GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  “Take a little of that!” he barked, as he shot. “And that. Good shot, good shot. It feels like I’m peeing myself. Am I, Stu?”

  Stu had been trying to fumble a magazine into his gun as blood kept running into his eyes. He swiped at his brow and squinted in at Willis’ crotch. “Naw. It’s, uh, just a little blood.” It was a lot of blood, actually, though he didn’t know how to say this.

  “Good. Don’t want to be pissing myself. No way. Here. Take this.” Willis thrust his empty rifle at Stu. “Gimme,” he said, holding a glistening red hand out. “Only one of us needs to be a hero. Reload this one, will ya? I got an extra couple of mags I’ve been holding onto.”

  Suddenly wobbly from his head wound, Stu handed over the gun and then loaded the next.

  Eleven minutes later, Willis ran out of bullets, and out of blood. Exposed like that, he’d been shot six more times and hadn’t complained once; hadn’t even uttered a word. He just kept firing, almost singlehandedly breaking the back of the attack and driving away the Corsairs.

  Stu could see them trudging over the hills, maybe fifty or sixty of them altogether. One of them let off a green smoke bomb and five ships came coursing in their direction. They weren’t being picked up, they were being reinforced.

  “Where’s James?” Stu was having trouble seeing out of his left eye and didn’t notice the tall dark, ex-slave standing not far away. Someone turned him in his direction. “There you are. Take twenty guys and gather all the ammo you can from the dead, theirs and ours, and then help the wounded back to the bridge. Then hold here at all costs.”

  James lifted an eyebrow in question. “We won’t leave without you,” Stu assured him. “I’ll keep you posted.”

  He was about to turn away when James grabbed him. “Hey, I want to thank you. We all wanted to thank you. You and the Queen. We might…” He seemed to lose his words as he glanced toward the ocean where more Corsairs were wading ashore. “We know we might die, but we still wanted to thank you. All of us.”

  Stu’s head and heart had been in utter turmoil for days on end, never quite knowing if he was doing the right thing concerning Jillybean, but these few words changed all that. Whatever happened in the battle, they would at least fight as free men and women. That was something.

  “It was all the Queen,” he answered. James started to shake his head, but Stu wasn’t going to take any credit. Even if he had time to, it wasn’t his way. He shook James’ hand, gave a final glance at Willis’ body flopped face first, half-in and half-out of the trench, then left with the walking wounded and about twenty-five others.

  He was still dwelling on what James had said and feeling at peace with himself despite the smoke and gunshots going off. They crested the hill and looked down at a sight that quickly robbed him of that feeling. In a neat line, fifty of the largest sailboats in the Corsair fleet were charging down on the buoys and the ropes that stretched between them.

  From his vantage point, the ropes looked terribly flimsy and he was altogether sure they would snap at the moment of collision, ruining their chance of sinking any of the boats.

  “Follow as best you can!” he cried to the others and, forgetting his wound, an ugly grazing gash, he raced down to the bridge. He gained speed once he hit the highway, while at the same time, the Corsair fleet which had been coming along with a very brisk ten mile an hour breeze right on their stern suddenly slowed as the headlands on either side of the bridge played havoc with the wind, causing it to fail utterly for minutes at a time or to come boiling up from unexpected directions.

  The boats lost momentum and the impressive line failed. They came at the barrier in ones and twos. Some hit dead spots where their sails drooped and others found they were drifting leeward and had to tack around. On the whole, this was the perfect situation for the defenders.

  Directly below Gretchen “Mush-mouth” Ingles, lay a forty-four foot cutter that had once bore the name: The 19th Hole, but had been rechristened, The Black Hole by its Corsair captain. Gretchen gritted her mangled teeth as she hefted a twenty-two-pound rock above her head. With a cry she sent it hurtling down at the wallowing craft just as a sailor was reaching out with a dagger to begin sawing at the rope that stretched up to the bridge.

  In truth, he should have been cutting the horizontal rope that connected one buoy to the next one, but either way the rock, traveling at over eighty miles an hour, struck him a glancing blow on the side of the head which killed him eight minutes later. The rock, its momentum hardly slowed, smashed through the deck near the bow, blasted through a small cabinet in the front cabin and embedded itself in the hull; this caused thin jets of water to spray upward into the cabinet, but this went unnoticed by anyone.

