GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  The hand was so shockingly cold that it had a paralyzing effect on Jillybean. She gasped, her back arching as she turned slowly to see who it was.

  “Hi Sis.” It was Eve, looking pale and somewhat cadaverous. “I look like this because you killed me. You thought you were so much better than me that you made…” Ernest cleared his throat and instead of flying off the handle at this mild rebuke, Eve smiled. “Right. Sorry Ernie.”

  “Sorry Ernie?” Jillybean asked, in amazement. “You hate this guy! And since when do you apologize to anyone?”

  She shrugged, her blue-tinged lips, smiling. “Since now. Since Ernie showed me what we can do if we give in to the inevitable.”

  Jillybean was completely certain she didn’t want to know Ernest’s power. Deep down, she was more afraid of this one unknown thing than she had been afraid of anything in her life. She wanted to run away but Eve had not removed the cold hand, and with it on her, Jillybean couldn’t even shrug.

  “What can he do?” The question had come from her own lips even though she hadn’t moved them.

  “Almost the right question,” Ernest answered. “A better one is, what can I do for you, Jillybean? I can make you whole. The Black Captain has to unite his army if he wants to defeat you, and you need to unite yourself to defeat him.”

  The cold from Eve’s hand was spreading, crossing Jillybean’s back and reaching down into her left arm. She couldn’t even twitch her fingers. It was hard to think with the cold invading her. “I-I am whole.”

  “Really?” Ernest moved closer and as he did the cold wound down Jillybean’s spine, turning it into a straight, ramrod of frozen steel, pinning her in place. “Are you really whole without Ipes and his innate wisdom and his ability to protect you? Or without Sadie and her raw courage and her undying loyalty?”

  “Stop lying! I know you don’t care about them and you don’t care about those qualities.”

  Now, he was close, inches away. In death, just as in life, he was below average in every physically measurable area. He made up for it by being shrewdly evil, conniving and subtly cajoling. His voice numbed the mind, making it unable to perceive the man’s evil completely. All she got were hints of a greater malignant force.

  “I do care, Jillybean. And they are all needed. Ipes, Sadie, and yes, Eve with her moral ambiguity and her ruthlessness. And lastly, me.” Jillybean would have choked, but her throat was locked tight. She couldn’t even speak. “Yes, you need me to tie up all these pieces and make you whole. Well, mostly whole.”

  He seemed to have grown and the darkness surrounding him had become more than just an absence of light. There was a corrupting poison in the air around Jillybean, befouling her mind and filling her with such an intense lethargy that she fell to the side and did nothing to catch herself.

  “There you go,” Ernest said, kneeling down beside her, a great, shining knife in one hand and a wicked looking pair of jagged-toothed pliers in the other. “We don’t need all of you, just your mind.” He stabbed the knife into the soggy hull, reached down and yanked open her mouth, stretching it wider and wider until her face split open. Then came the wicked pliers.

  “Let’s get rid of all this extra stuff. Love? I think you proved that’s a waste. Happiness? So fleeting you won’t miss it. Hmmm, ambition. That we’ll keep. Oh my, look at this.” His bright, hungry eyes began pulling out what looked like rotting flesh from her gaping mouth. A sudden revolting stench belched up from her insides. It was so horrible that she swooned and the world went grey and everything became insubstantial.

  Am I dead? she asked, her voice so soft that it seemed as though her throat was lined with fur. Except she couldn’t feel her throat. She couldn’t feel anything. Not the deck beneath her feet and not the body lying in front of her. It was a shaggy, plastic-covered, sodden girl of about…

  That’s me!

  Jillybean stepped back, staring at her body with a mixture of raw fear and disgust. She looked ragged, drenched and cold. More like a homeless vagabond than a queen.

  That’s because you’re not a queen. This voice surprised her because it was the very same one as before. I’m talking to myself. Great. There wasn’t anyone else to talk to. Everyone, including Ernest, had disappeared. She was about to poke about the sinking boat when her body stirred.

  Her body, seemingly on its own sat up, making the “ghost” Jillybean take a few steps back.

