GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  This should’ve been enough to dissuade the zombies, but sometimes they could get odd thoughts stuck in their heads. Chances were that they had forgotten about the humans and didn’t know why they were fighting to get on board.

  The why of it all wasn’t really that important, at least not just then when all she had to fight with was the knife. She slunk to the bow, pulling the sail along with her as cover. Once there, she went to work, stabbing any hand that got to the edge. A knife in anyone else’s hands would have been next to useless and yet in her hands, it was so much more.

  She knew exactly where to aim to cause the most damage, in this case, she went for the median nerve just as it branched from the carpal tunnel, a spot deep in the base of the hand. When her aim was dead on, the hand would spring open and never close again, unable to grasp a single thing.

  It wasn’t exactly a killing strike and yet it rendered the beasts harmless, one after another. They could hold on with their other hand and make slappy gestures toward the deck, but that was it. Still, there were dozens of the beasts and Jillybean found herself in a strange version of whack-a-mole, only she was after hands.

  Hands and eyes. A number of times a face would appear, and she would jab twice in quick succession pop, pop. Without their eyes the beasts seemed lost. They would let go of the edge of the gunwale and drift away, moaning in confusion.

  Jillybean was just getting the upper hand when Mike groaned and stood straight up, looking blearily around the Captain Jack. “Whe…where is we? Are we. Where arrre we? Where’s Jiffybean?”

  Colleen was unhelpfully shushing him with unnecessarily loud shushes and pointing a finely manicured finger out from under the wheel. He missed her entirely. He was just noticing the sail stretched along the deck and was looking down at it without the least bit of comprehension in his dazed eyes.

  “Ish that the shale?”

  “Mike! Stop!” Jillybean barked. It was too late for hiding and half-measures. She saw what was coming even before he took his first uncertain wobbling step.

  The deck of a heaving sailboat, especially one that’s surrounded by hordes of hungry zombies, is not a place for someone with a concussion. Right at that moment, Mike wouldn’t have been able to walk on the smoothest, flattest putting green without falling over. His center of gravity was somewhere west of the boat. He took three drunken steps and went right over with a confused cry and an awkward splash.

  There was no question whether or not Jillybean would go in after him: that answer was an emphatic “No Way!”

  Chapter 3

  Mike Gunter

  With slow, groping hands, Mike splashed about, much like an old and dying Golden Retriever might. The main difference between him and a dog was that he was utterly surprised to find himself in the water…at night…surrounded by zombies.

  It almost felt like he had been thrown over the side of the ship while he was sleeping, or drunk. His pounding head sure made it seem like he’d been drunk at some point. And what ship was it slowly receding from him? The Saber? No, the Saber had gone up in flames. He could picture the evil greedy fire and feel the blistering heat of it like it was only…yesterday? Had it been yesterday? Or was it still today?

  Slowly it was all coming back to him: the long chase by the Santas, the battle with the Corsairs, the smoke, the fire, the intentional sinking of the Saber, as he ran her between two other ships.

  “Tha’s the Captain Ja-ack.” He heard the slur in his words though why or how he was slurring was completely beyond him, but he knew the ship at least. It was definitely the Captain Jack with its moldy sails and dry-rotted cordage and cabins that were disgusting and maybe even diseased.

  And there was Jillybean…No, it was the Queen. She stood tall on the deck, her wild hair a great blowing shadow framing her white face. Since he was in love with Jenn, he never liked to admit just how beautiful Jillybean really was. Not that he would ever feel true love for her. She was simply too much for a simple sailor like him.

  It wasn’t just her looks, either. Her brain was like a hurricane, spitting out thoughts and ideas, and forming plans and plots, and thrusting his mundane way of thinking aside without effort. It was also this entire queen business that had come out of nowhere so suddenly. As much as he had fought it, at least internally, no one he’d ever met deserved such a title as she did.

