Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained

by Meredith, Peter

  She’d been so deep in her trance that she hadn’t noticed the shift change. The man in the recliner was heavy, bearded Ben Jager, now sounding like the bear he resembled. Jillybean had paused at the sight of him. It would have been so much easier to kill Derrick.

  Don’t back down now, Eve rasped from out of the shadows. As there was only one lantern burning, the shadows dominated the cellblock. He’s as bad as the rest of them.

  That was the problem. Ben hadn’t been so bad at all. He could have hurt Jillybean many times with the least provocation, and yet he never had. He only hurt her when he was ordered to. In Hoquiam he was a veritable prince of kindness.

  Turning side on, Eve slid between the bars of the cage without even a whisper of cloth. So, he never whipped you for fun. Big deal. What did he do for all those slaves who were boiled alive? What did he do for Leah? Or Stu. He probably hung Stu on that church, hammering five-inch nails through his body. He’s no good guy, Jillybean. And does it matter if he were? You have to escape. The Captain has a sixteen hour head start on you and if he gets past the wall, think about what will happen to little Emily.

  Eve tried to send a sickening picture into Jillybean’s mind. “Stop. I’ll do it.” There was never any question whether she would or not. Ben had to die.

  One at a time, Jillybean carefully slid each of her weights to the cage door and then worked the hairpins and the barrette from beneath the edge of the cage where she had hidden them. From there it was simply a matter of depressing the interior pins correctly with the hairpins and turning the lock using the barrette as a handle. Some locks were easy and some were beyond aggravating; this was one of the latter and if this had been the first lock she’d ever tried to picked, she would have given up in frustration.

  Two hours went by and midnight was long past before the lock finally turned. It had taken so long that she didn’t think she had time for even a sigh of relief. Without a pause, she dropped down and pushed the first 45-pound weight across the threshold of the cage, then the second, and third, and the fourth. She eased forward a foot and a half and repeated the process.

  This was a dangerous time. If Ben woke, there’d be nothing Jillybean could do or say. The guards would beat her and never let another person in the cell. They could even weld the lock and she would be trapped forever. Flesh cannot overcome metal, she thought as she pushed her chain-welded weights closer and closer to Ben. He snorted when she was a foot away and then went back to snoring.

  It was the closest she would come to being caught. Slowly, she stood with her feet set wide. Picking up one of the 45-pound weights took both hands leaving none to mask the sound of the links of the chain clinking together. It didn’t matter, Ben snored right up until she smashed the barbell into his forehead. His frontal bone cracked like an egg and blood geysered up, spraying Jillybean.

  The red fountain gushed for not even twenty seconds and then Ben died. Jillybean heaved him from the chair. It was a big leather beast and when her weights were settled on the seat, she could barely move it. Desperation gave her just enough strength to get it to the door of her cage.

  “Flesh cannot overcome metal,” she said under her breath, “but the mind can overcome anything.” Once under the metal door, she climbed up on the chair, reached down and lifted one of the weights. With a grunt she heaved it up until it was tucked just under her chin, then she bent her knees and launched it up over her head in a move that every weightlifter would recognize as the “clean and jerk.”

  She was just tall enough to push the weight over the crossbar of the door. When it fell over the top, the chain that was attached to it yanked Jillybean’s collar up. The edge of the gold collar dug cruelly into her throat. The only way to keep from strangling to death was for her to stand on her tippy-toes, hook her fingers through the collar and pull herself up as best she could. From an outside point of view it looked as though she were trying to kill herself, and when she kicked the chair over, the idea would have been cemented in a person’s mind.

  The three other weights attached to the collar dropped from the chair, their chains snapping tight, holding them a bare three inches above the floor where they swung back and forth.

  Jillybean swung back and forth as well. Her position had improved considerably. She still had her fingers hooked up under the collar, but she had her feet perched on the lower weights. Now all the weight was on a collar that had been made with pure gold, the most malleable of metals. Slowly it began to stretch. To speed up the process, Jillybean pushed down on the barbells, straining with all her might.

  The metal bit into her fingers until she thought it would cut right through them, but still she persevered until gradually the metal stretched just far enough for her to slide her ears through. The rest of her head followed easily and she was able to step down.

  She could not rest even then. She went to Ben’s body and searched it, finding a 9mm Glock and two extra magazines. From there, things went quickly. The door from the holding cells to the corridor had never been locked and nor was the door that led to the lobby where the two other guards were playing cards to fight off sleep.

  It was very late by then and they were slow-witted and unwary. Jillybean caught them at gunpoint, one in mid-yawn and the other pulling an ace from beneath his thigh.

  “Eve wants to kill you,” she told them. They knew about Eve and had laughed at her when she raged. They weren’t laughing now. Jillybean looked like she had bathed in blood. She looked like a demon. “I don’t want to kill you,” she said. “But I will if you try anything.”

  She led them back to the holding cells and shot them both in the back of head, execution style. Lying to them had been more difficult than killing them.

  And now standing in the cold night with Colleen White looking at her with frightened eyes, Jillybean said again, “Nothing is impossible.”

