GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  “It doesn’t take genius level intelligence to raise a boat,” Jillybean explained. “And what else? Stu, I can read you like a book.” When Jenn explained it was concerning electricity and that Jillybean was not to lie about whether she could make it or not, Jillybean couldn’t help the rush of gay laughter. “Next you’ll be wanting the recipe for ice.”

  She laughed at this until she was pink and there were tears in her eyes. “This is not funny,” Jenn said, crossly. “They could keep you locked up forever if they wanted.”

  This brought on another fit and it was sometime before Jillybean could breathe. “Locked up forever—in a shed? Eve could have gotten out of here and she would have if we hadn’t been so tired.” She smirked and held up a chained wrist. “And look at these. Standard issue police cuffs, they’re too easy.”

  Jenn looked doubtful. “I don’t care how smart you are, Jillybean, you can’t smart your way through iron.” Just as she said this she remembered what Neil Martin had said about trying to lock her away: The last thing anyone would want to do is try to put her behind bars. Now Jenn wished she had asked why?

  “First, these aren’t made of iron and second, you’d be surprised what a person can ‘smart’ their way out of. Now, since I won’t be offering free demonstrations, let’s get these off me. I really should check on my patient.” She presented the cuffs and Stu took them off without hesitation.

  Jillybean marched out of the shed as if the concept of arrest or imprisonment was foreign to her. She even nodded pleasantly to Miss Shay as she entered the clubhouse.

  Miss Shay looked down her nose at her. “I was just about to fetch you. There’s a problem.” She followed them into the clinic where One Shot was moaning in fantastic misery. Colleen stood near him, completely lost and ghastly pale. “It seems he’s dying.” Miss Shay’s announcement was devoid of emotion and filled with accusation.

  “Hardly,” Jillybean replied. She gave One Shot a quick review, changed out the IV bag hooked to his arm, and gave him a painkiller. They all watched in amazement as the single syringe of what looked like clear liquid calmed him considerably. “I’m going to need more normal saline, the heaviest copper wiring you can find and magnets, the bigger the better. Oh, and a ten-speed bike.”

  She strode out after saying this, leaving the four of them looking back and forth at each other. “She wasn’t talking to me, was she?” Miss Shay asked, her indignation meter red-lining at the idea.

  “I can’t do it, I have to keep an eye on her,” Jenn said, meaning Jillybean.

  Stu shrugged as if he wished he could help. “And I have to do something about the Saber.”

  Colleen’s mouth fell open as she strained to come up with an excuse. She wanted to get out of that room and away from One Shot, who was disgusting even when he slept, but that didn’t mean she wanted to go out in the world and scrounge around after odds and ends on what she considered a whim.

  She hesitated so long that Miss Shay said, “Don’t worry, dear, I’ll find someone to watch him.” She meant One Shot and now Colleen was stuck.

  “Good luck,” Jenn said, and hurried out of the room, followed by a limping Stu Currans. They caught up with Jillybean who immediately began rattling off more items she would need, her mouth going so quickly it was hard to follow it all.

  “And your meds,” Stu added to the list when she paused to take a breath. “I take it you’ve forgotten your pills today?”

  This brought her up short and for just a flash, a childish “I don’t want to,” look crossed her face. With a sigh, she admitted, “No, I haven’t.”

  Because of her failing liver, she started with two pills, added two more an hour later, then, because her heart started beating erratically she took two “downers” as she called them. Of course, these made her head feel leaden, so she countered the effects by swallowing two “uppers.”

  For the next two hours she was a whirlwind of activity. With Stu and Jenn struggling to catch up, she went down to the harbor and found Mike in his ghillie suit, standing, glumly on the dock, staring down at the boat beneath the water. In the fading light it looked like a ghost ship that might suddenly slip away on its own.

  “Aren’t you the saddest bit of shrubbery ever?” Jillybean joked. “Don’t worry your little green leaves over this, we’ll get her out of there in a jiffy. First things first, we’re going to need a fire or two. Jenn can you get rid of the dead for us?”

