GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  Jenn volunteered to sail for the next four hours. “Alone,” she said, when Mike tried to settle in next to her under a blanket. “You need your sleep more than anyone. Make him sleep in the cabin, Jillybean.” Harried by the two women and frankly very tired, Mike went down into the front cabin still giving out a slew of suggestions concerning the ship, the water conditions and the possible hazards ahead.

  The only real hazard Jenn faced was staying awake; somehow she managed it until they were a few hundred yards from the remains of the Bay Bridge. Most of the structure was eroding to nothing, a hundred feet below the water, however four or five useless spans still sat like giant tables looking out over the city. She aimed the boat toward the western section, where there were only five towers to avoid in a mile of otherwise open harbor.

  Thumping her foot on the deck brought Mike rushing up, his long blond hair in complete disarray. “What is it? Oh, we’re here already? You should pass leeward of that tower. Being upwind of it only invites trouble. Better safe than sorry.”

  A moment later, Jillybean and Stu were there. “Four in the morning?” Jillybean asked. “That was a long haul, Jenn. You should go below and catch a few zzzs.”

  She didn’t have to be told twice and was asleep before Mike adjusted course to dodge the tower, downwind. This also put him closer to Treasure Island, which was dark and quiet with no sign of the Corsairs on this side of the island.

  Stu used the starlight scope, but saw nothing but a sleeping island. He switched his view to Alcatraz which was a small hump rising out of the bay two miles away; it was too far to see anything. Mike went north a full mile out of their way; he wanted to give Jenn get an extra thirty minutes of sleep as well so they could come at the island on a diagonal and not directly into the steady wind. If there was trouble, he would have enough speed to veer away.

  As it turned out, the docks were empty of Corsair boats, but there were still people working, hauling items from the doughty little Puffer. “Ahoy Alcatraz,” Mike called in a carrying whisper as they drew close. “It’s the Saber.” No one wanted to get shot for being mistaken for a Corsair.

  “It’s about damned time!” Gerry the Greek groused, much to the amazement of the small crowd of shadowy people working alongside of him. “They’re coming, Mike. The Corsairs really are coming.”

  Although this was exactly what they had expected, all four of them felt the same stabbing panic in their chests. Jenn, who was still bleary and had just come on deck with the warmth of sleep still curling around her, was sure she was going to cry. Tears formed in her eyes. She found Mike’s hands and grabbed them. They were cold and tense, and at the same time damp with sweat. He was shaking.

  Stu tried to swallow his fear, only he choked on it. While his chest swelled in growing dread, his throat locked tight. The two reactions rendered him even more speechless than ever.

  Jillybean felt the same dread as everyone else, though her sense of it was dampened as it ran right up against a sudden blaze of fury that wanted her to scream with hellfire pouring out of her mouth—uncontrollable anger was Eve’s way of dealing with fear.

  There was a brief and inconclusive battle within her as the two, almost incompatible sensations sent her mind into a spin. She wobbled, casting an arm out and found one of the many ropes that ran from the mast. “D-did the scouts pick them up?” she asked. One of her first actions had been to send scouts with radios to the Point Reyes Lighthouse, thirty miles away. It had a perfect view of the Pacific. “How many of them are there?”

  Gerry paused so long that Jillybean began to grow irate. It was no time for theatrics. But Gerry wasn’t trying to play it up, he was quite a bit drunk and having trouble spitting out the number. “A hundred and seventy-nine and they’re all crammed with men.”

  Chapter 40

  A hundred and seventy-nine. Crammed with men. Crammed. The word conjured images of boats so overcrowded that people were constantly being knocked into the water and left behind, screaming and waving their hands in vain.

  Crammed.

  Jillybean felt a lurch inside her, a shift of her personalities. It was almost like putting a shirt on sideways. Eve stared out of her left eye while Jillybean had the right, plus she retained control of their mind—mostly. She could move her body and think in the simplest of terms, but Eve, like an anchor, hampered her so that Jillybean couldn’t even work out the easiest math problems.