  Chapter 27

  The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco

  As Bishop Wojdan thrust out his belly and gazed with unexaggerated sadness at the Golden Gate Bridge, Mike Gunter clung with freezing hands to one of the diagonal crossbeams beneath it that were part of the interlocking structure of girders, trusses, beams and rusting joists.

  The smoke bomb that had caused him to hesitate just when Jeff Battaglia ran out and died alone, had sent dark clouds billowing over Mike not thirty seconds later—just as he thought it would. They could have all escaped if the timing had been just a tiny bit off. As it was, Mike used the smoke to retreat just as the Corsair who threw it had attacked.

  The Corsair found only bleeding bodies. By then, Mike was already clambering beneath the bridge, hoping to God he wasn’t alone.

  As suicidal as the first part of the plan was, the second part was even more so, and he feared that the other volunteers had simply kept going across the bridge never to be seen again. If so, he wouldn’t have blamed them. The second part of the trap required them to climb beneath the bridge where there were no walkways, safety harnesses or lifelines. They were two-hundred and fifty feet above the water. Death was a slip away.

  There were eight others beneath the bridge, four congregating near the north tower, three near the south, and Rebecca Haigh on her own in the middle. It was generally thought that the survivors would be able to escape by going down through the towers. It was a self-deceit that Mike hadn’t tried to correct. The second the anchors started to drop, the Corsairs were going to make a charge for the towers in overwhelming numbers. No one was getting down that way.

  Mike had known from the beginning that there was only one way any of them were going to get down and that was to fall…or jump.

  “We’re not going to think about that,” Mike whispered to himself as he struggled along. “We’re going to just keep our eyes forward. What we’re not going to do is look down.” For some reason, saying “we” made him feel less alone.

  As Mike climbed among the struts, the cold wind came in alarming, icy gusts. It felt like an evil wind, one that was doing everything it c
ould to peel him off the metal and send him tumbling to his death. Moving slowly with great deliberation was the only way to keep that from happening—it was also the best way to get shot to death by the first Corsair to duck under the structure to take a quick look.

  Mike had no choice except to tempt fate as he scurried along, barely catching himself time and again.

  Above him on the bridge, he could hear the Corsairs going from car to car, checking for survivors or for traps. The traps were obvious. Hundreds of various sized anchors hung from one end of the bridge to the other but were impossible to get to from above. Someone would have to climb down and get in among the girders and the struts.

  Mike’s hope to destroy the Corsair fleet rested on the belief that none of the Corsairs were brave enough to climb down. It was one thing to come down just far enough to take a look down the long underbelly of the bridge, it was another thing altogether to climb further out.

  The metal was slick with green mold or algae, Mike didn’t know which. And it emanated an intense cold that seeped through anything that made contact with it. The cold went right through a person’s clothes. There were safety wires, but because they had been exposure to the elements for so long, they had become brittle and snapped easily. Perhaps most unnerving of all, was that the entire bridge groaned as if in constant pain, making it seem as though the next gust of wind would send it crashing down into the bay.

  Desperation drove the nine surviving Islanders beneath the bridge. Nothing else could have. The Corsairs were certainly not desperate enough, not at night and not with the icy wind howling among the struts.

  Terrified right to his core, Mike moved slowly along. After two hundred yards of climbing, he came across a woman, one of the volunteers. She was hugging a girder with all her might. With the hood of her parka up and tied tight, there was no telling who she was.

  “You’re too close,” he said to her. She was only forty yards from the near side of the first support tower.

  “I’m good,” she answered.

  “No, you’re not. With the gusts, the ships will head for the center of the bridge to pass through. You got to keep going.”

  “I-I said I’m good,” she said again.

  She wasn’t. She had hit the limit of her courage which was something Mike couldn’t judge in another person. Everyone had their breaking point. “Alright. Can you do me a favor? When things get going can you keep an eye on that door?” He pointed to the tower access door. “Someone’s gonna pop their head out of there and it would be good if you could kill him.”

  “I can do that.” She would be happy to murder her fellow man as long as it didn’t entail climbing any more than she had.

  Mike kept going, monkeying past the tower and getting two more of his crew to move further down the bridge where they could be of some use when the time came. The most frightening spot to be was in the exact center of the bridge. It’s where he found Rebecca Haigh, her red hair snapping across her dead-white face.

  “You’re in my spot,” he joked.

  “You’re alive? What about Jeff and Monica? I know they stayed back…” She read the look in his eyes. “Oh, okay. Maybe they were lucky, right? I never liked heights. They make me want to throw up. I did already. Ha-ha. Back there before the tower. I puked but I don’t know if it ever hit the water. It was gross. The wind just broke it apart. You know? By the way, I talk a lot when I’m scared and right now I’m so scared…”

  She suddenly ducked back behind the girder she was wedged up to “They’re here,” she hissed.

  Mike chanced a look back and in the lowering light, he saw the door to the north tower grinding open. Three distant dark figures came out onto the little fenced-in balcony and gazed up and down the tower and out along the metal grid-like structure beneath the bridge.

  “Go back in,” Rebecca whispered. “Please, go back in. Please, please God make them go back in.”

