“I have a question first. Why Neil?” She turned her soft blue eyes on him, making sure not to react to the blood trickling from the corners of his mouth. She didn’t want to know whose it was. “Your courage is as great as anyone’s, but you have to admit you sort of stand out. And even being what you are, you’re not much of a fighter. No offense, it’s just that you are the nicest zombie I ever met.”
Neil was also the only zombie who could blush. The gray cast to his scarred and scabbed flesh took on a deeper gray hue. “Well, thank you! That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me since all this started. Everyone else is like Ew gross or He’s going to eat me! Of course, I did eat the guy who said that, so that made a little sense.” He suddenly realized what he was saying and he quickly changed the subject, “Yeah, why do you want me to go, Jillybean?”
Jillybean had been grinning at her adopted father, but at the question her eyes dropped and her heart began to thump heavy but also hollow. “I picked him because I know him. Because I’ve known him since I was a little girl. In all that time, Neil has always made things right when I couldn’t. He and Captain…he and Gunner are the only people I’ve always been able to rely on. Trust me, if this is a just mission, they will find a way to win.”
Sometimes Jenn looked almost child-like and at other times, like this one, she had the weight of the world crushing down on her. “I wish I didn’t, but I understand completely.” She’d had the same thing in Stu Currans and Mike Gunter. Now, she had to wonder what her people would do when there were no more heroes. “I think we will go with your plan,” she stated, speaking for everyone whether they liked the plan or not. “Tell us what you need.”
Although Jillybean answered, “Not much,” it took the entire day to prepare and get her teams into position. The Queen’s fleet roved all over the harbor, landing here and there, seemingly at random. It was frequently scattered and had the Corsairs ships slipped their anchors and attacked, they could have won an easy victory. Instead, they could be seen dragging their ships through the shallows at the base of the mud river until their entire fleet was safe behind the great chain that stretched across the river.
The chaos behind the fleet’s movements was designed to hide Jillybean’s true intentions. At midday, three platoons were off-loaded along the shoreline of the North Bay, miles to the west of the city. Another two platoons were dropped off to the east. The groups were made up almost exclusively of Guardians. Some of the knights carried nothing except their ash-blackened spears. They fanned out to screen the formation against zombies. Dressed in rags, her face daubed in mud, and fearless as ever, Jillybean did not just go with them, she led the way.
The rest of the group trudged slowly after. They carried enormous loads and walked bent over like old men.
Slowest of them all was Gunner. He slogged along at a dreadful pace, moving from tree to tree, coughing in fits. Beneath his mask he was pale and dripping sweat. When he fell for the fourth time, the younger men offered to make a stretcher of sorts and carry him. Has it come to that? he wondered. Being carried around? The idea left him both tired and furious. He lifted his mask and spat. “Try to pick me up and I’ll tear your face off.”
Neil helped him up, saying, “Now you’ve gone and made me hungry. Oh my, you’ve gained some weight in the last ten years.” Neil felt stronger than ever and yet Gunner had become thick with tremendous bands of muscle. Neil set him up against a tree and paused while Gunner wavered and looked as though he might collapse again. “Look at me, Grey. Focus on me. Hey, you ever think this is Jillybean’s retirement gift to us. You know, one last hurrah. Going out in a blaze of glory by taking down one last bad guy.”
“I hope not,” Gunner said. When he closed his eyes, his mind was filled with visions of his wife and daughter. He didn’t want to die now that he had them back in his life. “That’s not Jillybean’s style either way. She’s all about results. Speaking of which.” He shoved himself away from the tree and plodded away.
Of all the teams, Gunner’s had the shortest hike, and still it took him three hours to move a mile and a half, and by the time he got to their attack position, he was shaking and moaning. The world kept going in and out of focus and he was on the verge of collapse.
Troy eased him down into the brush on a little hill that overlooked the long flat expanse of mud that had once been the east fork of the Hoquiam. Gunner grunted, “Thanks. Gonna rest,” and then didn’t so much fall asleep as he passed out.
“He is a mistake,” Troy muttered to Neil. “We should never have brought him.”
