GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  “She got shotted in the tummy and she told me to be on charge of the radio. She says I’m real good at talking, which is kinda funny since she used to say I talked too much and Aaron says I’m too small to mess around with fire so he’s doing it. Lighting the fires, I mean, but he’s not doing it real good since it’s only smoking. Boy, it’s like smoking real bad.”

  Aaron Altman wasn’t lighting normal fires. In essence he was lighting hundred-pound smoke bombs that were emitting clouds of smoke thicker than any San Francisco fog. These dense clouds rolled across the bay with the wind. By itself the smoke was nothing but a hindrance, however beyond it Jillybean had contrived a second line of buoys.

  During the first attack, the buoys had floated in what appeared to be harmless disarray west of the island. If the eight hundred feet of chain linking them could be pulled tight, it would form a barrier that couldn’t be breached.

  Gerry, seeing the fires were going nicely, ran to the chain where a couple of dozen people were hauling with all of their sickly strength. Many of the defenders of the island were the still weak people from Sacramento. They barely had the strength to haul the buoys into a straight line, but when it was done the taut chain disappeared into the smoke and the island’s western flank was, more or less, secure.

  “Now for the other one!” Gerry yelled.

  On the other side of the island was another line. This one was half chain and half of rope. It ran out to the Floating Fortress and when it was pulled tight, it would drag the barge to within six hundred feet of the island, allowing for both supporting fire as well as a second chain to impede the boats.

  It was the last arrow in Jillybean’s bag of tricks and should have stung the Corsairs yet again. The only problem was that the Black Captain had not waited to form his fleet into divisions. As soon as he saw the smoke he ordered his boats to attack.

  Without any central leadership, most of the captains chose to steer well clear of the smoke. They rushed down the other side of the island where anyone at the wheel was targeted; the first fourteen ships were sent spinning out of control and a great log jam occurred. Then the 39-foot sloop, Dead Rise, its hull riddled with holes and its sails in tatters, broke through and charged down the gap between the barge and the island.

  Ahead of it were the forty-three women who were still doing everything they could to heave a hundred tons of metal across the water. A rattle of automatic fire from the Dead Rise killed nine of them and the rest fled inland, screaming in panic.

  Someone on board tried to take the wheel so they could make it to the island. Stu shot him dead and the Dead Rise drifted lazily to the south, where it eventually sank.

  The Floating Fortress also drifted away, but not before eleven more ships became essentially rudderless under the accurate fire from the barge.

  In frustration, the Black Captain sent twenty ships into the smoke on the far side of the island, where they promptly hit the chain. With only the slowly dying Lois Blanchard with him, resting her head in his lap, Gerry the Greek took up one of only two rifles fitted with an ATN thermal scope and began firing with cool deliberation into the smoke.

  With the scope, he could see his targets perfectly.

  He was so coldly deliberate that it was some time before the Corsairs who were stuck on the chain even knew he was killing them without mercy. When they realized it, they sprayed bullets everywhere—uselessly as it turned out. Gerry kept shooting them and about the time Lois died, the sixty-four survivors in the boats took to the water and tried to swim away.

  By then the battle seemed to have bogged down. Thirty or so boats were drifting in a muddle in the gap, while another forty had broken off. Jillybean seemed to have inflicted the very sting she had hoped—only just as a victory cry was being raised, a sweeping wind pushed the jam of boats towards the island.

  There were still over two hundred men cowering in the holds of those boats and when they felt the rocks scraping the bottom of their hulls, they leapt up, eager to get to land where they could fight back. At the same time, the huge smoke-bombs were finally burning themselves out.

  The course of the battle changed. Corsairs swept out of the boats and in ten minutes the island’s defense began to fall apart. The defenders had been fighting with half their mind intent on running away. A concerted counterattack might have saved the day. Instead, they fled south in terror to Yerba Buena, which was a much smaller island attached by a narrow causeway to Treasure Island.