  They didn’t, and worse, the door to the south tower opened with a high, metallic shriek. More Corsairs came out. One had a flashlight which he beamed all around. It was weak and too far away to pick out any of Mike’s team. Still, it was frightening as all hell and made Rebecca want to vomit again. She began making an ugly urrgh sound deep in her throat.

  “It’ll be okay,” Mike said. “They can’t see us and with the wind, they can’t hear us.” Unless the wind drops at the wrong time and you’re one of those loud pukers, he didn’t add.

  The sun was all the way down by then and the world was in that strange twilight phase where the shadows played tricks. One of the Corsairs nudged his friend and pointed off to Mike’s left. He raised his gun and rattled off a string of bullets that whined and ricocheted around the structure. This was answered by more shots from behind Mike, making him think that the final battle for the bridge had begun.

  It hadn’t. The shooting was coming from the Corsairs at the north tower. “They’re trying to spook us into giving away our positions,” Mike told Rebecca.

  “Well, I doubt it’s going to work,” she replied. “Right now bullets don’t scare me at all. I’m too afraid to let go of this girder to even think about shooting.” It seemed like that was the overwhelming sentiment among his team. Other than the brief barrage by the Corsairs and the whipping wind, it was dead quiet beneath the bridge.

  Up above was another story. The earlier battle had attracted gangs of zombies and now the Corsairs were being besieged by rampaging beasts that came lumbering fearlessly from the southern end. Pretty much the entire bay could hear the fight raging, and from Alcatraz to Angel Island, people prayed that the Corsairs were battling one of those titanic hordes that swept down on the world, eating everything in sight. Even a small horde of a thousand beasts would be able to completely destroy the Corsair army.

  It was only a few dozen of them, enough to send the first line of Corsairs reeling all the way to the south tower where they rallied. The battle was intense, but disappointingly short.

  When it was over the Corsairs decided to try getting their ships past the chains and ropes strung beneath the bridge. They didn’t rush things and only brought up a single squadron of twelve ships. These were their smallest ships, not one over forty-six feet. They came easing slowly up to the chains in five spots. Mike was shocked to see that four of those spots were centered on the towers. The fifth was almost directly below him and Rebecca.

  She could have holed one easily, but the plan was to wait. When Jenn and Mike had come up with the plan, they hadn’t taken into account the cold. The metal beneath the bridge was untouchable by bare flesh. Mike could feel the cold coming off it the way heat came from a fire. And the wind was like a knife of ice, slicing through their clothes. Mike flesh became numb, his joints stiffened and his muscles contracted until they were bunched steel.

  In spite of the cold, his team persevered, or perhaps they were too afraid to move. Either way they did nothing as the Corsairs cut gaps in the chains. After the first fifty-foot gap was opened, a cheer went up and lights were flashed. The closest ship slipped under the bridge and was followed by three more. When the third lane was opened, the other crews simply packed up their tools, heaved away from the chains and followed their fellows into the bay.

  Now the main fleet surged forward. Where before everything had been orderly, now there was a sense of not wanting to miss out on the fun. The bigger ships shouldered aside the smaller ones and made straight for the openings, sometimes getting so close to each other that boathooks were used to push the other away. Angry curses and harsh laughter floated across the bay.

  “Now’s our chance to sting them,” Rebecca said and began moving across one of the girders using only her hands and arms; she kept her legs straddling the beam, holding tight as if it might think about bucking her off. It was slow but safe and soon she sat above a swaying anchor hanging from a sixty-foot rope. They thought sixty feet was a good drop point. It was high enough so that any of the anchors would go through a boat, but not so high that the wind under t
he bridge would change its course much.

  Mike sat above his own rope and, peering down its length, decided he would miss the nearest boat to the left. He went on to the next beam, crossed at a diagonal and sighted down another rope.

  Two boats were coming through at once, their short-handed crews, too busy worrying about scraping some paint to even look up. “Anchors away,” Mike said and slashed at his rope with a knife. The anchor sliced through the air like a dart. It was seventy-five pounds of steel, traveling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour when it hit the boat dead center. The blasted through the deck, exploded a toilet and continued through the flooring and out through the hull as if it were made of a sheet of tinfoil.

  Despite the mortal wound, the ship’s momentum carried it into the bay where it quickly began to sink, water fountaining up through the gaping wound.

  At first, the crews of the ships around it thought that something had exploded beneath the ship and someone cried out, “She hit a mine!” This set off a panic. The boats in front all tried to stop or turn, while the boats in back were oblivious to the entire incident. The crash of the anchor had been largely swallowed up by the wind and, as the ships were as black as the night, and boats didn’t come with brake lights, most didn’t even notice the change in speed until it was too late.

  In the meantime, Rebecca cut her first anchor away. The boat below her was half turned and she couldn’t miss. The anchor sheered through the boom line and crashed through the deck barely slowing. It hit the galley stove, which checked its speed enough so that it didn’t completely pierce the hull, but sat embedded in it with water gushering up.

  Salvaging the ship would have been possible if a gust of wind hadn’t swung the boom around and turned the boat completely sideways in the open lane. Two seconds later, a third ship rammed it amidships, breaking its back. Water flooded the first boat and with the two boats entwined in a violent embrace, they both started to sink.