GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  Outwardly, Jillybean looked as though she were giving the people time to perhaps get over the surprise of her self-incriminating testimony, when in truth she only let the whispering go on because she was wrestling with Eve, trying to keep her bottled up.

  When she could, she admitted to even more insanity, trying to make a joke of it. “It is a fact that my people secretly call me the ‘Mad Queen,’ and yet they have abandoned their home to follow me here aboard the Floating Fortress. They will fight the Corsairs for me and…”

  “Maybe they are all mad,” Gerry interrupted with a forced laugh, sounding a little mad himself.

  “I may be mad, but they are not,” she shot back. “And what of my madness? At least I foresaw the danger coming and I have a plan to deal with it. What will you do when two hundred ships and three thousand men come streaming under the bridge?”

  Everyone turned to see Gerry struggling with the question. His mind was spinning as badly as Jillybean’s. Unlike her, he had been sleeping peacefully five minutes before and was completely unprepared for a midnight challenge to his authority. He had no idea what he would do if the Corsairs came back.

  It had been a terrible shock when they had showed up twelve days before, and the ensuing battle had left him and the Islanders cowering. For three days they spied through telescopes at the twenty-four Corsair boats sitting in Pelican Harbor. On the fourth morning after the battle, they were gone without a trace.

  The Islanders were still debating things when, on the eighth day, fire poured down the hill, sweeping everything before it and blotting out the sky under the blackest cloud anyone had ever seen. Gerry had adopted a wait and see approach, that felt more like hiding to everyone.

  Finally, when the fires went north and no more had been seen of the Corsairs, the Islanders had summoned their courage and gone out on the Puffer to see what had happened to the Hill People. They were shocked to see most of them were still alive and still holed up in their apartment complex. They had named Jillybean as both their savior and their personal Satan.

  This should have been enough for the Islanders to turn on her right at that moment and yet they hadn’t. They were looking at Gerry for answers. He glared angrily into the beam from Jillybean’s flashlight. “Why do we listen to a stranger? A stranger who comes at night like a thief. Like these thieves.” He pointed at Mike, Stu and Jenn. “They are all criminals. You heard the stories from Donna and Orlando, just like me.”

  “They also heard my story,” William said. His story, which he had told a hundred times in the last three days, making him somewhat of a celebrity on the island, painted a much different picture of the four, one filled with heroism, loyalty and an amazing display of surgical knowledge.

  “They are still criminals,” Gerry countered, “while I have done nothing.”

  “It’s the fact that you have done nothing that should be concerning to these people,” Jillybean replied.

  Use the bomb on him, Eve whispered suddenly. At least, Jillybean hoped it was a whisper. Eve was becoming more than a shadow. Stick it down his pants and tell him to fall in line, or else. We can give them a demonstration. We could blow up the faggy, little Puffer.

  Jillybean could feel a craving for fire and death. She squeezed her eyes shut as Gerry went on, “If you call keeping my people safe, doing nothing then okay then. And we aren’t scared of the Corsairs! We have our walls and they are strong. We could hold off an army.”

  “Yes, if they come in dumb,” Jillybean said. “But they won’t this time. They learned their lesson. While you hide behind your walls, they will devour the Hill People and parade their bodies, draped over their ships. It’ll be your one warning. But they won’t attack. Why?”

  She paused for effect and was rewarded as the far-off moan of a zombie stretched over the dark waters.

  “They won’t need to attack. They have all the time in the world to wait until you starve to death or, more than likely, run out of water.”

  Gerry pointed up at the water tower. “Oh really? We have at least a month of water up there.”

  “That doesn’t look bulletproof to me and it won’t look it to the Corsairs either. They’ll come out of the night when their boats will be just shadows.” She paused again and looked out at the bay where, for all anyone knew, there could be a hundred Corsair boats lurking even then.

  “They’ll come silently up and shoot it full of holes and be gone again before you can do a thing. Then they’ll just sit back and wait until you are dying of thirst. No, they won’t need to attack you, Gerry. You’ll be begging them to surrender in a week.”