Neil was in the process of raping his fourth and last sandwich. Ever since Gunner’s face-tearing off comment, his stomach had been growling. “Hmm? Mistake?” he asked, part of the Saran-wrap Emily had wrapped the sandwiches in was caught up on one of his teeth and hung from the corner of his mouth. “No, he’s pivotal. He is the plan in a sense. Have you ever killed a man from two-hundred yards away?” Troy answered with a contemptuous look that suggested such a thing was beneath him. “Exactly,” Neil said, taking another bite. “I bet you couldn’t hit a man at a hundred yards.”
“With that fancy scope I could.”
Neil cocked the remains of one eyebrow at Troy as he chewed the cellophane up into his mouth. “But you’ve never done it, have you? I know it looks easy, but when the fate of thousands of people depend on you, you’d better have ice in your veins. Grey does. He’s the best shot I’ve ever seen and the coolest customer when things get hairy.” He took another bite, polishing off the last third of the sandwich. “I just wish he’d had the guts to face Deanna before we left. You know, properly.”
Just before they had pulled away from The Courageous, Gunner had stumped over to his wife and daughter, opened his mouth to tell Deanna who he really was, but at the last minute, had chickened out.
“It reminded me of myself at my eighth grade dance,” Neil said, a wistful look on his zombie face.
“You had a crush on a girl? Was she pretty?”
The little zombie sighed, “Oh yeah. Kim Phillips. She looked like an angel in her white dress and her perfect little nose.” He sighed again and then shrugged. “Too bad she had the black soul of a demon. There I was all set to pour my heart out to her when she whispers something to her friend, Becky-something. Becky starts laughing and then Kim starts laughing. And I’m just standing there like an idiot.” A third sigh escaped him. “Ahh, good times.”
Troy glanced over at Gunner. It was hard to look past the fact that he seemed more beast than man. “I can’t believe he and the governor were ever married.”
“If you had known him ten years ago you wouldn’t have questioned it a bit. He was handsome, of course, and brave and all that, but he was also happier. It makes a difference, you know? He would smile and laugh, and everything, just like a normal person. I don’t think he’s been happy in years.” It was a sad thought and it killed their conversation.
Troy watched as Neil dug in his pack for another sandwich and came away empty. It sparked a frown. The Guardian was about to give Neil one of his sandwiches when Neil pulled a branch from a nearly barren tree and began to nibble on a few leaves. Neil fell asleep not long after, his brown tongue sticking out from between his twisted lips.
While the two slept, Troy picked up Gunner’s rifle. It was a Remington 30-06 and looked like nothing special to him. On closer inspection, neither did the scope. He had expected some sort of high-tech super gizmo with lasers which could enable him to see in the dark. It was just a normal scope. He lined it up on one of the zombies that were trapped in the mud.
In the scope the thing’s hideous face looked huge. “I could probably make the shot,” he told himself. Probably wasn’t definitely, and a zombie was a good deal bigger than man. “And the Captain probably won’t be standing still. But if he was…” Troy simulated firing the gun.
He swept the scope to the south to where the Corsair ships were practically stacked on top of each other. If nothing else happened tha
t day, the world would finally be rid of that fleet. That alone made the risk worth it, and Troy knew it was the only reason that Bishop Wojdan had gone along with any part of Jillybean’s plan.
A check of his watch showed that Troy had an hour to kill before the action started. For the first few minutes, he spent it dry-firing the rifle at “targets” on the boats and along the wall. He soon lost the taste for such practice. It felt wrong even when it was Corsairs he was aiming at. Praying felt like a better use of his time. Normally, he was an in and out sort of praying man. He rarely felt the need to drag on prayers longer than necessary since God certainly knew what his heart desired and five extra hallelujahs wasn’t going to make a difference.
Just then, things were a bit different. In his heart he was sure that he was down to his last day, perhaps even his last hour. He wasn’t nervous about what was coming, it just felt right that his soul should be as pure as possible before he went into battle. He prayed silently until the hour was up, and then he gently shook Neil and Gunner awake. They both were groggy and slow, and both were wracked by low, wet coughs. Neither looked ready to face what was coming. “We only have a few minutes left. Are you okay, Gunner?”