  Jenn wanted to ask: By myself? but said nothing. She knew that Jillybean wouldn’t ask her to do something she couldn’t handle. They had dodged six zombies coming down to the harbor, which had seemed like a lot, but when she lit her first fire a few hundred yards from the docks, she was shocked at how many came swarming up. She lost count after thirty.

  Feeling jittery, she went further out and scraped together a pile of leaves and downed tree branches and lit another, even larger fire that belched dark smoke into the sky—the dead came at a run. Now there were close to a hundred. She sat in the shadow of a low-limbed pine and watched them for a few minutes feeling small and wondering if this was how people felt back in the time of dinosaurs.

  “How did they live through that at all?” It was a concept she couldn’t wrap her mind around.

  Once the zombies had been drawn away, raising the Saber turned out easier than any of them, Jillybean excluded, could have guessed. To her it was barely a challenge, especially since there were dozens of boat trailers, plenty of wet suits and enough hydraulic jacks to lift an aircraft carrier; all within a hundred yards.

  Jillybean began by having them sink one of the smaller docks to use as a boat ramp. Next, they wheeled the trailer into position, submerging it right in front of the Saber. Then came the part Jenn dreaded: actually getting in the frigid water.

  Thirty seconds at a time, they dove down to work the jacks into position and gradually got the boat up onto the trailer.

  Using the same jacks, horizontally this time, they gradually propelled the boat, foot by foot, onto dry land.

  As water streamed out of it, Mike went to the fourteen-inch long hole and began tapping around it. “Okay, okay,” he said, in a loving whisper. “This isn’t so bad. It’s just a little hole. It’s definitely fixable. Jillybean, I could kiss you.”

  Jillybean didn’t hear this. The uppers she had taken were out of her system and she had gone from full power to a dead stop the moment the Saber’s rudder had cleared the water. She was lying in a near-stupor on the dock with Jenn kneeling over her.

  Jenn had heard Mike very clearly.

  Chapter 10

  Mike and Stu stayed to hide the boat, while Jenn helped Jillybean up the hill. Jillybean was fagged to the point of apathy and would have blundered into one of the dead if Jenn hadn’t been there for her—it wasn’t her fault that Mike wanted to kiss her, Jenn kept telling herself.

  If Mike had said that to Jenn, she would have let him kiss her right there in front of everyone.

  Wishing it was his hand she was holding, she sighed and kept trudging. By the time they got back to the safety of the hilltop, it was dark and well past when Jenn normally ate dinner. “What do you say to some…” She looked into her pantry and didn’t see much staring back. She had emptied a lot of her food cache feeding Mike for a week, then used up more on the trip north, and since she had got back she’d been sharing with Jillybean, who could put it away as well as any man.

  Just then, Jillybean was standing in front of her open bag, looking over notes on a concept concerning courage which she had written a few nights back. Her thoughts had taken the form of several questions. Was courage a finite pool that emptied slowly with every dip, a well that could be called upon whenever needed, or was it like the edge of a knife, keen at first but dulled quickly with use, and if so could it be resharpened in certain circumstances?

  It had been Jenn’s courage on the night of the battle that had sparked the mental and quite singular conversation with herself. The girl had exhibited a well-grounded degre
e of courage on the trip north; what might be considered “average” courage. Taking up that flaming pendant and charging out into an army of the dead had taken a great deal more courage, almost super-human courage.

  Jillybean had given it quite some thought, but just then, in the midst of her stupor, she shoved the papers aside after staring blankly at them for a few seconds. “I’m too tired for this. And I’m too tired to eat so don’t bother, Jenn.” She dug past more papers, past a layer of black shirts, another of panties… “Ah, finally.” Somehow the bottle of amphetamines had gone from sitting on top of the bag to the very bottom. She popped two of the pills.

  Jenn thrust two jars at her. “It’s pretty much all I have, sorry. Your choice is grape or pear and you have to choose one.” Jillybean chose the jar of grape preserves thinking she could use something sweet just then. Unfortunately, the preserves had been made from wine grapes and not Concord grapes; they were more tart than sweet and the concentrated tannins left her tongue feeling puckered.

