GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  Jillybean also seemed affected; she stared for a long time, her face growing tighter and tighter. “We don’t have time for this,” she whispered to herself.

  Jenn was sure she must have misheard her, but her head was reeling and she found herself gulping down the horrible air, as her stomach began clenching and unclenching violently. Afraid she was about to vomit, or faint, she started back down. “I need a moment,” she said between clenched teeth. “I’ll be right back.”

  She was halfway down when she heard Jillybean hissing. Because her head was spinning Jenn wasn’t sure but it sounded like she had said, “I know, but you can’t just kill him.”

  Jenn was nearly hyperventilating now. There was no pretending otherwise, she was going to vomit and faint, it was just a matter of which came first. At ten feet above the ground she started to lose the feeling in her hands while at the same time, she could feel her dinner coming closer. “Oh lord,” she whispered and then dropped the final five feet. She clawed away her mask, hurled in a great splatter, adding to horror of the place, and then fell to the side of the mess. Somewhere in the process of passing out, she heard:

  “But if we don’t and there are more like this one, how many people will die in the end? We have to kill him.”

  Chapter 24

  The cold woke Jenn. She looked up and saw the stars shifting and bobbing. It was a moment before she realized she was being carried.

  “Mike? What happened? Am I…I’m not hurt, am I?” Other than an ugly taste in her mouth, she felt fine.

  “No. Jillybean wanted me to get you some air. It was pretty awful in there.” He paused, staring around the lot, his eyes lingering on the exploded pole. Then he looked at the Saber, where the penal slaves and five warehouse folk were hauling out the heavy water bladders.

  All of them had gaped at the black boat when he had first pulled it out of the dark. “You’re from that crummy hill top,” one of the Corsairs sneered, thinking they had only picked up the Saber from the wreckage of the battle.

  “I’m not, actually. And that boat is the one we took from Grays Harbor, right out from under your noses.” Mike was inordinately pleased by their reaction. He knew that the rumors, the true rumors, of how they had come by a Corsair boat would circulate and add to their mystique.

  Mike was about to mention this to Jenn when a thought struck him: was this why Jillybean had left the last four Corsairs alive? So they could see the boat and tell the tale? Had she thought…”

  “You can put me down now,” Jenn said, breaking in on his thoughts.

  He gazed down at her without setting her down. By the way she had her cheek resting on his chest, he could tell she really didn’t want to be put down. She was comfortable and safe.

  “Don’t worry, you’re not heavy.” She really wasn’t. And, as he had spent most of the day sitting on a boat, he had plenty of energy. “I’d hate to put you down and have you faint again.”

  “I’m not going to faint, not out here.” The stench of a few hundred decomposing bodies fouling the air was roses compared to the stench inside. It hadn’t been just the smell, either. The last couple of minutes had a vague, dream-like haze to it. She could remember climbing up the side of the shelf and pulling back chicken-wire as if the seven-by-ten shelf had been a pen of some sort. And she remembered fiddling around trying to remember where she had stuck the flashlight and then, when she found it, she immediately regretted it—and just then she regretted the sudden memory of the boy in his pool of feces. It hit her hard and she gagged, not knowing if she could go back inside.

  Mike set her down and she walked in a small circle. “Take your time,” he said, hoping to soothe her, but ruining it by adding, “We’ll be at this all night. Did you hear that list she’s got for me?”

  “I’ll trade jobs with you,” she said. His lips parted and he expelled air loudly in an abortive attempt at a laugh. He hoped it was a joke. It wasn’t, but she knew he was even less suited to be Jillybean’s assistant than she was. Besides, his job required strength that she didn’t have. She sighed. “I should get back in there.”

  “And I should get going with those guys. They slack off the second I’m not watching them.” The two gazed at each other for a moment, a long lingering moment that might have lingered half into the night, only just then Willis came over, dragging a cart with a bulbous, humped water bladder resting on it.

