GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  Jillybean did not help in any way. She stood at the bow as the boat slogged through the water, her bright eyes fixed on the island, which was mostly obscured by the rising clouds of smoke. She could not make heads or tails out of the plan of attack. It seemed to be occurring, not with razor sharp precision as she had imagined her own attack happening, but in a slow, exceedingly piecemeal fashion.

  Before she set foot on the island, she was convinced that the battle was already irredeemably lost. Her tiny, worthless, untrained crew had only a handful of bullets to fight with.

  Sacrifice them, Eve urged. Use them to get a better boat so we can really escape. Come on, Jillybean! You know they’re done for. You know they can’t last, no matter what. Even Sadie thinks so.

  A small, nearly hidden voice agreed, which was shocking. Sadie almost never agreed with Eve.

  Jillybean said nothing as the smoke drew nearer and the firing became muffled. They were fighting within the prison itself. A groan escaped her as she imagined the number of casualties that an ill-led, untrained group of civilians would incur attacking a hardened structure like the prison.

  Stu’s face floated through her consciousness. “He’s still alive,” she said to herself. “Only he could have got them into the prison. But at what price?”

  The Captain Jack had just turned south toward the dark shadowy island. It was hard to make out anything at first, then slowly, details became clearer as they drew nearer. Only two of their boats were visible: a portion of the Rapier to the north and run up on the rocks, her guts torn out, was the Tempest.

  “Where’s the Red Pill?” Jenn asked in a frightened feeble whisper. “I don’t see her. Is she one of those by the dock? Please let one of them be…oh, no.” She began to weep. Neither was the Red Pill.

  It’s not too late. We can slip right up and…

  “Shut up,” Jillybean growled. Jenn stiffened, clearly thinking that Jillybean was talking to her. “No not you. I meant Eve.”

  “Eve is the crazy girl inside her,” Aaron whispered to Lindy Smith, who whispered back, “I know that. Everyone knows that.”

  Jillybean wanted to tell them to shut up as well. It was difficult to think with whispers going on inside as well as outside her head. She needed to think, to devise a plan in the short time they had left. The Captain Jack was dying around them. The bucket brigade was falling behind and the sails were tearing with each gust.

  If they were going to slip away unseen, it would have to be in the next few seconds—once more Stu’s face rippled across her mind—and the moment was gone.

  “Bring us in along the dock, William. You’ll prepare one of the boats for an immediate departure.” Jillybean looked back at her little crew with a queasy feeling. Luck had kept them alive this long; for some of them, their luck had run out. “I’ll take Jenn, Shaina and…Aaron with me inland.”

  Jenn had expected the request, Aaron puffed up his thin chest, and Shaina looked like she had been hit on her head once more. “What are we going to do? I don’t think I know how to fight very well,” Shaina said in a squeak of a voice.

  “We’ll do what we have to and no more.” It wasn’t much of a pep talk and Shaina didn’t look very peppy from it. Jillybean was about to go on when she saw something moving along the remains of the Tempest. Now that they were closer, the Tempest looked as though it had been through the same grinder the Captain Jack had been in.

  The person on the Tempest saw them almost at the same time. It was a “she” judging by the scream that was let out before the person ducked down into the cabin. “Who was that? Was that Colleen?” Jillybean asked.

  “No,” Jenn answered, shaking her head. “That was Nathan Kittle. What the hell is he doing here while they’re fighting up in the prison?” Her face set in fury, Jenn was the first off the boat. She raced across the corpse-strewn rocks to the Tempest.

  “Who’s in there? Nathan? What are you doing?” She walked right up the boat and began pounding on its hull. “Get out here right this second! All of you.”

  Nathan inched his head up from the cabin and it was hard to tell who he was more afraid of, the queen staring coldly up at him or Jenn looking ready to drag him off the boat and pummel him. “Stu tol’ us to stay put. No, no he ordered us to stay put. And we weren’t just doin’ nothin’ neither. We got all sorts of wounded that we’s been a takin’ care of.”

