GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  “I’m not sure. Maybe around ten in the morning. Can you tell me your name?”

  Jenn seemed to take forever to answer. “Jenn Lockhart. Why’s my head so big? It hurts and it feels big.” She reached up a wavering hand and touched the bandages, a smile curving her lip for just a second. “I guess my head has always been this big.”

  A smile was a great sign and Jillybean breathed out a big sigh of relief. Jenn was going to live.

  Maybe, Eve whispered, from out of the darkness. She was surprisingly close to the surface. So close, in fact that for a few seconds Jillybean’s vision blurred and the tips of her fingers went numb. She thought that Eve was about to seize control, however the girl slid back down on her own, whispering, Maybe she’ll live.

  Chapter 16

  Eve was too close. Jillybean passed a hand over her face, the relief at seeing Jenn alive was utterly gone, replaced with a cold lump in her chest and an overwhelming desire for her pills. It was an addict’s hunger and it overpowered everything.

  “Your head is going to be fine. Just fine,” she patted Jenn’s arm, absently, her eyes searching past the glow of the candles for her pack. “Look I have to get some, uh some supplies. Wait here.”

  Jenn’s eyes were already closing as Jillybean grabbed one of the candles and went forward into the main cabin. Other than a pile of blankets it was empty. In the aft cabin, she found more blankets and two packs, neither of which were hers. “They left my pack? Jeeze.”

  Eve began to laugh as Jillybean hurried to the cramped set of stairs that led up. She even laughed when Jillybean saw her pack sitting with Jenn’s on the deck near the mast. In a flash she had a bottle in her hands.

  If you take the pills you’ll kill us both, Eve said. Is that what you want? Do you want us to go out looking like this? The image of the sickening, pus-dripping, yellow-faced girl she had seen in the mirror flashed into Jillybean’s mind, making her drop the bottle of pills.

  They rolled to the starboard side of the boat and Jillybean scrambled after them. “That only might happen,” she cried. “I just need enough of my meds to get rid of you. Then, then I’ll be good to go. I’ll stop, then.”

  The only way to get rid of me is for you to take all of those pills. Go on, I’ll wait. The image again but with one change, Jillybean’s left eye suddenly began dribbling green-grey gunk and as it did, the eye fell in on itself.

  “Stop it!”

  “Stop what?” Stu had just slipped around the barbed wire-topped wall that surrounded the rear of the repair shop. Mike was right behind him, accidentally tripping over a rusting fender that sat partially buried like some sort of newly uncovered dinosaur bone.

  Guilt and fear had Jillybean clamping the bottle between her hands. “It’s nothing,” she answered, as Eve laughed and laughed. Jillybean knew she could surface anytime she wanted to but, for reasons known only to Eve, she kept just below the edge of Jillybean’s consciousness, making jokes, snide remarks and sometimes screaming as if her intestines were being torn out.

  Jillybean jumped every time. After asking what was wrong once and receiving a blatant lie, Stu pretended not to notice. Nor did he mention Jillybean’s twitchy eyes and shaking hands as she cleaned Jenn’s wound and inspected it. Blood had clotted her hair into a crusty gob that made the wound seem huge, but once that had been cleaned away, it became obvious that the girl had been incredibly lucky. Her skull had barely been touched by the grazing bullet that had opened her scalp above the ear as neatly as a surgeon’s knife.

  “I’ll need a razor, or the sharpest knife you can find,” she told Stu. She had to clear the area around the wound of hair, or infection would almost be a given. By the time Stu returned, the various pots of water were boiled and the instruments sterilized. She took the razor from him and just as she was about to set it against Jenn’s flesh, her hand jerked.

  Careful now. You don’t want to slip.

  Jillybean hesitated, unwilling to speak to Eve when people were around. “Mike could you, uh, stand guard? And Stu, could you get me some food. Something warm please?” The moment they were gone, she hissed, “Get out of my head!”

  No. A sudden image of fire, and explosions, and arterial blood spraying in a fountain passed before her eyes. Jillybean’s hand went to her pocket where her Zyprexa was sitting. The pills had deteriorated to such an extent that five of them were only temporarily keeping Eve away and Jillybean didn’t dare take six.

