“Then I’ll swim.”
This caused Boon to stare. It was a two and a half mile swim to Angel Island in choppy forty-degree water that had been teeming with zombies for weeks ever since the second battle of the Bay. “Then I’ll pray for you,” she said.
Chapter 23
The Marin Headlands, San Francisco
Mike Gunter was the only one on the hill who had his binoculars pointed the wrong way. The ten other pairs were watching the approaching Corsairs as they moved forward in dashes. First one company, then another, then a third. They were being cautious in their dispositions this time, something the Queen had anticipated.
A sigh escaped Mike as he stared back at Jenn Lockhart who had been standing on the roof of the prison since noon. Her hair was a wild menace and her black coat undulated like the wings of a manta ray as the wind swirled and whipped around her. It was the same gusting wind that had come out of the north carrying the Corsairs down to their doorstep. Mike resented its bitter sting.
He had been out in the cold since midnight of the night before, doing everything he could to put the finishing touches on their defenses. They didn’t have a plan so much as they had foolish hope that the Corsairs would come at them with insane overconfidence. Jenn had known since the day before that they wouldn’t.
Mike had come back from a long night of resetting buoys and had found her deep in the prison, gazing blankly into one of the cold, damp cells. “I don’t know what to do?” she whispered. She didn’t like the prison blocks and especially hated how her voice would come back to her if she was too loud. She thought it sounded like her own ghost was speaking. “They’re going to take the bridge.”
“What did you see?” he asked.
This made her laugh. “A cockroach. Just a cockroach.”
“You got that from a cockroach? What else did he have to say?” he asked to cheer her up. No one had been there to cheer him up, however. He had never liked their chances and more than once he had hinted that they should take the Queen’s Revenge and make a run for somewhere with clear skies and crystal-blue waters. She wouldn’t leave her people and, amazingly, they wouldn’t leave her. Apart from a few Santas, the strange unwieldy conglomeration of people had held together.
Mike suspected this was because they hoped the Guardians would join them, but even when the Corsair fleet had been spotted, Bishop Wojden had remained steadfast—they would defend their island and nothing more. This had been their way from the very start and he figured that since it had always worked before, it would always work in the future.
Jenn knew better. The Corsairs were not going anywhere until they had enslaved everyone in the bay. And the only way to stop them wasn’t just to band together, they had to band together and fight. Donna Polston’s daily excursions to Angel Island had met with a rebuff at every turn.
“They’re at two-hundred yards!” Rebecca Haigh hissed, her freckled face no longer able to hide her true feelings. Her brows were bent far down, while her lips were turned up in a smiling grimace. She was deathly afraid, as was everyone else on the hill, and that included Mike.
He was on the verge of wetting himself and his hands were so slick with sweat that he was afraid his weapon would squirt right out of his grip when he tried to shoot it. “Got it,” he said, hearing his own voice squeak.
Bean-pole, Jeff Battaglia, who was nearly too tall for the low mound of dirt they had scraped together, looked back at him, and seemed on the verge of cracking a joke, only to close his mouth with a click. It was a bad sign that Jeff had let the prepubescent voice-crack go without at least a little ribbing. “Just come on already. Charge, please,” Jeff whispered. He wanted the battle over with. He wanted it to be only a distant memory.
Five feet away, a woman Mike didn’t recognize began to whine in her throat and twist in her crouched position. She had young features and grey in her hair; Mike didn’t know what to think of her, except he knew she was going to run at any moment. It made sense. They were sixty people against five hundred, and that was just the first wave of Corsairs. The woman kept saying, “This isn’t right. This isn’t right. I shouldn’t be here.”
“Then you shouldn’t have volunteered,” Miss Shay spat out. She was about the only person who was not afraid. She was angry, and not just at Jenn or Jillybean or even Mike. She was angry at the world and everything in it. Her son had died. It didn’t matter to her that Aaron had died a hero. Her boy was dead. Dead, dead, dead. It was all she could think of, that and the unspoken desire to die herself. Death was why she had volunteered.
