GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  When she died, Jillybean watched as her corpse twisted itself into a pretzel. She got to see her mother’s face contort, and hear her teeth crack and she got to take in the harsh aroma as her bowels let go.

  Jillybean’s mental state had been a fragile, brittle thing since the beginning of the apocalypse, but that endlessly lonely winter with a living corpse as her only companion had caused cracks to develop that would eventually become a full-on mental breakdown—thus the voices in her head and the darkness that would sweep over her, especially in times of stress.

  Seeing One Shot brought that darkness swirling around the upper reaches of her mind. It threatened to eclipse her.

  “Not yet,” she whispered. Taking a deep breath, she swallowed her fear and approached the body with a lit candle in her hand. Despite her great spread of knowledge concerning human anatomy and physiology, she was not particularly well versed in autopsies.

  In this case, the cause of death should have been obvious. Holding the candle at an angle, she let the hot wax dribble into a pool on One Shot’s chest. She then planted the base of the candle in it, so she could use both hands.

  Using a corpse as a candle holder, nice.

  In the corner of the room there was a shadow among the shadows. Jillybean refused to look in its direction. Keeping her head perfectly fixed, she went to the sink where her still-bloody surgical tools were collected in a steel tangle. She took a scalpel from the pile and approached the body, thinking that at any second One Shot would turn his head and stare at her, and perhaps accuse her of murder.

  He did not accuse her of anything, but the thing in the corner did. You shot him like a dog, it whispered.

  “He was a dog,” Jillybean answered. “Sorry,” she added, speaking to One Shot. Thankfully, the corpse did not reply.

  You shot him in cold blood, the voice in the shadows said, just as she cut into the body. Blood, chilled to room temperature, spilled out onto her bare hand. She pulled away, the point of the blade jittering.

  It wasn’t a lot of blood. In fact, there wasn’t near enough blood in his abdominal cavity to have killed him which was a load off her mind. She hadn’t missed a nick and the sutures were all sound. To be sure, she went through the loops, holding them up to the candle. The very act helped to stabilize her mind and the shadow retreated.

  When she was done, she wiped her hands on the sheet and leaned over the corpse, wishing she had a centrifuge handy. In ten minutes, she would have been able to discover whether or not One Shot had an elevated white blood count, the easiest way to check for infection.

  “Could I make a centrifuge?” Yes. The concept behind a centrifuge was simple enough: a centrifuge spins, generating forces that cause denser elements to separate from the lighter ones. Unfortunately, the small centrifuges used for separating the components of blood spun at 20,000 rotations per minute, which was not something she could duplicate overnight.

  “So that’s out.” The only other way to check for infection was to take the liver’s temperature. It turned out to be twenty-one degrees Celsius, a fine temperature if One Shot had died at exactly one in the afternoon without a fever. “But the last time he was seen alive was at ten.” Infection couldn’t be ruled out, but she highly doubted it as a cause of death.

  She had shot him not even two days before. No one developed a life-threatening infection in so short a time.

  Patting his chest lightly, she asked the empty room, “So, that leaves what? There’s no evidence of trauma. None of strangulation or choking or even poison.” One Shot looked as if he had just died. Just slipped away.

  You know he didn’t or you wouldn’t still be here. The voice was back, stating the obvious. You know where to look for the murder weapon.

  Jillybean’s eyes shifted to the trash can, knowing what she would find there. On top were the bloody rags Jenn had used during the surgery. What she was looking for would be found under all that. People always wanted to hide their sins.

  “They want to hide who they really are,” Jillybean said, though she didn’t remember thinking anything close to that. Pulling back the rags, she found the syringe…uncapped. She never left a syringe uncapped, and nor had she tossed one away during surgery.

  “So, we know who did this,” she heard someone say in something of a distant manner, as if she were hearing the words come from down a dark hall. There was no reason to ask who, as suddenly Colleen White’s pretty, smiling face blinked into her mind.

