GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  “I will explain everything once we are away,” she told him, turning from the fire and striding back towards the warehouse.

  “You mean you’ll explain once it’s too late, don’t you?” He said this with his voice raised almost, but not quite, yelling. Stu so rarely raised his voice that it stopped her when probably nothing else would have.

  She grew quiet and still, utterly unruffled in the way only she could get. It was in these elusive moments that Stu thought no one ever seemed more fit to be queen than she. “It’s already too late,” she whispered.

  This sounded so ominous that whatever he might have said next was struck from his slack mouth. Before he could recover, she turned and marched on. He jogged to catch up, falling in silent step with her.

  His mind kept spinning, very much akin to a broken record. The words: it’s already too late ran in a useless loop over and over again.

  In stark contrast, she was deep within herself, running down the possibilities contained within the dwindling choices left to her. Of course, each choice contained sub-choices and each of these held even more, so that the permutations of possibilities ran into the hundreds. Most were dead ends, literal dead ends in truth, as their only logical conclusions would lead to the death of her people.

  She was still hunting through the immense number of permutations for one that would end in some form of victory over the Corsairs when they made it back to the barge where people were milling about.

  Immediately, she began issuing orders in a long, continuous string. And although she might have been described as a whirlwind of activity before, it was nothing compared to the frenzied mania that gripped her now.

  Every able and even slightly able hand was called upon, organized into teams and driven to the breaking point. Twenty of the cargo containers were emptied completely, cleaned until they were as dirt free as a ballroom floor, jacked up and then trundled out on heavy duty steel dollies.

  As the only confirmed mariner in the entire group, Mike was put in charge of getting the containers on board the barge. The ones Jillybean had chosen were twenty feet long, seven feet wide and weighed five thousand pounds apiece, and since there were so many of them, they had to be set on the deck perfectly.

  Using field glasses, Jenn watched him work from the roof of the warehouse three hundred yards away. Having been up all night, she should have been resting instead of staring at the boy who was doing a man’s job.

  That was how she looked at him and in no way did she think the term “boy” disparaging. How could she not think of him in such a way? He was almost always with Stu who was very manly with his leathery skin and his hard stare. Compared to Stu, Mike had a childlike temperament and was as cheerful as Stu was grim.

  She was sure he thought the same of her. Compared to Jillybean, Jenn was practically a baby. Other than her name and her style of dress, Jillybean was a complete adult. She was an accomplished surgeon, a scientist and now a queen. Jenn was just Jenn; she was only fifteen and hoped to remain, at least mentally, always something of a girl.

  Unlike real adults, who seemed to just exist more than actually live, as a girl she got to discover life and the world as if it had been invented just for her. In particular, she got to discover love. And her love for Mike had been a slow burn with many stops and starts, and with a hundred distractions in the form of death and zombies and desperate battles.

  But it persisted steadily and was the reason why she sighed with dramatic sweeping breaths every time she stole away from the few remaining patients in the warehouse to come up and spy on Mike.

  He and thirty others were gathered around one of the containers working with handspikes, shovels and metal pipes to push the heavy box right up against the edge of the barge.

  The rest of the people were going back and forth in long lines emptying the warehouse of food, ammunition, weapons, water, medical supplies and everything else that wasn’t nailed down. They were like ants, trudging without pause. They were tired and pasty in the white light.

  They made Jenn sad and once more, she shifted her gaze to Mike. He was golden from thousands of days spent on the deck of one boat or another and when he got the container set perfectly, his white teeth flashed. Jenn smiled along, until something caught her eye that killed the smile entirely. It was the smoke from the fire.

  Just as Jillybean had foreseen, Jenn took one look at the burning building and the shifting smoke and felt a tremor go through her. Did it have meaning? she asked herself. “Not everything does.” Still the juxtaposition of Mike’s beaming smile with the black smoke heading their way dampened her spirit and she was just about to head back down, when Shaina came through the stairwell door.