  “I hit it!” Gretchen crowed. A cheer went up and that brief moment may have been the highpoint of her otherwise miserable life. Filled with excitement, she grabbed another rock, hefted it just as she had with the first and was all set to throw it down when a bullet fired from below took care of her dental problems once and for all as it plowed through her chin, exploded her teeth in all directions and ended up deep in her brain.

  The cheers died as Gretchen fell along with her rock.

  Chapter 42

  The second rock killed one Corsair outright, broke the collarbone of a second and crushed three toes of a third. Gretchen’s hundred and twenty pound body did even more damage as it struck the boom near the end. The boom broke right in half and worse, the mast bent and stuck out at an odd and quite unsailable angle. The Black Hole was now useless, except as a target for more rocks.

  The defenders on the bridge made sure not to expose themselves more than they had to. They’d take a quick peek to line things up and then heave their rocks over the edge. They battered the Black Hole, hitting it with twenty-four rocks. There was no defense against them. Not even hiding in the cabins offered any safety and it wasn’t long before sailors were diving overboard to get away. When that happened, the rock throwers grabbed their carts or wheelbarrows and rushed to the next stricken boat; there were already two dozen boats hung up on the rope.

  Those boats that drifted slowly into the slung ropes generally did the best, that is if they weren’t immediately attacked by hurtling rocks. It was the boats that had some headway on them that ended up getting irreversibly stuck. To a man, the captains of these boats tried to ride right over the rope and every one of them found themselves caught up in it.

  The rope would slide along the hull and either get snagged on the keel, if it was sharp enough, or the rudder. Either way, the boats were stuck, the ropes impossible to get at, and the rocks kept coming fast. Things grew even worse as Stu and his group arrived. They filled in along the bridge, taking up the heavy rocks and destroying boat after boat from north to south. For twenty-three and a half minutes they had the upper-hand, sinking or destroying thirty-one ships and killing or wounding three hundred men.

  Then the Corsair leader brought up his remaining boats, moving slowly with barely any sails set. At about two hundred yards they turned broadside on and sent a hail of bullets at the bridge. They were at just the right angle and three defenders died, including Willis’ friends Rondo and Jimmy who were still recovering from their long sickness and were rickety and fading, too slow to realize the danger from the mass of boats.

  Everyone hid behind the lines of old cars as the Corsairs kept up a modest covering fire. Within minutes there was a cheer from beneath the bridge.

  “Come in, Jillybean? What just happened?” Stu demanded, fearing the worst.

  A shaky, worried Jenn answered, “They cut the ropes. Sadie and I can see at least three of their boats are getting through. She doesn’t know what to do, Stu.” This was said in a frightened whisper. “I think you need to get off that bridge as fast as you can.”

  “Worry about her. Get her back, please.”

  Jenn said, she would try. Stu wasn’t ready to give up the bridge just yet. He rushed across to the bay side of the bridge where he was safe from the gunfire.
Almost directly below him was one of the Corsair boats slowly coming through a gap in the rope. “Over here!” he cried. The cowering defenders picked up their rocks and eagerly rushed to him. In a minute, they made a shambles of the boat, which drifted away, sitting lower and lower in the water.

  Although the ropes were cut in two more places, the gaps between the buoys were relatively narrow for the imprecisely controlled sailboats. With the wind slewing around the compass, they couldn’t just race through. Six more boats were sunk and another four were damaged so badly that their battered and half-dead crews struggled just to keep them afloat.

  Still, five or six boats managed to squeeze through without much damage and soon were out of range of the rocks and were shooting back. Stu realized it was time to give up the bridge. His defenders were now being pelted with fire from two directions and the only safe place was in the middle lanes.

  “Break it off, James,” he said over the radio. “We have to retreat. Come in, James. James?”

  “I’m here, but I don’t know…I don’t think…they’re really close.” It was hard to tell if James was winded or frightened out of his wits.