  The pills began to rattle as her hand shook.

  That’s the sound of me winning! Eve cried, in a huge voice that echoed like thunder and made Jillybean’s blue eyes bulge. I have grown strong while you have done nothing but hide in your books and your useless experiments.

  The razor fell from her hand. Her fingers were beginning to wiggle on their own and, as if she were watching someone else’s hand, it reached out on its own to pick up the razor. The gleaming edge turned toward Jenn who was awake and looking at her.

  “Hi,” Jillybean said, pulling the razor back, in control of her hands again. “I was just, um, running something over in m-my mind. You can relax, I’ll have you stitched up in no time.”

  In one hand she held the pills, in the other, the razor. With Jenn staring at her, she put the pills down.

  Jenn was only vaguely aware that something was wrong. All that came through her pounding head were mumbled words. She had classic concussion symptoms: headache, blurred vision, dizziness and a terrible lassitude that kept her from caring about Jillybean’s oddness or even about the coming fire which was closing in on the harbor from three directions.

  Somehow Jillybean was able to clean and stitch up the wound without Eve coming back. She had just finished wrapping Jenn’s head when Stu came into the cabin, moving stealthily as always. “We’re going to have to move the boat.” He explained why in two words: “The fire.”

  Nervously, Jillybean hurried onto the deck. The smoke had become heavier and fuller so that the sun was utterly obliterated and the daylight had the strength of late evening.

  The smoke had her coughing and squinting. Mike and Stu, barely visible in the haze, were forty feet away, pushing open the gates, which screeched like a lamb at its first shearing. A block or so beyond them, the fire was an eye-watering glow mostly hidden by the smoke.

  Even as close as they were, both men were also partially hidden. They looked ghostly and indistinct as if the wind might blow them away. Jillybean paused, uncertain whether she was really looking at actual spirits or whether her broken mind was playing tricks on her again.

  She coughed and pulled her shirt up over her nose, noticing that Mike and Stu had done something similar. “And would ghosts need to worry about smoke?” she asked herself. “Maybe not. I hope not.” She tried to laugh at herself: “I’m just being foolish.” But she had not forgotten the image of herself in the mirror. That soured her stomach and she descended the ladder, carefully, holding on to each rung.

  Stu put a steady, strong hand on her shoulder. “Keep watch, just in case.” That hand had been real and so was the crinkling around his eyes that told her he was smiling.

  “Certainly,” she replied. She was sure that the weak smile she was hiding under her shirt didn’t reach her eyes. That would have taken more effort than she could muster. Although she hadn’t taken any pills that morning, working on Jenn had worn her out.

  As Stu and Mike maneuvered the Saber down to the harbor, Jillybean watched in a careless manner, not expecting a zombie in this maelstrom of fire and smoke. In fact, she left after a couple of minutes and ducked into the remains of a Quickie Mart.

  There were few places she had been to that were as utterly trashed as this was. Amid sunglasses, magazines and road maps, she found a small bottle of Motrin. Pocketing it, she walked down to the harbor and discovered that she hadn’t even been missed as she climbed up to join Stu and Mike on deck.

  “We should hold off putting her in the water for as long as possible,” Mike was saying, with a look of worry on h
is face, or the part of his face not covered by the shirt he had wrapped around his head. Above the edge of it, his eyes were bright green and afraid for both his ship and for Jenn. If the glue wasn’t completely set the hull would open like a flower and how on earth would Jenn get to shore? With both the Saber and Jenn so fragile, he couldn’t chance putting to sea just yet.

  He got the Saber as close as he could, stopping the trailer at the high tide mark, with only a spindly rope holding it back. One slice of the knife would send them rolling into the water.

  “I’ll take first watch,” Stu said, his voice muffled by the shirt he wore over his face. “Jillybean, is there some way to keep the smoke from getting into the cabin. I’m with Mike. I want to hold off chancing the water for as long as possible.” He gestured to what little could be seen of the bay. The wind seemed confused which way to go, spinning the smoke and making the water choppy. “I don’t want to go out in that any sooner than…” He froze, his dark eyes squinting over the rail.

