GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  Most of the bullets winged up and to the right of his point of aim, but enough of them zipped in a straight line that Mike committed the unpardonable offense of missing his targets time and again. Sometimes the beasts would get to within spitting distance of the pyramid before he was able to drop them with what felt like lucky shots.

  The giant bodies of the dead began to pile up, with more zombies pressing in, and still the little pyramid held together. They yelled for people to: “Climb faster!” and for Mike to: “Shoot straight for once!” Many of them blubbered prayers which, in the end, did not come true.

  There were too many zombies for Mike to get them all and with the last two people scrambling up the pyramid, a seven-foot tall female with five of Mike’s bullets in her, stumbled the last few feet and brought the whole thing down.

  Three of the people managed to find handholds, but the rest went down in heap, landing squarely on the back of the zombie. It was a miracle that no one was seriously hurt. They were all whole enough to jump up and scramble for handholds. One fell from ten feet up and although he snapped his tibia square in two, he expelled only a terrified whimper. A second was pulled down by another zombie which tread so heavily on the still downed female zombie that she became wedged between two rocks and eventually drowned.

  A third member of Mike’s crew, a girl named Charmel Gilbert, could not find any hold whatsoever and went from point to point along the vertical wall in a growing fever, begging, “Please, please, please,” over and over again.

  She was a sunny, sweet girl. Like almost everyone, she was slim to the point of being skinny. What fat she did have was collected in her soft, pouty cheeks. The first time Jillybean had seen her, she had turned to Mike and whispered: “Don’t you just want to pinch those cheeks?”

  It wasn’t something that Mike would have ever thought on his own, but when Jillybean mentioned it, he had actually considered it. Now, as two more zombies got through the surf, he hunched over his rifle prepared to shoot Charm in the back. A bullet through the back of the head would be a sad mercy. Before he could pull the trigger, something went zipping past his scope. There was a sloshy thunk of a noise and when Mike resettled his aim, he saw that one of the zombies was down in the surf with a caved-in head.

  There was a cheer and then more of these strange blurs whipped past. Mike pulled his eye from the scope and saw that his crew on the top of the cliff were hurling rocks and chunks of concrete down on the zombies with such thorough hatred that soon even the man with the broken leg was able to be pulled to safety. What was more amazing was that five minutes later, Claudia Stephens was rescued. She was concussed to the point of being punch drunk, but she was alive.

  In the entire landing they had lost only one man, which in itself was a major victory. It was a pyretic victory, however. Mike’s small force had given everything they had just to survive. They lay around the top of the cliff gasping and weak. Few of them could go on and it was just as well since only one other person had managed to keep hold of their rifle.

  Dave Small, Jillybean’s one-time jailor, had a twisted ankle that was swollen to the size of a softball—still, he wouldn’t give up his weapon to someone whole, not that anyone asked for it. The general consensus was that they had pushed their luck as far as it would go and it was time to see about being rescued.

  Mike could only shake his head in wonder. Through Colleen he explained that the smoke from the Rapier would only last another twenty minutes at the most and that there was no time for a rescue.

  “The Queen could do it,” Rebecca said, speaking for the rest. “She could do it, no problem.”

  “Oh, there’s a big problem,” Colleen spouted before Mike could stop her. “The Queen’s been arrested!” As the battle on the other side of the island began to heat up, Mike’s crew used the last of their energy participating in a huge and useless uproar, one that he didn’t have time for.

  He waved his hands to settle them down but when they did he was at a loss what to say. Perhaps they had arrested Jillybean because they thought she would lead them into extreme danger, regardless of casualties, something that both Stu and Mike had also done.

  “She was behind all of this,” he admitted, speaking through Colleen again. “She meant for this to happen. She planned for the Corsairs to attack us. She wanted it.”