  It was crazily weird to stare at herself from this perspective. How is this even possible? Astral projection is a joke, as is an out of body experience. And yet here I am. Maybe I’m a mental projection of my own imagination. Maybe I’m only imagining myself floating around in the ether while my real self is taking care of normal tasks. Which begs the question: Why? It makes no sense. I, oh jeeze, why does my hair look like that?

  “She” had stood and thrown her head back; Jillybean thought she looked like a long-haired Persian cat after it had been thrown into a scummy pond.

  Both curious and disgusted, she followed herself as she went out on deck and gazed through the falling rain at the distant island. They were a good two miles away and drawing perilously close to the northern stretch of Oakland.

  Like an old hand, the “other” Jillybean came about easily and headed south. Who did that? Eve? It certainly wasn’t Ipes or Sadie, and Ernest was from the midwest. It had to be Eve. It was a disconcerting thought that Eve could so easily steal her thoughts or her knowledge. Curious, Jillybean went to stand in front of the wheel, opposite her own body.

  The “other” Jillybean looked right through her with steady, calm blue eyes. There was no trace of Eve in them, or Ernest, or Sadie. This was even more disconcerting. Who was driving the Good Ship Jillybean if they weren’t?

  She tried to fuse with her body, but only passed through it, ghost-like no matter how hard she concentrated.

  I’ll just have to wait and see, she decided. The wait was not long. The Captain Jack ran down the edge of Oakland, hugging the city until they passed Treasure Island then the other Jillybean turned east and began working the boat so that it would sneak up on Alcatraz, heading for the other side of the island away from the dock and the guard with the one scope left.

  Take a boat if you have to, but don’t hurt anyone! Jillybean yelled. Listen to me! The other Jillybean didn’t so much as twitch. She ran the boat straight at the island without fear of making any noise. The island stole their wind when they got close and they ended up drifting gently in.

  The girl took her wilted box and went ashore without looking back at the ship or at Jillybean, who almost stayed aboard. She was more afraid to watch what this strange girl was about to do than she was of drowning. Logically speaking, disembodied spirits couldn’t drown.

  Hoping she would be able to do something if things got out of hand, Jillybean followed her doppelgänger up the steep hill and then around the base of the wall to an ugly little pipe that jutted from the wall. Fearlessly, the girl went in, the pistol in her wet hand.

  Damn it, damn it, damn it, Jillybean whined, her fear running higher than ever. There was only one reason that she knew of to go back into the prison. She bent down at the pipe and hollered in: Don’t you hurt her!

  The other Jillybean stopped as if she had heard something.

  Can you hear me? Hey, Jillybean, did you hear me? The girl made no other move to indicate she had heard and was out of the pipe a second later. Cursing, Jillybean followed and found herself in the dungeon not far from the maximum security cells—the other girl, moving like a wraith, was slipping up to them.

  Was she lost, Jillybean wondered. She was going the opposite direction from the spiral stairs. Jillybean was still confused when the girl snatched open a door and pointed her gun inside.

  “Don’t move!” she hissed, her blue eyes blazing out of Jillybean’s face.

  Jillybean ran up behind her and saw Tammy Easterling, her eyes practically popping out of her head in surprise, and Dave Small frozen in an odd, statue-like position. Dave w
as in a half-stoop, caught in mid-stand with his mouth hanging all the way open, showing more gaps than teeth.

  “I voted for you,” Tammy said. “Ask anyone. It was Colleen and Gerry who didn’t. Please, don’t shoot me.”

  The girl didn’t shoot and probably had no intention to, and not out of the goodness of her heart, if there was any goodness in there that is. Shooting a gun would bring a hundred people running. Dave and Tammy didn’t know that. Meekly, they gave up their two rifles. Jillybean slung them over one shoulder and went swaggering down the hall, pushing Dave and Tammy ahead of her.

  “Your queen is here. Come and kneel before her.” She made Tammy open the doors and, one by one, fifteen Corsairs came out and knelt uncertainly in a sloppy line.