  Someone was coming towards them. It was only an indistinct figure in the drifting ash and the grey haze, but one thing was obvious, it wasn’t one of the dead. No, this wasn’t some huge creature, this was man-sized. Stu and Mike both unslung M4s.

  Jillybean looked down at herself; except for the ratty, black T-shirt and pants she had worn, off and on, since leaving Bainbridge, she possessed nothing.

  She stepped back, as Stu said in a carrying whisper, “Who is that?” The figure said nothing, it only started hurrying forward even quicker. “We are armed but we don’t want any trouble. Stop. I will shoot.”

  He didn’t shoot, even though the person came right up to the trailer. Up close they saw it wasn’t a person at all. It had been a Corsair. Now, it was a zombie and barely one at that. It had been fed on by the real monsters. Great hunks of flesh and muscle had been ripped away from its legs and arms. Its stomach had been excavated and its chest had been gnawed down to the bone. There was so little of it left that it wasn’t much more than a walking skeleton.

  How it retained enough of itself to be brought back, Jillybean couldn’t fathom. “Don’t shoot it. Don’t waste the ammo.” They were safe, high up on the boat. The thing went around and around, scraping at the sides of the boat, uselessly.

  “We should kill it,” Mike said, grinning suddenly and looking his age for the first time in days. “What if one of us has to use the bathroom. I guess Stu and I can pee on it, but what are you and Jenn going to do?”

  “And I suppose I do have to go back to the garage,” Jillybean said. “Okay kill it, just don’t shoot it. There were some chunks of concrete. I think it used to be a sidewalk. Use that to bash its head in.”

  We could do it, Eve whispered, eagerly. It’s been a long time since we got to have any fun like that.

  Jillybean regularly shot and stabbed her zombie patients. It wasn’t her idea of fun. “No,” she said, under her breath.

  Eve rose up inside of her, like an angry toddler throwing a violent temper tantrum. Let me kill it! The scream shook Jillybean and in her weakened state, her already unsteady legs gave out under her and she would have fallen off the boat if it hadn’t been for Stu catching her as she fell in his arms.

  For a moment she dangled above the creature with Stu’s strong hands around her middle. The monster, if it could be called such, had no lower jaw and only a stump of a black tongue. It made pitiful mewling sounds as it tried to get at her. Far from being frightened of it, Jillybean was only saddened by it.

  She hung, limp as Stu didn’t pull her up right away. He had a good hold of her and was strong enough to hold her like that for some time. “What are you waiting for, Mike? This is the best distraction you’re likely to get.”

  Swift and sure as a monkey, Mike scampered down onto the trailer before dropping with a thud onto the sand. A heavy rock, one the size of his own head, sat half-humped out of the sand. He pried it the rest of the way out, came up behind the zombie and caved in its head. What came pouring out made him shudder and he felt his gorge rise.

  Stu pulled her back but didn’t let go and for once that morning, Jillybean felt alone in her own head. She didn’t want to leave him, but Mike was coming back from dragging the body away.

  “I should, uh do something about the, uh, smoke,” she said, pulling away.

  He watched her go, muttering to herself and weaving slightly, reaching out to cars and buildings partially to hold her upright and partially to assure herself that the world around her was real or so it seemed to Stu. He was worried for her and followed along after at a discreet distance, slipping through the banks of smoke.

  She made her way back to where they had hidden the Saber and, as Stu watched, she solved their smoke problems with only a thought. Hanging on the wall were six or seven masks used by auto body specialists when spray painting a car. Each had round filters protruding downward. Putting one on, she tightened it and took a deep breath.

  It had been as simple as that. Any of them could have thought of the masks, but only she had.

  The masks were more comfortable than Stu would have thought. Their only downside was that they hadn’t been designed with a five-alarm forest fire in mind. Their filters had to be changed out frequently, still the masks allowed the four of them to remain on shore for another four hours.

