GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  Their luck was even greater considering that a third of them were sick and couldn’t have run to save their lives.

  It wasn’t an easy trek back to the Saber. Each of the carts weighed close to five hundred pounds and this weight had to be pushed up the plywood ramps every hundred yards or so. They were all growing tired and cross with the constant up and down, when from the top of a green Lexus, Mike saw his beloved Saber floating only five blocks away.

  They were in a residential neighborhood with lots of barren trees and ugly winter-brown shrubbery for cover. “She’s right there,” he said, pointing. Everyone looked except for two of the Corsairs, who chose that moment to make a break for freedom. They’d been planning it all day but before that very second, Stu had been steadily watching them with flinty eyes. Now he was eagerly looking across the intervening five blocks between him and their ride.

  They were halfway down the side street before Jillybean even noticed they weren’t craning their necks along with everyone else. She gave a shout and Mike was after them in a flash. Stu was on the wrong side of a large, dented van and by the time he got around it he was trailing badly.

  Mike was young and fast, while the Corsairs were both in their late thirties. He hissed for them to stop, but they weren’t afraid of being shot since gunfire would necessarily bring the dead. They kept on running, though after only a block the one in back was going at a fast waddle and puffing badly. He had been a smoker his entire life and his lung capacity was that of a child.

  Mike planned on throwing down the nearest Corsair and going on to the next, only just as he caught up to the first, the man dodged to the side, throwing himself across the hood of a car and rolling to the other side. Mike’s momentum was too great and he shot past, stumbled, then righted himself. He jumped onto the hood of the next car and leapt into the street, landing on the Corsair who had been running nearly blind.

  The Corsair’s legs might have been made of rubber and his lungs like tiny balloons, but his tattooed arms were very thick and strong. In a second, Mike was pulled from the man’s back, twisted around and slammed face first onto the cracked pavement. Hands that were rough as slate found his throat and squeezed. He was seeing small black splotches in his vision by the time Stu tackled the Corsair.

  These two were more evenly matched in size and strength, while Stu was the younger and fresher which made the difference as he quickly gained the upper hand. He planted himself on top of the Corsair and rained down rock-hard fists.

  “I give! I give!” the Corsair cried, through bloody lips.

  The moment he did, Stu was up. “Watch him. I’ll get the other one.” He trusted Mike and knew the order would be carried out without question. The words were hardly out of his mouth before Stu was charging after the second Corsair who was now a full hundred yards away and looking small in the distance.

  Stu went after him like he was shot out of a cannon. At twenty-one he was in peak condition and, unlike the sailor, who had spent most of his life onboard a small ship, he was used to running. In eleven seconds the man’s lead was down to a third of a block. Stu was already planning how he was going to bring the man down when movement to his right caught his eye.

  Without thinking he dropped and rolled beneath a Range Rover that still had just enough clearance to fit his thin body. A second later, the lower legs of a zombie rushed past in a grey blur—it had come from behind an overgrown hedge and, luckily for Stu, its focus had been entirely on the Corsair.

  It was even fresher and stronger than Stu and it sprinted along with such horrid eagerness that it ran with its enormous mouth, gaping wide, a hungry moan escaping from it. Sheer terror seized the Corsair when he looked back. Panic took him and he made the mistake of running straight into the next house he came to without any turn or feint, when there were cars all around him that might have slowed the beast. He simply ran inside and slammed the door behind him with an echoing boom that woke half a dozen more zombies, who converged on the house.

  Stu slunk down, slipping to his left, becoming one with the shadows, listening for the sound of the back door opening. If that had been him, he would have cut through the house, sped out the back door, jumped a few fences, made some quick turns and been home free.

  The Corsair did not run out the back. Stu could hear a thrumming from the house, and then crashes and screams that mounted higher and higher. The fool of a Corsair had managed to trap himself.

