GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  Where a second before she’d had sixty pairs of eyes on her, now there were only a few and one set was the unnervingly large blue eyes of Jillybean—they secretly gave Donna the willies. The others, very much like school children who hadn’t done their homework, studiously avoided making eye contact.

  An uncomfortable silence also descended on the room so that when Lois began glaring at Orlando Otis, his ensuing knuckle-cracking sounded like kindling snapping in a fire. Next to him, One Shot discovered something so exceedingly interesting about his shoes, he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off them.

  “Really? No one?” Jillybean asked, as she stood up. “How on earth did you people manage to survive?”

  The scorn in her voice, more than the question itself shamed half of them and angered the rest. Jenn didn’t know what she expected. The people of the Hilltop were no different than people anywhere else; the brave, the honorable and the men and women of great character had been the first to die. Behind Jenn was what was left over: the cowardly, the skulkers, and the mentally and physically soft.

  “I’ll go by myself if I have to,” Jillybean said, shaming them even further.

  “I didn’t know if it was my place to volunteer,” Mike Gunter said, as he too stood. “I think since I know boats better than anyone here, I should go along.” It was no secret that he had been yearning to claim one of the Corsair boats for himself; one for himself and also one for Gerry the Greek to act as a peace offering, since he had stolen Gerry’s beloved Calypso.

  Jenn didn’t want to go anywhere near the harbor. She had done her part in saving the complex and everyone in it, but now that Mike was going she couldn’t imagine being left behind. She was just about to raise her hand when, out of the blue, Colleen White stood up, touched her hair to make sure it was properly in place, glanced once at Mike, and asked to go.

  This caused another run of muttering to snake around the room. As far as Jenn knew, Colleen had never volunteered for anything remotely dangerous and it was obvious she was only doing so now because of Mike. For the last week she had been eyeing the handsome Islander and had found every excuse to be near him.

  Mike caught Jenn’s eye and lifted one shoulder as if to say: It’s not my fault. Jenn didn’t blame him, but on the other hand she wasn’t going to let him go out into the world with Colleen White hovering around, flirting with him every waking moment. The thought made Jenn ill.

  Once more she was about to raise her hand; was in the process in fact, when Stu Currans said, “I’m going, too.” He was pale from having stood so long and he was already favoring his left leg. Two surgeries in a week had taken their toll on the tough-as-nails hillman and his recovery was coming along slower than he wished.

  “I don’t think so,” Jillybean said, easily pushing him down into his chair. “If you can’t run, then you can’t go. No. Don’t give me any backtalk, cowboy. It’s doctor’s orders.”

  Again, Jenn was about to volunteer when Lois said, “One Shot Saul and Orlando will also go. They will represent the Coven and the interests of the Hill People.” One Shot muttered a curse under his breath, however Orlando, who was married to Lois and was as henpecked as a man could be, didn’t dare say a thing.

  In the silence that followed One Shot’s curse, Jenn finally raised her hand. “I’m going, too.”

  “Six?” Miss Shay asked with her eyebrows halfway up her forehead and acid in her tone. “An unlucky number for an unlucky girl. If you ask me, it’s almost as if you are trying to ruin their chances. Maybe it’ll be safer for everyone if you stay behind.”

  As always, Jenn felt like a child in front of the Coven and started to sit. Jillybean took her hand. “Since we won’t be relying on luck, six will be as good a number as five or fifty. Jenn is coming with us.”

  Jillybean gazed so fixedly and sternly at Miss Shay that the older woman eventually backed down, saying, “Any ill-luck will be on your head.”

  A laugh escaped Jillybean. “I doubt luck will have any part to play in our little trip down to the harbor.”

  This made the room stir uneasily and quite a number of people crossed themselves while others, Jenn included, fingered amulets or sachets. Jenn kept a small, drawstring pouch filled with clove and basil looped around her left wrist. Everyone knew you didn’t make statements like that, it was like begging for something bad to happen.

  Donna knocked on the table three times and said, “Regardless, we wish you luck. One Shot will be in charge. We will need to know exactly what was left behind. How many boats, what kind of supplies, that sort of thing. You should leave right away.”