  Mark Leney turned his tattooed face up to her. Beneath the tattoos were so many scars as to make his face unreadable. “So, are you queen of us or the island or both? We heard the gossip even down here. She,” he indicated Tammy, “said you had been made queen again, but that you gave it up. Did you do that for us?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I did it because there’s no future in being queen of this or that hunk of rock. One is either queen of everything or queen of nothing. Tammy, I want you to tell that to Jenn. Tell her Jillybean will be back. Not Eve or some other imposter, but Jillybean, got it?”

  Tammy nodded and kept nodding as she and Dave were pushed into one of urine-smelling cells.

  Jillybean turned to Leney and handed him her pistol, saying, “Don’t use it until we’re off the island, got it?” She then leaned the two rifles against the door of one of the cells. It did not go unnoticed by any of the Corsairs that she was now completely unarmed. Leney’s eyes widened and his finger slipped into the trigger guard.

  Coolly, she arched an eyebrow. “Here’s your chance,” she told him. “Here’s your only chance. In three days I will be queen of the entire bay. I will be queen from Sacramento to the Santas. In six months, I will be queen from Seattle to San Diego. In two years, I will own this country. But.”

  She said the word so loudly that it echoed along the hall. “But you can stop all that, right now. For just this one moment you have all the power, Leney. You can shoot me if you wish, or strangle me, or bash my head in…or you can be a part of my empire. A big part. That goes for each of you, as well. I generously reward those who are loyal to me. But.”

  Again, the word was loud. “But I will utterly destroy the treacherous and the treasonous. I will make their deaths very, very hard and very bloody and very painful.”

  She walked along the line of kneeling men, looking each in the eye. “You’ve all made vows to me earlier but do you really know what I offer? I offer pain and death. I offer danger and war. I offer the riches of this world and I offer power. True power. Not the power of terror which is all the Black Captain ever doled out. You saw what happened to that power in the face of courage. It melted away to nothing against the likes of them.”

  She pointed through the real Jillybean at the cell where Tammy and Dave cringed.

  “My cards are on the table, Leney. Now the decision is yours: kill me or join me. Remember, there is no middle ground.”

  Leney hadn’t acted at all afraid while sitting in his cell with an imminent death sentence hanging over his head, but he was afraid right then. Jillybean could see it in his eyes. The risk to reward ratio was harrowingly close in both directions.

  “What the hell,” he said, throwing in with the queen. “No guts no glory.”

  “Indeed,” she said, giving him a smile that could be compared to a snowflake: it was beautiful but vanished so quickly that it was hard to believe it had been there in the first place. She held out her hand and the smile came back, brighter as he handed her the gun.

  “Actually, I wanted you to kiss my hand.”

  His lip curled as though kissing her hand was the surest method to catch a bad case of the kooties. “It’s a mutual sign of respect,” she explained. “It also defines and reinforces our roles.”

  So far, she’s not all bad, Jillybean said aloud. She’s taming the wild beasts. Of course, I could have done the same thing, so why am I on the outside playing spectator?

  No answer came to her and she could do nothing but watch as her double went down the line of men offering them the choice between the gun and kissing her hand. No one hesitated. Her hand was kissed fifteen times. After the last, she marched straight out of the cell block and to the pipe.

  They all filed through with the ghost-like Jillybean coming last. Like a forgotten child, she hurried along in their wake as they hustled down the dock. There was no need for a complex plan or any orders beyond a few hand gestures. The squat, little hut was quickly surrounded. Inside, Nathan Kittle leaned against a counter, looking bored. He seemed so tired that when he yawned, his mouth would only come open halfway and his stretches were lackadaisical, one-armed affairs. As Jillybean watched, he bent over his rifle and peered through the scope and into the dark, rainy night.

  He was completely oblivious to the danger around him. The rain had muffled the footsteps of the creeping ex-Corsairs and the dark allowed the other Jillybean to get right up to the edge of the hut without being seen. Casually, calmly, she reached out and grabbed the gun while Nathan was in mid-stretch.

  “Hey!” he cried, in indignation, probably thinking he was being made fun of by the next guard. Then he saw the men and went stiff, standing with his back so straight it looked as though a pole had been run up his ass. “Y-You guys are, are, are not supposed to be out,” he choked.

