GENERATION Z THE COMPLETE BOX SET: NOVELS 1-3

by Peter Meredith

  When it was all piled together in the living room of the largest house on the island, the Queen seemed less than happy. Her long sigh worried Leney. “We got it all. Except the scopes. There weren’t none of them. Sorry.”

  The Queen made a waving motion. “It’s not the scopes. It took me years to find the three I did. It’s…it’s nothing.”

  Jillybean knew exactly what the problem was. The Queen didn’t have Stu, Jenn or Mike to rely on. She didn’t have Donna Polston’s odd form of pragmatism that was mixed with a love for her people. She didn’t have Aaron Altman’s one-armed, undying loyalty, and she didn’t have Shaina Hale’s endless abundance of faith in her abilities.

  She had Nathan Kittle sneaking off for an hour-long bathroom break. She had ex-Corsairs sniggering and eyeing the young girls and she had those same girls looking blankly at the items and twining locks of hair around their fingers.

  With a tired sigh, the Queen began issuing orders, dividing the work so that each room in the house was like its own separate assembly plant. In one room, old batteries were drilled out and refilled. In another, smoke bombs were mixed and packed. In a third, the simple torpedoes were assembled, and in a fourth, bomb components were prepared.

  The Queen finished the bombs herself—in secret. She didn’t completely trust any of her people. Yes, she feared that a few would use the bomb-making knowledge nefariously, but what had her more worried was that the great majority would, more than likely, blow the house sky high.

  The work continued into the afternoon, and Jillybean was forced to sit idly by, bored into a vacant-eyed stupor by the repetition and the less than intelligent discourse going on around her. Her highpoint was when the Queen finished her sixth torpedo and went to shower on board the barge. Before she ducked into the tent, she stood on the top of the container surveying the bay.

  The Corsairs were now in four distinct groups: the largest was positioned just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in Horseshoe Bay. The thirty or so boats moored there commanded the entrance to the entire bay and could come flying out if anyone tried to past the ropes and buoys.

  On the other side of the bay, sixteen ships, each flying the blue flag of the Magnum Killers, were kept safe in a small cove. They had come out of the safety of the cove only twice; once in an attempt to escape the bay, which had led to the loss of two ships, and once to negotiate with the third group that had evidently claimed the entire northern part of the bay.

  Jillybean could only guess that they were negotiating since the lead ship had flown a white flag over its blue one. The negotiations had gone nowhere, resulting only in a running half-day long battle and the loss of another ship.

  Two miles north of the Floating Fortress was Angel Island, where fourteen boats were in use. Here someone had raised the red and black flag of the Coos Bay Clan.

  Jillybean knew the Queen would single them out first because it was exactly what she would do. They were the weakest group and in the worst position. They’d be the easiest to pick off. And she would do it right after sunset. If things go bad, she’ll use the darkness to escape, and if they go well, the darkness would amplify the explosions and increase the fear factor involved.

  She sighed, the intense loneliness of her ghost life was exacerbated when she spoke to herself and no one answered. She was just starting to realize how much she had needed Eve around. Even snide comments were better than no comments.

  Her loneliness lasted until four that afternoon. Then the three boats were loaded, radios were checked, ammo was dispersed, and the torpedoes were readied. Each boat had a scant crew of nine with only five guns per boat. It wasn’t nearly enough to fight any sort of actual battle and, in truth, not even enough to pull off the kind of coup the Queen had in mind. But where she lacked in numbers, she made up for with pure audacity.

  “It’s time,” she called across to Leney, who was in command of the Death Rise, and to Tam on the Rapier. “Fall in behind me.” With this the three boats pulled away on a northwest heading, sailing easily in full view of Alcatraz.

  Everyone turned to watch the sudden pandemonium occurring on the island. Jillybean was embarrassed for them. Their fear could be felt across the half a mile of empty water.

  Then the three boats passed the island and now it was the large contingent of Corsairs in Horseshoe Bay who grew excited. Five of their largest boats put out, with more being prepared behind them. The five only went to the mouth of the little bay but came no further out. They clearly respected the Queen’s flag. She had stung them too many times for them to come rushing out even with ten to one odds.