  Now there was nowhere left to run, not enough people to fight and, even if there were, the twenty or so guns had barely four hundred rounds of ammo to use. Things weren’t much better on the Floating Fortress. Half the defenders were dead and the chain holding the barge in place had been cut. They were drifting south with Corsair boats going in every direction.

  The only person who dared to keep her head up was Jenn Lockhart. She hadn’t stopped searching for the Saber and now she saw it, racing in the distance, heading towards them as fast it could. Behind it the horizon seemed packed with the glorious black sails of twenty-three high-masted boats.

  She began to cry and Donna Polston, a bullet in her arm, mistook the tears for happiness.

  “It’s the Santas! Mike’s brought the Santas!” Donna yelled. It sure looked that way, however Mike wasn’t leading the Santas, he was running from them.

  Chapter 44

  If Mike had known he was their last hope, he might have puked into the bay. His mission had been plagued with bad luck since he’d seen the red sunrise. It had started with his recruits. When he asked for volunteers for a dangerous mission, one person had stepped up, Colleen White.

  Stu had made things worse by saying, “Don’t take any fighters. I need everyone who can handle a gun.”

  Mike was stuck with two very weak, and still somewhat sick, women from Sacramento, three Islanders who were just barely teens, and Colleen, who smiled or laughed at everything he said and was so clingy, that it was a blessing when she became seasick.

  A few miles south of Yerba Buena at an ugly, industrial shipping area called Hunters Pointe, he unloaded all the crates that had been stacked on board as well as three of his crew.

  Since his crew members were all less than ideal, it was difficult to choose which three to keep and which to leave behind. Although he would have dearly liked to leave Colleen, she couldn’t swim, which was the only prerequisite for their mission. He left two of the younger teens and one of the older women behind and, because of the number of zombies flocking north, he made sure the teens had crossbows and the woman had a pistol before setting sail once more.

  Light airs dogged the Saber all the way to Palo Alto as did sea sickness. Along with Colleen, the Sacramento woman, Kasie King, held onto the rail with weak hands, her limp ash-blonde hair hanging in front of her face, hiding the vomit that came up every ten minutes or so.

  Only thirteen-year-old Christopher Feltner, an Islander Mike had known since he was a toddler, was immune to the constant motion. The other two were worse than useless. Colleen especially so. She could barely stand, so Mike put her in “charge” of the radio. During one of her more violent gastronomical upheavals, she accidentally dropped it in the bay.

  From then on, they felt terribly alone. They had no idea what was happening back home with the Corsairs and it was four agonizing, anxious hours before they even made it to Palo Alto.

  With no choice but to follow the plan, Mike put on a display of sailing ineptitude that he thought must be unequalled. It convinced the Santas to take to the sea, but hey spent an hour getting twenty-three boats ready. An hour. They took so long that Mike had to fake being dismasted simply to have an excuse for not gliding over the horizon.

  Then when the Santas did put out, it was in such a chaotic manner that for a few minutes Mike wondered if they weren’t just pretending to be that bad. Half the boats sagged so far to leeward that they were in serious trouble of running onto the eastern shore.

  Mike had to tack into the west wind just to
induce them to follow along. It was during this long, left turn directly in front of the Santas’ fleet that he discovered they were out for blood. Gloom in the lead boat opened fire at a range of about two hundred yards.

  “Coming about!” Mike shouted. “Kasie, the boom, now!” The bullets thudding into the homemade kevlar cured the seasickness of everyone on board the Saber and the ship spun on a dime and raced before the wind, opening a half mile lead before Mike decided that he couldn’t get too far ahead.

  And that was how it went. As Willis Firam breathed his last and James Smith fought to the death on the Marin Headlands with five separate and astonishingly large wounds in his body, Mike played the fool. During the first hour of the “chase” he would tack when there wasn’t any real reason to and when he did, he’d purposely turn too far into the wind so that his boat would stall.

  During the next hour, as the Santas got the hang of working their boats, he kept them close by steering the Saber along the edge of dead zones where the waters were noticeably flatter and the airs weak.