  Mike came up just then. His Corsair had been turned over to Willis and now, still winded and nervous, he sized up the situation. “What’s the plan? How do we get him out of there?”

  “We don’t,” Stu answered.

  Chapter 27

  “We should do something,” Mike insisted. “I can draw at least half of them off. I’ll get the ones outside to chase me and then…”

  “It’s too late,” Stu said, quietly. There were at least four of the beasts inside the house and there would be no getting them out again, or so he thought. Only just then the Corsair proved him wrong by flinging open a second-floor window and crawling out onto the roof.

  He was twenty feet up with a drop into an overgrown yard as his only option. He should have taken the jump without hesitation. Instead he went to the edge and look down, then scampered fearfully along the roof to another spot and looked down.

  “Why doesn’t he jump?” Mike asked. Stu only grunted.

  Behind the man, the window from which he had exited was being torn apart. The glass went with one swipe of a huge claw, then the zombie tore out the frame and part of the wall before it pushed its enormous head and shoulders through the gap it had made.

  Now Mike understood why the man hadn’t seized his one chance; he had been hoping the beast would get stuck. He hoped in vain. The zombie’s shoulders did get wedged in tightly, for a few seconds, before it gathered itself and heaved in a ferocious display of strength that tore a gaping hole in the wall.

  The hole wasn’t big enough for all the zombies to come through at once and the others attacked various parts of the wall, tearing jagged gaps in it—and still the Corsair didn’t jump. He backed to one end of the peaked roof and made some abortive gestures toward jumping, even going so far as to swing a leg, but went no further even as the first zombie made it out onto the slanted roof.

  The zombie only made it three steps before it fell off the roof, landing with a ground-shaking thud. The fall didn’t kill it, though one of its long arms was bent oddly. It didn’t even notice as it glared hungrily up at the Corsair. There would be no jumping now. He thought that his only hope would be if all the zombies fell and by chance, the first three did, but they didn’t content themselves with waiting.

  They attacked the house beneath the stranded Corsair, tearing down the siding and then the studs beneath until it seemed the entire house was going to fall. With no other option, the terrified man tried to jump from the house to a nearby tree. His hands clasped the ends of spindly branches that could never bear his weight. They bent and snapped and down he went.

  Stu turned away. He didn’t glance at Mike, who hissed, “We might have been able to save him.”

  “He didn’t deserve saving. He was a Corsair.” There didn’t need to be any other discussion as far as Stu was concerned. Mike bristled yet couldn’t come up with a counterargument and only continued to look sullen.

  There was nothing to be said to the others when they got back. They had heard the screams, too.

  Stu rallied the group and set them back to work. Half of them pushed the carts the final five blocks while the rest kept watch for the dead. The Corsair’s violent and unsettlingly loud death had attracted all the zombies for a mile, allowing the little group to make it back to the Saber, where they set up a human chain. Everything was passed from person to person and then up into the boat where it was all neatly stowed away. Finally, the carts themselves were manhandled on board.

  Mike had been in a sour mood throughout the loading operation but softened when Jillybean asked i
f she could pilot the boat. “Of course. Remember what I said about feeling the boat and the wind? Try to think of it as all one thing. Try to feel the, uh…” He could not find the words to describe what he was thinking and could only make feeble hand motions.

  “Are you suggesting that I consider the interplay of converging forces as the actions of a single entity greater than simply boat, wind, and tide?”

  Mike took a second before declaring, “Exactly! That’s what I meant, exactly.”

  Stu rolled his eyes. “Remind me to always be on your team when we play charades,” he said to Jillybean.

  “Everyone ignore him,” Mike said, after Diamond uttered her little laugh. “He’s jealous of a proper captain. Trust me, Jillybean, the Hill People take to water kinda like rocks take to water.”

  Diamond tittered again. Her odd laugh had been missing on the entire trip, but now that they seemed to be safely away, it was back, bubbling up at very odd times. “I like charades,” she said to Stu. “Maybe we can get a game going…tonight.”