  “We will leave in an hour,” Jillybean declared, imperiously. “The rest of you might trust in luck to keep the dead from eating us, I would prefer to use my brains.”

  Chapter 2

  In the hour they had to get ready, Jenn and Jillybean threw together six poncho-like ghillie suits. They were ugly and almost comically simple. Since they didn’t have netting, they used strips of green and brown cloth which they stapled to dark blue sheets. A shoelace stapled near one corner was used to create a hood of sorts.

  Orlando sneered at his. “These aren’t gonna work.” He put his on and looked down at himself both dubiously and unhappily as he couldn’t seem to find a place on the suit to hide the bottle of booze he constantly carried. He ended up sticking it under one arm. “I feel like a kid at Halloween for crap’s sake.”

  “They work, trust me,” Jillybean answered. “If you’re smart, cautious and quiet you should be just fine.”

  Orlando turned out to be none of these things.

  Armed only with crossbows, the six slipped through the gate, the strips of camouflage on their suits waving and fluttering around them in an uncertain wind. Orlando and One Shot went first, passing the bottle back and forth between them. They took a direct route to the harbor, slinking through the decaying suburban world, passing houses that were crumbling into their foundations.

  For the most part they avoided the broken, buckled and trashed out streets, and walked through the overgrown, jungle-like yards where they could drop into a squat at the least hint of danger.

  It was twenty minutes before they saw the first of the dead lumber from behind an SUV that was permanently fused to a towering oak from some long-ago crash. Jenn spotted the creature first. She stopped and let out a low whistle. Everyone stopped as well, hunkering down—everyone but Orlando. He had been tipping the bottle back as he walked and didn’t hear the whistle and didn’t see the creature until he was practically on top of it. How he missed an eight-foot tall grey monster with teeth like daggers and huge gorilla arms was incomprehensible.

  He should have stopped and trusted in the camouflage. Instead, he let out a human squawk of fear and ran, leaving behind a trailing scent of bathtub hooch and body odor.

  “What do we do?” Colleen asked, peeking her face out from the low hood of her suit. She was asking Mike when she should have been asking Jenn or Jillybean. It was true that Mike was exceedingly brave, and on board any boat he was practically a god, but on land he lumbered about nearly as blithely as One Shot and Orlando. On the other hand, Jillybean was as stealthy as a cat and Jenn passed through the world like a ghost.

  Mike paused to take in the situation as he saw it. Jillybean had seen all she needed to and had already calculated the odds of every possible action. “We do nothing.”

  “I was asking Mike,” Colleen snapped. “He’s not the one who talks to himself and…” She stopped as a great commotion could be heard coming their way. It was Orlando. He had foolishly run in a wide circle, losing his ghillie suit and managing to attract every zombie in the area which were now converging on the little group.

  “No one move,” Jillybean whispered, the beginnings of a grin on her face. Part of her felt an ugly dark pleasure at seeing Orlando running for his life. She tried to shake it off, but the feeling persisted. She cursed to herself; it was a bad sign that she was losing it already.

  The five of them
hunkered down, appearing to the dead to be nothing more than odd mounds of shrubbery. Orlando wasn’t fooled. “Kill them! Kill them!” he shrieked, running right for his friends. His eyes were big circles of fear.

  Instead of shooting his crossbow at the dead, One Shot threw it aside and took off running to their right. Then Colleen’s nerve broke and she sprinted away in a panic, making a whining noise in her throat. Now the dead were going in three different directions.

  “She’s going to get herself killed,” Mike griped before racing after her and pulling her into a small ranch house.

  “If we had been looking for a distraction, we couldn’t have arranged anything better than this,” Jillybean remarked, casually. “We could practically skip down to the harbor now. It’s either that or we share their fate, which do you want?”

  Jenn didn’t like the idea of Mike sharing a fate, good or bad, with Colleen White. “You know the Coven is going to blame us if something happens to any of them.”

