GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  Hundreds of bullets came her way until she no longer even flinched. The wall absorbed many of them; however the great majority sailed high or wide. The Corsairs could only orient on her based on the sound of her gun which was soon lost in the great storm gun blasts that seemed to be coming from every direction.

  It was easy to get turned around in the apparently endless depths of the black smoke and the attack itself failed completely as one of the lead fighters thought he was heading straight when he was really taking an arcing course that curved to the left. He ran into one of his own men, who panicked and shot him. The shooter then turned only to be shot down himself. Within the smoke, the guns flashed like ball lightning and the confusion became chaos and then carnage.

  No one knew which way they had come from, or who was who. Shadowy figures would suddenly appear in front, behind, to the side. Everyone was screaming and everyone was shooting at anything that moved. They fired at point blank range, pulling their triggers as fast as they could.

  It was something of a miracle that even seven of them managed to make it out of the smoke alive. They wore stunned expressions, as if they had just emerged from the edge of hell and for some reason that was beyond Jillybean, they didn’t immediately run away. All seven acted as if smoke was more than smoke, as if it was some sort of supernatural barrier that had been conjured, and that they would be safe as long as they kept out of it.

  This gave Jillybean time to reload and line up a perfect shot. Killing one sent the others running pell-mell back across the causeway with her bullets chasing after. Two of them made it back to the far side where they blubbered and raved to the rest about smoke and an army of darkness.

  Despite her ears ringing with a wah-wah-wah sound, Jillybean could hear them and fully expected one or more of them to make a break for it. Surprisingly, none did. She didn’t want to have to leave her wall and meet them in a fair fight and so, without moving her eye from the scope, she yelled, “I’m coming for you!”

  There were thirteen of them left, hunkered down behind the low wall at the end of the causeway. In her thermal scope, she could see a pale glow emanating from each. One of these glows began to shift to the right. She knew he was about to run and when he made his move, she shot him.

  Now there came a fearful hissing, none of which she could make out. It hardly mattered since she knew they were discussing running away. It was just about their only option. They had tried attacking, which had ended in a massacre but they couldn’t simply sit there and be picked off one by one. This left getting up from the meager safety of the wall and running out into the open where they would be vulnerable.

  Their only choices were to do it in one great rush or go in twos and threes as the rest laid down cover fire.

  They ended up fleeing in one “great” rush. There was nothing great about twelve cowards fighting not to be the last one left behind. Jillybean killed three of them and then watched the rest dash from cover to cover, heading northeast.

  Slowly, she stood, her boots crunching through spent brass. Head to toe, she felt numb, except for her hands which thrummed and her right shoulder which ached from the repeated kicks from her M4.

  You’re a real killer, Eve said. Yessss, a real killer. I bet you enjoyed that. I bet you really liked that a lot.

  “I liked the economy of means,” Jillybean admitted. She was also proud of her simple idea.

  Which you kept to yourself, so you could be the big hero. Isn’t that right? Or did you do it to punish them? Stu and Mike didn’t worship you so you tried to kill them.

  “I didn’t do that, I swear. They wouldn’t listen…”

  You don’t have to explain it to me. I understand. They were getting out of hand and you had to put them in their place. Really, I applaud you. Just next time don’t wait so long. If someone back talks, you should…

  “Stop it!” Jillybean barked. “I don’t need to defend myself from the likes of you.”

  YOU-You-you, echoed around her, or inside of her, she couldn’t tell which. Eve seemed to have disappeared and now the causeway had grown quiet save for the moans and the sobs of the dying. Jillybean peered through her scope and saw the bright white of the living. There were six of them sprawled among the clumps of the newly dead, who gave off a lesser whiteness that was slowly fading away.

  Jillybean hated to waste the bullets on them, but she hated to get shot in the back even more. She aimed her rifle and fired six more times, killing…no, executing the wounded. She tried to lie to herself, “They’re just targets.”