  “Colleen? Really? Please. Hair and boys, that’s all she cares about. And we both know that killing someone takes more guts that people realize. She didn’t do it.” Another picture flashed into her head: Colleen lying in a pool of blood. In the dark the pool was black as tar.

  “It could’ve been anyone…”

  Chapter 13

  A lust for killing had brought Eve back to the surface and she aimed to get it as quickly as possible before one of Jillybean’s friends found her and tried to send her back down into the wretched darkness. The only problem: Eve had no notion where Colleen lived.

  With the night being full and deep, the apartment complex looked much bigger than it really was, and she wandered around until she heard voices talking in a quiet tone.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” asked the one.

  A pause. “It’s no concern of yours,” said the other. She knew that voice. It was a man’s voice. Yes, both speakers were men, but there was something quiet and strong in the second one and it stirred something inside her. A memory pushed aside the grating hate. She saw herself going up on tiptoes to kiss the man. This brought on more stirrings and she remembered quite clearly seeing him lying in a bed—completely naked.

  The image caught in her head and had the odd effect of paralyzing her as she dwelt on it.

  “It is my concern,” the first voice—Orlando Otis—said. “There’s a curfew on. It means no one’s allowed out tonight.”

  “Then shouldn’t I be in my own bed?” After his initial hesitation Stu recaptured his usual courage and walked right past Orlando as if he were holding a stick instead of a rifle. Orlando began to splutter and wave the gun, but Stu knew he wouldn’t dare shoot him in the back.

  Stu walked past him and down a rut that cut along the edge of the little plots and gardens. Something in the shadows of the building caught his eye and as he turned he saw Jillybean standing like a statue. Nothing could have surprised him more and instead of continuing on, he jerked to a stop, his head cranked to the side, a look of shock on his handsome face.

  Orlando had hesitated, unsure whether to stay put as he’d been told to by Lois, or to follow after Stu, who, he was certainly up to no good. After a brief moment he decided to follow him. Stu had not gone far into the dark and not thirty paces from his chair, Orlando caught up to the man.

  “You get right back in that…” Orlando started, then he too jerked, not so much at seeing Jillybean, because he could not quite make out her features, but of seeing anyone at all. “Who is that? Wha—Jillybean? How the hell did you get out of your cage?”

  She seemed small, too small to frighten a big man such as himself. If he had seen the black M4 across her back and the pure malevolence in her eyes, he wouldn’t have been so confident in his superior masculinity. But, as it turned out, it was Stu who surprised him.

  Unexpectedly, Stu swung his rock-hard fist, aiming for the man’s cheek. He missed his mark because of the dark and ended up giving Orlando a great clout on the ear. Stu had put a great deal of his strength into the punch and although it didn’t hit where he wished, he still managed to stun Orlando and drop him to his knees, where upon Stu promptly hit him again square in the back of his head.

  This turned out Orlando’s lights. Stu gave his shoulder a bit of a shake and hissed, “Orlando?” in his ear. He didn’t stir. Stu began to get up when he saw the shadow of Jillybean’s M4—the shadow of its barrel—pointed at Orlando’s head.

  “Just stop,” he said, pushing the barrel away and getti
ng to his feet. Eve’s fury blazed at him, obvious even in the dark. “I know you aren’t going to shoot so why bother pointing the gun.”

  “I might shoot. I am craaazy. I could do anything.”

  “Maybe you are crazy, maybe you aren’t, but one thing you’re not, is stupid. You’ll wake up the entire complex if you shoot and then where will you be? Strung up by the neck in ten minutes. Is that what you want?”

  She was about to answer in a proper and cruel manner when he snatched the M4 right out of her hand in a quick move. “You can have it back when you have learned some manners.”

  “Manners?” she cried in outrage. “How’s this for manners?” She attacked him, all claws and teeth. She had never been a fighter in the direct way and he easily spun her about and pinned her arm behind her back.

  “Stop. Do you hear that?” Her cry had been loud enough to wake the living and the dead. Someone murmured in one of the apartments while out beyond the fence and the forest of spears one of the dead let out a howl. The sound raised an army of goosebumps on Stu’s arm.