  Standing on the deck, looking ten-feet tall, she appeared very much the queen. She could even command the dead. “Look at me!” she roared out, and, as if the dead were her subjects, they did indeed turn to stare right at her. They not only stared, they also began clawing and swatting ineptly at the water. There was a great frothing and churning, with Mike treading water right in the middle of all of it.

  It dawned on him that if he didn’t do something that he would be trampled, or whatever the watery equivalent of the word was. Had he been in any shape, he would’ve been able to slip away as easily as walking. Just then, however, his brain felt scrambled and it ached fiercely. Still, swimming, even if it was ungainly and terribly labored, came second nature to him.

  He saw a gap had formed in what felt like a wall of dead bodies, so he began an uncoordinated version of freestyle swimming. It was miserably unsuccessful. With his boots filled with water, they felt like they weighed twenty pounds apiece, and his winter coat was so sodden and clinging that it was like trying to swim in a lead-lined straitjacket.

  The brief exercise, which couldn’t have lasted more than thirty seconds, had his head thrumming horribly and to make matters worse, the Captain Jack didn’t just seem further away, it definitely was further, while the zombies, with their long arms, ending in ragged claws were even closer.

  One monstrous beast turned vacant eyes on him and Mike could see it slowly puzzling out that he was indeed human. There was only one thing to do: he took a breath and let himself sink. He figured he would duck under long enough for the beast to forget about him or maybe look away. What Mike didn’t count on was just how quickly he would sink.

  It was the winter coat. It had to weigh fifty pounds alone. Alarm shot through him and brought with it a slight but definite tinge of panic, a sensation he’d never felt in the water before. He tried to fight it as he began to unbutton the long coat and at first, he was in control of the panic, but very soon, as the buttons felt like they were fused into their buttonholes, the panic began to spread, making everything worse.

  His hands felt blocky as well as twitchy, and above all practically nonfunctional as he went frantically at the buttons. Each balked, doing everything in their power to resist coming undone and as he twisted and yanked, he sank lower and lower in the inky black water until he was twelve feet deep with what looked like an undulating forest of grey legs above him. His lungs were bursting, and his head was pounding from the pressure.

  Finally, with a furiously violent and desperate series of jerks, he tore his coat open and wriggled free. Free but perilously close to giving in to the fantastic desire to breathe. Although there were dozens of the dead right above him, he had no other option than to head directly to the surface, breaking out into the cold night, right among them.

  From beneath, everything had seemed relatively serene. On the surface, the chaos was terrifying. Huge ragged hands splashed within inches of his face and long legs kicked out, knocking him sideways and pounding what little breath was in him, right out again, until he was gasping and spluttering, trying to cough out the black water he had sucked in.

  Jillybean must have seen him struggling because she ceased calling out to the zombies long enough to command, “Turn the wheel halfway to starboard. No. The other way.”

  “Starboard is to the right,” Colleen answered in a muffled whisper.

  “Not when you’re facing the stern! Now, turn the damned wheel the other way. Kasie, I need you on deck. Mike fell in the water…there you are. I need you and Colleen to help him out of the water, but first get the jib up.”

  In the gloom, Mike saw Kasie ease up enough to get a l
ay of the situation. It wasn’t good. There were mobs of zombies all around the Captain Jack fighting to get at the Queen, who had picked up the axe and was hacking at any zombie that managed to get too good of a hold. There were so many in that category that she no longer had to make a spectacle of herself.

  It was the only thing keeping Mike alive. For the moment, he was only a bobbing head in the black water, much like all the rest of them. As long as he kept his face down and coughed as quietly as he could, he was pretty much ignored. It was a situation that wouldn’t last. Eventually, one of them would notice his head was different in that it wasn’t the grotesque size of a pumpkin.

  The dead could be curious about such things and when one reached out and pulled Mike up by the hair, that would be it for him. He would be at the center of a feeding frenzy…a shudder ran up his back as he imagined what would happen to him then.

  He had to get away. He had no choice if he wanted to live, only he was stuck in the middle of a scrum, being battered by kicking feet and barely dodging long arms. The dead were twenty deep in every direction.