Two-thousand people and only sixty volunteered for this mission. There were plenty of people who were even then hunkered down behind sandbags on Alcatraz, rifles propped up next to them, nervously blabbing to their neighbor and being blabbed back, neither hearing the other. They would fight when the time came, only they would fight from the high ground, surrounded by rock and steel. They would fight because they knew they had a chance to live.
It was generally thought that none of the sixty trying to hold the barren hilltop were going to live—it was why Mike couldn’t stop staring back at Jenn and why she hadn’t taken her telescope off of him for a second.
He had volunteered because when the call went out, no one had stepped forward. Some of the same people who had fought on the Marin headlands twice before when Jillybean was queen refused to fight for Jenn, at least not out there where retreat was practically impossible.
Someone had to be the first to step forward and Mike had been that someone. Jenn had given him that calm, queenly smile of hers. Even though they hadn’t discussed it, she had known it would be him, just as she had known he couldn’t take it back later even though it was a suicide mission. She had little room to say anything to him since they both knew that being queen was also a form of suicide. If the Corsairs captured her they would do terrible things to her before they murdered her. She wasn’t going to give them the opportunity and carried a snub-nose .38 in the pocket of her coat.
In spite of the gun, she had told Mike, “We still have a chance.” He clung to those words as he gazed at the Corsairs coming on in short rushes. They were acting more like real soldiers than ever before; Jillybean’s string of victories had taught them valuable lessons.
“Look! Smoke!” Jeff cried, pointing down to their left. Some of the Corsairs had hauled up large cauldrons which were erupting in heavy black smoke. The smoke wasn’t nearly as effective as the Corsairs imagined it would be as the gusting wind whipped it into spinning vortexes and dispersed it before it reached the top of the hill. Still, the land in front of the little group of volunteers was grey and the Corsairs took on a ghostly appearance.
Rebecca saw the first of them pass the next marker. “A hundred and fifty yards,” she called out to the group. “God help us.” She was now so pale that her freckles looked darker, like splatters of mud…or old blood. Her stomach ached with fear, worse than she could ever remember, not even when she was attacking Alcatraz as Captain of the Rapier. At least then she’d had fifty things to do at once. Just sitting there waiting to be killed was a trial.
Mike had the same feeling, but he had one distraction and once more he looked back at Jenn. Two miles was a long distance even with binoculars and he couldn’t see her face clearly. Her telescope was far more powerful and so, he gave her a hearty grin, hoping that she would see he wasn’t afraid.
“A hundred yards!” Rebecca said, whispering now in spite of the whipping wind.
It was almost time. Mike was just turning away from the woman he loved when he caught sight of something in the water; it was a man swimming to the island, laboring in the heavy chop. He pointed so that if Jenn was looking she would see the person before he drowned. He jabbed with his finger just as a gun fired.
Thankfully, it was a trigger-happy Corsair. It started a tremendous burst that swept the top of the hill, kicking up dust and dirt. “No one shoot!” Mike and Rebecca shouted at the same time. No one had been going to. All sixty
people were flat against the earth as the hurricane of lead rippled the air above them. They had been warned not to waste ammo, but after a minute of doing nothing Mike thought they were taking the injunction to the extreme. At this rate they would die with full magazines.
Mike counted to three and popped up just as a group of Corsairs ran past the seventy-five yard marker. That was plenty close enough. “Jessica, in front of you!”
Jessica Mathis was only twenty and a young twenty at that. How she ended up in charge of a six-person squad, she didn’t know. She couldn’t even remember what insanity had made her volunteer in the first place. She hid her face behind a mass of black hair and pretended she didn’t hear Mike.
Kimm Reilly was hunkered down next to her. She was something of Jessica’s opposite. Her hair was blonde and tied severely back; her eyes were narrow and her brow was clear. She hit Jessica with her elbow. Jessica hit her back.