  The lie fell flat. The “targets” within the smoke were too close; their humanity couldn’t be ignored, though she tried very hard. Taking a deep breath, she left the shelter of her wall and ducked into the cloud. Her world shrank, looking as though it ended not far from the tip of her nose. Beyond that was only an undulating blackness that swirled in eddies that seemed to be leading her right through to the other side.

  For a few seconds she walked on pavement, then her feet hit the loose rock that came up out of the bay and she realized she had somehow taken a sharp left, and maybe a second left. The temptation to use the scope was immense. “No,” she told herself, forcibly. Yes, the scope would show her how far she had to go, but at the same time it would show her the many, many bodies. Besides, she had to be close to getting out.

  In fact, after only a dozen or so steps, she came hacking out of the smoke—only a few feet from the mound of rocks she had been shooting from. “How did I…”

  She knew how. Her eyes, even practically blind, had led her in a circle. The scope beckoned. She could be through the smoke in seconds. “I can do this,” she told herself.

  Do this…do this…do this…came whispering from somewhere in the smoke. After hearing that, she knew the scope was out of the question. Thinking her best bet was to simply charge straight through, she hurried into the smoke only to trip over one body and land in the wet entrails of a second. Her teeth clenched, locking in the scream that wanted to come blasting out of her.

  She scrambled on until something snagged her gun and pulled it out of her hands. “N-No!” she choked and went back, her hands slapping the rocks and pavement, searching for the missing gun. All she found were more bodies and she made the mistake of opening her eyes. Out of the smoke a white face seemed to glow all on its own.

  It was Sadie’s long-dead face. I saved my little sister. What did you do for yours? You tried to kill her.

  “I didn’t! I…I swear…I didn’t.” The strange, beer-smelling smoke was in her lungs, choking her again. She had to get away, gun or no gun. She crawled off to the right, thinking that was the direction she’d come from, only she ran into another body and another ghostly white face on the body of a Corsair. This time it was Eve’s face.

  In a way, it was fitting. “I killed you,” Jillybean said. Once upon a time she had killed Eve. She had trapped the girl in a doll and had tossed her into a fire. It should have been the end of her.

  You killed me twice over. Or don’t you remember? Just then there came a baby’s laugh from somewhere behind her.

  A cold wave of goosebumps broke out all over her body. “No!” she cried and began crawling again, desperate to get away from the baby. There was only one baby who would be crying in the smoke—the one she had murdered.

  “That was Eve! That wasn’t me.”

  Are you sure? This came from yet another corpse. Once more Eve’s head was stuck oddly onto it and Jillybean was sure that if she had a light, she would see that it had been sewn on with thick string, or maybe twine. Are you sure it was me? Look closer. What do you see? Who do you see?

  Jillybean saw Eve: pert little nose, ice-cold blue eyes, full lips, strange, wild hair. “No. We just look alike. That’s not me.”

  Then you aren’t looking close enough.

  “There’s a big difference between me and you,” Jillybean insisted, but as she looked for any difference at all, she came to realize that it wasn’t Eve’s head sewn to the corps
e, it was her own. She tried to twist herself off the horrid thing and all the while Eve laughed.

  Eve stood, looking very tall and striking in Jillybean’s three-quarter length black cloak and black boots. “One of these days, you’ll realize that we’re the same. The only real differences are the lies you tell yourself.”

  Chapter 15

  Eve

  Jillybean was gone, lost in the smoke that swirled and twirled, endlessly. It didn’t just seem endless, it was endless. Eve knew that fact better than anyone. A person could lose themselves in it forever if she didn’t fight for every breath, every second of the day.

  It was an ordeal that lesser creatures couldn’t handle. And there had been a number of them. Ipes, that pathetic wimp, had been around a lot at first, but they had needed something more than just a nagging version of their mother to survive. Then there’d been Chris, Jillybean’s first boyfriend. He had been so alive that even Eve had been jealous; in the end, however, he’d turned out to be nothing but a summer fling.

