GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  “Exactly,” Jenn agreed, “and Jillybean is going to fix them.”

  Chapter 17

  Eve was instantly aware, her bitter, dark mind blotting out Jillybean’s. “And why would she want to go anywhere near a bunch of disgusting diseased people? I don’t care what they have, the answer is no. It isn’t going to happen.” Her shrill tone was so superior, so haughty, that it seemed strange coming from Jillybean’s soft lips.

  Jenn would not be deterred. She had seen the sign plain as day; which meant they had to go. They really didn’t have a choice in the matter unless they wanted to court the worst luck ever. To be given a sign and then ignore it would be a huge mistake, one they couldn’t afford to make. “It’ll be okay, I know it. Jillybean will fix them, or cure them, or whatever, and then from there, who knows? Maybe they’ll make her the leader or something. Or maybe they’ll give her, like a bunch of bullets as thanks. It’ll be a start for us. What do you guys think?”

  Although Mike was Jenn’s biggest supporter when it came to her ability to read signs, he was secretly on Eve’s side on this one. If it had been anyone else making the suggestion, he would have been dead set against it and yet even he couldn’t commit to Jenn, beyond a shrug and brief, lukewarm smile. He turned quickly to Stu hoping that he would stomp the entire idea with one of his patented gruff responses.

  Instead, he asked Jillybean, “Can you cure diseases?”

  “Tell him, no,” Eve ordered with Jillybean’s lips.

  Jillybean felt her mind suddenly thrust forward again. Feeling slightly dizzy and pretty sure she had missed something, she asked, “No, to what? Going to Sacramento?”

  Stu took her hands in his and fixed her with his dark eyes. In her bewildered and sickly state, they had a hypnotic quality to them that was calming. They blotted out the smoke and the nails-on-the-chalkboard feel of Eve inside her.

  When her blue and yellow eyes softened, he asked, “Can you cure diseases? Is that even a possibility?”

  “It depends on the disease. Do you know what they have?”

  As always, Stu was too slow to answer for Jenn, who piped up, “TB, that’s what they said. They tried antibiotics only they didn’t work. Do you think it was because they might have gone bad?”

  “I think we shouldn’t accept a diagnosis from a patient at face value. But if it is tuberculosis we may want to listen to Eve on this one. TB is very hard to get rid of. Under optimal circumstances and with the right antibiotics it can take anywhere from six to nine months to treat properly.”

  This drained the enthusiasm out of Jenn. “Nine months? And you don’t have any of your antibiotics either way.” She looked back up at the smoke swirling overhead wondering if she had read the sign correctly. Nothing else made sense, however. “What if they’re wrong? What if it’s not TB? What if it’s something else? Could you cure it faster?”

  “Not unless it’s something very simple. Can you tell me their symptoms, again?” Jenn, with Mike throwing in a few adjectives and many squeamish looks, described the sickening smell of diarrhea that had permeated the air, the deep sunken eyes of the people, the blue tinge to their lips and their strangely wrinkled hands.

  “Classic symptoms of cholera,” Jillybean said, remembering she knew this already.

  “Is that the plague?” Mike asked. He had heard of the “plague” although he wasn’t exactly sure what it did to a person. All he knew was that it was worse than TB.

  Jillybean laughed gently, but not in a mean way. “No cholera comes from drinking water contaminated with the bacteria Vibrio Cholerae. It’s most likely because there is human feces in their water supply.”

  “Feces?” Mike asked, his lips pulled way down. “As in poop? Oh, gaw. That’s gross. Maybe we shouldn’t go. I mean, I’m not gonna drink the water there and we will have to drink. You can’t fix the water, can you?” They all stared at her; Mike anxiously, hoping she would say no; Jenn thoughtfully, wondering how this news went with her vision; and Stu, impassively, his thoughts hidden behind his dark eyes.

  Jillybean saw all this as did the shadow of Eve who was picturing herself as queen of these Sacramento freaks—assuming Jillybean could fix them and their water problems. She would demand to be made queen as payment. Being queen suited Eve.

