GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  “I am too,” Jillybean answered, with her own fake smile, pretending not to hear the voices whispering in the deeper darkness: Murderer, killer, murderer, killer, murder…they had been chanting ever since she had removed the fat 30 ml syringe with its aggressively long needle from her bag. She had drawn the plunger all the way back and, with her teeth almost fused together and her faced twisted, she had inserted the needle into the boy’s heart and sent a huge bubble of air into the weakened organ.

  The air embolism didn’t kill him as quickly as she hoped. He gasped and clawed and writhed for a full minute as his heart stuttered around the big bubble. She had cried the entire time.

  Chapter 25

  The night was dreadfully long for everyone, but it was a particular torture for Jillybean. She lacked the supplies to perform proper mercy killings and yet, counting that first boy, there were thirty-two people who clung desperately to life without the least chance of actually lasting out the remainder of the week.

  Even if she had dumped gallons of IV fluids into them, their immune systems were too weak to take on the bacteria eating out their guts. The fluids would just come running out of them again in one form or another.

  Logic told her they were going to die one way or the other and if it had been her lying in a disgusting pool of her own making, wracked by pain, she would want it over with. Still the voices haunted her. They gibbered and screamed and never in her life did she want her pills more. She even went back to the Saber at one point and scrambled around on all fours searching the carpet and the cracks, but she had done too good of a job when she had thrown them away.

  Sadie had come to her rescue but even she hadn’t been strong enough and her presence had slowly dimmed as the shadow-voices increased. Then it was just her, just Jillybean alone. She was afraid that she was an evil, terrible person. And in a way, she was. She had built a mirage out of reality, or was it a reality forged of illusion? She didn’t know. She only knew it wouldn’t last.

  Just like her foul victims, none of this would last the week.

  The only way she had to combat the voices was to throw herself as mindlessly as possible into her work. Thankfully, cholera was highly treatable in most cases. The first thing that had to be done was to remove the source of the contamination which at one point had been the Sacramento River, but once Tony Tibbs and his Corsairs saw what was happening they changed it to a small lake that lay just north of the industrial park. Unfortunately, the lake had an RV Park situated next to it and three years before, an underground waste-water holding tank had begun leaking, contaminating the lake with the same cholera producing germs.

  Jillybean didn’t trust anything that wasn’t filtered or boiled first and everything that had been touched by the contaminated water was scrapped. She devised a working filtering system, as well as a multilevel pipe and chamber pump designed to draw the water out of the river upstream from them and carry it through a chain of linked hoses straight to the warehouse. Of course, she provided a complete in depth list of materials needed and scale drawings. The drawings were, in her opinion, shockingly simplistic, but after watching through Sadie’s mocking eyes as grown adults tried and failed to move two-hundred and twenty pounds of shifting weight, six feet into the air, she felt the step by step was needed.

  To her, moving the water bladder would’ve been as simple as breathing.

  Sticking people with IVs was even more so, and she went at it with a will. By three in the morning Jenn was stumbling and making mistakes. Jillybean sent her off to bed on Mike’s weary arm. Stu refused her order to join them on the Saber. He stayed with her throughout the night as she worked, placing IVs, changing out bags and cleaning the patients.

  The ex-slaves had disappeared, one at a time, hours before and soon it was just the two of them—it was the least romantic time the two had ever spent together and that was okay. Jillybean didn’t need romance just then, she needed someone she could count on, someone who was more than just a handsome face.

  She also needed mental help that Stu wasn’t able to give. As the hours went by she spent more time talking to people that weren’t there and, though they were surrounded by a carpet of humanity, no one heard but him. Everyone else was fast asleep or gripped by delirium.

  “Tell me something,” he asked her. “Tell me something interesting.”

  Her eyes jiggered for a moment, each vibrating of their own accord as if each was looking at different parts of him, though there was no telling if she saw him at all, at least not until she asked, “What I would find interesting or what you would find interesting?”

  “Maybe a little of both.” He hoped she wouldn’t start in about math, he dreaded it, knowing he would never be able to keep up and that his agonizing boredom with the subject would show plain as day. Much to his delight, she did not. She talked about the stars and their comparative sizes and masses, which it turned out were two different things. She also spoke about their chemical make-up and their age. According to her, our sun was in the middle of its long life at four and half billion years.

  He had trouble wrapping his head around the immense number, and nor could he fully comprehend the reality of its size, but he did feel small in comparison. Small and somewhat pointless. If everything she said was true, he was only a spec of nothing on a tiny planet flung out on the edge of some random galaxy.

  “So where does God fit into all of this?” Stu wasn’t into signs and omens, and he didn’t think carrying a cross around his neck and pointing it at things that scared him did a lick of good, but he had always believed in God. He didn’t expect her to, however. He expected her to smile that condescending smile of hers, the one where he could tell she was thinking: How can I put this so a complete idiot would understand?

  Unless Eve was running the show she never meant it as a mean smile, still it couldn’t be read any other way.

  “Oh, I believe in God; wholeheartedly. The universe cannot logically exist without God. All of this,” she waved her arms around at the withered near corpse-like people and the dark, stinking warehouse, “did not simply spring into existence. It is undeniable, something or someone created it. And yes, I know what you are going to say.”

