GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  Other than this minor glitch, everything was like clockwork and about the only thing that Jillybean hadn’t planned on was that Mike had missed that second shot, leaving one of the guards very much alive.

  Jillybean had just stooped to grab the first heavy ammo can when an explosion of gunfire shook the night. The guard was not looking for precision, he set his weapon on full auto and ripped a long stream of bullets into the Captain Jack, pinging them off the ammo can in Jillybean’s hands, tearing up the deck and blasting the top of Kasie’s head right off.

  The blood-brain mixture splattered Jillybean and this more than anything turned her so weak she couldn’t stand. With bullets thudding inches from her, she fell back and sat there, unable to get back up as suddenly the weight of guilt was too much for her to bear.

  Chapter 6

  Mike Gunter

  If Jillybean felt the guilt on her like a hundred weight, Mike’s guilt was ten times that. He knew he had rushed that second shot, but when the guard had dropped, he had mentally declared it a “lucky” shot, congratulated himself on being just that good and hadn’t said a word.

  Now, he was crouched next to the vile, stinking entrails bin that had sat on the dock since Mike had been a kid. For once he didn’t notice the smell. He was as frozen as Jillybean, watching in horror as his little crew was being slaughtered.

  Kasie was sprawled across the deck with a good chunk of her head blasted across the wood. Colleen was lying against the railing, one arm under her head. She was so still she was either fast asleep or dead. Then there was Jillybean who was bleeding like a stuck pig, too injured to move in spite of the bullets zipping all around her.

  And Mike was doing nothing! In his rush to get the Rapier underway, he had forgotten the scoped rifle back on the Captain Jack. He had found himself defenseless before, but never so stupidly defenseless. Of course, the only remedy for being so stupidly defenseless was an even greater draught of stupid courage.

  Leaping up and making himself a perfect target, he turned his back to the guard tower and heaved hard against the Rapier, using all the strength in his young legs to thrust both boats away from the dock. He was helped by the sluggish current, which took the boats at a sloth’s pace eastward. The soft wind was even less helpful and did little besides turn the boats so they pointed north as they gradually slid west.

  It was the world’s slowest and most inept getaway. Mike had accidentally made the boats perfect targets and now that the guard didn’t have to shoot over the Rapier he could rake the Captain Jack mercilessly from stem to stern. Anyone left alive on the deck would be dead in seconds and anyone foolish enough to leap from one boat to the other would be dead even faster—and of course, Mike did exactly that.

  He had no choice. He had to get to the gun and return fire before any more guards showed up. To get from one boat to the other meant climbing up on the railing of the Rapier. It meant practically screaming: Shoot me! Shoot me!

  Mike didn’t hesitate. He went straight up, looking like a hero, right up until he misjudged the pitching of the two boats and nearly fell between them, where he would have been crushed and or drowned. He managed to save himself only by pinwheeling his arms in a gesture that could only be interpreted as: No, really shoot me! The guard tried and as Mike stood high up on the railing, swaying and rocking back and forth, he felt the air roiling with the passage of the streaking bullets.

  Had he not been in the middle of a battle, he would’ve waited to gain his balance before leaping across, more than likely looking graceful in the process, and landing in an elegant, but somewhat sinister ninja crouch. Just then, however, he didn’t have time for grace or even balance. The best he could manage was a singularly ugly thrusting fall that didn’t end in a landing exactly, but more of a splat followed by a tumbling ramble across the deck as the Captain Jack pitched up.

  Bullets followed him from one side of the deck to the other, sometimes missing by a hair's breadth, just grazing the goosebumps which had broken out in a wave all over his flesh. He felt at the mercy of both the fates and the tides as the deck pitched back the other way and sent him sprawling to the center of the ship where there was no cover whatsoever.

  He should’ve been killed; however the bullets were now passing just over his head. The guard was aiming high and shredding up the jib. Does he think someone’s hiding behind it? Mike wondered. Nothing else made a lick of sense.