  The only way out was to go under the water again where everything was black and cold, where his head would feel like it was going to burst from the pressure and his boots would try to suck him down into the depths. This reality was almost as frightening as what he had just imagined: being pulled apart by the dead as though he was nothing more than a rotisserie chicken.

  Panic and the icy cold water had him both literally and figuratively freezing. It got worse as Jillybean suddenly called out, “Mike! Mike! I don’t see you.” She was running back and forth along the deck, hacking weakly at the dead, doing just enough to keep the boat from being swamped. “I’m going to try to tack and come around.”

  It made sense; if she could turn in a big circle she might be able to disperse the dead, greatly alleviating the danger to him as well as the Captain Jack. The reasoning was sound, the execution would be nearly impossible with her lack of experience.

  Tacking with the jib alone would require speed and room to maneuver, and they would have neither. They were being weighed down by a mass of zombies and there were more in front which would act like speed bumps, killing any momentum that the Captain Jack might build.

  She would need a looser leach and a broad angle on the sail, and yet she stopped hacking at the dead long enough to point Kasie toward a line. “That’s the jib halyard. Pull it as far as it will go and tie it off. This rope over here is its shroud. Pull it tight, but don’t go crazy.” She looked up at the main mast. “Don’t go crazy on any of the ropes. By that I mean, don’t pull so tightly that we break any more of them.”

  If they lost the jib, Mike knew they’d be in huge trouble. This struck him as funny; he was already in big trouble. Huge trouble. He had managed to put his back to the giant, love seat-sized back of one of the dead and was in something of a safe zone. It wouldn’t last. Another beast was already getting closer and more were crushing in.

  Mike’s head had cleared somewhat, and the awful thrum had receded enough for him to realize that he only had one course of action, and that he couldn’t take it as encumbered as he was. Quickly, he pulled the knife from his belt and let it sink. Then he yanked out his multi-tool, which he always carried when on board a sailboat. It disappeared like magic.

  Next, he had to get rid of his boots, but he lacked the strength to tread water with only one hand, and he lacked the courage to take a chance of going under again with them still on. He took half-hearted swipes at his laces, swallowing a half-quart of brackish water in the process, as his arms grew heavier and heavier, his chin dropping ever lower.

  Death from drowning was maybe a minute away. Death from the undead was even closer. A hideous sagging grey face broached the water right in front of him, coming from out of nowhere. Mike nearly screamed, but couldn’t as there was a bubble of fear expanding in his chest.

  It was just about to burst when he heard Jillybean call out, “We’re coming about, Mike!” This didn’t help. He saw with Jillybean-like foresight exactly what was going to happen: Colleen would turn the wheel and the boat would slew around, spinning with painful slowness around on its over-weighted bow without actually going anywhere, either forward or back.

  As he was closer to the stern, the move would put him further away from safety. He had to act and he had to act right that second. With his strength waning, he pulled up both legs, planted them on the chest of the zombie and pushed off, shooting away…four feet away, right into the broad back of another zombie.

  Now, he was just too drained to swim any further and to keep from sinking, he reached out and grabbed the shoulder of the zombie he had thudded into. Mike expected it to bellow or rage or twist violently to get at him, but it only turned slowly with Mike, playing the part of a remora turning along with it. Finally, a break, he thought.

  How he wished he could simply cling to the beast for a few minutes to gather his strength or better yet, ride it back to the Captain Jack, and say, “Thanks so much,” as he gave it a pat on the head and stepped aboard.

  Both were fantasies that he didn’t have time for, not when the Captain Jack was spinning away just as he had foreseen. It stuttered over the dead, with Jillybean barking orders in a harsh voice and swinging the axe as if it weighed eighty pounds. Her only chance was to square up and try to run before the wind. It meant leaving him behind.

  He managed to get one boot off as Jillybean lost the axe. It thudded deep into a skull and when the zombie slipped beneath the surface, it took the axe and very nearly Jillybean with it. She let go just in time.