  It was eternally frustrating that she couldn’t even estimate the numbers of Corsairs arrayed against her. What did “crammed” really mean? Did it mean there were up to thirty men per boat or fifty or twelve hundred…Eve began rattling off every number she knew which, thanks to her hatred of everything that had to do with math, wasn’t all that many.

  “Twenty,” Jillybean said, under her breath. “We’ll call it twenty.”

  Does it even matter? You can’t win, bitch! Winning was never part of the plan, so get that out of our head right now. You tried. Good for you. Now let’s get out of here before the sun comes up.

  “Get out of my head!” Jillybean whispered, sharply, wishing she were alone. She could feel the others staring at her and she hated it. It made her skin crawl. It made everything worse. “I don’t need you yet.” She turned away so the others wouldn’t stare, so they wouldn’t see how hard it was for her even to calculate a simple number. One seventy-nine times twenty. Normally the answer would just pop right into her head; now nothing popped, she was an utter blank.

  She cursed unintelligibly, making a hissing sound through clenched teeth. Stu cocked an eyebrow at her, which was a hundred times worse than the stares. It made her want to rip that eyebrow off and shove it down his…

  Jillybean caught herself and reined in her unbridled anger long enough to ask, “Why don’t you tell us what’s going on, Gerry. I mean…me. Tell me what’s going on?”

  Gerry cleared his throat, his lips twisted in distaste, partially from the sour gin-ish burp that had just come up from his churning stomach, but mostly because of the insane creature he had knelt in front of eighteen long hours before. At some point after the sun went down, he had begun worrying that it might have been a mistake to make her queen, now he was sure of it. But what, he thought to himself, morosely, could he do? There was no escape in the pathetic little Puffer and Mike hadn’t left the Saber once since they put in the day before. Gerry was stuck, lashed to a course that he knew would be the end of him.

  Despair, exhaustion and too much hooch had him speaking in a long slurring ramble as he explained what had been happening; the gist of which was that a lone black-sailed boat had been spotted by the scouts at Point Reyes lighthouse just as the sun was setting. The boat, a heavy fifty-footer with stiff sails and rigid lines, was followed by a long, disorderly gaggle of Corsair vessels that came straggling up over the next hour.

  The scouts were shocked at just how many boats there were and were properly nervous. It was normal at night for the Corsairs to give themselves plenty of sea room by heading further out into the ocean, lighting fires to keep track of their ships. That night was different. They had come in close, a great mass of boats, like a giant school of enormous black sharks. They anchored almost directly beneath where the frightened scouts were hunkered down and when the Corsairs swarmed ashore to find places to sleep, they covered the beach completely.

  The scouts’ whispered radio messages were dire and nearly caused a panic on Alcatraz as the reports were foolishly allowed to spread in the form of increasingly terrifying rumors. Without the Queen’s presence, people ran in circles or tried to mob the few boats at the docks, which were forced to stand out in the bay to keep from being swamped.

  Work bogged down, grinding almost to a halt. They lost a few people who slipped away from work parties and took to the hills. A couple of others tried to swim from the island—at least one of whom was eaten by one of the putrefying zombies that wallowed around in the bay. Her screams were mercifully cut short as the beast pulled her down into the cold depths.


  Of the remaining five hundred, approximately half went somewhere to hide while the rest sat by their fires crying, moaning and generally lamenting their terrible luck.

  “If you ask me, they were lucky to live this long,” Gerry remarked, as he took another nip from the flask he had refilled four times that night. “Luckily, most of the work had been done before ‘The Great Freak-out.’ We got only some odds and ends left to fetch from the city. Everything else is more or less in place. You’re welcome.” He tipped the flask back again and drank the last of it. Not the last of his stash, of course. He had enough hooch to keep him good and drunk until the end of the battle.

  So, half your army is hiding and the other half is doing nothing but crying? Eve squealed, laughing so hard that part of her evil mirth slipped out of Jillybean’s mouth.

  “I don’t see what’s so damned funny.” Gerry snapped. “Unless you got some newer plan, we, all of us are gonna die.”