  Thinking his luck had changed, Mike rushed to where he had left the gun and stopped with his hand outstretched. The gun was gone! His mind flashed images of him setting the rifle exactly there. “What the he…”

  “Get out of the way, Magoo!”

  Mike jumped and might have let out a small squeak. Jillybean, covered in gore and partially hidden by a stack of ammo crates, had the rifle at her shoulder. No, this wasn’t Jillybean, this it was Sadie. Only she called him that annoying name and only she had the confidence to shoot just inches over his shoulder as he stood gaping at her.

  The shot silenced the guard. Mike turned to see if he was down for good, and as he did, Sadie leapt up and shoved him to the edge of the Captain Jack. “Get us outa here, damn it!” she ordered. His head had been ringing with all the shooting, but now that it was clearing, he could hear that the island was filled with shouts and the sound of running feet. Someone was even shooting, but they were shooting in the wrong direction.

  He had paused to take this in, but there was no “pause” in Sadie and before he knew it, she had given him a healthy shove toward the Rapier.

  “Hey!” he squawked as he clung to the railing.

  “Get moving!” Sadie cried as she tossed a crate over him, sending it crashing onto the deck of the Rapier. “We have one minute to get out of here or our goose is cooked.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Mike heaved himself over the railing and ran to the jib and squinted at the workings and saw only a mass of ropes running in every direction. For the first time since he was a kid, he looked at the rigging of a boat in complete confusion. The setup was bizarre as well as counterintuitive. Although he had been raised on the water, he had only been on so many boats and did not have an unlimited knowledge concerning every single type of rigging system known to man and this one…

  Suddenly he saw how the lines crisscrossed before running back toward the stern, almost to the wheel. Now, he understood. The jib and main were designed to be raised and lowered from the rear of the boat, perhaps so that one person could run the ship singlehandedly. Turning on a dime, he raced back, just as Sadie chucked an ammo crate across to him. When it hit, probably leaving a huge and unconscionable divot on the deck, it broke open and out poured hundreds of rounds of ammo.

  Mike slipped and slid through it all, somehow managing to keep on his feet, only to trip over Colleen’s body. She let out a whimpering sound. “Sorry!” he yelled. More guns had opened fire and it was useless now to bother whispering. He thought about helping her below but then saw that she was unhurt. There wasn’t a drop of blood on her or her clothes.

  “Get your ass up!” he roared. “Help Jillybean. Come on!” Furiously, he yanked her to her feet and thrust her toward the rail where she cringed at the first crate thrown her way. Mike had to turn his back on all of that. He gave the wheel a quick spin to starboard and then turned the crank to raise the jib, or at least he thought it was the jib since it was in front of the mainsail. As it rose, he saw that it was very large and strangely swept back toward where the main would normally go, almost as if the two were meant to overlap.

  It was odd and an affront to what he considered a real sail. “Probably someone rigged the wrong sized sail.”

  Still, it did the trick and filled nicely.

  He was just beginning to think the over-large jib might have been done on purpose when a shrill cry had him turning back to his left where Sadie was shooting at the island and Colleen was spread eagle between the two boats doing everything she could to keep them together.

  “You better not let go,” Sadie
growled at her and then snapped off another shot. She appeared completely unfazed by the number of bullets zipping her way, chewing up the deck and tinging off the aluminum mast. Mike ran to help, slipping in a slick black run of Kasie’s blood and nearly pitching overboard.

  Sadie snorted laughter. “You really are a Magoo. Maybe you should help Apocalypse Barbie before she gets torn in two.”

  He almost asked How? Then he remembered he knew boats—other than that strangely large jib, that is. It didn’t take any real brains to help Colleen. Attached to the railing was a boathook: a multipurpose tool mostly used to aid in docking or fishing people out of the water. It was little more than a long pole with a hook which he used to snag the Captain Jack and haul it closer.

  In fine dramatic form, Colleen fell exhausted onto the deck of the Rapier. There was no time for drama. Mike picked her up and shoved her toward the wheel. She cringed away from it, edging instead closer to the hold where she probably thought she would be safer. “I don’t know how to drive one of these things. You know that.”