  “They suspect a trap,” the Queen laughed. No one laughed with her. Next to her, Nathan sat hunched with his back to the rail, licking his lips. The Queen’s Man at the wheel had ahold of it with shaking hands.

  Everyone was afraid. Six torpedoes and a couple of hundred rounds of ammo was nothing compared to what could be brought against them. If the Corsairs decided to attack, they would be dead in minutes. Even Jillybean was nervous and she couldn’t even feel pain.

  Only the Queen was steadfast, completely so. She didn’t show an ounce of fear.

  It was impressive, and Jillybean didn’t understand it one bit. Whenever she had ridden into battle she had to hide her fear and to fight the stress to keep from falling apart, to keep from losing herself in the darkness of her own mind. Somehow, the Queen was immune. It was almost as if she wasn’t crazy at all.

  What’s that mean for me? Jillybean asked. If she’s sane, then I…I don’t really exist. Maybe I’m a residual memory. Maybe I’ll gradually fade to nothing. She looked down at her hands; they seemed solid to her. But what does that prove? Nothing.

  Jillybean’s nonexistent knees buckled and she found herself sitting on the deck next to one of the heavy smoke-bombs. She watched dully as the three ships slid smoothly away from Horseshoe Bay and began to edge closer to Angel Island.

  She didn’t really perk back up until the Queen growled, “What is Tam doing? He’s not thinking of doing anything stupid, is he?”

  The Rapier had been following at a fifty-yard interval but was now eighty yards behind and remaining on the same course they’d been taking.

  A grizzled, stunted root of a man named Ed Hoffman gazed back. “I don’t think so, Queen-ma’am. He’s gotta line fouled in his boom. He should be gettin’ out any…oh, there it goes.” The Rapier came around, went slightly too far and then fixed her course.

  “Not very impressive,” the Queen said. Jillybean had to agree. She had figured that the Corsairs would all have the same sailing skills as Mike Gunter or would be even better at it since their boats were all better than the old, dinky and greatly outclassed Calypso.

  In this, she was wrong. She watched them closely as they began to swing east, putting the setting sun directly at their backs. The ex-Corsairs were very good sailors, but they weren’t great. They didn’t share Mike’s unbound love for the sea and it showed as they went through the motions of sailing without fully embracing any particular aspect of it.

  She and the Queen said, Hmmm at precisely the same time. Jillybean couldn’t read the Queen’s mind, but she guessed that she was missing her three friends even more right at that moment. With Mike at the wheel, Stu manning the scoped gun at the bow, and Jenn standing like a rock at her side, they would be unstoppable.

  The three ships rode into Raccoon Straight, the four-hundred-yard run of water that separated Angel Island from a jutting arm of the mainland. They kept close to the mainland as they watched for the fourteen Clan ships. Would they come out to fight or remain bottled up in Ayala Cove?

  The smart move was to come out. They would have options if they came out. If they waited inside the cove with the wind almost in their faces, they’d be stuck fighting a completely defensive battle. They chose not to come out and only the Queen was keen to go in after them.

  “We make awful big targets,” Leney said, from the deck of the Death Rise. He had his head tilted back as if speakin
g to the flaming sunset. “If it were me on that island, I’d have a few guys right out on that stretch of land right over there.” Jutting from either side of the cove were two rocky horns of land that were about two-hundred yards apart. They were perfect places to set fighters, who could subject any attacking fleet to a deadly crossfire.

  Jillybean rolled her eyes. There was no way the Queen had missed something so obvious.

  “As we don’t know the range of our torpedoes, we’ll have to take a chance. But it won’t be much of one, Leney. Follow my lead.” The ships were dead silent as they coasted easily into the bay, just as the sun dropped behind the far horizon. In the twilight, distance was hard to judge as everything became indistinct and shadows became as real as rock.

  Just within reach of the jutting horns she had Ed lower the sails of the Hell Quake and had him point her away from the island. The other boats followed suit. They didn’t need to be told to lower the first of their torpedoes into the gently lapping water.

  “Now?” Ed asked.