  It was only then that Stu really paid attention to what had been a steady rumble of gunfire from the headlands. “What’s going on? James? We need to retreat!”

  “They’re too close! They’re all around us! I-I don’t think we’ll be able to…Get down…” Gunfire erupted, coming through the radio so loudly that it drowned out James’ voice.

  Stu listened to this with his heart in his throat. “Hold on, James!” he screamed into the radio. “I’ll be right there.” He had put his rifle down so he could hurl rocks; now he looked for it and saw it leaning against a tow truck.

  Frantically, he ran for it but just as he grabbed it and spun, he heard Jillybean say, “Don’t you dare, Stu! Your mission is to get your team off that bridge and get them back here as soon as possible.”

  A mile away, she sat perched behind the long telescope. She could see his face go red as he slowly picked up his gun. He looked frozen in indecision and pulled in two directions as more urgent gunfire rattled over the radio and drifted across the bay.

  “Listen to me, Stu,” she said, trying her best to remain calm, trying her best to shut out the cawing voices that kept bursting out of the darkness. “The battle has just begun and we need you. Don’t throw your life away. Please.”

  She was pretty sure she sounded sane. Even Jenn, nodding with crooked-smile encouragement, thought so and yet Stu still hesitated, caught between a rock and a hard place. He had a duty to his queen, but how in good conscience was he supposed to leave James and who knew how many others to die?

  “Damn it!” Jillybean snapped as indecision glued him in place. “Look around you, Stu. Look at them.” Obediently he took in the frightened faces of what was left of the bridge’s defenders. For the most part, they were Islanders and Hill People. He had known all of them for most of his life. They were scared out of their wits.

  “Where’s the leader among them?” Jillybean whispered. There wasn’t one. They were frightened and pitiful. She was sure that if Stu left them half would run away and the other half would be captured. “Bring them back, Stu.”

  He took a last long look up at the Marin Headlands where the battle was going full throttle, before he turned and headed south. Jillybean almost melted in relief.

  “Why don’t you just admit it to everyone that you love him?” Jenn asked.

  “So I can be like you?”

  Jenn had already swiveled the telescope, scanning the only part of the south bay they could see from their angle. She was searching for a lone black sail. The Saber wasn’t due back for at least an hour, but that hadn’t stopped her from gazing in that direction every chance she could.

  Once again, the south bay was empty.

  Jillybean appeared sympathetic, or so she hoped—her emotions and her emotional responses were all over the board. “He’ll make it. Trust me. The plan is working.” So far it was arguably working exactly as she had stated it would, though she had not counted on the high casualties among the defenders on the bridge; only thirty-three of the hundred that had left that morning were unhurt. Fourteen more were wounded and the rest were dead, or soon would be as the battle began slackening on the Marin Headlands.

  The losses had not been in vain. They had inflicted a terrible toll on the Corsairs. A telescope was not needed to see the hundreds of bodies floating on the surface and the many crippled sailboats that were slowly sinking or hanging from the uncut ropes like the carcasses of insects on forgotten strands of spiderwebs.

  “How much more will they take?” Jillybean asked.

  Jenn looked up from the telescope, unsure if Jillybean had been talking to her. All morning Jillybean had fluctuated between muttering to herself and all out screaming furiously at nothing at all. It was why they were alone on the partially collapsed roof of the laundry building.

  “Not much more, I bet,” Jenn said. She gestured at the bridge and the wreckage. “They took a real beating. I mean a bad one, and I know I wouldn’t want any more.”

  Jillybean stopped in mid-pace, another habit that had gone on and on that morning. She contemplated Jenn, first with a contemptuous sneer, then with a start, and a guilty look. “Sorry. So, you think one more good smack across the knuckles will do it?”

  “Smack across the knuckles?” Jenn sniffed. “That was more than a smack across the knuckles.”

  “Hmmm.” Jillybean said, dropping down into one of the two chairs that little, one-armed Aaron Altman had dragged to the roof. While Jenn’s chair was little more than a stool, Jillybean’s was an immense reclinable hunk of leather that weighed more than Aaron. Despite his efforts, which had nearly ended in a hernia, Jillybean’s chair had hardly been used. She had perched on the edge twice, both times being little more than pit stops in her endless pacing.