  “Just do what I tell you,” he shouted back and then cursed, dropping the boathook. A bullet had hit it only inches from his fingers, and the shock of it had numbed his left hand. “Keep us pointed east,” he said and bent to pick the boathook back up, feeling something swish violently above his head as he did.

  Colleen went and hid behind the wheel, crouching down to make herself as small a target as possible. Thankfully it wasn’t really needed. The jib was pulling them further into the bay and, as the Rapier was a black boat on black water in a black night, they were already fading into the background. The bullets passing close were no longer being aimed with any sort of precision and the shooting as a whole was beginning to slack off.

  “Come on, Magoo, why aren’t we tied off already?” Sadie asked, ignoring the occasional thump of bullets whacking into the side of the Captain Jack. “I thought you knew about knots and all that sea-crap.” She reloaded the M4 and scanned the island with the scope one last time.

  “I take it they’re not pulling off after us?” he asked.

  Sadie rolled Jillybean’s large eyes. “Would I ask you to tie us to this hulk if they were? Please, Magoo. I’m not an idiot.”

  “We’re not going to keep that stinking thing, are we?” Colleen had lifted her head over the top of the wheel and surveyed the Captain Jack with a look of disgust. “That’s what you meant by tie it off, right? You mean to keep this, this wreck.”

  Mike was offended by this. Sure, the Captain Jack’s deck had a few holes in it and the water was rising in the cabins at a prodigious rate, but a “wreck?” That was just insulting. “Don’t be like that, Colleen. It’s nothing a little resin and some work can’t fix.”

  “I can see through the boat, Mike! It’s like Swiss cheese. Why would we want it, anyway? Why would you?” This she asked of Sadie. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  Sadie’s eyes glinted at the question, as if it were a challenge. Colleen looked away. “We’re keeping the boat because she wants it. That should be good enough for the likes of you. Now, Mike tie off the boats and Colleen tie off the wheel and clean up the mess.” As bold as she was, Sadie couldn’t bring herself to look at Kasie’s body.

  She went below deck to start plugging what looked like hundreds of holes, leaving Colleen gasping and spluttering about “fairness.”

  Sometimes Mike didn’t understand the meaning of the word fair. He had been the one who had missed the guard; it should be him lying in a pool of blood instead of Kasie. “If you get the bullets rounded up, I’ll take care of her,” he told Colleen after he finished tying off the two boats. Although he had hung rubber fenders between them, the boats still thumped annoyingly against each other—it was a temporary solution only.

  Colleen thanked Mike profusely, adding far too many compliments concerning his courage and chivalry than he cared to hear. They only added to his guilt, concerning both Kasie and Jenn. Was she still alive? he wondered, picturing Jenn as he had last seen her fifteen hours before, waving at him and looking so beautiful with her auburn hair flowing in the breeze. She looked beautiful but so terribly young, so small.

  “Jenn was okay when you left, right?” he called across to Sadie. He had already asked this of Jillybean and had received a satisfactory answer. Yet, it didn’t hurt to ask again, especially of Sadie who could be brutally honest at times.

  There was a long pause before Sadie answered, “She was…she was fine. And so was Stu, though I think he might have been hurt a little. Just some scratches and nicks. Nothing to worry about with either of them.”

  Fat chance of that. Mike had been worrying about Jenn all day. Even when he’d been in the midst of that terrible battle in the smoke, he had been more worried about her than himself. And gazing south at the dark hulk of the Floating Fortress didn’t help. Nothing had ever looked so desolate, lonely or dead.

  He stepped across to the Captain Jack and picked up the rifle, hoping to see little white figures through the thermal scope. Instead, the entire thing glowed whitish-grey as if it had been heated through somehow. “Colleen, turn the wheel three-quarters to starboard. To the right, I mean.”

  Almost directly below him, Sadie drew in a sharp breath. “Are we going to the Fortress?”