  Jillybean shrugged. “Like I care, but I see you do. Come on.” Staying low they hurried along the edge of the overgrown yards until they were abreast of the ranch house. Just down the street Orlando was trapped under a rusting scrap of metal that had once been a truck, while two of the beasts, both smallish seven-footers, were straining to heave it over to get at him. Not far from him, One Shot was hiding in an overturned trash can as more of the creatures stalked around in a fury.

  If One Shot played it cool, Jenn figured he would probably live; Orlando wasn’t that lucky. The dead knew exactly where he was, and they would get to him one way or another even if they had to tear apart the truck piece by piece.

  Taking Jenn’s hand, Jillybean led her to the ranch house. “Get inside,” she whispered giving Jenn a push. Standing next to Mike and Colleen, Jenn watched from the front window as Jillybean reached into her pocket, took out a fat cat’s eye marble, kissed it, and chucked it as far as she could down the street where it bounced with the familiar, clack, clack, clack sound.

  Immediately, the dead around One Shot’s trash can turned toward the sound. As the marble itself was too quick and too small to see, they began to follow the sound as did one of the beasts that had been tearing at the old truck. The other one, its huge lower jaw hanging open, was gazing after them, utter incomprehension in its filmed-over eyes. In that one second, it had forgotten all about the human under the truck.

  Grinning, Jillybean ducked into the little cracker-box of a house. “That was easy enough. What? What are you…”

  She stopped when she saw they were all still staring out the window with matching looks of alarm. Orlando and One Shot hadn’t waited to give the dead time to settle down like they should have. Instead, they were running for the ranch with all the zombies racing after.

  Mike began waving his arms in the universal sign for “Go Away!” The two were frantic and ignored the sign. Before they knew it, the two had raced into the living room, panting like dogs. Orlando slammed the door shut and threw his weight against it.

  It would never hold. “Out the back!” Jillybean cried. They hurried to the back door only to see two more of the beasts in the yard, sluggishly moving towards the kitchen door. Now they had no choice but to rush into the basement. Just like that, they had managed to trap themselves in a near-pitch black windowless hole in the ground. It felt horribly like a crypt to Jenn.

  The dead were on the main floor searching for them, tearing the place apart, ripping down walls and doors, throwing aside beds and dressers.

  “Look,” One Shot Saul whispered, pointing at the far end of the basement where light had begun to stream in. With the weight of the beasts on one side of the house, the whole structure was tilting in that direction like a soggy cardboard box. Two-by-fours began to split and somewhere a pipe let out a groan.

  Jenn took only a single glance before she turned her attention to a jagged crack that ran up the basement wall like a fork of lightning. Although there were many cracks in the house’s foundation, some fine and thin as if they had been drawn with a pencil, and others inches across and who knew how deep, this one drew her eyes.

  At the top of the crack, the frame of the house was split in two. In fact, the frame looked no sturdier than if it had been made of cork and had been hand-glued by a first-grader using a bottle of Elmer’s. Jenn Lockhart fixated on that split and tried not to cry. If the house was going to come down on them, it would start there. Everyone else, their chests heaving from the chase, stared upward as the house shook and dust filtered down through new beams of light.

  Jenn refused to take her eyes off the split. She was afraid that if she looked away and saw the house on the verge of collapse, she would scream. Her father had been killed in the same earthquake that had caused the cracks in the house’s foundation. A building had fallen and squished him like a grape, popping his eyes right out of his head, or so she imagined, and now she was in danger of sharing the same fate.

  “Damn,” Mike whispered. “I’m starting to think this was a mistake.”

  “Magoo is ‘starting to think,’ that’s something, I guess,” Jillybean remarked, dryly. When Mike glared at her, she looked at him blankly for a moment before jerking as if startled. “I said that out loud? Sorry, that was Sadie. It wasn’t me.”

  As if she had been yelling, One Shot shushed her, sticking a dirty finger to his lips. “They’ll pull up the floor to get at us if they hear you,” he hissed. “We have to find a way out of here.”

  Hearing the panic in his voice didn’t help Jenn who was struggling to stay calm. Nor did it help that Jillybean looked as though she was wavering between personalities.