  The cry was taken up by others, many of them down the hill in the direction of the harbor and the Saber. They were loud, but not close, though that would change quickly.

  “Come on,” he hissed, grabbing the M4 that Orlando had dropped. They had less time than even he supposed. Stu had just straightened, when Orlando put out a hand, feeling the ground and not understanding the cold and the damp, or the thumping in his head or why his eyes refused to focus.

  Now, Stu really did grab Eve’s hand, holding it with near-crushing force. Eve was still spitting-mad. “Let go of my…” He gave her hand a hard yank, pulling her along so quickly that she was almost thrown off her feet and only their momentum kept her upright. She tried to resist, thrusting out stiff legs, but he was far too strong. She slid along as if she were skiing, until one foot hit a rock, then she was stumbling again.

  “I was just having a little fun, damn it!”

  She was loud, her voice carrying through the night. Behind them, Orlando had gotten to his knees. Although he was still reeling, he was slowly putting the broken pieces of his recent memory together. They were big, clunky chunks of memory, like a toddler’s jigsaw puzzle. He had been with Stu. He had been with Stu and going back to his apartment. Going back to his apartment because Stu was in trouble. Orlando was angry but he couldn’t remember why. Then everything went blank from there. “He knocked me out, that son of a bitch!”

  Standing at her open window, Jenn heard everything, from the curses to the zombies, to Eve’s blundering steps. She pieced together that somehow Jillybean had escaped from the shed, and that if they didn’t move quickly, she would get caught.

  “Get the bags!” she said to Mike in an urgent whisper. He slung the duffle-bag and grabbed two backpacks, while she snatched up her bag and Jillybean’s. Since there would be no coming back, they were heavy, filled with all the food Jenn had left.

  They flew down the stairs, just as Stu hauled Eve out of the deeper shadows. The girl was practically foaming at the mouth.

  “What the hell are we going to do with her?” Mike asked.

  “We’ll turn her back,” Jenn said. “Eve, what’s seven times nine?” Eve snorted at the lame attempt. Jenn was about to throw out two more numbers and whether they had any sort of relationship with each other she had no idea. “Five times…”

  “The girl has escaped!”

  This was cried in a half-shout, half-whisper from Dango who was still over at the shed, but it carried easily through the night. It galvanized the four of them, Eve included. Yes, she was mad and thoroughly evil, but she also had a streak of self-preservation a mile wide.

  Stu, still with his strong fingers crushing her wrist, led them to the back of the complex to where there had once been a drainage ditch. Years before, it had been torn out and had been improperly filled leaving a small gap.

  Stu had used the gap to sneak from the complex one too many times and Orlando’s friend, Dave Small, knew about it and was lurking in the dark waiting for them.

  Dave had heard enough of the whispers and cries and all the running about to know a break-out was happening. He readied himself behind his gun, thinking he would be the hero. He was just a few months past his thirtieth birthday but felt far older than that mainly because he smoked liked a chimney, rolling his own tobacco leaves, of which he was perpetually in short supply. During the later months of winter, his insatiable habit forced him to add anything he could find to his cigarettes: grass, pine needles and even oak leaves.

  He would smoke anything and it was killing him. A look into his lungs would have found them half-eaten away and the rest was covered in a grey/green film that he hacked up with alarming frequency. Traces of it could be seen on his collar and sleeve.

  The harsh smoke from his last fag hung in the air. Stu missed the dirty smell, but Jenn and Eve did not. Eve was practically at the fence, when she spun around, while Jenn, who was still on the dirt path, stopped with Mike thudding into her from behind.

  “Just hold up right there,” Dave said, in a phlegmy whisper. He held an unwavering M4 on Stu and Eve. “Don’t touch any of them, hrrggh, guns.” He had scraped up some of the gunk from his lungs and now spat it out. He had turned to the side, but still didn’t see Mike and Jenn who blended into the shadows in their tattered ghillie suits.