  “I was going to say something?” Stu asked. “That doesn’t sound like me.”

  She found this far funnier than he had expected, and collapsed in weak laughter, her back to a pallet. She carried on, holding her belly with one hand and covering her mouth with the other trying to contain her mirth. “No, I don’t suppose you were going to say anything,” she said, when the last giggle drained out of her. “But you were likely thinking it: by my same logic, how do I explain the existence of God? Who made him? How does he logically exist if matter can’t pop out of thin air?”

  Stu didn’t even bother opening his mouth. If philosophers and scientists, all of whom had made their living simply by thinking, couldn’t agree on an answer to the question, then Stu, with his sixth-grade education, thought it was smart not to spout off about things he had no business spouting off about.

  He did shrug, however, a clear indication for her to answer her own question, which he had little doubt she could.

  “If you consider our lives and this universe to be somewhat like a book—a story book, if you want. It would be a giant book filled with every detail about everything great and small. It would be a hard cover book with a thick binding and its pages would be perfect and the lines within them precisely laid out. And the words would be impeccably drawn and spelled properly because within the book there are exact rules and logical laws governing every aspect of the writing.”

  She paused to make sure he was keeping up with the simple analogy and he nodded for her to go on, already caught up in it. “A proper book couldn’t be written without exact rules and logical laws, otherwise everything would be gibberish. But nothing is ever gibberish in this book. We have explored this book cover to cover and always find the laws never vary, or if they do, it’s because of something we hadn’t thought
of before. But the one thing we just can’t seem to wrap our heads around is where did the book came from to begin with?”

  “Who made God?” Stu asked.

  “Yes. We ask the question from within the book. We form the question thinking the rules and laws within the book bind everything outside of it as well. But look at any book in a library. Isn’t the author greater than the book? He chooses the language, the sentence structure, the punctuality and all the rest. You might say he is bound by his language, but he really isn’t. Supposedly, Shakespeare made up words all the time. The point being, God is not governed by the same laws of physics that govern us. In fact, by definition, God is omnipotent and is not bound by any law, thus it is perfectly plausible that either he has always existed or he created himself.”

  “I actually followed that,” Stu told her. “You dumbed it down perfectly.”

  She laughed again, tiredly and then yawned. “I think I can sleep now. Thanks.” He walked her to the Saber, wishing he could hold her hand, but it was too cold and hers were stuffed down into the pockets of her coat. “You coming?” she asked when he made no move to step on board.

  Had this been any other night he would have said yes and perhaps tried to kiss her. He’d been wanting to kiss her for some time now, but one thing after another kept getting in the way. Now, she was dead tired and still a little yellow in the eyes from her liver disease. It wasn’t the right time.

  “No. Someone should watch over the patients.”

  “Yeah.” They stared at each other until a strong cold breeze killed even that. “Goodnight. Wake me by nine. Promise.”

  He promised but didn’t wake her until it was after ten and the sun was a third of the way into the sky and he had hooked up the last of the IV bags. He turned them all down to slow drips to keep them from backing up with blood. The forty-one ex-slaves were the first ones awake. The stronger of them were tending to the needs of the weaker ones, checking their IV bags and changing their clothes if they’d been incontinent.

  The other people were sprawled across the freezing cold floor; if they weren’t part of a family, they were usually left on their own. The ex-slaves wouldn’t even look at them and the stronger people generally acted like the weaker ones weren’t even there as they went to fix themselves breakfast.

  When Stu told her this, Jillybean leapt up in such a fury that Eve nearly got out of her mental cage. She was so close to the surface that she spoke through Jillybean’s lips, “Kill one of them. It’ll teach the others respect. I’ll do it if you can’t. Please, let me.”

  “Shut up!” Jillybean hissed, pulling a knife from her pocket.

  “Hey, cool your jets,” Stu said. “Remember the stars. Remember what you told me about the stars?”

  Her eyes came back into focus and she was able to smile. “I thought the book was far more poetic.”

  They were still looking into each other’s eyes when Mike asked, “Stu, you read a book?” He sounded shocked, as if such a thing as reading was beyond a man like Stu.

  This broke the connection. “He read part of it,” she answered with a dimple showing in one cheek. “Perhaps the best part of it. Either way, we should get to work. Stu, go get your people in hand. Mike get me that same crew you were with last night. I know Willis and his friends will bitch, but I don’t care. I need every able body. Jenn, come do something about my hair.”

  It had been a quiet morning with only the far-off sounds of the dead breaking the calm—it suddenly became even quieter. As long as any of them had known Jillybean, she had never given a single thought to her wild hair. Her cheeks went a little pink as she cast a furtive eye towards Stu. “I just…it’s just, I’m queen now. Shouldn’t I look presentable? Respectable?”

  Jenn tried to imagine her with long straight hair. The image wouldn’t come. She wouldn’t be Jillybean. She wouldn’t have that slightly mad, slightly innocent look about her. She might even look like a full adult.