  She walked up to him, shining the light on his chest, so that his face was eerily shadowed and his eyes dark with uncertainty. “They’ll make you promises of safety. They’ll tell you lies and you’ll eat ‘em up with a knife and fork because, what choice will you have? You made your choice, didn’t you, Gerry? You decided to hide behind your walls instead of making a stand. You let your ego get in the way of doing the right thing for your people.”

  “I didn’t,” he said, in a choked voice.

  “Then kneel and show true leadership and courage.”

  Even though this strangely beguiling woman had made terrible sense at every turn, Gerry hesitated, afraid that he was being tricked somehow. “What if they never come?”

  Now it was Jillybean’s turn to hesitate. The stress of the moment, as well as the last two weeks, was coming down hard on her, filling her throat and her mind with screams of fear and anger and imagined misery. She had to turn away to hold it all in.

  Jenn saw her anguish and came to her defense. “They will come. I’ve seen it.” She crossed herself before saying, “The vision is one of death, great death. Many, many deaths. One way or the other it will happen. I see these visions and I am frightened right down in the pit of my stomach and yet they are a gift. They give us time to prepare.”

  “Or to run,” someone said.

  “Who was that, Ryan?” Mike asked, squinting at a figure who suddenly slunk behind a taller friend. “It’s okay. I had the same response.” He quickly gave the same reasons for not running as Jillybean had given him. There was a smattering of curses as people began to realize that not only was Mike right, they were left little choice but to fight against very long odds.

  By then Jillybean had mastered herself. “Your choices are very limited,” she said, no longer talking to Gerry, but to the entire group. “You may follow your current leadership, which has served you well enough in time of peace or you may join me and, perhaps survive the coming battle. I make no promises. We are facing the greatest armada since the beginning of the apocalypse. The only thing I ask is that you accept me as your Queen and follow my directions as if they come from God above.”

  This was a huge thing to ask in the dead of night with almost nothing to show as proof. An immediate wire-stiff tension ran through the crowd. They had been scared into believing the Corsairs were coming and had been shown that Gerry wasn’t quite the war-time leader they needed, and all that was terribly worrisome—but now they were being asked to take a knee to a queen.

  Just like the people of Sacramento, most of them still hung on to some small shred of their American identity and Americans didn’t scrape and bow. Stu had expected exactly this and felt a sharp, hot embarrassment for Jillybean.

  “My name is Stuart Currans. I have not pledged myself officially to the Queen. I do so now.” He stepped off the boat and knelt on one knee in front of her. She smiled down at him, beautiful and sexy, more of a pirate queen than some fantasy queen out of a picture book. “Do I need to say something?”

  She laughed, a low sound that grew in joy. If no one else kneeled before her, she knew she would still be satisfied. “I think you should pledge your life and your sacred honor to me.”

  “I do. I pledge my life and sacred honor to you, my Queen.” It felt very much like a marriage proposal the way he said this and she had to stifle a giddiness that wanted to bubble out of her—E
ve was gone, swallowed up by her happiness. She held out her hand and he did the exact right thing, bending his head forward and kissing the back of it.

  He stood and sighed. Their eyes were locked, and she was a little surprised when Jenn knelt and made the same pledge, going so far as to kiss her hand as well.

  Mike, who was always going back and forth with Jillybean, was the slowest. So slow that William pushed his way in front of him and Mike was quick to hold his arm as he knelt and offered his life to the Queen.

  “If it’s worth anything,” he added.

  “Why would I have saved it if I hadn’t thought it worth saving?”

  After William kissed her hand, Mike helped him up and was about to kneel himself when an old friend of his asked, “Before I even think about kneeling and I ain’t said I am, I wanna know what you plan on doin’ that’s gonna be all that diff-er-ent than Gerry.”

  “Before I do, I must send Mike and Jenn off on an errand,” she said. In a quieter voice she told the two, “Get back as fast as you can. Do not wait for sunrise to move the Fortress.”