  “This needs to go with something,” she said, pushing the jar away and getting to her feet. “But for the life of me I don’t know what.” She swayed briefly. The uppers were kicking in. Her eyes were wide and unfortunately still yellow. In the light of the guttering candle, her skin, once nearly perfectly white also seemed to have an odd hue to it.

  Jenn noticed, a nervous smile plucking at the corners of her lips. She was worried that no matter what Jillybean said, the disease could bounce from person to person.

  When she remarked on it, Jillybean explained, “It’s just the jaundice. Too many pills, don’t worry. Hey, I have to go make sure One Shot doesn’t die and I have to work on the generator.”

  “The what?”

  Jillybean laughed as if Jenn had been joking and ignored the question. “I’m going to need some things. Do you have any sort of adhesive?”

  “Adhesive? Do you mean like glue or tape?”

  Again the laugh. It came high and fast, like the chattering of a squirrel. Jillybean couldn’t seem to control it, and neither could she stop her heart from racing a mile a minute, or her hands from shaking. She hid them deep in her pockets.

  “That’s exactly what I meant. Oh, I’m going to need a soldering gun…you don’t know what that is, I see. If Stu stops by, ask him. And I’ll need tools, just the usual, nothing fancy.”

  Jenn had tools in a neat little box and handed them over, no questions asked. In fact, she was purposefully not asking questions about any of it, and she had an excuse ready just in case Jillybean asked for her help. Secretly, Jenn didn’t want to go anywhere near the electricity maker.

  Ever since she had met Jillybean, Jenn had been seeing fewer and fewer signs. It was almost as if Jillybean’s constant references to technical and scientific things had put a damper on Jenn’s ability to see the signs that had once flourished all around her. Besides, when Jillybean got too deep into her science blather, Jenn didn’t really understand much of what she was saying, and it made her feel stupid.

  “Have fun,” Jenn said, as Jillybean was walking out the door.

  “Fun? You think building a scale-model, wind-powered generator, with a banishment hanging over my head if said generator doesn’t work, is fun?”

  Jenn mumbled, “Maybe. I guess. And I would help, but…”

  “That’s okay,” Jillybean said before Jenn could start in on a lie. Jillybean found her naive innocence too precious to waste on a useless lie. “I think I got this.” She really wasn’t worried one way or the other. A generator was child’s play and the idea of banishment didn’t scare her in the least since she had never planned on staying in the bay area for very long to begin with.

  She left a relieved-looking Jenn and tromped to the clubhouse where Colleen was still at One Shot’s bedside. Colleen’s homecoming queen looks had faded considerably. Her hair had lost its bounce, her dress had an ugly stain on it and her face was lined and haggard.

  Conversely, One Shot looked far more alive, almost like his old self. “Hey, it’s the bitch that shot me,” One Shot said, his familiar sneer back in place.

  “It’s who. As in, ‘Look, it’s the bitch who shot me.’” She paused to allow him some sort of comeback, but she had ruined the greeting he had been planning for the last hour. “From your unpleasant demeanor, which I believe passes as normal for you, I’m happy to see that you are healing properly.”

  He took a deep breath, clearly as a preliminary to go on some sort of curse-laden rant, but the very act caused his wound to sear. He was only able to grunt, “I’m not unpleasant except for when I been shot, right Colleen?”

  “Oh, right. He’s never unpleasant. Can I go? I got all the stuff you asked for.” She pointed at an old and terribly rusted Schwinn. Next to it was a small box with some wires poking out. Jillybean went to it and saw a few magnets, none bigger than a quarter, and a roll of copper wire that was far too small for her needs.

  “Thank you and thanks for watching him. Let me show you how to keep him quiet for next time. Ten milligrams of this,” she held up a clear bottle of fluid, “in his IV and he will be nighty-night for hours. Thirty milligrams and it will be nighty-night forever.”

  Colleen had been about to tell Jillybean that there would be no “next time,” but what she had just suggested—murder, Colleen was sure—had suddenly put her at a loss for words. One Shot wore the same staggered expression and what color had been in his cheeks had quite gone out of it.