  “Only time and proper management will fix their water issues,” Jillybean said. “As for the cholera, we’re going to need a lot of supplies, as much as she can handle.” She patted the filthy deck of the Saber. When Mike began to protest, she said, “We need her for just a bit longer.”

  She had Mike steer for the closest hospital which happened to be directly across the bay in northern Oakland. It was a slow trip with only a cold, near insubstantial wind pushing them along. Slowly, they passed the oddly named, Treasure Island, which sat in the bay halfway between Alcatraz and Oakland.

  It seemed to take forever for them to slip past the flat island. Still, it gave them time to clean the boat from stem to stern. Then they lounged on deck, wrapped in blankets, as a tired, melancholy sensation stole over them. Jillybean was still feeling the effects of her liver damage and slept with her head in Stu’s lap until they reached the far side of the bay two hours later.

  With only a whisper and the smallest thump, Mike slid them in next to one of the few remaining piers that were still standing.

  Stu woke Jillybean with a smile. “We’re here. I’m going to need a list.” She started to tell him that she could remember everything, but he cut her off. “You’re not going with us. Your problems get worse with stress. So, I want you to just relax right here. We’ll get everything you need.”

  “Relax?” she asked, as if the word was new to her. “But there’s so much stuff I need and you may not be able to…”

  “Just write it all down, but make sure it’s, uh, legible.” This time his smile was a little off. Jillybean guessed that when he said legible he meant for her to use small words.

  The list was much longer than Stu had expected. He read down it to make sure he understood each item. “Isn’t this surgery stuff? And what’s with the equal signs?”

  “Some items may be found under different names. Here, normal saline is the same as sodium chloride .09%, and that’s the same as NaCl .09%. And the surgical items are just in case. We never know what we might find…”

  “No surgery!” Eve suddenly barked, the words jumping right out of Jillybean’s mouth. “You know there’s no time.”

  “No time for what?” Stu asked.

  Eve turned Jillybean’s features cagey. “Wouldn’t you like to know? Oh, I bet you would, but too bad for…”

  Jillybean turned quickly away and hushed her into silence. “Okay, no surgery,” she hissed under her breath. Straightening, she wore an embarrassed smile as she said to Stu, “Forget the surgical tools. Please get everything else, though.”

  “I will never get used to that in a million years,” Mike said, in a low voice, ten minutes later as they crept down a city street, empty packs on their backs, their ragged ghillie suits pulled up over their heads. “I tell you, it gives me the creeps. And am I the only one worried about leaving her alone with the boat? She could steal it. There’s nothing stopping Eve from heading off to Mexico.”

  Stu commented with a grunt, though what he meant by it, Mike didn’t know.

  Jenn, who felt amazingly better, had asked to come with them, if only to keep watch. She was just about to put in her two-cents when she paused, with her head canted so she could see through the strips of material. “Hold on,” she whispered, stopping in front of a boutique, one of the few places on the street with an intact front window.

  She had heard something: a scrape of wood, like a chair being brushed aside. It seemed like too small of a sound to have been made by one of the dead and yet thirty feet ahead of them a zombie, naked except for a ridiculously long striped scarf, suddenly stumbled out of the remains of a hotel. As one, the three of them dropped into a crouch and froze—and prayed. Jenn sent out a prayer to the Christ
ian God and her fingers itched to either grab her cross or make the sign of the cross, but she didn’t dare move.

  The beast had turned immediately towards them and, with slow, deliberate steps, it came stomping right down the sidewalk. It was up to Stu as leader to decide what to do: run or fight. Running was the smartest choice, only he couldn’t run, the best he could do was a gimping jog. And it would be a terrible way to start an expedition by shooting their rifles and attracting every zombie in the city right to them.

  He was rarely indecisive and yet three seconds went by as he dithered between his terrible choices. In that short time the zombie had cut the distance in half and now running was no longer an option for any of them.