  This killed the uproar and in its place was a long uncomfortable silence in which everyone snuck looks at Mike. Whether they meant it or not, the looks reminded him of the part he played in all of this. Almost singlehandedly he had made it possible for Jillybean to steal the Corsair boat to begin with, which made everything that followed more or less his fault.

  Although the crowd was staring dazedly around as if this news was more of a jolt than their near-death experience, Mike knew that it was only a matter of time, perhaps only a matter of seconds, before they began pelting him with questions that he didn’t want to answer.

  Then would come the blame and the steaming hot piles of guilt they would shovel onto him. He would rather face the Corsairs alone than deal with that. “We’ll figure things out when we get back,” Colleen told them, speaking for him. “Everyone wait here and try not to call attention to yourselves.” Not being overburdened with perception, Mike missed the twice spoken word “we” until he had gathered the last hundred rounds of ammo from among the survivors and stood facing the black wall of smoke.

  “I can’t believe I’m going in there,” Colleen said, with a high and broken laugh.

  “Mhhh?” He couldn’t believe what he’d just heard coming from her mouth.

  Although her spine was positively stiff with determination, the rest of Colleen seemed just as surprised. She was no fighter and Mike saw it must have been a great trial for her just to be standing there. Her eyes sparkled as usual, although now there were frightened tears in them, and her smile was just as pretty as always, except now it was lopsided and quivering.

  “You’re not going,” Mike said in a barely audible whisper. He tried to push her back to be with the others.

  She shrugged off his hand. “No. You can’t go alone. Something might happen to you. And I…I…couldn’t let that happen. I…” She faltered, a flush of pink bloomed into her cheeks, causing Mike to fear she was going to say something concerning love and destiny. The thought had him cringing. She had come this far because of him and he had allowed it because he needed someone to speak for him.

  The rest of the way would be about fighting and, more than likely, dying. He didn’t want her to come while she was under any illusion that she had a chance with him.

  “I love Jenn,” he told her.

  This hit her like a physical force and she stepped back in shock. “I…I know. Everyone knows that. But why say it like that? Are you trying to be mean?” Her eyes no longer sparkled with fear-filled tears, they now sparked with anger.

  “No, I just don’t want you to get hurt thinking that we will ever happen.”

  She turned cold, then in a literal blink, the ice melted. “You don’t want me to get hurt? It sounds like you care about me more than you want to admit. There’s only one way to find out just how much you’ve been lying to yourself.”

  With a wink, she strode off toward the bank of smoke and the hellacious sound of the raging battle.

  Chapter 25

  Stu Currans

  The Tempest could not float much longer. Three times the ship had slipped out of the smoke banks to suffer a storm of bullets that riddled her sails and punched so many holes through her fiberglass hull that the boat was more like a colander than a serviceable watercraft.

  She was slowly settling as the water level in the cabins rose to three feet, four feet, five…

  “Just a little longer,” Stu growled as he squinted, trying to peer through both the natural darkness and the manmade maelstrom. He was alone on deck, hoping the Tempest was pointed in the general direction of the docks.

  His ex-Corsairs were all dead. Dustin had been the last to fall, blee
ding from a half-dozen gunshot wounds. Stu slid his corpse over the side with only a grunted, “Sorry.” He felt sorrier for himself and his pathetically huddled crew. They were doomed if he couldn’t find his way to the dock.

  He didn’t have Mike’s ear for the sounds of the bay or his sailing talents. All Stu possessed was the solid conviction that he would find the island one way or another, and get his revenge. Beyond seething anger, Stu felt little. He certainly didn’t feel love. Jillybean had taken that from him. Hell, he thought, she had taken everything from him, including his name. When the truth got out, the name Stu Currans would be synonymous with dupe, or moron, or jackass.

  “Or all three,” he muttered, apparently louder than he thought.

  Something along the side of the boat moaned in agreement. It was one of the dead. The bay was chugged full of the beasts. They’d been drawn to the sound of battle and the sight of the flying black boats, and now they were just something else to piss Stu off.