  Shaina stood, swaying gently, almost drunkenly, holding to the knob, as if her rickety body was uncertain whether it would keep her up. When she decided she wasn’t going to faint or fall, she squinted around in the bright light until she saw Jenn.

  “I hate to bother you, but we was gonna get Miss Rebecca a shower but she doesn’t wake up no matter what. She ain’t dead at all, but I think it’s a coma that’s got her, but I’m not the expert like you and the Queen.”

  Jenn wasn’t an expert either, not even close to one, and wished no one had wasted time coming to look for her. She rushed past Shaina, nearly knocking the frail woman over with the wind of her urgent passing, and was down the zigzagging stairs in seconds.

  Miss Rebecca was dreadfully pale, while at the same time a grey pall seemed to hang over her. Jenn looked around and saw the line of marching people across the warehouse and picked out the fittest of them. “James!” she yelled, her voice booming in an echo. “Get the Queen!”

  He ran off at the double, while Jenn knelt down next to the woman. At first it was simply because people were looking and she wanted to appear as if she were actually doing something. Then she realized that Jillybean would have expectations of her.

  At the least, she would expect Jenn to take her pulse. She tried to find Miss Rebecca’s radial pulse at the wrist but simply could not get a feel for it. The now familiar thrum would come and go, ghost-like. Jenn was forced to bend over the woman’s torso and put her head to her chest to hear the heartbeat, which was uncommonly slow and strangely jerky in its rhythm. Her breathing was slow as well.

  While she was bent over her, Jenn noticed a stale smell and upon further examination saw that she had not just wet herself, she had drenched herself.

  Jillybean came hurrying up just then, accompanied as always by Stu. Just as Jenn had guessed, Jillybean wore the exact look of expectation she had imagined. Jenn told her of her findings, which cast a cloud over Jillybean’s face.

  “It sounds like she’s suffering from hypokalemia. It’s a condition caused by a deficiency of potassium. Normally, it’s treatable but now, here, I don’t know. But what if it’s something else?” She walked away suddenly, her hands forming a steeple beneath her chin as she paced and thought.

  “What else could it be?” Jenn asked.

  This stopped Jillybean. “Was that a question or a statement?” Jenn blinked in confusion and Jillybean answered herself: “If it’s a question, the answer is it could be a hundred things and she’ll die before we figure it out. But if it’s a statement, a very self-assured statement I might add, then we get to treating her.”

  She paused, and Jenn wondered, Is she putting this on me? “Is the treatment hard?”

  “It’s actually simple. We put a nasogastric tube in and force-feed her a mash of potatoes.”

  Although she didn’t understand most of that, potatoes sounded like simple medicine and Jenn liked simple when she could get it. “Let’s do that.”

  “And if you’re wrong?” Jillybean asked, stepping close, her eyes boring into Jenn’s. “You’re making a life and death decision here.” This undid Jenn, who now wanted to take back her answer. In fact, she didn’t want to answer one way or another and this disappointed Jillybean. “On one hand, what we do may kill her and it’ll be on our heads. O
n the other, doing nothing will definitely kill her.”

  “Then, I guess, we do something?” Jenn replied, wishing this was all on someone else.

  Jillybean immediately grinned, clapped her hands and began issuing orders. She sent Stu to get the potatoes and Jenn to get her med bag. They left together, but despite the urgency, Stu stopped her and pointed at the smoke from the fire Jillybean had set.

  “What do you think about that?” he asked, his face kept carefully neutral.

  It was the last question Jenn had expected from him. Her head was already spinning, she turned and saw the smoke was now so close that it hung over the river…over Mike, who was standing on one of the containers, gold glinting in his blond hair as he gave directions to his team. The juxtaposition she had noted before was so much more obvious that her arms broke out in goosebumps.

  “What do you see?” Stu asked, taking her arm in a hard grip, bending over her, his dark eyes drilled into her own, searching for his own answer.