  With all his heart he wanted to race north, afraid that by the time he was able to coax the Santas back to Alcatraz it would be too late. But he couldn’t. Gloom would smell the bluff if he got too good too quickly, and so he spilled air off his sails or let his jib come untied and let the Santas come closer and closer. Every time they got within two hundred yards Gloom would try a ranging shot and Mike would scoot ahead.

  As he passed Hunters Point, he let fly a ten-foot long white pendant. Doing her best to keep out of sight, Colleen studied the water in front of the piers with their one set of binoculars. “I see them. They look good to go.”

  “Good,” Mike said and edged closer to the wind, adding a knot to his speed. Carefully taking the binoculars from her, he looked back at the strung-out line of boats. The last was probably a mile distant. “Jeeze,” he grumbled at their ineptitude.

  Next, he turned the glasses north. They had seen the smoke earlier but it had run its course and now there was nothing but a thin distant crackling. With the wind carrying the sound of gunfire to the east, it didn’t seem like much of a battle and yet there were dozens of dark blobs in the water that could only be Corsair ships, and there was the Floating Fortress turned oddly and closer to the remains of the Bay Bridge than it should’ve been.

  Mike’s heart began to hammer and he had to fight the urge to tighten the main and hit the gas, so to speak. “Ready the green rocket,” he told Christopher. Taking a deep breath, he counted out loud with slow deliberation to a hundred. After fifty, the others joined in, their voices growing louder until they reached a hundred in a shout. “Light it, Christopher!”

  With a serpentine hissing, the rocket raced a quarter mile into the sky and detonated with a staggering flash of light and sound.

  They all flinched and Kasie King said in a dead soft voice, “Well, that did it. We can’t take that back even if we wanted to.”

  With the echoes still bouncing around the city, Mike put the Saber to rights and raced northeast, looking like he was going to run under the larger spans of the Bay Bridge near Oakland. The Santas followed as if they didn’t have a choice in the matter.

  At the sound of the rocket and the sudden appearance of this new fleet, the battle faltered in the northern section of the bay. Everyone stared south, the Corsairs in complete confusion, and the defenders of the Fortress with looks of hope except for Jenn, who wore a tearful smile that closely resembled ecstasy.

  The lull lasted half a minute as the Saber seemed to grow in size and majesty, then the Black Captain started sending up signals one after another. The boats that had been zipping in circles around the barge turned suddenly away, as did those moving to reinforce the planned assault on Yerba Buena.

  “They’re breaking off the attack!” Donna cried. This was followed by a tremendous cheer that went on and on as if the Corsairs were turning tail and running for home. They were not. They quickly gathered into two squadrons of thirty ships each and headed south. The remaining boats, another ragged thirty or so, headed north toward where the Black Captain’s ship had remained throughout the battle.

  Jillybean watched all of this with a stony expression on her face. She had not cheered. She knew their chances had only marginally improved and by a razor slim margin, at that. As Mike hauled the Saber around, now shooting southwest under full sail, she turned away, keying the radio.

  “This is the Queen. Team leaders check in. I need an accurate ammo count and a head count as soon as humanly possible.”

  “I dropped my radio,” Donna said, a smile still on her lined face. She swayed slightly, her injured arm hanging limp and useless, clearly in need of immediate medical attention.

  There was no time for anything but the basics. “Jenn, I need you to wrap…” Jillybean stopped when she saw Jenn wouldn’t be of any use while Mike was in danger—the ecstasy Jenn had exhibited had turned to stark terror. She stared down the length of the barge to the south with her mouth open and twisted at the Saber which no longer appeared so magnificent. It now looked small and very alone racing between two converging fleets. When gunfire erupted, Jenn sucked in a sharp ragged breath.

  “Stu,” Jillybean said. He too was watching the flight of the Saber and didn’t stir at his name. She noticed that he had aged in the last few hours of endless battle. “Stu! Wrap that arm good and tight.” She didn’t have time to check to see if her order was being carried out. The Floating Fortress had endured a thirty-minute attack from half the Corsair fleet and was now a floating mess. They had been on the eastern side of the barge and now she moved in towards the center.