  “Unless you or Jillybean have a better idea.”

  “She says you won’t find anything there. They were leaving. They were going to take the Puffer to Treasure Island and then flee with the children to the mainland.”

  “Do you know where they were going exactly?”

  Another long pause before she said, “No, they didn’t mention that. Look, I’ve got like a million holes to fill, so if you don’t mind.”

  Mike hurried to the stairs and went down into the dark cabins, where the water came up to his hip. Sadie retreated into the stern cabin, saying, “If you’ll get the bow cabin, I’ll work back here.” She tried to shut and lock the door, but the lock had been blown to pieces.

  He opened the door and Sadie backed away from him as if he were some sort of monster. She even held a ripped-up blanket in front of her. Although he stopped in the doorway she backed into the bed and fell. “What’s wrong?” he demanded. “What happened to Jenn?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Where were you supposed to meet them?” She lifted a single shoulder in a half-shrug as answer. It told him more than any lie that she could have contrived. “You weren’t supposed to meet them. Was it because you thought you would die?”

  Sadie grinned without showing her teeth. “Maybe. Maybe we were all supposed to die.” She got up and as she was trying to scoot around Mike, she caught her reflection in a broken mirror. It made her jerk and he caught a strange look in her blue eyes. She tried to hide her eyes behind her bushy hair and laughingly asked, “Do you think Jillybean would mind if I cut her hair?”

  It was a bizarre and unexpected question and before he could even think of an answer, she was past him, splashing through the water and climbing up onto the deck. The wind had picked up and the jib was full. The Floating Fortress loomed ahead of them so shockingly dark that he only just realized why it glowed within the thermal scope: it had been torched. But by who?

  Mike was suddenly angry. He was tired of worrying and he was tired of Jillybean and her wall-to-wall crazy. He didn’t like the look of the barge or how the Captain Jack was so fearfully low in the water, and he especially didn’t like how the wind and tide had conspired to create what appeared to be a river of corpses in the middle of the bay.

  This ugly mass of bodies snaked out away from the Floating Fortress and went in the direction of where Jillybean had blown up the Sea King.

  Sadie had her eyes locked on the undulating river. “I’ve been to hell, Mike and this is just a glimpse.”

  He gave the bodies only a glance; she was trying to sidetrack him again. “Jillybean never actually planned on dying, not even surrounded by a fleet of Corsairs. So, why don’t either of you know where Jenn is?
Were you going to abandon her? Is that why you had me go north for so long?”

  “Me? You think I would abandon my best friend?” This made Sadie laugh. It was high and loud, and also filled with sorrow. “No, I would never do that. It was the other way around. She abandoned me and, and, and…”

  She swallowed, thickly, before adding, “And if you want to know why, you’re going to have to ask her. Just do me a favor and remember what happened with you and those zombies. Remember the greater good.”

  Chapter 7

  Jenn Lockhart

  From the highest point on Yerba Buena Island, Jenn watched the spectacular explosion of the Sea King as it lit up the golden evening with a fireball that blotted out the last of the sunlight and extinguished the first stars.

  In spite of the brilliant white light and the great fire that followed it, which burnt nine ships down to the waterline, Jenn felt almost nothing. Her heart had been a lump of ice sitting square in the middle of her chest since she watched Mike Gunter turn the Saber back into the battle on his suicide run. When she closed her eyes she could still see the fire engulfing the Saber’s decks and eating up her sails. She could see the overwhelming odds against him. She could see his noble sacrifice play over and over again.

  Jenn bitterly labeled Jillybean’s death a convenient suicide. The explosion left a bitter taste of guilt in her mouth, but it did nothing for her heart.

  Next to her, Stu Currans sucked in a long breath until the thunder of the explosion came to them seconds later. Then he turned away, blinking rapidly, staring at nothing. He wouldn’t look in the direction of the raging fire or the billowing smoke, and he didn’t seem to care a bit that a new battle had broken out among the Corsairs.