Generation Z_The Queen of the Dead

by Peter Meredith

  Mike had been in a sour mood throughout the loading operation but softened when Jillybean asked if she could pilot the boat. “Of course. Remember what I said about feeling the boat and the wind? Try to think of it as all one thing. Try to feel the, uh…” He could not find the words to describe what he was thinking and could only make feeble hand motions.

  “Are you suggesting that I consider the interplay of converging forces as the actions of a single entity greater than simply boat, wind, and tide?”

  Mike took a second before declaring, “Exactly! That’s what I meant, exactly.”

  Stu rolled his eyes. “Remind me to always be on your team when we play charades,” he said to Jillybean.

  “Everyone ignore him,” Mike said after Diamond uttered her little laugh. “He’s jealous of a proper captain. Trust me, Jillybean, the Hill People take to water kinda like rocks take to water.”

  Diamond tittered again. Her odd laugh had been missing on the entire trip, but now that they seemed to be safely away, it was back, bubbling up at very odd times. “I like charades,” she said to Stu. “Maybe we can get a game going…tonight.”

  Stu’s mouth came open and his eyes flicked to Jillybean, who already had an eyebrow cocked. “I’m sure I’m busy tonight.”

  “Then maybe…”

  “Watch the boom!” Jillybean barked, letting the breeze haul it around. It looked like it was going to take Diamond’s head off and she squealed as she ducked. “Maybe you should go below,” Jillybean warned. “You might get hurt up here. I’m not the best sailor.”

  Mike hid his smirk and Stu pretended to be inspecting one of the ropes dangling from the mast. She might not be the best, but she had turned the boat against the wind with perfect timing to get that boom to swing like it did. In truth, she was already a good sailor. She had watched Mike handling the Saber all the way down from Grays Harbor.

  She could have piloted the boat from both a theoretical as well as a mathematical point of view had she wished and done a creditable job of it, probably better than Stu who was an uneasy and nervous captain at the best of times.

  What she lacked was that “feel” for the boat that Mike talked about. He had intuition that bordered on sorcery. He could feel the wind before it strengthened or died. He could sense the tide turning and could judge its strength from the play of the wheel in his hands and he could feel the speed of the current by the sound of the keel knifing through the water.

  Jillybean feared she would be too stiff, too analytical in her approach to sailing—and Mike feared the same thing. He stood behind her and, after a nod toward Stu, he said, “Let’s loosen you up.” He took a rope and looped it around one of the spokes of the wheel, holding it in place. “Drop your arms. Let them dangle.”

  He took hold of her upper body and began to waggle her from side to side. “Just go limp,” he told her when she tried to resist. She couldn’t help laugh as her arms swung. “Okay, now clap hold of the wheel, but gently. Feel the boat as you turn. Feel the rudder bite and the sail strain.”

  The Saber took an easy zigzagging course down river as Jillybean let her mind and all its troubles fall away. She was surprised that she enjoyed sailing as much as she did. It was relaxing on a calm day such as this. Mike was no more relaxed than if she were carrying his baby with glass hands and with the merging of the two rivers fast approaching he was running out a string of instructions that she followed to the letter.

  It was an easy transition from one river to the other since the Sacramento was a good deal wider. She cut an easy meandering path down river and all the while Mike fretted over the next transition, this one from the river to the slough. They would have to cut sharply down a narrow manmade canal which was no more than fifty feet across. He even began hinting that perhaps he should take the wheel for just a minute or so.

  He even tried “insisting” which made her laugh. “Just guide me and, of course, never used the word ‘insist’ around me in public. It’s not smart.”

  The prospect of her damaging his beloved boat overrode any anger he normally would have shown over the rebuke. As the slough came up, he began to rapid fire instructions at her very quickly and although she understood them all, she was inexperienced and failed to coordinate her single sail with the movement of the current and rudder. She missed her mark.