  A huge crash from above shivered the walls and sent more dust down into the eyes of those staring up. Colleen’s face twisted oddly and froze that way for a few seconds before she sneezed violently into the crook of her arm. The way One Shot reacted, Jenn thought an artery in his head had exploded like a balloon. His eyes shot wide as he made a garbled, gobbling noise and clamped his hand across Colleen’s face, covering both her nose and mouth.

  In seconds, she was struggling to breathe. Orlando, who was kneeling between them, glanced from one to the other with dull-eyed confusion. Topping out at an inch over six foot, Orlando was the biggest man there, but it was up to Mike to keep Colleen from being suffocated.

  Mike slid out his hunting knife and laid the point on One Shot’s cheek an inch from his eye. “Let go of her.” Mike was cool, the coolest one in the basement and the blade didn’t waiver.

  One Shot’s hand went limp and Colleen shoved it away. “What the hell?” Now, she was loud, and One Shot silently begged her to lower her voice, going so far as to clasp his hands beneath his bristled chin as if he were praying. “No, I won’t shut up. They can’t hear us.”

  The zombies were making a tremendous racket as they tore the house apart—the tilt was getting worse. There was a four-inch gap along one wall as the frame pulled away from the foundation. Colleen turned to Jillybean. “You’re supposed to be smart, why don’t you think of something?”

  “I have been thinking of many things,” Jillybean shot back. “For instance, I was just now thinking what an utterly moronic…”

  Jenn finally turned from the gap in the foundation and elbowed Jillybean. The two locked eyes. Both sets were equally blue, however Jillybean’s were huge and had a lamp-like quality to them—they were also getting twitchy. “Stay focused, okay?” Jenn whispered to her. “We gotta keep the house from falling on us. That’s step one.”

  “Then do it. You don’t need her for something that simple.” It was Jillybean’s lips moving but Jenn didn’t think it was her doing the talking.

  Everyone stared at Jenn; Colleen and One Shot wearing openly dubious expressions, while Orlando, looking as though he were watching live theater, pulled a hip flask out and took a slug. Only Mike seemed hopeful.

  “Maybe we can wedge some of this stuff up under the frame to hold it in place,” he suggested. The dark basement was, like
so many others, filled with useless trash from the old days, Christmas decorations, fine, hand-painted blue China that had only been used once, a wedding dress, which appeared in the darkness like a condemned woman hanging from the rafters, and of course, dusty boxes that were liberally sprinkled with mouse droppings.

  Jillybean reached out to touch the wedding dress. Without looking back at Mike, she asked, “Really, Magoo? There are five or six thousand pounds of undead meat threatening to fall through the floorboards and you want to jack it up somehow and put a gravy boat and some Christmas bulbs under the floor joists? Come on! We get tired of you making Jillybean do all the thinking.”

  The ceiling above their heads groaned louder than ever and the joists began to sag.

  “Please, just tell us what to do,” Colleen begged. Jillybean only shook her head, as she traced the intricate lace designs. Her mind was twisting and folding in on itself, but there was one thing it knew just then: the dress was beautiful.

  “I can do this,” Jenn whispered under her breath. And she really believed she could. In the two weeks that Jenn had known Jillybean, she had been getting an intense indoctrination into the fundamentals of logic or as she thought of it: Jillybean was trying to make her smarter. “First identify the immediate problem. The floor is going to cave in because there are too many zombies in one place.” Just saying this aloud opened her eyes to a range of possibilities.

  “Orlando, can you reach up and pull down that thing?”

  He squinted his red eyes up at the rafters. “You mean the ski pole? You never heard of a ski pole before? Sheesh, maybe we should get someone else in charge of getting us out of here.”

  When no one else volunteered, Jenn snapped her fingers and held her hand out, palm up. With a shrug, Orlando pulled the pole down and gave it to her. She hurried to the far side of the house and tapped gently on the ceiling, blinking against the dust and the gossamer strings of spider webs that cascaded down. The effect of the light tapping was immediate: some of the dead stomped over to investigate the sound and the house righted itself.