  “Arm the torpedoes,” she commanded. “Turn on the cars.” Mounted at the very back of the oxygen tanks were large, remote control cars with plastic “fins” glued to their wheels. They provided a way to steer the torpedoes.

  The fins were narrow and the arc of the pivotable wheels less than ten percent. Both the Queen and Jillybean had assumed that this would make it difficult for the torpedoes to make sharp turns, and yet, in their one test, the only thing they learned was just how easy it was to over-steer the torpedoes.

  It took a gentle touch to keep them on course or they’d zigzag in useless curves, wasting the compressed air and reducing their range.

  The torpedoes began to whir as their back wheels spun. “Ed will fire his first,” the Queen said in a loud whisper, “then Leney and then Tam. I want fifteen-second intervals between each. Are we clear? Good. Tam, go ahead and turn the valve.”

  With one of the sailors holding the torpedo pointed into the bay, Ed turned the valve, releasing the compressed air, and away the torpedo went, making an immediate left turn and zipping within two feet of the Rapier, causing the sailors on board to panic.

  “Relax,” the Queen said. “These aren’t contact warheads. They’re not going to blow up so easily.” She put the one Starlight scope up to her eye. “Gently to the right, Ed. Too far. Come back. There. Hold that course. Now you, Leney. Let her go.”

  Leney’s torpedo sagged so badly to starboard that Jillybean guessed he had lost one of the plastic fins. Tam ran his into a partially submerged zombie. The creature smashed it with a sledgehammer of a fist, almost sinking it. It popped up out of the water a second later and continued on its merry, buzzing way.

  The Queen relayed all of this and soon there was a horse race quality to the proceedings, which included betting and frantic whispers of: “Come on, Rapier. Come on, Rapier,” and the like.

  Despite giving up a thirty-second head start, the Rapier’s torpedo hit first, thumping dully into the side of a two-masted, fifty-foot boat. A second later, the thirty-pound warhead exploded in a shock of white light, blasting a ten-foot wide gaping hole in its side.

  Great booming echoes had just begun bouncing around the bay when the Hell Quake’s torpedo exploded after sliding under the keel of a thirty-six footer. The explosion lifted the boat out of the water, breaking its back.

  Leney cursed what he called his “Crap-screwed torp,” but his did the most damage. It came in from a slightly different angle, glanced off the bow of one boat and slid between two others. When the Queen detonated it, the explosion set one of the boats on fire and laid the other on its side.

  By the light of the burning ship, Jillybean watched men flinging themselves from ships or firing blindly in all direction. The fifty-footer went down by the head while the thirty-six footer bobbed in two pieces for a few minutes before each half slowly sunk.

  The Queen was not idle during this. She had her three ships slip further out until they were on the other side of the straight, nestled up against the mainland. “Light lanterns fore and aft,” she ordered. It was a brazen, confident move. “We want them to know who did this and we want them to know we aren’t afraid,” she explained.

  “They gotta be going nuts over there,” Leney remarked, one foot on the gunwale, one hand holding easily to a shroud. “How do you fight against torpedoes?”

  The Queen had been looking through her scope. “They aren’t. They’re abandoning their boats.”

  Leney grunted. “Cowards.”

  “I’m glad my men aren’t cowards. Leney, I need you to take in one of the small boats and bring back their leader to negotiate their peaceful surrender. Make them understand we have enough firepower to wipe them out completely.”

  “Me? I wouldn’t send me. I mean, those are Clan boys and I’m a…”

  “A what? A Corsair?”

  Leney saw the landmine and tried to step around it. “I was a Corsair and that’s all those jackasses will see.” The Queen made no reply, she just stared until he cursed, ran a hand through his greasy hair and then kicked the rail.

  “Fine!”

  “Fine, Your Highness.”

  Her tone was ice cold and he didn’t miss the fact that she held an M4 pointing at his crotch. “Sorry, Your Highness.” Hurriedly, and with a great deal of muttered curses, he set out in a little skiff with a lantern set in the front and a white flag trailing from the top of the eight-foot mast.