“Yeah. I’m good. Where’s the…” He took a deep wheezing breath. “The gun…can you hand it to me?”
“Are you sure? You’re shaking.” Gunner’s one hand was fine, however his head was doing a little dance on his shoulders. “Maybe, maybe I should take the shot. It’s only a hundred yards and with this scope, I can’t miss.” As much as Troy hated the idea of assassination, he would make an exception for the Black Captain.
Gunner felt haggard and weak, and so tired that he knew that if he closed his eyes for even a second, he’d go right back to sleep. Still, he knew his duty and he trusted his body even if it felt like it was sort of drifting away from him. “No, I got this. Just load it for me. There you go.” He set the rifle on a fallen tree trunk, laid his stump of a left arm on top of the scope and snugged the stock into his right shoulder. “And now we wait.”
He fell asleep thirty seconds later.
Troy sighed and pointed at his watch. “Neil, we have one minute and look at him. You have to see that this isn’t going to work out. We have one chance…”
“Two chances.”
“Maybe two,” he admitted, though he felt the second chance was more of a pipe dream. “Still, I’d rather it be done and over with on the first. If you don’t trust me taking the shot, then you do it. Gunner can’t. It’s obvious.”
Neil squinted across at the trenches and the twisting coils of razor-sharp concertina wire. It was all a blur. “I can’t shoot to save my life. No, I think we should trust Jillybean. She knew his condition and she still chose him for a reason.”
Troy only grunted, “I suppose,” and went back to watching the second hand tick round the face of his watch. When it made its way back to the twelve o’clock position, he said, “It’s time,” and then cocked his head.
The explosion was twenty-one seconds late. It was a great booming thunderclap that shook the earth beneath them and jarred Gunner out of sleep. They all turned to watch as a fireball rose in the north; it was followed a few seconds later by a blast of hot air that washed over them, stirring up the leaves. More seconds ticked by and the three squatted in the underbrush, waiting.
“Did it work?” Neil asked.
“Of course it worked,” Gunner growled. “It had to. I taught her everything she knows about explosives. We just have to be patient.”
It was half a minute before they heard the rumble and another fifteen seconds before they saw the doom of the Corsair fleet. The explosives that the two platoons had hauled north of Hoquiam were enough to bring down a three hundred foot section of Bainbridge’s reinforced concrete wall. The Corsairs’ earthen dam was puny in comparison and the two-thousand pounds of Jillybean’s C-4 made short work of it.
The dam had been holding back a manmade lake that covered over two-hundred acres and now that pent-up water came roaring down the east fork of the Hoquiam like a faceless monster. It was a towering wall of churning mud, spinning water, and tree trunks that lanced like tremendous spears. It howled and shook the world down to its foundations as it raced past them at seventy miles an hour.
None of the three had ever seen such power unleashed. Neil was laughing, his face dark and mad as a demon’s. He screamed something to Gunner, however his voice was lost as the wall of water smashed into the gaggle of boats at the base of the river with another thundering explosion. Foam shot into the air, higher than a building and came down like a curtain falling.
When the last of the water was only grey mist they saw there was nothing left of the Corsair fleet except splinters, trash and long rags that had once been sails. The men who’d been on the boats were nowhere to be seen. They had been destroyed by the maelstrom. The unearthly violence ruptured their eyes and burst their lungs. Their limbs were torn off and many were sent to the bottom with such force that they were embedded deep in the muck on the floor of the harbor.
Troy forgot himself and whispered, “My God!”
“That wasn’t the hand of God,” Gunner said, grinning behind his mask. “That was Jillybean doing the smiting. It’s clear she hasn’t lost her touch.”
The three stared for a few minutes as the water kept coming and coming. A few giant corpses were swept along as well, and for some reason, that made Gunner sad. They’d been people once.
Letting out a long aching breath. He settled back down behind his rifle. “Now show that pretty face of yours.”
