the principal’s office as their own; most people weren’t Jillybean. She used the school’s science lab because she was in it more times than not.

  There were fourteen workstations, each equipped with a microscope, a laptop, a little sink, running water and a gas line. Thirteen of the stations had some sort of experiment currently running, or so Deanna assumed by the stacks of petri dishes, the whirring centrifuges, the numerous grow lights and the many beakers. Some of the latter contained what looked like black sludge and smelled of rotten eggs.

  Along with all of this, the room contained nine filing cabinets. In typical Jillybean style, each cabinet had a list of the contents taped to the side.

  There was no mention of Operation Otter Pop anywhere. “There’s nothing about explosives in any of these, either. Which is good, I guess.”

  The stacks of paperwork on Jillybean’s desk concerned every matter under the sun, except bombs, and that left only her personal computer. Just like almost everyone else on the island, Deanna wasn’t great with computers. They were a throwback and reminded people how they had they had gotten themselves in an apocalypse to begin with.

  Deanna hadn’t really cared for them back before. They had always been changing programs and apps; just enough to make things confusing and frustrating. Had it not been for the internet, she wouldn’t have toughed them. “There’s no internet now,” she whispered as she sat down and flicked on the device. It whirred and hummed into life, and she was confronted with an immediate problem.

  “A password? Hmm, let’s try Ipes.” It didn’t work and neither did Sadie, Einstein, calculus or a hundred other words that she associated with Jillybean.

  “I’m being stupid. She would never use a word that just anyone could guess. But I’m not just anyone. I should be able to get this.” She racked her brain without success. She gazed around the science lab, looking for clues. Her eyes fell on the Periodic Table of Elements that seemed to be a prerequisite for every science lab in the country. Her face warped in a look of disgust. Science had never been her thing either.

  Apprehensively, she approached the chart, her pretty eyes flicking over the abbreviated elemental names. It was a surprise how few of them she actually knew.

  “Noble gasses? How is a gas noble? Gadolinium? Krypton? Is that really a thing? Jeeze-loo-eeze, some ultra-nerd named an element after Superman’s home planet? And people were okay with that?”

  With a sigh, she tore down the chart and went back to the computer and began typing in the names of elements, starting with Krypton. When those didn’t work, she actually typed in Jillybeanium. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work, either. Cursing, she shoved the chart off the desk and it was then that she heard a door close in the school. It was an accidental click, a secretive one that had her reaching for her knife and darting for the door.

  Now she heard footfalls. They weren’t the striding, confident steps of someone with an innocent purpose. No, these were soft. Someone was trying to be stealthy. Deanna pictured the assassin and readied the knife; her plan was to plunge it into the person first, and ask questions later. The doorknob twisted, the door opened slowly and, unexpectedly, Deanna saw a big blonde mane of wavy hair.

  “Veronica?”

  The big blonde screamed, making Deanna jump and setting off the zombies again.

  “You scared the crap out of me!” Veronica said, clutching her chest.

  Behind her was Deberha Perkins, looking wide-eyed and pale. “Wayne said you were here. He…some of us are just sorta wondering what you’re doing here?”

  Deanna tucked the knife away. “I was just…you know, checking things out. I forgot all Jillybean’s zombies. I had to, you know, feed them.”

  Veronica wasn’t buying it. “Nope. Nope. Don’t lie to me, Dee. I know you better than that. You’re here for something else. Is it a weapon? It’s a weapon, right?” Deanna shook her head, not knowing whether she should let even her best friend in on Operation Otter Pop. Veronica gave her a sharp look. “Come on, Dee. We all know she was experimenting with weapons. She used to shoot them off all the time. So what
are they? Missiles of some sort?”

  “No. The council never trusted Jillybean, and the only times she ever shot anything off was when Neil caught her in the process of finishing a rocket or some sort of ‘sub-sonic missile.’ As if being sub-sonic made it any better. It’s my guess that she always allowed herself to get caught right when she was finishing up with something.”

  Deberha glanced around nervously. “Maybe she had more rockets than she let on. Maybe there are a bunch here in the school.”

  “Maybe, though I kind of doubt it. She hadn’t been able to get the guidance packages correct against moving targets, especially small ones like a sailboat, and she isn’t the kind of person who would waste time and energy on an inferior product. Trust me, I wanted her to succeed. It’s why I made sure you turned a blind eye on her, Deberha.”

  “I kinda figured as much. If you’re not after missiles, then what are you doing here?”

  Although Deberha was too shy and lacked the intelligence to be a spy, and Veronica was too big and brassy, Deanna hesitated. The thought of tearing down the walls was just so outrageous that she didn’t want to say anything unless she actually could do it…and even then, she didn’t know if she would actually announce it to the world. As she was thinking this, a sly idea hatched inside her. She could blow up the wall and blame it on the assassin. Everyone would believe it.

  She hid the grim smile that wanted to spread itself triumphantly across her face, and pointed at the computer. “I was hoping to see if, you know, I was wrong about the missiles. Do either of you guys know anything about computers? It needs a password and I don’t know it.”

  “Did you try Ipes?” Veronica asked. “Remember that little stuffed zebra she used to carry around?”

  “Yep. And Sadie and Neil, and her birthday, and everything else I could think of. I was doing science words when you guys showed up.”