  His stare was knowing and deviant, and very off-putting. “I should go,” she said with a little wave. He matched the wave. That little thing, made her feel, well she didn’t know how it made her feel. She had never been in love before and she had never done that thing that she knew other girls did, where they sat around and talked about boys; which they thought was cute and who liked who.

  How she wished she could be doing that instead of heading back inside to what had to be the worst job in the world.

  She found Jillybean leading what looked like a frail old man by the arm. Like the boy, he too was covered in horrible brown gunk. “Grab a pair of gloves, kiddo. These walking piles of crap need love, too.”

  “Piles of…Jillybean? Is that you?”

  “Nope. Jillybean has left the building. She made like a leaf and got the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Eve?” Jenn asked, cautiously.

  The girl in black threw back her head and laughed. “Are you kidding me? Do you think Eve would actually touch one of these guys? No way. She might disinfect the place, but only if we let her use a flamethrower. No, she tried to come back, took one look at what was going on and left. That’s called being a weak little bitch.” This was Sadie, the toughest part of Jillybean.

  And what different laughs the three had. The original only smiled at jokes since she found the punchlines blatant and foresaw them a mile off, she laughed only if she were infused with joy. Eve’s laughter was always mocking and cruel, designed to inflict pain, and Sadie laughed at anything and everything, from the silliest pun to the dirtiest joke, most of which would be of her own telling.

  “I hate a weak little bitch,” Sadie went on, “especially when there’s work to be done. That’s what I always loved about Neil. People think…hey, what’s wrong? Don’t even think I was calling you a weak little bitch. Yes, you puked and passed out. So what? The important thing is you came back. That shows you have rectitude.”

  “Rectitude?” Jenn asked. “I guess that’s a good thing?”

  Sadie shrugged. “I’m not sure. It’s a word. I know that. Jillybean never keeps words up here that aren’t real words. Either way, I meant it as a good thing and that’s what counts the most.”

  She did mean it and it did count the most to Jenn. She was about to thank her when Sadie gave her a jab in the side with a surprisingly pointy elbow. “So, what’s the what? I got these two bimbos calling me ‘your Highness.’ What’s up with that?”

  “You made yourself into a queen,” Jenn explained.

  “Whoa! That’s crazy even for Jillybean. But hey, queen, I like it. All rise for Queen Sadie.” She let go of the shuffling, dying man to give an odd little cupped-hand wave. Then she saw Jenn shaking her head. “What? We aren’t calling ourselves Queen Sadie? Oh jeeze! It’s not Queen…” Here she lowered her voice. “It’s not Queen Jillybean, is it?”

  “Right now, it’s just Queen or ‘The’ Queen.”

  Sadie snorted, saying, “Let’s keep it that way.” They came to the clean area where three of the sickly warehouse people were trying to heave one of the water bladders up onto a six-foot high stack of pallets. They were supposed to be building a make-shift shower station but the entire structure kept tilting. “We have another one for you,” Sadie called out and settled the man down next to three other cadaverous beings waiting their turn to be scrubbed down by Diamond and Johanna, both of whom were pasty and pale.

  “Should those guys be doing it that way?” Jenn asked, as the pallets fell. “I don’t think that’s gonna work.”

  “Uh,” Sadie said, squinting over at them. “Prol
ly not. They should use pulleys and winches or what? What was that last word?” She canted her head upwards, her eyes cocked so that it looked as though she were trying to catch sight of her own ear. “Vul-crums? Oh, fulcrums. Yeah, I know what those are. Look, I gotta go, Jenn’s staring at me like I got boog hanging off my nose. Sheesh, what a pain.”

  “Was that Jillybean?” Jenn asked, trying to make it seem like it was altogether normal and not crazy at all for the girl to be talking to thin air.

  Sadie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, always backseat driving. Do I get all loud when she’s in charge? Do I say anything when she blows up half a city or unleashes a zombie army? No. I keep to myself, I do my own thing, which is mostly just playing pong on single player mode. It’s not the most exciting death, but it beats the alternative.” She rolled her eyes again and then thumped the side of her head with the heel of her hand. “Shut up in there. I’m going. Oh, hey, you know what you’re supposed to be doing right?”