  At that point, the fire jumped the four-lane highway that separated most of the town from the harbor. An entire platoon of towering Fremont cottonwoods that had been leaning over the highway for years finally came down with a roar that could be heard three hundred yards away in the Saber. The old dead grass went up first, igniting overgrown bushes and trees and finally houses and businesses.

  The four of them, lying languidly with sweat streaming into pools at the notches of their throats, waited as long as they could. Every thirty minutes, Mike summoned the energy to go out into that hateful world to wet the sails and the deck, afraid of what he called “spontaneous combustion.” Jillybean was too exhausted to explain that spontaneous combustion was an altogether different and unproven phenomenon.

  When he came back the last time after only thirty seconds, Jillybean knew it was time to go. “It’s bad,” he said.

  Jenn stayed in the cabin as the three went up on deck. She missed catching a glimpse of hell. The world Stu had known for the last five years, from the Marin headlands to Mill Valley was engulfed in flame and that flame seemed to be pressing down on them like a mountain of fire. The flames stretched across the rim of the harbor and within the fire were explosions and mini-tornadoes.

  The savage heat was too much for Jillybean who was driven back down. Stu with his face turning a bright cherry red, braved the heat and cut the line holding the trailer in place. The ship trundled into the water with a hiss. The exposed metal aboard the ship was too hot to touch and for a few minutes the Saber spun gently out of control.

  Unfortunately, the fire was affecting the wind patterns within the harbor. To feed the immense inferno, air was being sucked in towards it and the Saber was being sucked in as well. Before Mike could even get the boom around they had grounded again. He tried to go to the bow but the heat felt as though it were peeling the skin from his face and, when he ducked his head, he thought his hair was going to burst into flames.

  Again, it was Jillybean who did what should have been obvious. She had gone back below to fetch blankets, which she soaked with sea water. Setting one over her head she was able to go forward to Mike and Stu, who were yelling back and forth, their eyes at squints and their faces screwed up against the pain. Once covered, the two were able to shove off from the rocks. This time the boom was ready and, making only a whisper against the tumultuous back drop, they cut a line through the choppy water and out into the bay.

  The chaotic wind close-in made Mike think the same would continue further out into the bay but, after a mile they were practically becalmed with only a soft one-knot breath coaxing them along. All around them clouds of smoke hung low over the green water, sometimes softly
running across its gently lapping waves, and sometimes lifting completely so that they were dazzled by the early afternoon sun.

  Pale and teetering, Jenn came onto the deck, keeping her hands to herself. There was a film of ash coating every inch of it. Mike and Stu were coated as well and resembled the little zombie they had run across earlier.

  “So, what do we do now?” she asked.

  That was the question on all of their minds. There was no going back, even if they had wanted to. They could go to Alcatraz but only to return the Saber, which Mike was still determined to do. Jenn and Stu were more reluctant, but knew it was the right thing. Even though it meant not going home to Bainbridge, Jillybean also agreed.

  “We could winter in Stockton,” Mike said. “We went scavenging there a few months back and there are a few places we could fortify. I bet Gerry the Greek would give us a lift. Once he sees the Saber that is.” He rubbed away some of the dust from the railing and sighed.

  A winter in Stockton did not appeal to any of them. Then again, it would be a desperately tough winter no matter which way they turned. They were on their own with about four days’ worth of food and sixty-one rounds of ammo for the three M4s. Their prospects were dismal. Survival was about the only thing they could hope for.

  They were all quiet when Jenn glanced up. The clouds of dense smoke parted long enough for her to catch sight of a V-shaped formation of geese, winging their way northeast. They were going the wrong direction perhaps confused by the fire.

  “I know where we should go,” she said, as relief flooded her. The birds were a sign. They had even pointed like an arrow where to go.

  Stu looked up just as the smoke swept over them again. “Where?” Mike demanded. “You’re not going to tell us you saw a sign or something.”

  “I did. We’re going to Sacramento,” she announced.

  “But they’re all diseased there,” Mike said, remembering the ghastly stench of the warehouse and the sad children with their bowed legs, scuttling around like crabs. Death hung like a shadow over the community and he would rather fight a zombie barehanded than go back.