  Mike would have been able to recover by cutting the angle sharper and tacking inward, but it was a move guided by feel and he couldn’t spit out what that feeling was in time. For a second it looked as though they were going to crash, but to his great relief she swung the wheel in the opposite direction instead of trying to force the turn and they swept easily away. The Saber took a long curve as she gradually turned back upriver.

  “I was too quick with the rudder by about a second and a half,” she said, stating the problem with complete and surprising accuracy for a noob. “I’ll get it on this next…” She had stopped in midsentence and was staring at a bend in the river downstream where a strange rust-colored hunk of metal, a hundred and twenty feet long and thirty-five wide, sat half in the water and half on land, or rather in the land. The back end was partially buried in mud.

  She swung the Saber further downriver and as they came close it turned out to be a barge. Mike’s lip curled at it. Jillybean had the opposite reaction and gazed at it in complete wonderment. “Stu, there is a God!” she cried.

  He nodded, gazing at the hunk and not seeing the face of God in its mottled rust and steel. “Okay, yeah I agree, but are you looking at that barge when you say that or am I missing something?”

  “I’m looking at the barge. Mike, take the wheel! Get us back to the warehouse as fast as you can.”

  She walked away from the wheel and stood at the rail, her mind wholly taken up with the necessities involved with using a flat-bottomed barge with no means of propulsion or steering as a way to transport her two hundred and forty people to San Francisco. Using the Saber to tow the hunk of metal was obvious but also shortsighted.

  A more permanent solution was needed. A mast would have to be constructed and sails spliced together. A rudder or, more than likely, two independent rudders would have to be constructed along with a means to shift them. She would need hundreds of feet of rope for the sails and chains for the anchor.

  “Oh, I’m going to need an anchor,” she whispered, wondering if she should bother working out the boat weight to anchor size ratio, with the variables of time and wind acting upon…”

  “Jillybean, we’re here,” Stu said, bringing her out of her immersive state.

  She looked around and saw the ugly warehouses and the crumbling industrial buildings, and she smelled the gut-heaving stench of the rotting corpses. “Ah, home,” she said as a joke. Stu made a face, which was exactly the reaction she was looking for. “Unload everything as quickly as possible, but I want the carts back on board when it’s done.”

  “You okay?” he asked, taking her arm just as she was about to step on the dock. She gave him an excited smile and nodded, her face full of life and her big eyes clear of the insanity that had been haunting her.

  “For now,” she answered honestly. “But I have to check on the patients.” With him still holding her arm, she stepped across to the dock. “I think we might have caught a break,” she said and left him in a state of confusion, a state he’d been in off and on for the last day. Why was she suddenly fixated on a barge? And why had she declared herself queen in the first place? And what were they supposed to do with her hundreds of diseased “subjects?”

  There was no sane answer to any of these questions.

  Mike had heard it all and gave Stu a weary sigh before he roused himself and began ordering the team to unload the boat. They were rested and the work went quickly. The carts were trundled inside and rolled to the back where a harried and tired-looking Jenn Lockhart was finally allowing herself a break after five hours of nonstop work.

  Her diligence had paid off and the sick were visibly less so and the smell not nea
rly as bad as it had been. She sat against a wall with her tired legs flung out in front of her, gazing with a vacant expression as Jillybean took over changing out IV bags, wearing a broad smile and filling everyone with her infectious spirit.

  The barge and its possibilities had driven Eve and the whispering shadows far from her mind.

  She was a whirlwind of activity and people were swept up in her frenzy. Although she allowed the sicker members of the team to rest, she put the others to work, especially the three remaining Corsairs and the two ex-slave girls who were tired but still healthy enough to hand out clean sheets and to bathe the people who had soiled themselves.

  As she moved from patient to patient, her mind went down the list of things to do and she was just contemplating who she’d detail to assemble the new water pump, when her stomach began to growl. It had been hours since she had eaten a bite.

  “Willis!” she bellowed. “Willis Firam, where are you?”