“Damn it,” Mike swore. He lifted himself just high enough to get his gun positioned before he rattled off four shots directly into the clump of men. There was a brief moment in which he heard a curse and a high scream. Then the entire Corsair army shot at him, or so it seemed by the outrageous amount of return fire that blasted into his little mound of dirt, whittling it lower and lower. The sound of so many guns going off so closely was shocking. It was like a thousand explosions erupting all across the hill below him.
The only thing more shocking was that it was still all one sided. “Someone else shoot!”
Wearing her usual cold sneer, Miss Shay fired, missing higher with each of her three shots. It wasn’t a total waste of ammo, however. She became the focal point of the enemy, so much so that Mike felt safe enough to risk a look and was shocked to see that the Corsairs were still surging forward. Already the closest was only fifty yards away. Mike fired twice and ducked again just as one of the Corsairs seemed to take a seat in the middle of the battlefield. He just sat down Indian style and didn’t move.
“Kimm! Wake up and shoot. Jessica, you too. Everyone fight!”
Some listened, some did nothing but hide, and some, like the young woman Miss Shay had yelled at earlier, ran away, racing down the back of the hill for the safety of the bridge.
Mike had no choice but to carry on with the fight. He popped up ready to do some damage and was nearly killed three times over. Bullets passed all around him, one coming so close to his cheek that it felt like a butterfly kiss. It sent him back into the dirt face first.
Jeff Battaglia took that moment to fire. “Got one!” he crowed. A bullet passing a foot from his face ended his celebration and his next few shots were fired without looking; he would expose only his rifle and part of one arm. Mike couldn’t complain, at least he was shooting. So many weren’t that Mike had to call them out by name and even threw a rock at one young man who wouldn’t listen. He screamed his volunteers into action.
Jessica Mathis rallied her squad, screaming words that weren’t English and may not have been part of any language whatsoever. She looked insane, her bushy hair standing up and her dark eyes bulging in fear. Her insanity was contagious and for eighteen precious minutes the battle became a slugging match in which the people of the Bay got the better of the fight. The Corsairs were stopped cold forty yards from the top of the hill and for a moment, Mike had the wild hope that they could win. It was hope built on illusion, which was shattered as the second wave of Corsairs arrived.
More smoke poured over the battlefield and the fire sweeping the hill was withering.
Miss Shay died, a bullet taking her squarely in the forehead with the sound of a bat hitting a baseball. In death her pinched look vanished and for the first time Mike saw the girl she had been before the apocalypse. Then Kimm lost the top of her head in a brilliant red spray as she was gunning down an entire squad of Corsairs. Right beside her, Jessica was shot through the throat. Sanity returned to her dark eyes as blood poured down the front of her coat from the gaping wound.
“Don’t hurt,” she whispered and then stood up, firing off the rest of her magazine. She died standing as every gun centered on her. Seconds later her entire squad ran away, half of whom were cut down in a blink.
When Rebecca saw that most of the remaining defenders had lost what little nerve they’d had and were firing without looking like Jeff was, she yelled over to Mike, “We gotta go before it’s too late.”
Disappointed, Mike stole a peek at the Corsairs. They had taken a good drubbing and more than a hundred were dead or wounded. It wasn’t enough, not by a long shot. “Alright. Ones get ready.” Half the force was designated either a one or a two. The ones got to retreat under the covering fire of the twos. The twos had to trust to luck.
On the word “Go!” the ones took off—as did most everyone else. It was a disaster. Only Mike, Jeff and three others did their part and their gunfire wasn’t enough to keep the Corsairs from ripping into the fleeing defenders. Not even a dozen made it to the bridge. The rest were cut down by the deadly, plunging fire.
“Mike,” Jeff whispered. “What do we do?”
Fear made Mike weak and he chanced a look back at Angel Island—their white boats had not budged. On Alcatraz, the Queen’s Revenge was just easing up to the dock and the six repaired ex-Corsair ships were out in the shallows busy setting their traps. Even if the Revenge was turned around at that moment, it would take her a half an hour to tack into the wind. A rescue wasn’t going to happen and without any cover fire whatsoever, running was out of the question. The only real option left to them was to fight and die.