  She had kept her voice perfectly calm. Her hand on Mike’s arm was another matter. There was great urgency in her grip and in her look. Mike barely waited for Jenn to get her legs beneath her before he heaved the Saber away from the dock, snatched up a westerly breeze in her main and shot her towards the northwest.

  The Islanders watched her go, Gerry with a longing that he couldn’t hide.

  Mike stood proudly at the wheel until the island was out of sight, then he slumped, running a hand along the spokes. He hated the idea of giving her up. It was the right thing to do and getting Gerry’s help made it also the only thing he could do, but he was sure it was something like giving up a child.

  “You still have me,” Jenn said. She knew what had him suddenly sad and a part of her wanted them to give up the Saber as fast as possible. It had been Mike she had seen in that second vision—she had no problem picturing him, his hair golden in the light shining down while hell-dark clouds of smoke came racing to envelope him.

  It could have been Gerry, she thought, suddenly. Oh, let that be Gerry It was a horrible thought, one she couldn’t help and one she didn’t try to help. She loved Mike. Whenever she had a moment to rest or to put aside the many, many cares that felt like they were draped on her shoulders like chains, she would search out Mike’s smiling face—and was always rewarded.

  He smiled at that moment and some of the weight on her was blown away, but not all of it.

  The wind blowing her hair around whispered this to her that it wouldn’t be Gerry facing whatever hell was coming. If there was ever a sign, the wind racing them northeast was it, and she had no doubt that when they tied the boat to the hundred-ton barge, the wind would turn around again and shoot them right down again.

  Just as she had foreseen, they made it back to the barge in little more than an hour. They hooked up and weighed the heavy anchor, listening to the ropes creak as they picked up the strain. With the expanse of the bay to use, Mike began tacking only to find they were trudging directly into the wind.

  “That’s lucky,” he said, and swung south with the wind dead on their starboard side.

  “Yeah,” Jenn said, so breathlessly that the same wind pushing them to their fate caught the word and shoved it back down her throat.

  They followed almost the same course as they had coming down and, although now the tide was against them, they cleared the western edge of Angel Island just as the sun rose and the wind eased. Mike’s keen eyes picked out the sail before anyone.

  “Sail ho!” he cried, sending Jenn’s heart into her throat. Instead of the thousand black sails she feared would be stretching from one end of the bay to the other, it was only the dinky white triangle of the Puffer. Mike brought out his binoculars.

  The boat was crowded with five of the seven members of the Coven. They gradually came close enough for him to see Miss Shay’s pinched face as she surveyed the barge with a sneer. “Take a look at that.” Mike handed Jenn the binoculars.

  “Ugh! I know the barge is not the…”

  “The Floating Fortress,” he corrected. It sounded a whole lot better than just “the barge.” He knew with the rust and the clunky containers arrayed like building blocks on her deck, she would never be what anyone would consider stylish, but she could pass for a kind of fortress and she was floating.

  “I like that better, too. It makes it sound, I don’t know, tougher, I guess.” She gave Mike a grin and then looked at Miss Shay. “Oh, she’s gotten worse. It looks like she just ate the head off a bat. Take a look.”

  He took the binoculars back. “You aren’t kidding, except I’d say it looks like she just took a heaping spoonful of hot…” The sneer suddenly vanished and was replaced by surprise. Miss Shay was pointing toward the Floating Fortress. Mike pulled the glasses away to see first dozens and then at least two hundred people crowding the tops of the containers or coming out into the few open areas of the exposed hull.

  Everyone on board the Puffer stared as they passed. When they came abreast of the Saber. George Parry was piloting and gave Mike a friendly wave. He waved back and then he and Jenn waved at the Coven. Donna and Lois nodded, but the other three only stared with hard faces. This was especially pronounced on Miss Shay’s cace. She stared so hard that Jenn had to look away.