  Now, she sat back, her fingers steepled, her eyes closed as she considered Jenn’s words.

  For once the telescope didn’t pull Jenn to it. She found herself staring at Jillybean. The Queen had always been striking: flawless white skin, full lips, a small but regal nose, her heart-shaped face framed by that mass of hair. All of this was dominated by great fluid, blue eyes but with those eyes shut, she became more beautiful.

  Gone was the intensity that made Jenn feel as though her flesh was transparent and her mind a coverless open book.

  For a good minute she sat there before she cracked her eyes. Shaking her head, she sighed. “No. I’m sorry, but I believe you are wrong. They’ll keep coming. With every small defeat, their leader will be in that much more need of a victory. That’s how these petty tyrants are. They rule through fear and domination, which means they can never be seen as weak. And what is weaker than running home with your tail between your legs?”

  Again, Jillybean hopped up, this time going to the very edge of the crumbling building. Putting her foot on the wall, she leaned out to watch the Corsairs struggle through the debris around the bridge. She counted a hundred and thirty-nine boats, some with gaping holes in their sails and others looking as though their hulls were barely seaworthy. So far, it had been a disaster for them.

  “But they won’t stop,” she said, again mostly to herself, her voice soft and far away. “They haven’t met defeat before, only victory after victory. They don’t know what it is to lose. And they’re not like us, Jenn. Their leader is a sadist. That’s what means he gets off on hurting people. He’s evil. He’s so evil he makes Eve look like a saint. Ha! Saint Eve.”

  For maybe the tenth time that day, she was in between personalities, see-sawing back and forth, and when she had said “Ha,” it had come out robotically.

  Jenn should have tried to right her mind, but she was somewhat enthralled by these revelations. “You act like you know their leader. Have you met him before?”

  Slowly, Jillybean shook her head. “The Black Captain? No, I’ve never met him, but I’ve studied him. I’ve inter
rogated his men and questioned his runaways. I know him inside and out. And I know that he’s the greatest threat to the island we have yet faced and probably will ever face in our lifetime.”

  “The island?” It didn’t seem like she was talking about Alcatraz.

  “Bainbridge. I warned the old governor when the Corsairs had just a few boats. Back then they couldn’t decide if they were fishermen, traders or pirates. And I warned Deanna when the Black Captain was calling himself ‘The’ Captain and first started raiding settlements. And I warned Neil and then…then it was too late. Almost too late. Right?” She turned vacant eyes on Jenn. In the bright morning light, her pupils were pinpricks and her eyes were like blue coins.

  Jenn took a step back.

  “But I could do something. Just no nukes. That’s what Neil said. No nukes. You can’t control the fallout. There’ll be collateral damage and we can’t have that.” She laughed, loud and harsh.

  The only thing Jenn really understood in all that was the fallout part. She knew it was that invisible poison killing the people in Cathlamet. Could Jillybean make fallout? Was a part of her that evil? Jenn’s head was spinning over this when Aaron Altman ran up the stairs, spilling water from a pitcher he was carrying.

  “I can’t believe we’re winning!” he piped. “That’s what they’re saying down at the dock.”

  Jillybean blinked. “Dock?” She looked around in bewilderment. “Oh, right. Alcatraz. We’re on Alcatraz.”

  Aaron wasn’t put off by her strange answer. She was the “Mad Queen” after all and it was part of what made her so great in his eyes. The Coven had always been so stodgy, while there was no telling what Jillybean was going to do next. It made her exciting and mysterious. When she took the water, the water which he had poured all by himself without being told by anyone, he thought his heart was going to burst.

  “Thank you for this,” she said, her smile making him swoon. He walked away, his head swimming in a mist. The second he was gone, Jillybean’s smile disappeared. She snuck a look Jenn’s way and saw the anxious look on the teen’s face and knew that she must have said something wrong. Jillybean tried to dismiss her own words with a simple wave of her hand. “I can go on and on, but you shouldn’t mind it too much. I’m crazy. Everyone says so, right?”