  Stu’s mouth came open and his eyes flicked to Jillybean, who already had an eyebrow cocked. “I’m sure I’m going to be busy tonight.”

  “Then maybe…”

  “Watch the boom!” Jillybean barked, letting the breeze haul it around. It looked like it was going to take Diamond’s head off and she squealed as she ducked. “Maybe you should go below,” Jillybean warned. “You might get hurt up here. I’m not the best sailor.”

  Mike hid his smirk and Stu pretended to be inspecting one of the ropes dangling from the mast. She might not be the best, but she had turned the boat against the wind with perfect timing to get that boom to swing like it did. In truth, she was already a good sailor. She had watched Mike handling the Saber all the way down from Grays Harbor.

  She could have piloted the boat from both a theoretical as well as a mathematical point of view, had she wished, and done a creditable job of it, probably better than Stu who was an uneasy and nervous captain at the best of times.

  What she lacked was that “feel” for the boat that Mike talked about. He had intuition that bordered on sorcery. He could feel the wind before it strengthened or died. He could sense the tide turning and could judge its strength from the play of the wheel in his hands and he could feel the speed of the current by the sound of the keel knifing through the water.

  Jillybean feared she would be too stiff, too analytical in her approach to sailing. Mike noticed. He stood behind her and, after a nod toward Stu, he said, “Let’s loosen you up.” He took a rope and looped it around one of the spokes of the wheel, holding it in place. “Drop your arms. Let them dangle.”

  He took hold of her upper body and began to waggle her from side to side. “Just go limp,” he told her when she tried to resist. She couldn’t help laughing as her arms swung. “Okay, now clap hold of the wheel, but gently. Feel the boat as you turn. Feel the rudder bite and the sail strain.”

  The Saber took an easy zigzagging course down river as Jillybean let her mind and all its troubles fall away. She was surprised that she enjoyed sailing as much as she did. It was relaxing on a calm day such as this. Mike was no more relaxed than if she were carrying his baby with glass hands and with the merging of the two rivers fast approaching, he was running out a string of instructions that she followed to the letter.

  It was an easy transition from one river to the other since the Sacramento was a good deal wider. She cut an easy meandering path down river and all the while Mike fretted over the next transition, this one from the river to the slough. They would have to cut sharply down a narrow, manmade canal which was no more than fifty feet across.

  He began hinting that perhaps he should take the wheel for just a minute or so. He even tried “insisting” which made her laugh. “Just guide me and, of course, never used the word ‘insist’ around me in public. It’s not smart.”

  The prospect of her damaging his beloved boat overrode any anger he normally would have shown over the rebuke and, as the slough came up, he began to rapid fire instructions at her very quickly. Although she understood them all, she was inexperienced and failed to coordinate her single sail with the movement of the current and the rudder. She missed her mark.

  Mike would have been able to recover by cutting the angle sharper and tacking inward, but it was a move guided by feel and he couldn’t spit out what that feeling was in time. For a second it looked as though they were going to crash, but to his great relief she swung the wheel in the opposite direction instead of trying to force the turn and they swept easily away. The Saber took a long curve as she gradually turned back upriver.

  “I was too quick with the rudder by about a second and a half,” she said, stating the problem with complete and surprising accuracy for a noob. “I’ll get it on this next…” She had stopped in midsentence and was staring at a bend in the river downstream where a strange rust-colored hunk of metal, a hundred and twenty feet long and thirty-five wide, sat half in the water and half on land, or rather in the land. The back end was partially buried in mud.

  She swung the Saber further downriver and as they came close it turned out to be a barge. Mike’s lip curled at it. Jillybean had the opposite reaction and gazed at it in complete wonderment. “Stu, there is a God!” she cried.

  He nodded, gazing at the hunk and not seeing the face of God in its mottled rust and steel. “Okay, yeah I agree, but are you looking at that barge when you say that or am I missing something?”