“Take as many as you can with you,” he told Jeff. “You know what they do to prisoners.”
Chapter 24
Bainbridge Island, Washington
Deberha Perkins, Neil Martin and Gunner were the only ones Deanna Grey told about the murder of Veronica Henessy. There was no way she was going to tell Emily and she guessed correctly that the news of another murder would only dampen the military zeal of the islanders. That zeal, if it could be called such, was not an inferno to begin with. It was closer to something like a guttering candle that was only a puff of wind away from going out.
“You need to find the spy,” Gunner whispered, as another company boarded the newly returned boats. “If she’s still out there when the full might of the Corsairs shows up, we’re going to be screwed. Surprise is our only hope. That’s no exaggeration. And you,” he barked at Neil. “You’ve slept enough. Do you understand me?”
“Yes. I’m good now. I feel quite refreshed.” He didn’t look it. He had the mottled grey tinge that roast beef got when it had been left out for a few days. “And sorry, I should have been there for you, Deanna.”
Deberha, who was so haggard that she didn’t look much better than Neil, said, “It’s also my fault. I shoulda caught this guy a long time ago. I-I don’t think I’m really cut out for this sort of thing. I was a better sheriff when it was just like little arguments between neighbors. And I’m not even a very good councilman. Maybe I’d be better off with one of the companies.”
Deanna overrode her. “No. The council will stay and we will hold our heads high. We have to give the illusion that everything is fine.”
Very little was fine and Deanna couldn’t fool anyone that it was when the last company and the last ship slipped away an hour before dawn. Having turned a lackluster mob into a small cohesive army had exhausted Gunner and he had to be carried aboard the Dead Fish. Emily was the last to leave and the reality of their situation had turned her back into a frightened child. She clung to Deanna so tightly that she could feel her daughter trembling through their collective layers of clothing.
“It’ll be okay,” Deanna said, reflexively resorting to a platitude and very nearly uttered the perennial politician’s remark of: Things always appear darkest before the dawn. Emily was not her constituent, she was her daughter. “I love you, Em. Your dad would be so proud of you.”
Emily let out a high sweet laugh at this. At first Deanna thought it was nervous lau
ghter, then the joy of it came through. “I like to think he is,” she said, “and I’m proud of him, and you.”
“Well good,” Deanna said. “And thanks, I guess.”
Another quick hug and Emily left her, tromping across the gangway. She waved a final time and went below to sit with Gunner.
“Keep her safe, please,” Deanna prayed as the black ship shook out its main and crossed through the gate. It was immediately shut behind them and despite her serene smile, Deanna wondered if it would ever open again. So much of their future rested on a dying man and an eleven-year-old girl.
Neil had kept to the shadows during the sendoff. Now he came forward, eating a jelly and cheese sandwich he had pulled from his pocket. He didn’t bother picking the fluff off of it. “What do you think? Is the killer out there or in here with us?”
“I hope she’s here with us. She can only do so much damage here. Don’t get jelly on your gun. If she’s here, she’ll eventually come after me.” When the Dead Fish and the rest of the gaggle of fishing boats disappeared, melding with the shadows, Deanna and Neil left with what was left of the small crowd, most of whom went home to get some sleep. The pair was not afforded that luxury; they still had to do something with Veronica before the sun came up.
They moved the body to Jillybean’s school and under the glow of the fluorescent lights they carried out a brief autopsy. Neither knew what they were looking for—the fist-sized dent in the back of her head could have been made by anything. The autopsy ended after Neil’s stomach began to growl. They decided to bury her near a section of the wall where hundreds of rose bushes had been growing in a tangle for years. At times it was the prettiest spot on the island.
Dirty and fatigued, the two then went back to the police station and stared about the crime scene. Deberha was sitting at her desk, an elbow cocked on her desk, her chin propped in her hand. “They broke my computer. Or I guess it’s a she. Whichever.” She jabbed a few buttons on her keyboard. “It’s not turning on or nothing.”
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