A grin flashed across her face as her coat fluttered in the wind. A plan was beginning to gel in her mind. “And what about their fearless Captain? Will he cut and run with his enemy right in front of his face? How will that make him look in the eyes of his men? Like a coward, I dare say. No. The fight will happen right here. They will come to us, and we will win.” She made a fist and then grimaced. The thin bones of her fingers were taking forever to heal from her torture.
The conviction of an insane crippled woman did little to sway the Islanders. There were more calls to “Pull back.” It was code for running away.
“When I tell you we will win, it’s not just a rah-rah speech,” she told them, raising her voice. “We’ll win because we will make allies of the four elements.”
Paul leaned back, squinting at her. “Which four? There are more than four elements, right?” He looked around for support. While most of the onlookers were trying to recall ninth grade science, a few of them agreed that there were indeed more than four elements. Someone even suggested that there were close to five-hundred.
Jillybean laughed as if that was a joke, before she explained, “The ancients believed that there were only four elements: air, earth, water and fire. With these on our side, we can’t lose.”
Their skepticism ran deep, right up until Jillybean ordered them to torch the forest along the front of their lines. This stopped their whining cold.
“Did you say burn the forest?” Wayne asked in a nervous voice. The idea of being burned alive made his heart flutter.
“Yes, burn it. Fire and wind will give the Corsairs something to think about.” None of the Islanders were master tacticians, however they could all see the immediate benefit of a raging inferno being pushed along by a westerly wind, and they rushed to obey. Within minutes, fires were roaring up and down the line. The Islanders burned with abandon and, in many cases, a heartless joy. They pictured the fires washing over their enemies and leaving nothing but charred bones and ash.
The thick underbrush went up so quickly it was frightening, however the trees were slower to catch. It wasn’t until a fifteen-year-old began throwing burning branches up into the boughs that they started to ignite. His mom was also among the soldiers, and she was the only one who worried about “putting an eye out.” Everyone else joined in until the fire raged across both the sky and the ground.
As Jillybean had foreseen, the wind slowly pushed the tremendous wall of flames westward but, much to the Islanders’ disappointment, the Corsairs were not burned alive. The forest went on for only about three hundred yards before it gave way to tall grasses and then to sand that sprouted straggly weeds. The Corsairs backed away from the advancing flames, some going to stand in the Sound itself. The fire never really got close.
Still, the smoke was choking and the heat was outrageous. The Corsairs huddled in a great mass along the shoreline for two solid hours until the wind brought the rain. It came in a grey burst that soaked everyone within seconds. The land hissed and steamed as the fires withered until finally there was nothing left except a black, soggy, bog of mud and ash that stretched from the Islanders’ line to the Sound. It looked like the scorched earth was softly giving up its ghosts as pale, membranous mists.
While the fire raged, Jillybean set the Islanders to work, bringing the earth in as their last ally. They trudged and dug and hauled and by the time the fire was out they had formed a crude wall a thousand feet long. It was made from old fallen pine trees, branches, stone and dirt. It was low, barely over three feet in height, and had a slapped together feeling to it. Yet the Islanders felt secure behind their defenses. The wall, such as it was, could stop bullets and that’s all that mattered. They would be able to shoot from a safe and secure position against enemies slogging through muck that was knee-deep.
Jillybean’s “allies” gave the Islanders such a boost in confidence that they couldn’t wait for the battle to begin. They screamed increasingly inventive insults at the Corsairs, made obscene gestures and a few of the braver souls bared their rears and mooned them. Laughter ran up and down the line.
Only Jillybean, Emily and the worst of the wounded failed to join in. Once Jillybean had given the briefest of instructions to the captains concerning overlapping fields of fire, reserve tactics and logistics management—using the simplest of terms—she went to work on the wounded, starting with Gunner. She loved him fiercely and even though he seemed to be fading away, she opened him up and attacked the dozens of bleeders that were turning his insides into a red bowl of death.
The larger holes were sewn shut, while the smaller ones were cauterized using orange-tipped needles that she plucked straight from the fire. She worked as quickly as she could, but still two patients died while she kept him alive. Once he was stabilized, she went to the others. Some were beyond her help and some, like Wayne French, decided against being operated on without anesthesia.
“You can’t give me back my legs one way or the other, can you?” he asked. His spinal column had been severed; there was no chance. She shook her head. “Well, damn. I wasn’t supposed to…” His throat tightened and he could feel tears coming. Savagely he tore his sleeve across his face. The tears were an obscene and unmanly expression of self-pity. He hated them. “Put me on the line,” he growled. “Give me a gun. I can still shoot until I bleed out.”
A number of the other wounded had the same attitude. One man even hobbled away on a new stump. Jillybean had been forced to take his foot off just above the ankle.
Emily had assisted where she could, but her main concern was for her father. She propped a tarp over him and kept a fire going as close to him as she dared. She kept coming back to him right up until the Corsairs began to creep forward. With a last kiss, she hurried along next to Jillybean as she made a last-minute inspection of the line.
There was little that needed to be changed. Because the underbrush had been turned to ash, the Corsairs couldn’t actually make any surprise moves. It was going to be a slugfest with almost every advantage going to the defenders. The Corsairs had the numbers, but were burdened with the responsibility of moving forward into the teeth of a fully prepared defense.