  The deck was awash in blood, which brought Eve up to the surface. You’ve lost. The battle is over. You don’t stand a chance. Run away, Jillybean. Run away. Ernest has foreseen all of…

  “No,” Jillybean hissed through gritted teeth. Louder, she addressed, Nathan, asking, “How many of your wounded are ambulatory?” He answered with a slow-witted, Huh? “How many can walk and how many need to be carried?”

  As if they had all the time in the world, he drawled out, “Well, let me see. Manny got himself a grazed-sorta wound on his arm, which he says burns like a som-bitch. And…”

  The gunfire in the prison suddenly stopped and the silence was a hundred times worse than the shooting.

  Jillybean felt her heart dying. “Never mind,” she snapped at Nathan. “Jenn get up there and straighten this out. I need every able body out here in two minutes. We will take care of the wounded as soon as the battle is over.”

  Jenn cast a look up at the prison, where thunderous gunfire rolled down on them and flashes of light could be seen coming from its depths. She didn’t immediately climb up and Jillybean had to give her a push. Jenn began cursing and barking orders as she practically flew up the side of the boat.

  Certain that Jenn had the situation in hand, Jillybean turned to Shaina and Aaron. “There’s a good fifteen bottles of alcohol back on the Captain Jack. They’re in the storage lockers under the benches by the wheel. Grab all you can find and get back here as fast as possible.”

  Nathan, wearing a guilty look, had just climbed down. She sent him back up onto the Tempest to cut down the sails. When Manny groaned his way down with a hole through his arm, Jillybean took one look at the wound, declared him fit for battle, and sent him to the Captain Jack to tear down its sails as well.

  She didn’t have an army left, but the Corsairs didn’t know that. She just needed to make them think she did. With a sudden burst of optimism, she countermanded the orders she’d given William Trafny to prepare a boat for escape. Soon she had assembled a tiny battalion consisting of cowards, children and the walking wounded.

  It would have to do.

  Designating a partner to each, she assigned spots for them around the prison approximately sixty yards apart. Without radios, signal flags or even enough people to use as messengers, Jillybean could only give out a single order: “Do what I do and keep the fires burning.”

  Because she didn’t trust him, she had partnered with Manny. “Scrounge for wood or anything that’ll burn. And…” She pointed the Sig Sauer at him. “And be quick about it. Don’t make me go looking for you.”

  He ran off and she wrapped her shredded hunk of sheet around a scraggly, little shrub, poured some of the moonshine onto it and set it on fire. Seconds later, fires flared into life to her left and right, and then more flames appeared.

  “That’s right!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Come on! Give them a rebel yell.” Weird wailing hollers came out of the night. Jillybean thought the screams were weak and thin. She yelled again and, in a strange echo, the screams ran around the prison.

  She lit a second bush on fire and shot her gun once at the prison. A few people also fired their weapons while others hid, thinking the battle had begun. Jillybean didn’t have much more of a plan than this. They were too few and too weak to attack. All they could do was stage a bluff.

  Manny returned, huffing and puffing, with an armful of clothes he had scavenged from an apartment building. Jillybean didn’t hesitate and lit these as well. “Get more! Light the island on fire!” she cried. “On fire! On fire!” she chanted.

  This was taken up by the ring of peop
le. It went on for a minute before there was a sudden cry from one little group on the edge of the circle. There was fear and then excitement. Colleen White suddenly appeared out of the darkness.

  “Are we attacking? Mike’s in there and maybe Stu, also. I-I didn’t have a gun, so I ran back to get everyone else.”

  Everyone else included the crews of the Rapier and the Red Pill, which doubled the size of Jillybean’s battalion. Unfortunately, they came without bullets or guns. They still couldn’t attack, but they could make a great ruckus. More fires were lit until the entire prison was ringed with flames.

  Jillybean had her people dance and chant: Give up! Give up! Give up! and the more they did, the more confidence they gained until it almost seemed like a party was going on.

  Dark shadows could be seen in the windows. They were like children poking their noses out from behind living room curtains after a stranger rang the doorbell.