  He made his way, limping for some reason, over to her. He eyed her nervously not yet able to judge his new queen, but knowing she could lash out at any moment. “Yes?”

  “Yes, your Highness,” she corrected and then waited for him to repeat it. When he did, without looking up from the floor, she stated, “We need water boiled for soup. Enough for everyone. And I’ll need a quick description of our supply situation as it pertains to food.”

  Willis gave her a quick rundown and Jillybean was happily surprised to find out the warehouse was well stocked with food. Three months before nearly a thousand people had lived there and although they were never the most industrious group, they still knew enough to amass food for the coming winter. Thanks to Tony Tibbs and his Corsairs, it was no longer stashed in a hundred different locations but instead all centrally located.

  When he had finished filling her in, she sent him off to get the water going. He wasn’t shy about demanding help from those who could stand. The biggest pots were gathered, filled with clean water and set over a dozen fires. Soon he was back, grumbling under his breath. “What kinda soup are you wanting?” he asked.

  Jillybean looked up from her patient and said, “Uhhhh,” and then laughed. She had never made a proper soup in her life, and after carrots and celery she wasn’t exactly sure what was in soup. She told him to start there and then, when he’d left she called out, “Jenn, hey Jenn, you in there? What’s in a good soup? I’ve never made soup before.”

  As Jenn blinked, coming slowly out of her stupor, a young woman, perhaps only thirty or so whose IV site Jillybean had been changing due to a blown vein, laughed softly. “You’ve never made soup? Wow, you really must be a queen.”

  “I really am,” Jillybean said, without looking up. The woman might have been thirty but her depleted veins were the tiny blue squiggles of a seventy year old.

  The woman—Rebecca Haigh was actually all of twenty-six but for some reason was referred to as Miss Rebecca by everyone. She had bedraggled brown hair styled with a week’s worth of sweat, and blue eyes that were mottled interestingly with brown flecks. She smiled warmly but wearily at Jillybean and said, “I used to cook all sorts a soup back in the day. I used to help out with the church.” She paused to let the significance of that sink in. “I could give you the recipe to one my favorites.”

  “Or you can give it my right hand woman. This is Jenn Lockhart. She’s a wiz at cooking, navigating and zombie hunting. I don’t know if you know this, but she was the one who killed the fabled ‘Frankenstein’ of zombies. It was over nine feet tall and all she used was a crossbow.” She had overheard Mike and Stu talking about it on the ride back after someone had mentioned how large one of the zombies that killed the Corsair had been.

  Miss Rebecca looked impressed. “Then I guess I can give it to her. But say, Miss Queen ma’am there’s talk about you finding a big boat. Is it true? And why? Are you thinking of moving us?”

  Jillybean was at a loss for words. They had been back for all of half an hour and in that time the whispers had gone from person to person, shooting around the warehouse and coming to a conclusion with remarkable accuracy.

  She was indeed planning on moving the people, but she hadn’t even had time to figure out the best way to approach the subject. Her instincts were to slip suggestions Jenn’s way and perhaps set up some sort of sign pointing towards a mass emigration, if there was such a thing. With Jenn and her superstitions on board, there’d be no question of Mike’s eager inclusion.

  Stu would be dragged along in their wake, outvoted even before there was a vote.

  “At the moment, I’m only thinking of getting the barge afloat,” Jillybean lied. “A barge would be mighty useful to river people.”

  Miss Rebecca couldn’t hide her disappointment or the fear in her blue-brown eyes. “If you do use it to leave, could you take me with you?”

  “You would want that?” Jillybean asked, with a glance to see if Jenn was listening. She was listening, her weariness forgotten for the moment.

  “Oh yes. I hate it here. I’ve hated it from the beginning.” She lowered her voice. “A lot of us hate it here. The people used to be nice, but they all turned mean. And nobody ever leads. We’ve always been afraid of leaders turning into dictators and look where it’s got us.”

  Jillybean smiled somewhat ruefully. “You know that in a certain sense, queens are dictators.”