Jillybean grinned as she watched through binoculars as three of them slid into one of the deeper bogs. They became trapped in thigh-deep mud and were stuck until a rope was found and they were pulled free. “The Black Captain is even more desperate than I expected,” she remarked. “He’s only waited long enough for the land to cool. I’m afraid he will push them very hard.”
“Will we still win like you said?” Emily asked.
Before answering, Jillybean glanced up and down the line. On one hand, she saw farmers, goat herders, school teachers and fishermen, while on the other she saw the descendants of Lexington and Concord. “Yes, all we have to do is stand our ground.”
That was one of two little bits of advice which she doled out. The second was to let them get close. The closer the better. That was it. She didn’t see the point of trying to overload them at this point in the game.
It wasn’t long before the first shot was fired. Every one of the Islanders ducked down behind the wall as if they were being targeted. Inside Jillybean, Eve laughed, braying like a donkey, and Ipes groaned. “Shush, the both of you,” Jillybean warned. Louder, she clapped her hands. “Good. Don’t waste the ammo. Let them get in close and while they’re hiding behind a tree in front of you, someone down the line is ripping into them. Remember, we work as a team. We cover each other. If you run, it means your friend down the line is going to die so, stand your ground!”
“I should find a place on the line,” Emily said. “I’d like to be over by where we left the patients.” Where we left my dad, is what she really meant.
“No. I need you with me. Eve can get a little, uh, hungry, you might say during battle. I need you to keep her at bay. Can you do that?”
Emily nodded and ducked as more bullets began to splatter into the wall. Most thudded softly, making the same sound they
would when striking a man in the chest. Some found stone and screamed away.
“Let ‘em come a little closer!” Jillybean cried. The closest Corsairs were now only a hundred yards off and a few of her men were getting anxious to return fire. Too few in her mind. Hiding behind the wall was the easy part. The tough part would be when the time came to expose themselves. How many would answer the call?
Two minutes later, the roll of gunfire was almost constant as the Corsairs came trudging forward through the muck as fast as they could. They had to get closer than close. They had to actually break the line and pour through. But their sprint was the stuff of nightmares. It felt as if they were running in slow motion as the mud grew deeper with every step. Moving in combat was strangely exhausting under the best of conditions, but this was torture.
By the time the first of them was fifty yards from the little wall—to them the wall appeared laughably weak—he was staggering, flailing from side to side, his breath coming in hoarse gulps. He died a second later as he was hit by two different shooters.
“Everyone up!” Jillybean screamed. “Fire! Shoot them! Kill them! Kill them all!”
Emily was shocked to see how quickly her eyes had darkened. She pulled Jillybean down. “Focus, Jillybean. Look at me. You’re Jillybean, got it? Say it. Tell me that you’re Jillybean.”
“I know who I am.” Emily shook her once and stared hard until Jillybean said it. “I’m Jillybean. Now, let go. This is a crucial time. The Captain has weighted his attack somewhere along the line. We have to find out where before the blow lands.”
From all appearances, the Corsairs were attacking in one long, unimaginative line. For ten minutes, the drumbeat of fire neither rose nor fell. Everywhere Jillybean went, she was confronted by the same methodical shooting, the same vision of slime-covered men crawling along, using the mud as both concealment as well as cover.
Unbelievably, there was no hidden troop build-up, no crab-like shifting left or right by companies preparing for a sudden surge. The closest the Black Captain got to anything smacking of strategy was the reserve force of about four-hundred men he kept a hundred yards back. Jillybean supposed that they were waiting to exploit a breakthrough and she had her own reserve force to shadow them.
The fight was only methodical from her sterile point of view. From the view of the men and women fighting behind the wall, it was terrifying. The wall was slowly disintegrated as much from the bullets as the rain. And as it fell to ruin, the Islanders shrunk down lower and lower.
On the other side of the wall, the Corsairs who reached the fifty-yard mark realized that they were up to their necks in a real battle. The Captain had convinced them that the Islanders were weak, that they would cut and run before they even got close, that they were low on ammunition and couldn’t shoot to save their lives. Every last Corsair was certain that they would overwhelm their wimpy enemies in no time in a straight up fight.
But that was not how the fight was going. Bullets by the hundreds hissed through the rain coming from strange angles. Always from the sides. And always both sides at once, making it impossible to find real cover. The Corsairs died screaming like little girls, while beyond the wall there was almost no screaming at all. There was only the bellowing of leaders, exhorting their men to keep shooting.
It seemed as if the Islanders were bulletproof. The truth was far different. The Islanders rarely exposed more than just their head and part of a shoulder. When they were hit, it was almost always a head shot and was almost always immediately fatal. Still, the relative silence it was unnerving to the individual Corsair who was surrounded by the black mud, grey bodies and deep red blood.
Those pushing up from behind found that the best cover available to them was to huddle in the shadow of corpses piled one on top of the other.