  Jillybean could sense their fear. It was time to demand their surrender. “Manny, find Nathan and get back here, quickly.” When they returned, she shoved empty guns into their hands and said, “Follow me and don’t say a word, just try to look tough.”

  Grabbing a branch of a shrub, she lit it and marched directly to the main doors to the prison, which she pounded on with a rock.

  The Corsairs had seen her coming; someone was behind the door. “Whatchu want?”

  “You will surrender now,” Jillybean informed the hidden person. “You will surrender or we will light the prison on fire and shoot you like rats as you come running out. You have one minute to decide.”

  “We have two of your men and we’ll kill them if you don’t leave.”

  Jillybean’s heart leaped—Stu was alive! She pushed the gush of fear and love back down and with precise calmness, she looked down at her watch. “Forty-five seconds left. If they are killed, I think it would be advisable that you kill yourselves next. Trust me, you’ll wish you were dead.”

  There was a long pause in which Jillybean stood with complete self-assurance, her watch and arm cocked in front of her cold face.

  “I want to give up, Tam,” someone else said. “There’s hundreds of ‘em. We can’t win.”

  “Shut up,” Tam seethed. “Don’t listen to him, Lady. We need some reassurances before we do anything.”

  Jillybean’s eyes dipped to her watch. “Twenty seconds. I’ve given you all the reassurances you’re going to get. You should be glad we’re not Corsairs. We’re civilized people. Ten seconds.”

  She pointed Manny and Nathan towards the wall so that they wouldn’t be targets. She went to one side of the door and waved the burning branch as if in signal for attack.

  “Wait!” cried the one man. “I want to give up.” There was a clatter as a gun was dropped. It was followed by the sound of more. In seconds, the Corsairs had come hurrying out, their hands in the air.

  “Those two guys are still down in the cell block,” Tam said, speaking quickly, his eyes twitching. “We never got to them, okay? So, if they’re dead…it’s…it’s…”

  Jillybean’s pistol came up to point into his chest. It had happened without her knowing and she heard herself say, “It’s what? Not your fault because you missed?” He could say nothing to this and nor could he say anything when he saw the lowly group he had surrendered to. The Corsairs could only gape, red-faced as they were frisked and tied up.

  Now that the battle was won, Jenn could not be stopped from racing down into the prison to find Mike and Stu. Jillybean went more slowly, afraid that she would find Stu dead and equally afraid to find his judging eyes boring into her. He managed to find the perfect middle ground between the two: he was unconscious.

  She went right to work, hooking up two large gauge IVs before breaking out the needle and thread and patching him back together. By the time she was done, he looked like the sails on the Captain Jack, before they had been torn down and burnt, that is.

  Mike had been nicked a few times and the stitches in his throat had sprung some leaks, but he wasn’t in a bad way; Jenn found him an excellent patient to practice on since he couldn’t cry out at all and only rarely moaned.

  Their new Corsair captives carried the two men out of the prison and into the last of the night, which showed only a few misty stellar lights. They soon gave way to a new sky that looked as if a deep purple shade had been drawn down over the stars.

  Jillybean was tired and should have been optimistic. Stu was already coming around in a groggy but growly manner, Alcatraz had been taken with only a few deaths, if the Corsair “volunteers” were discounted, that is, and it turned out the Rapier was in fact salvageable. But a gloom had settled over her.

  I know why, Sadie told her. You’re barely scraping together wins, and with each you get weaker.

  “And it only takes one loss, however small to end this entirely. So, what do I do?”

  Sadie didn’t answer—Jenn was watching. “A good night, all in all,” Jillybean said to Jenn. “But we got lucky.”

  Jenn looked away briefly. “We. There can’t be a ‘we.’ Colleen has been spreading rumors around about you…the true rumors. And now everyone knows that you started all of this. I’m going to have to officially arrest you. And this time, there will be no escape.”

  Chapter 30

  Eve

  To keep her from escaping, Jillybean was stripped of her black clothes and given a velvet pink warmup suit. She was then imprisoned in the maximum security wing of Alcatraz, where the cold went deep into the foundation and chilled the dank, urine-smelling air.