  “Yes, but you are nice. Everyone thinks so. I do, too, even if you are mad. But I don’t mind it, no way. A person has gotta be crazy to come in this…in this crap hole to help when she doesn’t have to. So be the Queen and as long as you stay nice we’d love to have you, just don’t leave us, please. We’re not always like this.”

  The man next to her agreed through vomit crusted lips. He broke down and begged not to be left behind. “You guys are like, I don’t know, a gift. All of you.”

  Jenn listened with a growing sense of pleasure. She had been working like a dog for most of the last twenty hours and here was vindication that her labors were being appreciated and that the signs that had guided them here had been a hundred percent spot on. They even managed to make Jillybean’s unexpected and worrisome assumption of royalty not just a good thing but even the right thing.

  She expected to see Jillybean smiling about this, if not outwardly gloating, however the girl was actually hiding a frown. “We’ll see if she even floats,” Jillybean said without the bursting enthusiasm of only a minute before. “From there…we’ll see.”

  Chapter 28

  Jillybean finished setting the IV and moved on, her smile perfunctory with each patient all of whom had a kind word or an eager, pleasing smile plastered on their sweating faces. Any normal person would have been lapping this up. Jenn certainly was. She had received nearly as many compliments as Jillybean, something she had never heard even from her own people.

  It honestly felt good and it should have felt good to Jillybean as well. Most of her people back in Bainbridge had been somewhat stingy with their compliments of her. Almost always adding a “but” or something similar along with them.

  It’s great she’s a doctor, but she’s crazy.

  I’m so happy we have electricity, too bad Jillybean’s crazy.

  Jillybean created her own antibiotics, now if only she could do something about being crazy.

  These weren’t actual quotes, of course, but it was the sense that Jenn had gotten from everyone. Here they didn’t seem to care about her obvious insanity. All they cared about was that Jillybean had a good heart.

  “Are you okay?” Jenn asked when Jillybean took a moment to get a drink of water. “You seem sort of weird, even for you.” Jenn received a shrug as an answer. “Come on, Jillybean. This is pretty incredible. Not even queen for a day and you have people practically worshipping you. So why the look? Why aren’t you happy?Is it because we’re really leaving?”

  Jillybean’s eyes darted away as she said, “Yes. That was always the plan. This place is too diseased and its defenses are laughable. We can’t stay here.
”

  She was still hiding something. Jenn had come to trust her intuition and she knew Jillybean wasn’t being honest but about what point, she didn’t know. She threw out a guess. “Were you actually going to leave some of these people behind?”

  “No,” she stated forcefully. “That is not going to happen. When we leave it’ll be all of us. I promise.” She gazed so steadily into Jenn’s eyes that the truth was obvious…and yet, there was still something in those big blue eyes. She began searching them, looking deeper.

  Jillybean broke away first saying, “If you don’t mind, I need to give out the medicine.” She lowered her voice, “I’m telling everyone that they are broad spectrum antibiotics, but it’s really just aspirin. Trust me, it’s a lie that will help them. It’s called the placebo effect. I’ll explain later. Aspirin can cause upset stomach, so if anyone asks tell them it means the pills are working and not to worry.”

  Jenn hated to lie. Even small lies like this bothered her. “I’m actually going outside to stretch my legs. I might even take a nap since someone should be up tonight.”

  “Hey.” Jillybean stopped her as she was about to walk away. “Are we okay? You know, are we still friends?”

  There was the slightest hesitation before Jenn answered honestly, “Yes, we’re still friends.” She had to look past those big eyes and past the fact that the girl was a murderer, and past the fact she had once taken her hostage, killed one of her people, got her banished and nearly burned down her home. When she looked deeper she saw a girl who was infinitely lovable.

  “We’re still friends and I’ll follow you anywhere.”

  Jillybean took a sharp breath, looked as if she were about to tell her secret, but it passed and the guarded veil slipped over her again. “Good. Go find a place to rest. I’ll wake you around ten or eleven.”