It was a horror, but still they fought, knowing that they were bigger, stronger, faster, and better in all ways compared to the Islanders. They had been bullies for so long that their supremacy was imprinted on their black hearts. They couldn’t lose. And so the guns roared back and forth without let up. The number of defenders grew thin in spots and Jillybean was forced to split up her reserves to fill the holes.
On the other side, the Black Captain saw his chance and sent in his four hundred. They were rested and had the rain not been coming down in sheets, they might have been able to cover the hundred yards in less than a minute. The slop was too thick for a sprint, and they could only crawl forward, facing a withering unrelenting fire. When they finally got close enough to really see the wall, most of them found that their guns were so choked with mud that they jammed after every shot.
To clear their weapons required them to roll to one side or the other and yank back on the charging handle. It made them obvious targets and, as they began to die by the score, their assault was brought to a dead stop.
From that moment on, it was a new battle. It was the battle of logistics. With their wall and the firm ground under their feet, the Islanders could shuttle men and ammunition anywhere along the line. The Corsairs could not. If someone ran out of ammunition, their only choice was to beg for bullets from the men around him. Greed was as ingrained in them as their cruelty, and few would part with so much as a single round.
Men with empty guns began to squirm back in the direction they had come. Then the wounded started leaving. Many of the mountain bandits decided that they had backed the losing side and they started crawling away as well. The trickle of retreating men became a flood.
“We have to attack!” Jillybean cried, seeing her chance to end the war. An attack, even a small one, could be the final straw that broke the Corsairs’ backs. “Come on! Right this minute,” she yelled to Paul Daniels, the nearest captain. “Get your men up. Let’s go!” She was wild-eyed and frantic with haste. The mud would slow them down as well and she didn’t want to give the Corsairs time to breathe, let alone think.
When no one moved, she ran to the closest of the Islanders and tried to pull her to her feet. “Get up! Get up!” she screamed.
Emily almost tackled Jillybean. “Stop. You’re Jillybean. Look at me. Say it. I’m Jillybean.”
“I know who I am. Let go, this instant. Emily, look at them. They’re beaten. They’re crawling for their lives. Now’s the time to strike. Quick before they rally. We have to…” She was cut off as the Islanders began to cheer. They were only then realizing that they had won.
They danced, and splashed in the rain, and hugged each other in perfect joy. The one thing they did not do was listen to Jillybean. No one wanted to fight anymore and couldn’t the crazy girl see the Corsairs rushing to board their boats? Didn’t she realize the war was over?
They lied to themselves and the moment passed. The Corsairs slipped away and the war had not ended.
Chapter 40
San Francisco Bay
When the Harbinger’s mast fell across her deck, something broke inside Jenn Lockhart, Queen of the Bay. It was the last of her innocence she assumed, since all she felt inside her was a seething rage the likes of which she had never felt before.
“Someone find the damned Bishop and tell him to pray harder! Get every Guardian up here. They need to get closer to God, because whatever they’re doing is not working.”
Donna Polston tried to calm her down. She came up close and whispered, “We can’t turn on each other. You know that. We have to think of something.”
“We have to think of something?” Jenn cried, pushing the older woman away. “No! You think of something, Donna. And you Guardians say your prayers like good little morons. And Shaina, you can just sit there looking stupid because that’s all you’re going to do anyway.”
Shaina stepped back, her eyes filling with tears. Donna put an arm around her shoulders and glared at Jenn. “What about you? What are you going to do? You’re supposed to be queen. We’re supposed to look to you for answers.”
“I don’t have answers,” Jenn answered, her voice cold as the wind stealing past her long black
coat. “I only have the truth. What I’m going to do is watch the man I love die and then, when the Corsairs come, I’ll hang myself in a cell down in the dungeons.”
Donna was taken aback by the coldness in Jenn’s voice. She wasn’t lying. “That’s a coward’s way out,” Donna challenged.
“What would you have me do? Fight them myself? Should I order the children to throw rocks at them as they come ashore? Should I have the women cut off their own breasts to keep them from being raped to death?” Donna dropped her gaze. “Look at me, Donna! You can’t call me a coward and then not face the truth. Mike was our only hope.”
Silence reigned across the prison roof. Two dozen people stood mutely, watching their queen fall to pieces. “I’m sorry, I’m so stupid,” Shaina whispered. “I d-don’t mean to be but it just happens. And Mike was never our only hope. It was always you, because you’re so great. You have powers. Everyone knows that.”
Jenn’s heart was still like ice. Far out on the bay she could see the catamaran coming closer to the stricken Harbinger and she knew that in seconds there would be a few final shots and that would be it for the boy she had fallen head over heels for. And that would be it for her people.
“I don’t have powers, Shaina. Sometimes I see signs. That’s it.” And just then the signs all pointed to death and torture. She shook her head, knowing that wasn’t right. There were no signs to be read as far as she could tell, and if there were, her mind was closed and her heart was dying second by second. Besides, if there were signs, what could they possibly show her? Signs could not bend reality.
“Sorry Shaina, I can’t turn ants into soldiers or wishes into ships.” She didn’t even have normal everyday powers. Even if Mike could make it back, she could not fix a belly wound. He would still die. It would just be a slower, drawn-out death. Her eyes dropped and her heart sank.
Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained Page 47