  Even though a fire was started in the hall outside her cell, it couldn’t permeate the heavy, rusted metal door and when she wasn’t cocooned in a nest of old blankets, her teeth chattered and her lips turned blue.

  It was a gloomy, frightful place where ancient evil festered, where hatreds and jealousy and fears bred and flourished. It was a place where the very concept of goodness and purity were constantly under assault.

  The walls were seeped, not just in mold, but also in the memories of murderers and the ghosts of rapists and sadists. Eerie, demented sounds followed the pipes down into her cell night and day. It was like the prison was speaking to her in dark whispers.

  Jillybean was rarely herself. Eve dominated. In fact, Eve thrived. Everything nasty about her tiny eight-by-ten cell amplified her aggrieved sense of self. It gave her power and stoked her desires.

  Sometime in that first wretchedly cold night she came to the decision that she would be queen again. Ernie said it was preordained. The evidence of this was everywhere and started with the fact that she was still alive. By all the laws governing the role of conqueror and conquered, Eve should’ve been put to the sword without hesitation.

  That she was still alive was a sign of Jenn’s weakness. And, if she’s too weak-willed to kill her greatest rival, then she’s too weak to be queen, Ernest told her.

  “And when I get my throne back, I won’t make that same mistake.” In the light of her one candle, she swung her arm in a vicious arc, imagining a curved sword in her hand.

  Who she was jailed with seemed like another manifestation of her destiny. Kept in three of the dungeon-like cells around her were the eighteen Corsairs who had been captured in the last two battles.

  They were sullen and crude. Half the time they were secretive, conspiring in hissing whispers about how they were going to escape, or telling each other what horrible torture they would inflict on their captors once they were free. The rest of the time, they screamed down the cellblock about their innocence in all matters, including how they were angels who’d been forced into the Corsair life. “We’re not really like that, deep inside.”

  They also made a laughable attempt to scare Eve. “Wait ’til we get out, missy,” Tam said. He was a big, thick-armed Corsair with two chipped front teeth and a habit of tonguing them constantly. “You’ll pay for what you done, tricking us an all. You ever been raped before?”

  “Yes,” she answered, blandly.
<
br />   “Did you like it? Huh?”

  She’d never given it much thought. “A little, yeah. It made me a stronger…person.” She’d hesitated since being an actual person was a concept that was hard to define. The whole idea was somewhat unsettling and so she reverted to something she knew well. “Do you want to know what I did to the guy who raped me? I stabbed him over and over and over until my arm got tired. I stabbed his junk with my hunting knife so many times it looked like dog meat. That was fun, but not nearly as fun as the raping I gave you Corsairs.”

  A high giggle escaped her. “Ooh, you got it good. The corpses of your friends are stinking up the bay from one end to the other.” She stuck her pert nose to the small barred window that was set in the metal door and sniffed loudly. “I can smell them even down here. That’s where you’re going to end up. All of you will be in the bay soon enough. Crabs popping out your eyes; gulls sitting on your bloated bellies, picking through them, looking for the sweet meats.”

  This shut them up and a sulking, depressed silence followed. One of them rattled the door in frustration, making Eve giggle again.

  “What about you?” Tam asked. He pushed his pockmarked face to the bars. “Huh? I bet you end up out in the bay before us.”

  She pictured herself floating face down in the water, a hole in the back of her head leaking blood.

  That won’t happen if you stick with me.

  Eve nearly jumped out of her skin. She turned to see that she wasn’t alone in her cell. Ernest Smith lounged against one wall. “I got this, Ernie. I don’t need Jillybean’s supposed smarts.”

  We’ll see, won’t we. Chances are, that filthy Corsair is right.

  “No way. You see, killing a Corsair is easy. No, it’s easier than easy. It’s…” She only just realized that she was talking loud enough for everyone to hear. She quickly pretended to be talking to Tam. “Jenn will have to kill you, Tam, to show everyone that she has the power over life and death. At least that’s what I would do and it’s what she…I mean it’s what I taught her in a roundabout way. But killing a queen, that’s a whole other thing.”