Generation Z_The Queen of the Dead

by Peter Meredith

  “A surprise? What is it?”

  “Do you honestly expect me to answer that? It wouldn’t be much of a surprise if I did, would it? You go on alone. I’ll go get those IVs DC’d. Good luck.” She gave Jenn a wink which was very strange for her, but not so much for Sadie. The wink only confused her, while at the same time a heavy thud rattling the wall of the warehouse, frightened her.

  There was a zombie outside, looking to get in. Its presence soured Jenn and colored her imagination turning what might have been interesting or even pleasant into something unnerving. She didn’t know what sort of ghastly surprise Mike could have found in the warehouse and she approached a small curtained off area stuck in the very corner with a good deal of trepidation.

  The first thing she saw beyond the little curtain was a fire in which blackened pots had been thrust. Then she saw a blue plastic rectangle, like a large box that was half-filled with water—hot water. Through the falling grey light little wisps of steam could be seen rising from its surface. Mike stood next to it, grinning from ear to ear. “Me and Stu found it! We found it yesterday but there wasn’t any room in the carts so we left it. But, but I went and got it just now and Stu got the water going for me.”

  “Oh, for you,” she said, hoping the disappointment didn’t show.

  “No for you. He got it ready for me to give to you. So it’d be ready when I got back.” He felt like he was blowing what should have been a slam dunk.

  Strangely, it had been Stu’s idea. Stu had woken him at four in the morning and told him to go fetch the portable tub as soon as it was light out. He had said, “Jenn will love it,” but Jenn only looked a little stunned.

  “I have shampoo,” he exclaimed when she only stood there. “It’s fancy and smells like coconuts. And I have towels that are clean. See?” She nodded but did nothing else. “So, uh, do you like it? You don’t do you?”

  “I do like it a lot, but I don’t think it’s right for me to, you know, bathe with you right here. I don’t know what you thought was going to happen.”

  Mike went instantaneously red. “I didn’t think anything!” he cried. “Nothing, I swear. I just, uh, wanted to make sure you were okay. I’m leaving right now.”

  He was almost through the curtains when she caught him. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to come off like I’m not happy with your gift. It was very kind.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.

  As though he were ten feet tall, he swaggered out into the warehouse, gazing fondly on everyone he met. He was looking for Stu and found him hovering over Jillybean as she supervised the simple operation of removing an IV. The worst had passed for the majority of the people. They would continue to have diarrhea for a few more days and their full strength wouldn’t return for another week but they would live.

  “I gotta thank you, Stu,” Mike said, swatting him on the shoulder. “That bath really did the trick. She kissed me square on the cheek.”

  “A kiss on the cheek. Good for you.” Stu looked on him approvingly, before casting a glance at Jillybean who was smiling prettily up at him. Her cheeks had a bloom to them so that she appeared to be the quintessential English rose. Stu held her gaze for a moment before turning back to Mike and asking, “So when’s the wedding?”

  If he thought he was going to sink Mike with the glib question, he was mistaken. Mike looked around with evident suspicion, lowered his voice, and said with utmost seriousness, “A week maybe. As soon as things settle down around here.”

  “Well, about that,” Jillybean said, the bloom coming off the rose as her cheeks lost their color. “I’m afraid you might want to move up the proceedings…”

  “The proceedings?”

  She cleared her throat and gestured at Mike’s body midway down. “Your nuptials if you prefer. I’m sorry but we need to be afloat by this time tomorrow. We will free the barge today, stock her with the essentials and cast off at first light.”

  Mike gaped. He had been so busy that he was almost the only person not to have heard the rumors that they were all leaving on the barge. “Cast off to where?”

  “San Francisco. Now, if will excuse me, I have things to attend to. Please be ready by eight with all the able-bodied people you can gather. We will, of course need the Saber available.”

  Mike made noises as if he were expressing the vowels of a foreign language, while Stu only stared after her, his thoughts his own, but he had lost the gaiety that had been lighting his dark eyes.

  “What does she plan on doing in San Francisco?” Mike demanded. “The Hill People will kill her on sight and I bet Gerry will as well.” Stu could only shrug, a cold worry eating away at the warmth that had been burning in him ever since the night before. Jenn wasn’t the only one who knew Jillybean was carrying a secret inside of her.