  This had Eve laughing so hard that it reverberated through Jillybean’s skull intensifying the disjointed, turned-around feeling to such an extent that she spun in place, while trying to get her feet and her mind in sync. She ended up stumbling and was caught by Mike and Jenn.

  Gerry made the mistake of smirking with Stu close enough to see it in the dark. One long stride brought him within inches of Gerry’s face, which he promptly bloodied with a single, heavy punch. As Gerry lay on the ground spitting blood and making questioning noises deep in his throat, Stu grabbed his flask and threw it in the bay.

  Thinking he might be attacked by some of the others who had been helping, Stu spun and glared. The glare eased when he saw who he was facing. Some were not surprising: the ex-slave James Smith and the mariner, George Parry. They were tough and dedicated. But Stu would never have believed that Donna Polston and Lois Blanchard, both of whom were hunched from exhaustion, would still be working after so many hours. Dango Ferem, Jillybean’s one-time guard who she had smashed over the head, was another unexpected face, as was Rebecca Haigh who looked shockingly robust for having been at death’s door not so long before.

  There was also Johanna Murphy, who was practically unrecognizable in a pair of over-large jeans and a heavy jacket. And finally, Shaina Hale, lumpy head and all, was there. She tottered up to Jillybean, a look of concern crossing her simple features. “You was laughing. Should we be laughing, too?”

  Stu began shaking his head, however Jillybean found something in Shaina’s battered face that allowed her to pull herself up out of the darkness. In a very childlike way, Shaina needed her and that was something. “Maybe we should laugh. It’s better than being glum and it might actually help us.”

  Just because Dango might have been working for the cause as hard as anyone, didn’t mean he was a Jillybean fan. “How the hell will that help? It’ll make us look as crazy as you.”

  This ruffled a good number of feathers. Jillybean, still sitting on the dock, said, “Maybe we want to appear crazy. We need an edge in this battle. As much as I wished to, I can’t make this a battle of annihilation.” Shaina wasn’t the only one wearing a blank look at this. “A battle of annihilation is one in which we destroy our enemies completely. That’s not going to happen. The most we can hope for is to sting them hard and make them believe we will fight to the last man or woman. At a certain point, they’re going to realize that they’re wasting their ammo as well as dying for nothing.”

  “And that is going to be funny?” Shaina asked, honestly trying to comprehend everything going on around her.

  Jillybean stood and smiled at her. “We laugh to show them how tough we are. We laugh to show them we’re not afraid. Can you do that for me?”

  “Like a favor? Sure, I can do that! I like to laugh. Do you want me to laugh now or should I wait?”

  A part of Jillybean wanted to hear the laugh right then. “No. I say we wait until we see them or better yet, wait until they get close and then we’ll let loose with a good belly laugh, okay?”

  Shaina said that would be okay with her. Next to her, James let out a quiet rumbling chuckle. “I’ve heard worse ideas than going down with a laugh. And you shouldn’t listen to him.” He jacked a thumb at Gerry. “It’s not even as close to being as bad as he was saying. People aren’t hiding, they’re sleeping.”

  “Well, it’s time we wake them!” Jillybean cried. “The Corsairs will leave at first light. We need to be fully prepared.”

  She roused up the island with a renewed vigor and the more she gave out orders, starting with finding Gerry’s stash of hooch and destroying it, the more she was nearly entirely herself, though Eve was never far away. It seemed to Jillybean that the evil girl was always lurking over her shoulder, biding her time, waiting for the smallest sign of weakness.

  Jillybean couldn’t make a single mistake; not with Eve and certainly not with the Corsairs. She couldn’t even make one with her own people. Gerry the Greek had not been that far off in his assessment of their mental state. An electric fear strummed along the chilly predawn light as they came quickly awake, all with the same whispered question: “Are they here?”

  Anxiety pervaded the island and to counter it Jillybean turned to Jenn, who was once again relegated to the position of royal babysitter, or so it seemed to her. Jillybean asked, “I think it might help morale immeasurably if you could find us an incontestable, though not necessarily genuine, positive sign.”