  There had been others—more than Jillybean would ever admit—that came and went quickly. For the most part, they were perverse caricatures of Jillybean’s worst fears: the doctor who prescribed leeches and enemas for every injury, the mom who kept trying to put Jillybean to bed, and keep her there, and the general who wanted to run from everything.

  These were at least interesting. On the other end of the scale was Sadie. She thought she was Jillybean’s “friend,” which made Eve want to gag. Sadie wasn’t her friend, she was her guilt. A jumbo-sized helping of useless guilt who was always trying to undermine Eve.

  “As if I have anything whatsoever to feel guilty about.” Jillybean had frequently called her a sociopath as if it were a bad thing, but that complete lack of guilt may have been the best part about being Eve. It took the stress out of life. “Being a sociopath means you never have to worry about not saying you’re sorry.” She laughed easily.

  “But here we are at the end of times when survival is all that counts. Who would you rather have on your side? Me or that dopey goody-goody Sadie?” Eve didn’t seem to notice or care that she was talking to one of the dead bodies on the edge of the smoke.

  “You bet your sweet ass the answer is Eve. Because I am the ultimate survivor. It’ll be me in the end, just wait and see. I’ll come out on top because I have the ultimate patience. That’s something she doesn’t know. But she’s gonna find out soon enough. I have fought and scratched and persevered and now it’s almost time. It’s almost my time.”

  She grinned at the thought and she grinned at the nightmare around her. The smoke that had covered a huge chunk of the causeway was receding by then as the bomb petered out. What was left was a chunk of scorched cement, pools of blood, and dozens of mangled and pain-contorted bodies.

  “Dang, JB,” Eve whispered in appreciation. “You can pretend that you’re one of the good guys all you want, but deep down you know you enjoyed yourself. This is the work of an artist and not a reluctant one.” Eve was under the impression that when she banished Jillybean for good, she would inherit her “genes” when it came to killing. Eve was a killer, there was no question about that, but she lacked Jillybean’s smooth ability to deal out death on a massive scale.

  It was something she was looking forward to.

  That and being queen. She gazed around the bay, thinking that it would be a good place to build her empire. Once the bay was secure, she’d go south to gobble up the bird-brained religious Guardians, then north to Bainbridge where she would undermine the governor, instigate a war with the remaining Corsairs, and murder Neil Martin with her own bare hands, something she’d longed to do for years.

  Once that little putz was cold and dead, it wouldn’t be long before the entire west coast was hers—the rest of America would be next, falling to her town by town. She truly believed that America had always belonged to the person with the guts to take it. Which made it all the funnier that a fifteen-year-old girl was pretty much the only thing standing in her way.

  “Jenn!” The name left a putrid taste in Eve’s mouth and she spat onto one of the corpses, splattering a hawked-up gob in its open eye. “Jenn is the worst of them all. She thinks she could be queen? What a joke. What has she ever done? A few fake visions doesn’t make a person queen. Yeah, she’s gotta go and once she does, the rest will fall in place, no matter what lies she’s told them about me. They’re sheep and all I have to do is play the part of shepherd for a few days until I can eliminate any undesirables.”

  It was odd that the faces of Stu and Mike came to mind just then. In truth, she didn’t want to lose either one. Stu was almost the last competent fighter left, and Mike knew boats better than anyone alive; she would need him to challenge the Corsairs on the high seas.

  “Which means I’ll have to be subtle about killing Jenn.” Eve saw the glint of her thermal scope and went to the gun. Its strap had snagged on a dead Corsair’s boot. Taking it, she scanned the north end of the causeway which the Corsairs had left unguarded. She then scoped the south end, hoping to catch a glimpse of Jenn, perhaps sneaking out of her hiding place to give Jillybean a healthy dose of self-righteous crap.

  It would make killing her so very simple. “One of the Corsairs was still alive! And, oh my, they shot poor, poor Jenn Dink-heart. I tried to stop him, only, for all darn it, I was too slow. I avenged her, however.” She poked one of the corpses with the barrel of her gun and whispered, “Bammo.”