  “I’m looking at the barge. Mike, take the wheel! Get us back to the warehouse as fast as you can.”

  She walked away from the wheel and stood at the rail, her mind wholly taken up with the necessities involved with using a flat-bottomed barge with no means of propulsion or steering as a way to transport her two hundred and forty people to San Francisco. Using the Saber to tow the hunk of metal was obvious but also shortsighted.

  A more permanent solution was needed. A mast would have to be constructed and sails spliced together. A rudder or, more than likely, two independent rudders would have to be constructed along with a means to shift them. She would need hundreds of feet of rope for the sails and chains for the anchor.

  “Oh, I’m going to need an anchor,” she whispered, wondering if she should bother working out the boat weight to anchor-size ratio, with the variables of time and wind acting upon…”

  “Jillybean, we’re here,” Stu said, bringing her out of her immersive state.

  She looked around and saw the ugly warehouses and the crumbling industrial buildings, and she smelled the gut-heaving stench of the rotting corpses. “Ah, home,” she said, as a joke. Stu made a face, which was exactly the reaction she was looking for. “Unload everything as quickly as possible, but I want the carts back on board when it’s done.”

  “You okay?” he asked, taking her arm just as she was about to step on the dock. She gave him an excited smile and nodded, her face full of life and her big eyes clear of the insanity that had been haunting her.

  “For now,” she answered honestly. “But I have to check on the patients.” With him still holding her arm, she stepped across to the dock. “I think we might have caught a break,” she said and left him in a state of confusion, a state he’d been in off and on for the last day. Why was she suddenly fixated on a barge? And why had she declared herself queen in the first place? And what were they supposed to do with her hundreds of diseased “subjects?”

  There was no sane answer to any of these questions.

  Mike had heard it all and gave Stu a weary sigh before he roused himself and began ordering the team to unload the boat. They were rested and the work went quickly. The carts were trundled inside and rolled to the back, where a harried and tired-looking Jenn Lockhart was finally allowing herself a break after five hours of nonstop work.

  Her diligence had paid off and the sick were visibly less so and the smell not nearly as bad as it had been. She sat against a wall with her tired legs flung out in front of her, gazing with a vac
ant expression as Jillybean took over changing out IV bags, wearing a broad smile and filling everyone with her infectious spirit.

  The barge and its possibilities had driven Eve and the whispering shadows far from her mind.

  She was a whirlwind of activity and people were swept up in her frenzy. Although she allowed the sicker members of the team to rest, she put the others to work, especially the three remaining Corsairs and the two ex-slave girls who were tired but still healthy enough to hand out clean sheets and to bathe the people who had soiled themselves.

  As she moved from patient to patient, her mind went down the list of things to do and she was just contemplating who she’d detail to assemble the new water pump when her stomach began to growl. It had been hours since she had eaten a bite.

  “Willis!” she bellowed. “Willis Firam, where are you?”

  He made his way, limping for some reason, over to her. He eyed her nervously not yet able to judge his new queen, but knowing she could lash out at any moment. “Yes?”

  “Yes, your Highness,” she corrected and then waited for him to repeat it. When he did, without looking up from the floor, she began issuing orders, “We need water boiled for soup. Enough for everyone. And I’ll need a quick description of our supply situation as it pertains to food.”

  Willis gave her a quick rundown and Jillybean was happily surprised to find out the warehouse was well stocked with food. Three months before, nearly a thousand people had lived there and, although they were never the most industrious group, they still knew enough to amass food for the coming winter. Thanks to Tony Tibbs and his Corsairs, it was no longer stashed in a hundred different locations but instead all centrally located.

  When he had finished filling her in, she sent him off to get the water going. He wasn’t shy about demanding help from those who could stand. The biggest pots were gathered, filled with clean water and set over a dozen fires. Soon he was back, grumbling under his breath. “What kinda soup are you wanting?” he asked.