As he sighted across at the lair of the Corsairs, Neil and Troy picked up their binoculars. They were big clunky devices that brought the other bank close enough they could see the eye color of the Corsairs as they stood gaping at the trash floating on the harbor—all that remained of their fleet.
Had Gunner wanted to kill any one of them, he could’ve put a slug squarely through their head at any time. He didn’t care about killing any of them. It was the Black Captain he was after. One shot and the war would be over. “Anything?” he asked.
Every second brought dozens of people to the defensive lines, where they pushed each other aside so they could gawk at nothing. It was a constant shifting of faces that was making Gunner dizzy.
“I see…” Neil began, only to stop with a curse. “Wasn’t him. How about over there next to that oak tree?”
“No,” Troy answered. “He’s got a rifle on his back.”
Face to face, the Captain was both impressive and distinctive, but in a crowd where a third of the people were black and everyone wore dark clothing, he didn’t exactly jump out at them. To make things worse, Neil and Troy had only seen him from afar.
It became something of a farce as Gunner was forced to shift his sights left, right, right, left, in the middle…his head began to spin and the lens grew blurry. “Just find him! Watch how people react to him. Look for his silver guns. Just don’t point out black men over and over.”
The crowd had actually begun to disperse when Neil whispered in excitement, “I got him. Right across from us. Right where Jillybean said he would be. Oh, he just turned around. He’s the one in the middle.”
Gunner centered his rifle and saw four black men surrounded by a crowd. From the back he couldn’t be sure who was who. “Which one? There’s four of them.”
“The one in the middle.”
“Damn it, Neil, there’s four of them. None are in the middle. Christ! They’re leaving. Which one is he, Neil?”
Neil didn’t know. When the Black Captain had been facing him, he had known the face in an instant. It had been handsome, demonic, furious. Now that the four men were in a line and heading up a low berm, none stood out, no silver guns could be seen, everyone was turned away so reactions couldn’t be judged.
“The second man,” he said with all the conviction he could muster. The Captain was a leader, not a follower, at the same time he would have bodyguards: one in front and one behin
d. “Yes, the second one.”
In Gunner’s sights the man’s head was big as a dinner plate. He had a direct line, with almost no wind. He had to take into account the rise as the man stepped up…the Remington fired and a fraction of a second later there was a red cloud where the man’s head used to be.
“Got him!” Neil cried, leaping to his feet.
Troy pulled him down and held him beneath a bush. “Was it him?” he asked.
Gunner scanned the other faces as they turned back to stare. They were all filled with alarm, all save one. This man had a silver gun in hand. He had dark intelligent eyes and handsome brown features. He was in Gunner’s sights for maybe a second and then he slid down and to the side behind a small gaggle of Corsairs.
“I don’t think so,” Gunner whispered, dropping his head, resting his cheek on the stock of his rifle. “It wasn’t him.”
Chapter 44
Grays Harbor, Washington
Gunner sat slumped over as a few hundred guns started firing and bullets tore up the trees and bushes up and down the river bank. He didn’t flinch. Flinching would have taken energy he didn’t have. It probably would have hurt as well. Just then, everything hurt.
Even though all the fight had gone out of Neil, Troy was still crushing him into the cold earth. “Maybe let him breathe?” Gunner muttered. Troy leaned back, looking stunned. For a moment, Gunner thought he was going to let go with a curse, or whatever it was that Guardians said when they were mad. When it didn’t explode out of him, Gunner said, “I guess it’s time for Plan B…unfortunately. Could you light the smoke, Troy? But first reload me, will you?”
Troy took the rifle, jacked a new round into the chamber and then dashed off to light the fire that would signal failure. While he was gone, Gunner stared in vain down his scope, searching for the Captain. He was nowhere to be seen. “The son of a bitch is probably hiding in one of those trenches like a little pussy.”
“I’m sorry,” Neil said. He still had his face pressed into the mud and when he spoke, it was to a curled up little orange leaf that sat an inch from his nose. “It was one of them and I had to choose.”
Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained Page 52