  Jenn remembered. “IVs, but I’ve never done one.”

  “I wish I could show you but I’ve never done one either. It can’t be too hard, right?”

  Sadie gave her a last smile before walking away. “Not too hard?” Jenn said out loud. Diamond heard and gave her a dull-eyed, nonjudgmental look. Perhaps she thinks we’re all crazy, Jenn wondered. The two ex-slaves were scrubbing down the would-be patients using antibacterial soap and buckets of clean water from the bladders. They were doing a thorough but quick job of it. Already there were two pale, shivering men wrapped in blankets, waiting to be hooked up to IVs.

  Jenn glanced back to where Sadie was trying to work out the details of the simplest machine while trying to ignore Jillybean’s massively complex brain. Jenn would have traded with her in a second. One of the men was looking at her with teary eyes that were very old in a face that couldn’t have been over forty.

  “Maybe you should sit down. No, lie down. There you go.” When he was lying down it was harder for him to see Jenn’s frazzled look. “Okay…what’s first?” She had never started an IV before, but she had seen Jillybean do it numerous times and Jillybean had never once failed to talk her way through it, not for her own benefit, but for Jenn’s.

  Step one gather supplies: belt, tape, tubing, catheter and IV bag. Step two: get the bag and line ready. Three: tie off arm with the belt and clean the injection site. Four: insert the tip of the needle into the vein without stabbing out the back of it. “You should feel a slight pop and then there’ll be the…” She felt it! She was in the vein on her first try. She slid the catheter the rest of the way into the vein and withdrew the needle.

  Blood immediately began to bubble out of the end of the tubing—a lot of blood. Enough blood to start an avalanche of panic in Jenn’s heart. She stubbed her thumb down on the vein which helped to slow the blood, but also caused the man to wince. “Sorry,” she said, easing up slightly, her eyes gaping as the dribble became a trickle, once more.

  This never seemed to happen to Jillybean—why not? Because she attaches the tubing, doorknob, her own cranky, inner voice said. “Right.” Jenn made a bloody mess of things hooking up the tube and only belatedly realized she had forgotten to untie the belt. Still the IV was flowing and that’s what counted.

  “My first operation,” she said, using the loosest possible definition of the word. She went onto the next man who had veins like slackened earthworms. They were big and blue, but they rolled as if trying to dodge the needle. Jenn poked the man again and again, and each time he grimaced.

  She said, “Sorry,” so many times the word lost all meaning. She looked around for Jillybean, only she had gone back to triaging the sick. Jenn was on her own until finally, Stu happened by with two men and a woman, all of them stooped and haggard from years bearing the chains and weights that many slaves were forced to endure to keep them from running. They had been sick just like all the rest and yet there was a stringy toughness to them, an endurance that ran deeper than most. They were eager to work as free people and couldn’t have cared less that Jillybean was crazy. They loved her already.

  “Stu. Thank God. I can’t get this. Can you help me?” Other than reading signs, Stu had always been better at everything. She held up the little catheter needle combo.

  He frowned and didn’t take it. “I’d say ask Jillybean but she isn’t exactly herself at the moment, if you know what I mean.”

  Not three minutes before he had seen her coming down from one of the shelves arguing with empty air. There had been much hissing of angry whispers, but when he had asked her what was wrong she, or rather Sadie had smiled a lie behind her mask and said, “Nothing. Now go do your wooden Indian routine somewhere else.”

  “At least it’s not Eve,” Jenn said. There would have been gunshots, fire and screams by then if Eve had been around.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what the problem is,” he suggested, hunkering down on the other side of the man. She explained the rolling squiggly vein situation and even described it using an earthworm analogy. “Then treat it like one,” he said. “If you were going to stick a worm with a needle you’d want to hold that sucker down, right?”

  He pressed down on either side of the vein, stretching the man’s flesh tight across it. Quickly she jabbed the needle inside the vein, fed the catheter up it, released the belt, connected the tubing and lashed it down with tape.