  At first, she saw no one.

  They’re all dead! Eve shouted and then laughed. The sound of that creepy laughter echoed along the narrow alleys between the huge metal boxes. The echo made it seem like the barge was deserted.

  Jillybean took one step toward a ladder and her foot came down in a narrow river, running through the gap. The water was red—not tinted red, but deep red.

  I don’t think that’s water. Do you? Do you really think that’s water?

  Jillybean refused to answer her. During the battle, her mind had been racing faster than few humans dead or alive could have kept up with, but now there was a lull in both the fighting and the whirring gyro of her brain and into this respite the shadows moved in.

  Her only choice was to ignore Eve as best as she could. She sloshed to the ladder, a grimace on her face and her heart constricted so badly she could barely breathe. Climbing out of the blood river helped, however at the top of the ladder she gazed around the open expanse and counted only six people, five of whom were bleeding.

  “Where’s everyone else?” she whispered. She distinctly remembered hearing a cheer when Mike had fired his first rocket. It had been loud and strong.

  Don’t pretend you don’t know. The voice had come from below her among the shadowy, bloody lanes. Eve was out of her head. Sometime during the battle, she had escaped and was now roaming the ship.

  The death ship, Eve corrected, calling from within the maze. Come and see what you did.

  “No! I don’t have to. I’m the Queen.” Jillybean wanted to run away. She wanted to find some dark container and hide. “I’ll have Stu get a head count.” Eve snorted laughter at this and sent an image into Jillybean’s head. The image was of Stu as he had looked only a minute before: dried blood caked down the side of his face, shiny, fresh blood leaking down his back, his entire body sagging in complete exhaustion against the wall of a container. He had carried the fight from the first shot on the Marin Headlands to this point.

  Good plan. Run him ragged until he dies. Wasn’t that your plan all along? Weren’t they all supposed to die? Isn’t that right, Miss Three-Steps-Ahead?

  “We’re not done yet,” Jillybean snapped and began struggling down the narrow alleys between the metal boxes, pretending that the ankle-deep blood wasn’t utterly horrific. It helped if she kept her chin up and her eyes on the next container,
even if it was riddled with holes and there were splashes of…her foot came down on someone’s face and she let out a little cry.

  The face, with the distinctive swirl of her boot imprinted in the tacky blood was unrecognizable. It was too mangled, too disfigured…”

  The radio crackled: “Queen, this is Gerry.”

  Jillybean gratefully answered; anything was better than that face. “This is the Queen. I’m glad you’re alive. How many fighters do you have?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  She couldn’t answer for a few seconds as that numb feeling swept her and it was all she could do to hold the radio. “Thirty-one? Is that what you said?” Her mind could not comprehend the number. It made no sense. There had been three hundred and fifty people on the island.

  “Yes. Thirty-one. Three, one. We aren’t with the others. We’re in a building on the east side of the island. We only have seventy-four rounds left.”

  So bad news/terrible news. “Seventy-four?” she mumbled, mostly to herself. It was only enough for them to commit suicide with. The thought made Eve’s presence grow. Jillybean shook her head savagely. “Do what you can defensively. I’ll…I’ll think of something.”

  Yeah, you can kill yourself, too! The high cackle rang and rang. Jillybean tried to escape it, hurrying away, but she could only go so fast as she ran into more corpses in shabby little piles or completely carpeting the runs between the containers.

  No one was alive it seemed. She found dead body after body until she came to the front end of the barge where the ramp sloped upward. There was only one body here, surrounded by a litter of spent shell casings, that rolled back and forth in time with the gently pitching deck.

  Jillybean was just turning away when there was a distant explosion. Mike had set off his second rocket—the signal for the three-person team he had left behind to light the crates on fire. Each of the fifteen crates was filled with more of the potassium chlorate, barley, and baking soda mixture used to make great clouds of smoke which filled the southern part of the bay. The smoke was Mike’s only chance to escape.