  She pulled away, her stomach thrilling in fear. “I don’t see anything. Nothing, okay?”

  “It’s not okay. Tell me what you saw, damn it!”

  He had turned savage and the grip on her arm was intense. She yanked her arm away. “Danger, okay? It’s almost on us. Anyone can see that. But before I saw…I saw…” She trailed off remembering the cloud of crows. It had been a storm of crows. But this was different. This was danger and light, so close to each other that they were now almost interlocking. She didn’t really know what it meant.

  “I’ll tell you what it means,” Stu said, his anger gone, replaced by the certainty of death. “It means that Jillybean wants us to fight the Corsairs. She told me that was her plan. And we can’t do that, Jenn. We’ll never win. It’ll be suicide.”

  The crows of her imagination roared through her head and she nodded.

  “You have to stop her. You have to change her mind. I tried and you know Mike doesn’t stand a chance. It has to be you.”

  Chapter 32

  Ten minutes later, Stu had to give Jenn a push to get her to go back into the warehouse. He didn’t want them entering at the same time and it made sense that she went first since the med-bag had been in the Saber, while the potatoes, sad little things with gnarly reaching roots, were buried in the hardest to access container.

  “Here you go,” she said to Jillybean as she hurried up.

  Jillybean glanced up and, within a second, she remarked, “He talked to you, didn’t he?”

  The two were friends but the chill that came down between them was like a curtain. “Yes.” She hoped the simple answer would suffice, however Jillybean looked up from the bag with raised eyebrows which for her was equal to a direct question. “He told me to look for signs but I already saw one and it was bad.”

  Jillybean smiled and gave the smallest laugh before reaching into her med-bag. “And did this sign show you what would happen if I don’t act?”

  “No, but I don’t think they work that way,” Jenn admitted. She really didn’t know how the signs acted and she wasn’t even sure what she had seen or how any of it connected.

  “That’s the nice thing about science,” Jillybean remarked, turning casually analytical the second she found a nasogastric tube. “Everything is very much cut and dried. Take Miss Rebecca for instance. She can’t hold down anything which means she has a marked electrolyte imbalance which was only exacerbated by the IV. Every liter that went through her drew out more and more potassium which is vital to maintain a regular heartbeat.”

  She paused as she hefted Rebecca up into a sitting position with her back against one of the racks. She then slipped the tube up the woman’s right nostril. To Jenn’s amazement, Jillybean kept feeding more of the tube up and up and up until Jenn thought it would come sprouting out of the top of her head. As Jillybean was pushing the tube into Miss Rebecca’s nose, she listened with a stethoscope first at her lungs and then at her stomach. “30cc syringe,” she said, snapping her fingers and holding her hand out.

  Jenn dug one out and handed it to Jillybean, who sent a bolus of air through the tube. She seemed satisfied and handed the stethoscope to Jenn, saying, “Fill the syringe and then push it through. You’ll hear a whoosh in her stomach.”

  “Her stomach? That looked like it went into her brain.”

  Jillybean laughed easily. “No. Have you ever snorted a good hunk of snot into your brain? No, of course not. The tube followed the nasal passage, which connects to the back of the throat. It’s right there where we might have problems, especially in an unconscious person. If you’re not careful, the tube will go down into the lungs.”

  She had Jenn listen to the sound of the whoosh again. “If you don’t hear that, it means you’re in the lungs and you have to start over. Now where is Stu?”

  Their earlier conversation seemed to have been completely forgotten and when Stu arrived a minute later with a steel pot of mushed potatoes, he didn’t allude to it either. He set the pot down and stared hard at the two women, looking for some clue in their faces.

  “That’s not quite the right consistency,” Jillybean said, dipping a finger into the pot. “Make it as soft as possible. Put some muscle into it.” He had a potato masher with him and presently he was mashing as hard as he could, looking as though he was taking his frustrations out on the potatoes.