  “It’s okay, Nathan,” the other Jillybean said. “They are with me. They are my men, just like you used to be.”

  Panic flooded him, turning him ghostly white. He began to hyperventilate. “I-I-I still am. I-I don’t know what anyone said, but I’m your man.”

  “Then you’ll come with me and wrest control of the bay from the Corsairs in brutal battle? You’ll lay down your life for me? You’ll risk capture and torture?”

  Nathan’s mouth opened wider with each question and his eyes bulged more and more. When she finally paused for him to answer, his head went from side to side as he said, “Y-Yeah, I guess, maybe. That, that, that.” He paused in his recitation of the word to lick his lips. “That could happen, but maybe I could be in charge of communications. That, that, that’s what I-I do best. You know? I mean, you know, Your Highness?”

  The other Jillybean took so long in her decision that Nathan nearly passed out holding his pent-up breath. Finally, she said, “Excellent suggestion. Come along.”

  Nathan rocked on his heels as if he was about to fall over. Leney made a face. “Him? Really? I don’t think we need the likes of him. And I don’t know if I trust him.”

  “Ha-ha!” Nathan laughed, a good deal of hysteria in the sound. “You don’t trust me? You, sir are the Corsair, not me.”

  Leney, his eyes blazing with hate, pointed the pistol directly into Nathan’s face.

  The other Jillybean said, “I’d be mad, too if someone called me a Corsair. And I don’t appreciate someone calling one of my men a Corsair, either. It’s just rude, Nathan. Tell him, Leney. Tell him you’re not a Corsair.”

  The gun twitched as Leney’s finger began to stiffen on the trigger. For three very long seconds, Leney remained motionless, then he pointed the gun upward. “I’m not a Corsair. I’m the Queen’s Man.”

  Jillybean could only shake her head. Man, she’s good.

  Chapter 34

  Jillybean/The other Jillybean

  In less than a minute, Jillybean changed her mind about the other girl’s supposed “goodness.”

  With Nathan sandwiched between two hulking Queen’s Men, they went to the first of the three black boats. From its mast hung the white and gold flag that Jillybean had created to show unity. “Tear that thing down,” she ordered.

  Smirking, Leney ripped it down and then ripped it to pieces. With casual indifference, he threw the remains in the bay. Other men did the same for the oth
er two sailboats. Nathan had a green tinge to him that the dark couldn’t hide and the woman explained, “It’s the flag that Jenn uses. There can be only one queen.”

  “What are you going to do to her if, you know?”

  “Like I said, there can be only one queen.”

  You will not harm one hair on her head! Jillybean hissed, furiously, jumping to her feet and getting right in her own face.

  Her fury was wasted. The woman walked quickly and easily through her and began assigning men to the boats. Three were chosen to pilot the thirty-eight foot Death Rise, and five to the still damaged Rapier. She kept the last seven with her, along with Nathan and all of the guns on board the forty-foot Hell Quake.

  “Who named these boats?” Jillybean muttered. “Let’s get the rest of those small boats. Tie them to the stern of the Death Rise.” Scrounged from the wreckage of the battle were a number of smaller dinghies and paddle-boats.

  “You’re not going to leave them anything?” Nathan asked. “They’ll be stranded.”

  Leney threw his hands in the air. “Can I please throw him overboard for all our sakes. We can chain him by the ankles and use him as an anchor. That’s a win-win.”

  The woman glared. “That’s a win-win, Your Majesty. Say it right or you’ll be the one going overboard.” She glared until Leney repeated the plea properly. At once she answered with a quick, “No, of course not. And yes, Nathan, they will be stranded and isolated. It’s what you do to your enemies. And yes, they are our enemies. You are either for us or against us. Now let’s get a move on. Unless things have changed, Treasure Island is practically defenseless.” She was looking directly at Nathan as she said this.

  “It is, I guess. There was a lot more of that infightin’ going on among the Corsairs and Jenn felt we needed a rest. After the attack on Alcatraz, we was all sorts of wiped out so we just sorta stayed where we were. Though some of us worked on the boats and others cooked and helped with movin’ the wounded to the clinic she set up here.”