  Too bad Jenn wasn’t in sight. “Maybe some sort of poison, then?” She had left all her good poisons back on Bainbridge, hidden beneath one of the mossy tombstones in the little cemetery there. It was a perfect hiding spot since those sorts of decorations always gave Jillybean the shivers and she never went near them.

  Eve knelt down on one of the corpses and said to it, “I know what you’re thinking: if I can’t use a normal poison, why don’t I overdose her with one of Jillybean’s medicines?” She slapped the cold cheek before rummaging in its pockets for any extra magazines. “We gotta be very careful heading down that path. Medicine is her thing and we gotta steer clear of it or she’ll come back and it’s way too early for that.”

  The dead body was noncommittal on the subject, but where it lacked in conversational aptitude, it made up for it in a good supply of bullets: four full magazines worth. And the next body had an equal number, as did the next. This was a treasure trove of ammunition and it made Eve curious. She pulled out Jillybean’s penlight and saw right away that the bullets were tipped with a dull, grey metal.

  “Lead. Oh, you sly dogs.” These were homemade bullets—or they were mostly so. Someone had taken spent brass cartridges, added gunpowder to them and popped a machine-tooled lead bullet in the nose of each. “That explains how they’ve been so…” Prolific was a Jillybean word that sat just out of reach on the tip of Eve’s tongue. “So…free with their shooting. Ha, it turns out you’re not the only one who can make a mold, Jillybean.”

  Deep inside her, Eve felt something stir and quickly added, “Never mind, don’t answer that.” Quickly, she filled a satchel with magazines and, after a final scan in both directions, headed north onto Treasure Island, muttering, “The dumbest name of an island in all the history of islands. I think I’ll rename it Evie-Island.”

  Wasn’t that what you were going to rename Bainbridge Island?

  Eve stopped at the sound of the soft, furtive voice coming from out of the night. She brought the gun up and did a 360-degree scan with it; she saw nothing in the scope. “Maybe, I’ll name more than one place after me. Ever think of that, dink?” When the shadows made no reply, she said, “That’s what I thought.”

  She wasn’t afraid of the other voices inside her own head and even less so of the ones that came from outside it. The voices meant Jillybean was crazy and broken, not her. After a few seconds, she went on, heading further onto the island which, to all appearances, seemed to have been entirely deserted. Her fancy scope told her otherwise. Here and there stray men hid a
mong the old military buildings, the heat of their bodies against the cold background gave them away. Even when they were locked away deep in some closet, there was always a faint shimmer.

  For the most part, she bypassed these lone cowards, however a few stuck their heads up out of their hidey-holes as she passed, muttering to herself, so she was obliged to shoot at them. After two misses she took a long look at her scope, then at the barrel. They both seemed fine. “It’s the bullets,” she said, disappointed. She wasn’t just disappointed in the bullets themselves, she but also that she wouldn’t be able to rub it in Jillybean’s face that there was someone out there just as smart as she was.

  Cursing, Eve had to take time to test fire a dozen rounds, shooting at the side of one of the buildings. The bullets missed consistently high and to the right. She adjusted the windage and elevation as far as possible but even at a distance of a hundred yards she was still missing by a foot to the right.

  “How damn tough is it to make a damn bullet that flies straight?” she screamed. Furious, she strode north, thinking that she would find whoever had made the bullets and make him eat them. An entire magazine worth. One at a time.

  “It’s only what he would deserve,” she said, picturing the bullet maker—a bespectacled, balding man with a greasy combover—pouting and holding his belly.

  Until then she would have to get hold of some better bullets. She knew that not all the Corsair bullets were bad. Inside her head was a vague recollection of Jillybean shooting and hitting target after target. She found herself growing even more furious. “She thinks she’s this great killer when it was really the bullets. She took all the good ones and what did she leave me? She left me crap!”

  In her fury, Eve fired three times into the dark.

  “I know what she’s up to. She wants me to fail. She wants everyone to think that Eve ain’t a real killer. I’ll show her, and I won’t hide behind a wall of rocks. That’s the weaselly, wimp’s way out.”