  “Don’t move,” he whispered, hoping that the beast would mistake them for three very schlumpy-looking bushes, and, unfortunately that is exactly what happened. The zombie went right for Mike and as the creature wasn’t roaring or going crazy, Mike actually believed it was going to keep walking past him. Instead it simply reached out and pulled the ghillie suit right off of him.

  Mike thought he was a dead man and trained his M4 up to shoot in a last-ditch attempt to live, but before he could pull the trigger, he saw that the beast had been completely fooled by the camouflage. Thinking it was eating some sort of plant, the zombie shoved the blanket into its gaping pit of a mouth where three yellow teeth could be seen.

  It chewed and chewed and then took to rending the blanket with its great, clawed hands, and all the while Mike was in a crouch at its feet, alive only because the end of the blanket hung over his head, blocking the beast’s view. The situation, both precarious and absurd, couldn’t last. Any second, the zombie would toss aside the ghillie suit and see him.

  As it would be stupid to wait for that to happen, Mike tried to slink around it, hoping to put a bullet in the back of its head before it even knew he was there. He hadn’t quite got into position, when his movement caught the beast’s eye and it let out a howl of rage. It tossed aside the ghillie suit and spun, but not all the way around.

  It had spun towards the boutique’s window where Mike’s reflection, looking tiny and frail compared to the eight-foot tall beast, was perfectly clear. So clear, in fact that it fooled the zombie, who charged straight at the glass with a hideous screech that echoed down the empty streets.

  Even though it weighed nearly six hundred pounds, it was so close to the window that it couldn’t generate the velocity to smash it in. Instead it ended up smacking into the glass face-first with an oddly musical gong sound and leaving a smear of mucus and blood. As they were without fully functioning brains, it was very difficult to stun a zombie and yet this one had to blink three straight times before its vision cleared enough to see the little man gawping in surprise and again it charged.

  This time it charged and swung a haymaker that came all the way from left field. Its fist connected with Mike’s reflection and now the window came apart in a waterfall of glass that cut up the beast horribly. It didn’t notice the many lacerations from which black blood poured out.

  The zombie only knew that the man had somehow disappeared. Its rage doubled, and then doubled again. In a perfectly volcanic manner, the zombie exploded, releasing that rage as it attacked the nearest human-like thing to it: a mannequin done up with a blonde wig and a stylish black pantsuit. In seconds the mannequin was destroyed, its plastic head torn from its plastic body. But there were more mannequins and the beast’s rage was infinite. It threw itself on each in a frenzy of claws and teeth.

  Jittery, his heart pounding and a tremor going in his hands, Mike stood in front of the store watching the one-sided battle and picturing himself as each of those mannequins, soft and so easily broken. Stu handed him the torn ghillie suit, still wet with zombie slobber. “It’s good enough,” he said about the suit. “You’ll be fine.” This was his version of a pep-talk.

  He wasn’t wrong about the ghillie suit. That was the thing about Jillybean’s strange ghillie-blanket, it retained its camouflaging abilities no matter what sort of damage it took. In fact, when he slipped it over his head, he looked even less human than before. He just hoped he looked less like a plant.

  The three scampered away, leaving the zombie rampaging throughout the boutique, “killing” mannequin after mannequin, tossing arms and heads around, and leaving a trail of black blood.

  After this, Stu had Jenn lead, while he trailed ten yards behind her and Mike a further ten yards behind him.

  Jenn crossed herself three times, kissed her M4 and started off, moving slower and with more care than before. She was a good choice to lead after how close Mike had come to death. Her nerves were a-tingle and her bat-sharp ears were attuned to every sound as she guided them on a roundabout course for the hospital, avoiding the many zombies.

  Only one managed to surprise her as it quite unexpectedly walked off the roof of a three-story office building. It kept walking even when there was nothing under its feet but air and only stopped walking when it met the earth with a stomach-churning splat-thud. The fall didn’t kill it, however it did add a new hinge to its leg—its knee bent one way and midway down, its shin went the other.

  It crawled and scraped along after them.