  He was gone an hour and when he came back, he had a nervous, pouch-eyed man with him. “On your knees,” Leney said to him in a whisper when he came on deck. “Your Highness, this is Alec Steinmeyer, Captain of the Devil’s Kid.”

  She held a hand out for him to kiss. After, he started to stand. “No,” she said. “Don’t get up and don’t speak unless I ask you a direct question. You see, I don’t want to hear your excuses, your rationalizations or your deflections. I don’t want to hear how you would never have come to San Francisco if it wasn’t for that mean ol’ Black Captain making you kill, and torture and rape. I know precisely why you are here. It’s because I, Jillybean of Bainbridge and Jillian, Queen of this bay and everything in it, wanted you here.”

  Actually, that was all me, Jillybean said to no one in particular.

  “Is that right?” Alec asked, cautiously.

  “It is indeed,” the Queen answered. “What happens to someone if they steal a Corsair boat? Don’t the Corsairs hunt them to all ends of the ocean? I stole one and led you here with the sole purpose of destroying the Corsairs. But you aren’t a Corsair, are you?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m a…”

  Leney interrupted by shoving the man. “Don’t say ma’am. It’s Your Highness.”

  “No, Your Highness. I’m not a Corsair.”

  “It’s why I’m going to let you live.” She held his gaze in a lengthy pause. “If you submit, that is. If not, I will destroy your boats and strand you on that island until you starve to death. Are you able to speak for your entire clan?” He shook his head. “Then I will send you back with Captain Leney. Explain the situation to your fellow captains. You have one hour to surrender.”

  Alec looked shocked that this was the extent of the negotiations. “Okaaay, but I’m not really sure what the situation is myself. You only have three boats.”

  “Three boats and all the firepower I need to destroy the Coos Bay Clan completely. It’s not my first option, however it is a viable one. When the other groups see the wreckage of your ships and see the bodies of your sailors being eaten by gulls they will kneel before me, just like you are doing. So, it makes no difference to whether you live or die, I win either way.”

  The Queen waited for Alec to say something. When ten seconds passed, she went on, “You have one hour. In exactly sixty minutes I will destroy your fleet. Captain Leney will keep me posted.”

  Alec’s eyes widened when the Queen handed Leney a radio. “A radio? Son of a bitch.” Leney shoved him again for cursing in front of the Queen. It had A
lec rankled. “You say you want to destroy the Corsairs, but you trust him?”

  Very slowly, she drew out the word, “Yessss. He knows I’m unstoppable, unbeatable, unkillable. He knows that to defy me is a death sentence. He knows that soon I will own the entire west coast. I trust him because he trusts me.”

  Alec went away with a troubled look on his face and half an hour later, Leney laughed over the radio. “They’re caving! They’re going to join us!”

  The next few hours were spent bringing the two sides together slowly and peacefully. There were a few remarks about the “Mad Queen”, but no one could fault her for what she’d accomplished so far and after hearing the stories of her triumphs, her genius, and her destructive capabilities, practically everyone was excited to see what would happen the next day as she set her sights on the Magnum Killers.

  She began the psychological side of the war against them around midnight. Instead of smoke, she lit floating pyres just outside the cove where the sixteen Magnum ships were moored. This caused a frantic scramble of activity and the ships came flying out to challenge any attacker, however the Queen saw them coming through her scope and nimbly danced her ships out of the way, while leaving behind a bank of smoke.

  This was repeated three times and Jillybean was sure their nerves had to be close to shattering when dawn came. The light of the new sun found the land side of their little man-made harbor surrounded by twenty of the Queen’s flags hanging proudly from different buildings.

  To increase the illusion that the harbor was surrounded by legions of men, dozens and dozens of fires suddenly sprang to life and in no time, that side of the city was covered in a great pall of smoke as the fires raged unchecked. The deception had been accomplished by twenty-two men and fifteen lighters.

  It seemed like a perfect time for the Queen to attack with her now thirteen ship fleet, but she was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t for another tense five hours that her fleet hove into view. She had taken the time to construct ten more torpedoes and the glue was still drying on the last few when she streamed across the entrance of the harbor, stopping in a line three hundred yards from shore.