  Jenn looked down into the water, where their reflections were wobbly and strangely distorted, and somewhat frightening. She was still staring when the smaller, lighter boat skimmed away.

  “You okay?” Mike asked her.

  She wasn’t. What she had seen in the water had been a sign and, like some of the signs shown to her, she knew the truth behind it the second she saw it.

  “How long will it take to get to the island?”

  The urgency in her voice made Mike nervous. He peered around the mainsail at Alcatraz. It sat dead on, not much more than a mile away, but with every passing minute the wind was dying. Beneath them the waves had become only an easy swell, slowly lifting them and dropping them in a gentle waltz.

  “Forty minutes and that’s if the bar…I mean the Fortress, can find a good spot to anchor that’ll hold.”

  Jenn stood, looking back and forth, knowing that they didn’t have forty minutes. “Let her go! Cut her free. We have to get to the island as fast as possible.” She went to the closest of the wrist-thick tow ropes.

  Mike grabbed her hands. “You want me to let the barge go here? Are you crazy?”

  “I’m not the crazy one,” she shot back, pulling her hands free. “Jillybean is and the Coven knows it. They’re going to bring out Eve.”

  “Why would they do that? They know how dangerous she is.”

  The signs never gave Jenn a “Why” they only gave a hint of what was to come. In this case, it was obvious. “They’re crazy, too. They’re delusional. They don’t want to believe life can get even worse than it is now. And there’s nothing worse than life under the Corsairs. Even the dead are nothing compared to them.”

  Chapter 36

  William Trafney had been the first to bend his knee and proclaim Jillybean his queen. He had not been the last. Out of fear alone, Jillybean had half-won over the Islanders just by explaining the forces arrayed against them. Once she explained her defensive concept, which made heavy use of the natural terrain, and allowed the defenders to fight from positions of cover and protection, fourteen more came over to her side.

  They formed a line along the dock and each knelt in turn. It was a disappointing number especially as Stu could see that almost all of the rest were on the verge of accepting her as their queen and would have if only they weren’t so shockingly feeble.

  Their miserable fear was deplorable. Under the cover of dark, they snuck cowardly looks back and forth at one another, waiting to see what everyone else was going to do. The lack of courage on display was especially hard to witness since courage was exactly what was needed if they were going to have any chance against the Cors
airs.

  Gerry Xydis knew that he was part of the problem and had he been just another sailor, he would have pledged himself to Jillybean, however, as their leader he simply couldn’t commit himself without more proof than just her word.

  “Let me see this Floating Fortress of yours,” he told Jillybean. “Then maybe we can come to some sort of deal.”

  Up to this point, Stu thought Jillybean had been amazing, hitting every note just right in spelling out the dreadful plight they were all in giving the Islanders a glimmer of hope when she described her plan of defense. Then, inexplicably, she blew it by not challenging the word “deal.”

  There could be no deal. Everything depended on seamless cooperation, which could only occur under the command of a single leader. A government started with compromises, and one with built-in factions, would undoubtedly fail its very first test.

  To make matters worse, she said, “That’s understandable. I’m sure the Coven will have the same stipulation. To save time, could you send someone to bring them here as soon as possible?”

  Stu was very close to butting in at this point, only he couldn’t since it would undermine Jillybean and make it look as though anyone could throw in their two cents on a whim. When Gerry turned away to ask for a volunteer, Stu whispered to Jillybean, “The Coven hates you. They’ll try to sabotage you and screw this up for everyone. You should’ve waited until the Islanders were squarely on your side before bringing them in.”

  “You are probably right,” she said, leaning on him. He was shocked to find she was shaking and, up close, he could see the fatigue in her eyes. “I’ve been fighting Eve,” she explained, “and it’s starting to take its toll. I need to rest at least for a little while.”

  As the sun could very well rise on a Corsair fleet streaming into the bay, there was no time to rest. Then again, she was a special case and Stu knew their lives depended on Jillybean remaining herself. William Trafney jumped at the chance to help her and gave up his bed.