  Jenn guided them to a children’s hospital, but once there, she was reluctant to lead, afraid that she would actually see a child zombie or worse, a zombie baby. The three of them stood in the lobby, feeling the walls for the least vibration, their ears cocked, and their breath held. Thankfully, the building was empty and deathly quiet.

  Satisfied, they went in search of the supplies on the list and in just under three hours, they were back in the lobby loaded like pack mules.

  At the beginning of the apocalypse, San Francisco and its surrounding cities had not been well armed and when the dead came they swept aside the defenses that had been erected with particular ease, sending the people screaming north and leaving behind a city well-stocked in many items.

  Deep in its underground storerooms, the hospital had many, many crates filled with IV fluids. By candlelight, they went through each, taking only the normal saline. In all, they found thirty-nine boxes of the stuff. They didn’t just collect the fluids, they also gathered boxes of catheters and tubing. Then they went in search of cleaning supplies, gloves and masks.

  When they were done, Mike sat on a stack of boxes, the hood of his ghillie suit thrown back, staring at the piles. “I’m pretty sure when Jillybean said ‘get all they have,’ she didn’t really mean this much.”

  “She said she wanted to fill the Saber,” Stu reminded him, “and this might do it.”

  Mike knew better. Counting deck space, the Saber could hold twice as much, but he wasn’t about to admit that. “Okay, so how the hell are we going to get it back? It’s not like we have a cart that will fit all this stuff or a zombie to drag it along.”

  Jenn was just getting her new logic-oriented mind in gear, ready to puzzle it out when Stu answered, “Gurneys. You know, those rolling beds? We’ll lash six or seven together and take it all in one trip. I picked out a route on the way here. There’s a few places where the road is completely messed up that will be tricky, and we’ll have to manhandle the stuff past it, but it’ll let us do it all in one trip.”

  It was a very slow and exhausting business. After tying down the boxes, the two men heaved, while Jenn led the way. When she couldn’t guide them around the zombies, she was forced to distract them with thrown rocks or strategic fires.

  It was right at sunset that they made it back to the Saber, all three of them secretly relieved to find it still there. It was an ugly sunset. The fires had not burned out and the entire western edge of the bay, from where the Golden Gate touched to beyond what the eye could see, was enveloped in smoke.

  They pulled the gurneys, one by one, down to the Saber but were stopped as they came to a four-foot wide gap in the planks on the dock that hadn’t been there before. In the water below, were two sodden and howling zombies wallowing, unable to either climb up o
r swim away.

  Stu had a bad feeling about the gap as he leapt across it and hurried down to where Jillybean was sitting in a crouch at the edge of the dock. She hadn’t been resting and she hadn’t stayed with the boat. Just then she was worrying over three separate fires, each of which had a number of pots sitting right down in the flames. Whatever she was cooking smelled ghastly.

  “Oh, it’s almost night,” she said, glancing around, noticing the setting sun for the first time. She grinned at Stu, not even seeing Jenn and Mike. Her smile was almost drunkenly giddy. “It’s good you’re back. I need someone to keep stirring this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Mostly bunker fuel and a sludge of old grease I got out of a McDonald’s holding tank.”

  Stu couldn’t tell if this was one of her other personalities talking or if she had gone to a whole new level of crazy.

  She was almost like a little kid playing pretend chef. “And this other stuff? What’s it all for?” There was a tumble of supplies around her; strange items that didn’t make any more sense than the old grease: spools of wire, short lengths of threaded pipes, tape, radios, tools and bags of fertilizer.

  “I know I told myself I wouldn’t, but I’m making bombs!”

  Chapter 18

  Stu opened his mouth to ask the obvious, but it was as though the question had turned sideways in his throat because it refused to come out until he had swallowed loudly and coughed, purposefully. “A bomb? Why do you need a bomb?”

  Jillybean’s gay smile dimmed. “Just in case, I suppose. You never know, right? You never know when a bomb might come in handy and you know they’d be awful useful against zombies. I can see you’re worried, Stu. Just think of them as tools.”