  “That was pretty good,” he said, giving her his highest praise. He left to hunt down more slaves—there were dozens missing and he was sure that some people were hiding their slaves. Some were unwilling to give them up because of sheer laziness, while others were afraid to free them, certain that their cruelties would come back to haunt them in the form of revenge on the part of the slaves.

  Jenn couldn’t spare a second of thought for the slaves just then. She was up to her neck in patients. The aide station was filling up fast as rumors of a “treatment” spread. With Jillybean out looking for the people who were in desperate need of attention, Jenn stuck people on a first come basis. By the time she had done her fiftieth IV, she was something of an expert.

  With only a single candle to light her efforts, she worked like a machine, running the steps over and over on the newly cleansed patients, but as she worked, a question kept stealing into her mind: Where was the boy? Where was that awful, crap-covered boy? She dreaded seeing him drip down the aisle, leaving a wet, brown trail of disease behind him. But he hadn’t yet showed. Why wasn’t he here? He had been alive. Jenn could remember him looking up with one eye that was as brown as everything else. Even the whites were the awful color—but he’d been alive.

  She searched the line that had formed. It was a sorry, sagging line. Few people stood. Most sat, their bleary eyes unfocused, while some were curled in little balls, shivering on the cold floor. It was sad, and yet it could have been worse since there was no one who seemed as bad off as that boy had been. None of the people in the line looked like they were on the verge of dying.

  Jenn was afraid to ask about the boy when Jillybean returned, leading a string of invalids. It was really Jillybean again. She had the same brittle, restless energy.

  “You’re going to need an assistant or two. We can’t let the IV’s run that low.” All of Jenn’s earlier patients had empty IV bags and now blood was beginning to flow back up the clear tubes. Jenn freaked at the sight, thinking she was killing them.

  Jillybean was very casual about ripping away the old bag from the end of the tubing and reattaching the new one. “Remember, the bag has to be above the level of the heart. If people lie down, at least put the bag on their chests. And don’t run them full bore. A steady drip is fine but I don’t want to run out before morning. I’m going to be sending Mike and Stu over to a hospital off the American River.” She sighed, breathing out a plume of exhaustion. “I’m going to have to go with them. We need so much.”

  That meant that Jenn would be alone to care for hundreds of people. What if there was a riot? What if the Corsairs came back? What
if everyone died and it was all her fault?

  “It’ll be okay,” Jillybean said, seeing her fear. “You’ll have the stripper twins and some of the other ex-slaves to help you. Now, keep doing what you’re doing. Just take a break every ten minutes and check each bag.”

  She started to walk away and Jenn blurted, “Where’s that boy?” She didn’t have to say which boy. Jillybean stopped, her shoulders frozen in a hunch.

  Without turning around, she answered, “He died.”

  “How?”

  Jillybean spun, and for a second, her mind was overcome by anger. Jenn could see Eve trying to get out. With a force of will, the girl mastered herself. “He died like a hero so that his people could live and so did many others.”

  Jenn’s mouth fell open. “How many others?”

  “Too many. Jenn,” she whispered. “They never really stood a chance. They were so far gone that maybe, maybe IV therapy might have brought them back, but it would have taken days and days of treatment and between them they would’ve drained our entire supply. There wouldn’t have been anything left for anyone else. So, I had to make a terrible choice. Do I save the many or the few?”

  Jillybean had begun speaking faster and faster, hissing out the words, her face growing red. “I-I decided to save the many, only now I don’t know if that was the right thing. Was it?” Put on the spot like this, Jenn had no idea. She only knew that it was hard to call straight-up murder “the right thing”, but that was no answer, or at least it wasn’t an answer that would do at the moment. When she failed to answer, Jillybean raised her voice, “Which was it? Tell me! Am I being the bad guy or the good guy? Because I really have to know.”

  “You’re the good guy,” Jenn blurted out with faked, cheerful reassurance. “I never doubted it. I was…I was just worried about you.”