  Most ignored the near-silent craft; it was beyond their ken. This one was different. The boat yawed to the right as it took hold of the gunwale and tried to pull itself up. Stu ignored it. If it got on board, only then would he consider doing something about it. As it was, the extra weight was nothing compared to the ten tons of water he was already shipping.

  He was sorely tempted to break out the thermal scope and check his position once more. “No. Hold off.” This time his mutter was so low that the zombie missed it. The scope worried him. Or rather the battery within the scope worried him.

  The first time he had met Eve, she had told Stu not to trust Jillybean’s batteries, claiming that they “sucked” compared to the old ones. The only way they did was that they tended to run down quickly. Stu had no idea how much juice was left in the scope’s battery and since it was the one true advantage he had, he couldn’t use it haphazardly.

  Besides, it had only been five minutes since a spun-up gypsy wind had come whipping around from nowhere to push the Tempest’s bow forty degrees from center. Before he knew it, they were outside the protection of the smoke. That was when Dustin had his ticket punched.

  It was also when Stu realized fate would get him to the island. He was standing at the wheel just as tall and obvious as a man could be. Bullets had lashed the air all around him as he hauled the dying, creeping boat toward the next bank of clouds. Once in it, he had used the scope to spy the long, rigid lines of what could only be another sailing ship snugged up against the dock.

  That had been his aiming point, but had he played the current right? Was he drifting away from the island or was he running too close? Were the docks directly ahead? The guard tower? Or was he pointed south towards the Santas?

  “I’ll check in another a minute,” he told himself. Half a minute was all that was needed to show that he was off target and in the worst possible way.

  Once more the Tempest materialized out of the smoke, this time directly in front of the guard tower. With its sails in tatters and its deck strewn with corpses, the ship appeared to be a dreadful apparition from some horrid nightmare.

  Stu had no idea how the boat appeared or what sort of mayhem the smoke and the circling ships had caused. He only knew that what seemed like a thousand bullets were speeding right at him, but once again they all missed. They missed him but not the boat itself, so when he went to turn to port and slip up on the dock, more like a guest than an enemy, the wheel only spun uselessly, its cable shot completely away.

  “Hmm,” was all Stu said. He wasn’t worried. If he died, then his problems would die with him. With bullets sizzling past him, he went forward and adjusted the boom and yanked hard on the sail, which sagged, displaying all the vitality found in a bloodhound’s cheek.

  The wind chose that moment to curl around and, in seconds, he had picked up such a good head that when he ran aground, the bow of the Tempest rode right up onto the rocks at a sharp angle. It was so sharp, in fact that the guards in the tower couldn’t angle their weapons far enough down to hit anything but the now flooded stern.

  Stu squatted down next to the cabin stairs with his eye to the thermal scope as firing was beginning to pick up all along the island. For the most part, the defenders were shooting at anything that moved and, with smoke pouring over the dock, a lot of bullets were whisking wastefully out into the bay.

  “Hang down there for a bit,” he drawled to his assault team, with a little smirk on his face. It was his idea of a joke as he was sure they had no intention of doing anything else. Still wearing the smirk, he slung the pack that carried three of the smaller smoke bombs and walked forward up the slanted deck. He was just about to leap down off the boat when he saw a zombie on all fours struggling up the rocks towards the guard tower.

  In the dark, with its great size and slow, ponderous belly scraping the rocks, it looked like a cross between a hippo and a gorilla. Stu couldn’t imagine what it had been feeding on to get so big, but he guessed that it had to weigh half a ton, easily.

  The bullets zinging by were a quick death and he didn’t fear them at all, but this creature wiped the smirk from his face. He hunkered down in the midst of the one-sided battle and watched as the gigantic zombie tottered up to the tower and screamed in rage at the guards.