  Mike eased out from behind Jenn. She realized, too late, that he was going to try to attack a man armed with a gun while he only had a hunting knife. Desperately, she shook her head, but he ignored her. He had the advantage; all he had to do was cross ten feet of dirt without making a sound.

  His feet, which had always been a bit too big for his body, betrayed him. After only three steps, a sunbaked dirt clod went bopping away from his boot as he tripped.

  In what felt like slow motion, Dave turned, swinging his rifle around in a long arc. Mike reacted without thinking, dodging down and away as Dave pulled the trigger in a flash and a roar of thunder.

  He hadn’t meant to pull the trigger. When he heard the sound behind him, his heart had jumped in his chest and before he knew it, as he was hauling the gun around, Eve flung herself on him like a hellcat, her claws tearing at his eyes.

  The gun went off as he went sprawling in the dirt with her on top still doing everything in her power to blind him. To save his eyes, he had to give up the gun and grab her wrists. As small as she was, he couldn’t get her off him. It was Mike who pulled Eve up and, although she might have saved his life, he didn’t pick her up gently. They didn’t have time for gentle.

  He yanked her up, pinning her arms to her sides while at the same time, Stu bent and snatched the M4 from Dave. “Let’s have any extra ammo. Come on, quick…” Stu stopped as he saw a new shadow draped along the path they had just come from. It was a shadow that didn’t make sense. It was oddly dappled with lighter flecks worked into a dark background. And the shape was long and narrow and…

  “Jenn!” he whispered, as he realized what the shadow really was. Forgetting Dave, he rushed to her and saw the blood gushing from her head. “Oh God! Jeeze. How did this happen? How…”

  He spun and glared at Dave Small with such fury that Dave cried out, “I didn’t mean it, honest.”

  Stu was nearly out of his mind, not only afraid for Jenn, but also with the likelihood of getting caught. The entire complex was awake now and where it was usually shrouded in a numbing quiet, he could hear people hissing back and forth at each other, and there were people rushing around in the dark, stumbling and cursing in high voices that carried over the wall.

  The dead had to have heard the gunshot. They couldn’t have missed it and Stu was sure they could hear the commotion. He could picture dozens of filmed-over, grey eyes fixed on the hilltop. Almost as if the dead were in sync with his thoughts, a new howl broke the night. It was followed by more howls and then screams and moans. The dead were coming, and by the sound of it, there were more than enough to destroy the fence and kill everyon
e inside.

  For just a moment, Stu was overwhelmed. He froze, not knowing what to do or which way to turn; there was danger all around them, mere seconds away and it seemed to him that any decision he made just then would only make things worse. Should he run? Should he hide? And when the dead came, should he fight or slip out while everyone was busy getting killed? How was he going to…

  He jumped as Jenn let out a soft moan and brushed his arm with a fluttering hand. She was alive. Startled, Stu jerked away from her as though she were one of the dead coming back to life.

  Before he could recover his wits, Mike was suddenly at his side. “What happened? Oh, she’s shot! She’s shot!” He had dropped Eve who immediately went scrambling under the fence. Stu rushed to snatch her foot as it was just about to disappear under.

  He caught it and pulled her halfway back, kicking and cursing. Before he could get her all the way to their side of the fence, Dave took off running. Stu let Eve go and started to run after him only to stop after a few feet—Eve was squirming back under the fence and in a blink, was gone.

  “Forget that guy,” Mike snapped. “We need Jillybean to fix Jenn.” He grabbed one of the M4s, two backpacks in one hand, took hold of Jenn’s coat in the other and dragged her to the low spot. He went under first then pulled her through. He whispered, “Ah crap. You better hurry, Stu.” In the woods beyond the spears there came a great deal of rustling of leaves and cracking of twigs interspersed with the long, hungry moans of the dead. It sounded like an army was coming at them.

  Quickly, Stu shoved the duffel bag through and then crawled after, dragging two M4s along with him. Jenn, kicking out in her semi-consciousness, planted one on his cheek, leaving dusty tread marks but not really hurting him. She was making a raspy sound deep in her throat as her eyes fluttered.