  This pleased Jillybean immensely. Although she hated a bully, she felt that it was okay to use their tactics to undo them from time to time. “I guess you can go. Go eat your dinner. Enjoy your night, but I will need you in the morning. Remember the normal saline I asked for? I have enough to get him through tonight but if something happens, he’ll be out of luck.”

  Looking dejected, Colleen left.

  Jillybean began checking One Shot’s vitals, and as she did he sneered at her, wishing he was strong enough to bash her a good one. “You should be thanking me,” he said. “If it wasn’t for me they woulda sent out a posse to get you and string you up by the neck.”

  “My hero. Open your mouth. Say ‘ah’. Oh, my. You really have to start flossing. I’m not trying to be mean, it’s just a fact. You probably have a few cavities. Real doozies judging by the smell and the plaque build-up.”

  This only made him want to punch her even more.

  She knew this and was only afraid that if he tried, he would tear the stitches holding his intestines together, and that would mean a ton more work. “I’m just trying to help. Okay, your stitches look good. No sign of infection. No drainage.” She listened to his belly with her stethoscope and heard nothing, which was normal. His bowel was currently paralyzed and would be for another day or two.

  “You’ll live,” she stated.

  Her prognosis did nothing to change his mind about her. He would hate her until she was dead and buried. “Then you’ll live, too. Your life depends on mine, so let’s not pretend you’re doing me any favors. And don’t think I’m afraid of you. Even when you’re crazy, you gotta have the sense to know I’m untouchable.”

  “I wouldn’t bet my life on that if I were you.” She immediately turned away, ignoring him completely. She knew what was going on in the ruffian’s head and did not fear it in the least since she had gone against men so much more capable than this half-beast.

  With disappointment in her yellow eyes, she gazed at the magnets and the wire. They really wouldn’t do, not even for a demonstration. The bike would, barely.

  Wheeling it out into the lobby, she lit another candle, went to the nearest receptacle and plopped down in front of it. There was wire in the walls and for the next hour she pulled and dug out all she needed. Then she went to work on the speakers in the conference room, popping them open and prying out their magnets. Next, she found a vacuum and after ripping out its guts, she stole the magnets from it as well.

  Electricity was simple to make: revolving magnets within a copper w
ire coil generated a flow of electrons. Done. The real trick was to produce a constant flow. The generator she had built in Bainbridge was a coal-fired steam generator and, compared to the plants built before the apocalypse, it was a crude, childish attempt.

  She had drawn up plans for something far more grand, but lacked the resources to build it. There on the hilltop she was hamstrung to an even greater extent because of the complete lack of coal. As an energy source it had been practically outlawed in California before the apocalypse. Washington had not been much better and yet there were still train cars filled with the stuff, more than Bainbridge could use in a hundred years.

  Jillybean would have to settle for another source, the most obvious being wind power, not that she would waste a second constructing an actual, life-sized functioning wind generator. The hilltop was a comically bad place to build a society, though it was an apparently lucky one. Luck could be the only reason it had survived as long as it had.

  Now, that the Corsairs knew exactly where they were, luck was not going to save them. They needed to move and they needed to move quickly. But they would not. She knew that just as she knew the poison burning in One Shot’s heart.

  They had been lulled by years of ease and relative sloth. Everything they needed was close at hand: fish by the dozen, easily pulled from the bay, clothing lying about everywhere, wood for fires just outside the gates and fresh water within them. Even their little farms displayed their languorous nature. Each plot was just large enough to require a few hours’ worth of work a week and, of course, they produced just enough. That was how they lived their life, doing just enough and always having just enough.

  “But they want electricity, so they’re going to get electricity.”

  Although she had joked about the idea that making a wind-powered generator could be fun, she actually enjoyed tinkering. Using wire coat-hangers and a sheet that had once hung across one of the windows, she made neat little fans that spun on a greased bike wheel, this turned a rod connected to the magnets she had glued into a clump. Around the clump was a pinky-thick band of gleaming copper wire that she had braided from the odds and ends. Attached to this was a rubber coated cord that snaked to a lamp in which she had found a proper little LED 8-watt bulb.