  Jenn had not followed half of that. “You want me to see a sign? For real? I can’t just make them happen. That’s not the way it works. Everyone knows that.”

  “Actually, what everyone knows is that you are the be all, end all when it comes to these sorts of supernatural fallacies. So, if you could just help me out and…3,580!” The number she had been looking for earlier just jumped into her head, fully formed. Her happiness over the small victory dimmed quickly. The number represented how many Corsairs were coming. Seven to one odds were long, long odds, especially when the Corsairs’ many other advantages were factored in.

  “3,580?” Jenn was very confused as well as scared. It seemed as though the cold and the fear had gotten down deep into her bones and she had begun shivering.

  “Don’t worry about that. It was just a math problem I was working on. What I need you to do is give me some of that old fashioned hocus-pocus. It doesn’t have to be big. Really, whatever the opposite of a black cat, is will work.”

  No one wanted a good sign more than Jenn, but to actively search for one felt wrong. She felt as though it would be playing with fire. Her intuition proved frighteningly correct. The stars were no help because they were fading as the sun was just beginning to show itself. Dread flooded her. The sky was suffused with a terrible, violent red.

  Jenn crossed herself three times, saying, “Red sky at night, sailors delight. Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. We’re in trouble, Jillybean. You can’t make the signs obey you and see what happened?” Her stomach began to churn as she looked toward the dock for Mike.

  “Hey, settle down. This is a good sign. Red sky in the morning—we are not sailors,” Jillybean noted. “They are the sailors and they are the ones who should heed this warning. I bet they’re seeing that same sunrise and are just about…”

  “Mike is a sailor!” Jenn practically cried. Then her heart almost stopped as she saw him coming up towards them. “Let me go with him,” she suddenly demanded. “I know you think you need me here with you, but Mike needs me more. And…and didn’t you say his role was crucial?”

  Jillybean shook her head. “Your role is even more crucial, vastly more crucial.”

  Mike came up and saw the two staring hard at each other, neither giving an inch. He found it strange that in the early light, the two looked very similar. “Hi. I just wanted to let you know we’re ready to go.” He gestured down at the Saber. Its deck overflowed with wooden crates and people, while from its sides hung sheets of steel, sandwiching an inch-thick polycarbon fiber cloth of such a high tensile strength that it acted ver
y much like Kevlar. His might be the most dangerous mission and it called for the most protection.

  He could be riding in a floating tank for all Jenn cared. The red sunrise had been a dire warning directly concerning him, and she was just about out of her mind. “Already? No, you can’t leave yet.”

  “I have to,” he said, trying to hide his own fear. He had seen the sunrise. Every sailor worth their salt took a red sunrise to heart, especially a sailor going into battle. His breath rattled in his lungs, still he smiled. “You know it’s a long trip. With this wind, it’ll be four hours there and three back. Time is against us. I shouldn’t even be here talking to you.” He was there, regardless of the minutes that suddenly seemed to fly by, because he had to kiss her goodbye.

  Jillybean gave him a quick hug, whispered, “Good luck,” and moved away to watch the two as they kissed briefly and then fell into a crushing embrace, neither wanting to pull away. Jenn’s hands were clenched into fists that shook as the gripped Mike. They both trembled in their long embrace and Jillybean was just wondering how she was going to separate them when Stu came up.

  A grunt from him broke the two up. “Sorry, but it’s time.”

  Mike broke out a big smile to show that everything would be just fine. Jenn’s was watery and kept trying to dribble away to nothing. “I love you,” he murmured, so that only she could hear.

  “Really?” She felt a little like she’d just received an unexpected present and a real smile blossomed, lighting up her face. “I love you, too,” she said, just before the smile froze. “Come back to me in one piece…and without any holes in you, either. Promise?”

  “I promise.” He gulped down a large swallow of nothing, gave her another lying smile and a warm kiss, and was gone. He looked back once, tripped over someone’s pack, went red in the face and then jogged the rest of the way down to the dock. Jenn stared after him.