  “Center the wheel!” she ordered.

  This was it. They would go, and Mike would have to be okay with that. He got his second boot off and for just a moment, he clung to the beast, breathing in its sickening odor and not noticing. After a dozen or so billowing breaths, he felt he was ready.

  “Jillybean!” he yelled across the thrashing water and the heads of the dead. Go on without me—was what he’d planned on saying, only the beast he’d been clinging too suddenly erupted in an explosion of rage and fountaining water; its strength was unbelievably shocking.

  Mike found himself flying through the air, still holding onto the zombie! How it managed to get up out of the water, he had no idea. With a twist of its heaving body, it turned in midair, trying to get at Mike even as it came down on its back; on top of Mike.

  Having six-hundred pounds of zombie back-flop on him, both stunned and deafened him. Like a rag-doll, he was spun and elbowed and churned until he had no idea which way up was, and he might have drowned if he wasn’t now far more buoyant. Drowning would have been a kinder death than the one he envisioned as he came popping up in the middle of a monstrous fight.

  The dead were going at each other tooth and nail. Great fists were swinging like scythes in every direction. Blood and body parts flew until the dead had no idea what they were fighting about at all. It ended as quickly as it had begun and after the melee, which Mike spent in a sort of vacant-eyed stupor, a few of the dead actually seemed dead. They floated like logs, some face-up, some face-down dribbling bubbles up around their ears.

  With his head ringing again, Mike forgot that he’d been about to tell Jillybean to leave. He remembered just as one of the seemingly dead zombies came back to life. It had been face down and as it righted itself it turned in Mike’s direction. He didn’t think he had it in him to escape another of the beasts. The creature’s face was caved in on one side and extra lumpy on the other. It looked stupidly at Mike, opened its mouth and puked a great steaming gush of grey fluid all over him.

  It then ignored Mike completely.

  Although surrounded, Mike said, “Yeah, that’s about right.”

  Exhausted, he dipped briefly under the water to rid himself of the zombie puke before he started side-stroking east towards the bridge. Somehow during all that, he found himself outside the circle of zombies around the Captain Jack.

  He watched Jillybean as he swam,
and as slow as he was, he was making more headway than the struggling ship. Jillybean had given up on trying to keep the dead from getting on board and was now engaged in some sort of plot or scheme. It was a bad idea since at least four zombies were almost over the edge of the boat.

  Mike considered yelling to draw some of the dead away, but it wouldn’t have done much good. They had their sights firmly set on the girl standing on the roof of the cabin, working on fixing something to the boom. Even in the dark they couldn’t miss her.

  “Forget the sail,” he muttered, urgently. “You’ll never get it restrung in time.” If it had been him in that situation, he would’ve done his level best to get the zombies away from the bow and trust that his jib would catch enough wind to get them out of there.

  As he should have guessed, Jillybean had another plan and, unsurprisingly, it had to do with fire. That was all well and good, but to use the boom as a fire-engulfed flagpole made Mike go limp in the water. “Oh, Lord, that had better be a blanket,” he moaned.

  She had slung something large and very sail-like on the end of the boom, lit it on fire and then swung the entire thing over the starboard side of the boat. Zombies love fire. They become enthralled with it. The ones on the starboard side stopped fighting to get on the boat and instead splashed around beneath the fire letting flaming hunks of the please-don’t-let-it-be-the-sail, fall in their faces.

  After thirty seconds as the flames began to die, Jillybean drew the boom around, tossed more very large squares of cloth over it, set it alight and did the same thing on the port side.

  Mike should have been swimming on an intercepting course, but he was so worried that Eve had gotten control of things and was burning his sails out of spite that he just treaded water making sad puppy dog noises in his throat.

  Jillybean’s plan was working and slowly, sluggishly the Captain Jack was moving away from the mass of dead. The second they were completely free, she extinguished the last of the fire and turned toward Mike. He waved his arm. “I’m over here!”