  “I don’t know if I would change it, if I were you,” Jenn said. Flanked behind her, on either side, Mike and Stu were staring hard at Jillybean as well; both were nodding in agreement. “It’s you. It’s who you are. You know, sorta wild. It keeps people guessing what you’re about.”

  “Oh,” she said, with a final glance towards Stu. “If everyone’s sure. I’m going to take a shower. Thanks for setting that up.” This she said to Mike, who had rigged a hose from the last of the heavy bladders. It was a cold shower and a light one but she needed it.

  As always, she dressed in black, though this time she added knee-high black velvet boots and a three-quarter leather coat. She made sure she had her necessities tucked into her wild mane, or on her belt, and then sauntered into the warehouse—the pettiest of petty kingdoms—turning heads when she did. The coat and the boots and the pure darkness of her outfit made her white skin stand out even more and there was something both dangerous and regal about her.

  When she asked for every able person, she really meant anyone who could stay on their feet for an hour straight. This did not amount to many people. Out of two hundred and forty-one people, there were only sixteen she considered able.

  Jillybean took fifteen of them, leaving only Jenn to manage the overflowing aide station by herself. It seemed like a huge task but there were at least a dozen people who could be rated semi-abled who could work for a few minutes at a time.

  “And besides, you just have to keep them alive,” Jillybean assured her. “You’re the only one I trust to handle the job.”

  Just like Mike was the only one she trusted to pilot the Saber up the Sacramento and then through the tricky waters where the smaller, faster American River joined it. And Stu was the only one she trusted to truly guard her back. He was the toughest man she’d known in years and in a way, it worried her. Tough men who were also good men were extremely rare mainly because they had the awful habit of dying young.

  Jillybean wanted to make only four stops that morning, one at Mercy Hospital, which was a mile from the American River. The next stop would be at a touristy area where four hotels sat glaring severely across from one another, and the last two would be any sort of sporting goods store or plumbing outfit between the two.

  They brought their own large-wheeled carts from the warehouse, each placed just so on the deck of the Saber under Mike’s unhappy supervision—he would have preferred nothing heavier than a dandelion head on board, and he fretted over every scrape.

  There was no dock or pier along that stretch of the river and the deeper part of the channel was so narrow that they could get no closer to the bank than fifty feet. Everyone looked at the water in apprehension and then at Mike. “What are you waiting for?” Willis asked. “Just run it up there. A little sand won’t hurt it none.” Diamond and Johanna heartily agreed with him as did his two friends. Everyone else fell into the category of not wanting to get wet but not wanting to say so and thus kept quiet.

  “We can’t risk the boat,” Jillybean stated. “We anchor here.” The four Corsairs went in first and the carts were handed down to them. The others went in, one at a time, each making a face of dire pain as the chest-deep cold water shocked them. When Jillybean went to climb over the bow, Stu stopped her and had her climb onto his shoulders which she did, gratefully. Diamond and Johanna both begged for rides in the same manner and had a few of the men tussle over the chance.

  It was a quiet tussle, however. They were out in the open, and although most of them were armed, they did not want to do anything that might attract the dead. Diamond and Johanna were particularly frightened of the beasts and clung miserably to each other, their eyes twitching at every sound. There were many terrible aspects to being a Corsair slave girl, but facing the dead had never been one.

  Their fears came to nothing during the hike to the hospital, which was uneventful thanks to Stu who guided them through a debris field of what had been a city. Although most of the buildings were structurally intact, the streets were a fantastic mess. Nine major highways fed i
nto the city and in the final days of the apocalypse millions of people had flung themselves here and there, going every which way.

  They had been like stampeding herds of buffalo constantly rushing away from danger or even the whisper of danger. People were desperate to get out of the city; people were desperate to get in; some thought there was safety to the north and some to the south—it had been all chaos. Safety had been an illusion because there was no safety in any direction. Death was everywhere, gasoline on the other hand, had been nowhere and it hadn’t taken long to turn the city into one massive traffic jam.

  Old dusty cars lined the streets, sitting so close to each other that in many cases they were irreversibly locked, bumper to bumper. Even the side streets were clogged. They hadn’t gone four blocks before they found their way utterly blocked. Moving slowly and cautiously, Stu crept up onto a Ryder truck, and gazed down both directions and saw what amounted to a metal and glass canyon.

  “Getting to the hospital won’t be a problem,” he said, when he’d slid back down. “We’ll be able to lift the carts over the cars. Once they’re full, we won’t be able to.”

  Everyone looked at Jillybean, most of them thinking they were done with the trip and most of them happy to be. They were cold and wet, and although they couldn’t see the dead, they could hear them just fine and the sound was enough to raise the hair on their arms.

  They looked at Jillybean, but she was looking past them and their little problems. Blocked streets were nothing; they were a nuisance compared to the obvious danger around them. Didn’t they see they were surrounded? Didn’t they see how every one of the buildings in this city was teeming with shadows and each seemed to hide some sort of laughing, mocking beast. They had been getting louder and she was sure everyone could hear the taunts of Murderer! Baby Killer! Bow to the Queen of blood!

  “What do you think, Jillybean?” Stu asked. “Should we try further up river?”