  The only sounds were his grunts, some of which sounded like curses. Jillybean said nothing for a few minutes. She remained sitting placidly next to Rebecca while the tension built up. Finally, she said, “Now add water and keep mushing. Miss Rebecca will thank you for your efforts.”

  Not if I save her in time to be killed by the Corsairs, Stu thought to himself as he savagely went at the potatoes.

  It wasn’t long before the consistency met Jillybean’s approval. “We’ll give her sixteen ounces now and then another eight ounces in a half an hour and go from there.” She showed Jenn how to use the feeding tube and once half of the potato slop was down, she and Stu left in an icy silence.

  Jenn fed the goop down into Rebecca and then waited for some miracle. There was nothing flashy about the potato mixture but somehow, her heart arrhythmia slowly corrected itself. It took so long that Jenn fell asleep after giving her the second of the two doses.

  A crick in her neck woke her, and in the filtered daylight finding its way into the warehouse, she saw Miss Rebecca gazing at her. “Hi,” Jenn said, sitting up and massaging her neck. The pot of potatoes was nearly gone, meaning Jillybean had come by occasionally to feed the woman her gruel.

  “The Queen says she’s taking all of us invalids,” Miss Rebecca murmured, jutting her chin toward the others. There were only ten of them left, the sickest ten. Jenn supposed invalids meant that they were the sickest.

  “Good,” she answered, with forced conviction and an equally forced smile.

  Miss Rebecca also smiled and it almost seemed her jaw creaked as if she hadn’t worked her smile muscles in years. “It is good. It is very good. Everyone is glad to be quit of this place.”

  “There’s danger ahead,” Jenn said, watching her closely.

  The smile widened, showing off small gaps in her teeth. “There’s danger all around us. It’s why we never left this place even though year after year it got worse and worse. No, we aren’t gonna be scared off now that the Queen has put us in motion. She got us over our, uh what’s the word? Inertia? And now that she’s got us inertialized or energized or what not, we aren’t gonna be scared off by no danger, big or small.”

  This was the presiding feeling of everyone Jenn ran into. The ten invalids—her new word of the day—were eager to get on board the barge, more afraid to be left behind than of any future danger. The others, exhausted from sickness and their day-long labors, were already claiming spots in the containers.

  Jenn was surprised to see that there were tables inside of the containers. “To increase surface area,” Mike explained. “Everyone gets three feet of room, width-wise. Without the tables, that
comes out to only six people per container, but with the tables we can double that to twelve. Light people sleep on top, heavy people on the bottom.”

  “That’s pretty smart.”

  The wind cutting around the edges of the containers made a soft incessant flurry of her hair and he had to resist the urge to touch it. He stared for a few moments before he remembered he was in the middle of a conversation. Quite unnecessarily he said, “It was Jillybean’s idea. I said they’d never fit with all their stuff and she said ‘get some tables,’ as if there were tables just sitting all over the place.”

  He looked like he was ready to go on for a while. Quickly, she asked, “Has Stu talked to you about what Jillybean has planned for us?”

  The rosy-cheeked smile he’d worn since seeing her dimmed. “Yeah. He tried to be all sneaky about it, but Jillybean caught him. She pretended not to be mad and I gotta say, pretending may be her worst thing. She didn’t yell or anything, but boy you could see the steam coming out of her ears.”

  “So? What do you think? It’s crazy to go right?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not that crazy. I mean feel this.” He knocked the nearest container with his knuckles. “This barge isn’t exactly made of cardboard. We might be okay unless they try to board us. Then, yeah, we’re screwed.”

  His casual attitude was astonishing to her. “Did Stu tell you about the sign I saw?” It would’ve been difficult for him to do so since she hadn’t gone into even the slightest of descriptions. With the barge swarming with people loading box after box, she dragged him further down the long pier, explaining what she had seen in a low whisper.

  Mike apportioned complete respect in certain fields to each of his friends: Jillybean owned everything to do with intelligence, Stu was gritty determination and steel toughness, while Jenn was the final word in the field of visions and the supernatural.