  Immediately, the firing stopped, replaced by whispers which the zombie heard. It threw its great bulk at the closest leg of the tower, shaking the entire structure. The tower had stood there for over seventy years and many of its bolts were rust-eaten and many of its welds were cracked. When the beast hit it, the vibration rang like a pulse right up to the platform.

  Rust flakes came fluttering down like a red-brown snowstorm. Along with the rust, a high scream filtered down. It was as close to womanly that a man could get. Stu had heard that sort of scream from men—usually as they were being eaten alive, but sometimes right before, like this.

  The beast grabbed the ladder and heaved upwards. There was a groan of metal and then a rung snapped off. One of the Corsairs leaned out and fired a cannon-like pistol at the zombie. It screamed into the blasts, looking as though it were eating the slugs. And it might have been since it definitely wasn’t dying.

  Black blood sprayed the broken concrete all around the thing’s feet in a useless display of splatter and light. The bullets did not slow it down in the slightest. The creature began climbing. Stu had never seen such a thing before. As far as he knew, zombies could not climb. They were too uncoordinated even for such simple action and yet there it was, going hand over hand while its huge mud and filth-covered feet kicked spastically at the rungs.

  It certainly wasn’t a fast climber or an effective one and if the climb had been higher, it wouldn’t have stood a chance. The tower was only thirty feet high and when the nearly ten-foot tall zombie reached up with its long gorilla arms, it was already halfway to the top.

  The men in the tower screamed and another gun was produced and fired with little thought and no time given to aiming. They pointed it down and with the beast reaching up, there was a bare two feet between the two. The shooter rippled off fifteen rounds, half of which went into that huge outstretched hand, blasting off three fingers and a thumb, without which the zombie had no chance to continue its climb.

  It fell with an earthshaking thud at the base of the ladder.

  “Thank God,” one of the men whispered, prematurely, as it turned out. A moment later the beast picked itself up and once more attacked the tower, making a gong sound as its head smacked one of the legs of the tower. The blow split its grey skin, going right to the bone. Unfazed, it slammed itself at the tower again and again.

  More shots were fired down from the platform, hitting with less than lethal force and only building the thing’s towering rage. It roared again, this time so loudly that it dwarfed the noise of the guns firing and there were a lot of guns firing. So many guns were firing that it sounded like an actual assault was underway, when it was really just Stu and a single zombie, and so far, Stu hadn’t done anything except watch.
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  The single zombie was joined by others crawling up out of the bay drawn by the sound of the battle. Most were stymied by the seawall rising up from the rocks, though it was only seven-feet tall. Then there was the heavy fence behind it to contend with. In places, such as beneath the tower, the wall had collapsed and the fence proved to be weaker than it looked and no match for the zombies.

  Three more made it to the guard tower and a few others found their way inland to spread more chaos in what was already a chaotic night.

  In the contest between old and rusted metal, and the combined strength of four zombies, the zombies won out. With a new and much higher womanly shriek from one of the men, the tower came crashing down and in a blink the creatures swarmed. There were more shrieks and a good deal of shooting in which two of the zombies were finally killed, but in the end, the remains of the tower were torn open and the zombies ate the men as if they were eating a crab straight from its shell.

  During all of this, Stu had only watched, while a few feet below him, his crew listened in horror as the zombies ate, crunching bones and making a sickening slurping sound as they did. It was repulsive. To set his mind on something else, Stu took up his scope once more and scanned the part of the island he could see.

  South of him, the dock was engulfed in smoke. It billowed right up to the squat apartment building that overlooked them, and completely blacked out one side of it. Through the scope, Stu could see the heat signature of thirteen Corsairs peeking from windows or up on the roof, waving their hands to clear away the dark vapors.

  Thirty yards to his right was the furthest edge of the damp and decrepit old guard’s quarters which had a leaky roof and a wide, jagged crack that cut the place nearly in two. There were five Corsairs in the building, which, because of the odd shape of the island and the need for flat surfaces on which to build on, was canted at such an angle that none of the windows faced directly towards the Tempest.