  “They may not. We’ll have a barge filled with people at our back. No one’s going to risk a battle that will get us all killed over revenge, or the loss of a boat in Gerry’s case.”

  In a sane world that made sense. Unfortunately, Jillybean didn’t always live in a sane world. “What about Eve?” Mike asked, his voice pitched so low that he had to lean almost into Stu’s ear to make himself heard. “She might do anything. Anything, Stu. We can’t let her attack our people for no reason.”

  “We’re not going to attack anyone. Eve maybe a little off, but she isn’t suicidal. Or completely suicidal, I should say. I’ll talk to Jillybean and see what’s going on.”

  He tried and failed in this. When she wasn’t sending people to him with one request after another, she point blank ignored his direct questions. He pressed her as politely as possible until she grew agitated and her eyes took to shifting, light to dark and back again.

  When Jenn emerged, pink and wrinkled from her bath, Mike and Stu cornered her and peppered her with questions, only she knew no more than them.

  After that things became too busy to even breathe. Jillybean was her usual self. With inexhaustible zeal, she thought enough for a dozen people at once, setting seven plans into action, most of which were aimed at getting the barge out of the mud.

  Teams were sent out into the city in search of shovels, buckets, jacks, ropes and more hoses. The mud was thick, but relatively fresh. The same storm that had shot the Calypso north three weeks before, had sent a flood down the Sacramento, sweeping the barge from the dry dock it had been on sitting for the last dozen years and depositing it, as well as twenty tons of mud, almost in view of the warehouse.

  Jillybean did not believe in signs and omens, and yet she did not entertain even the possibility the barge would sink once it was pulled into the river. She believed with utter religious certainty that it would float.

  When the Saber pulled alongside she casually leapt from the sailboat to the canted front edge of the barge. Beaming, she walked down the ramp into the long empty hold and stamped her foot on the steel decking, and grinned. It was solid and strong.

  The barge had been brand new twelve years before and hadn’t even taken its first run when the apocalypse had struck. Ever since then it had sat with its shallow hold hidden and protected by hard plastic covers until two years before the first of the covers had blown off and now they were all gone. There was the beginnings of rust along its edges and the sun and elements had turned everything dull and ugly, but it was sound.

  Jillybean grinned and she was not the only one. Everyone who came aboard did just as she had: they gave the decking a few kicks, grunted in amazement and then grinned at one another—everyone had heard the rumors: that it was finally time to leave the horrible warehouse after all the years they’d been there. Not one of them wanted to stay and just like Jillybean, they saw the barge as a sign from God.

  “Will it be all of us going?” Shaina asked. Her grin was as lopsided as her head. She was afraid that she had so little to offer that if anyone was going to be left behind it would be her. Others looked on, their grins not so vibrant as before. They had been subsisting on rumor and now Shaina had come right out and br
oached the subject.

  The question and the sudden quiet around her, surprised Jillybean who had been deep within a calculation trying to find an estimation of the weight of the vessel, which would have a bearing on the size of the anchor it would need, the sturdiness of the mast and the composition of the rudders. She put it aside for the moment, realizing that it was time to explain why she wanted to move and why it had to happen so quickly.

  “I know a lot of you have similar questions,” Jillybean began in a loud, strict voice. She was afraid that she would see resistance in some of their faces; Willis’ in particular, and she wanted it known quickly that she would not put up with it. “And I know a lot of you have fears, but know this: I will not leave anyone behind. The warehouse is not safe. In fact, it’s never been safe, not from disease, not from the Corsairs, and certainly not from the dead.”

  Happily, everyone including Willis began to nod and she went on in a much gentler tone, explaining that the time to move was right then and that they could not delay no matter how tired or sick they were. Of course she used long, somewhat mysterious sounding words, whose definitions were only partially understood.

  The barge was “providential,” their duty was “incumbent,” the timing was “precipitous,” and so on until the people were dazzled into believing the chance of their lives might slip away if they did not throw themselves into the task of freeing the barge. Despite the promise of hours of hard work in front of them, they cheered their new queen.

  Stu Currans cheered along with them, but he was only going through the motions. He was not dazzled by the important sounding words and far from seeing the barge as providential, which he gathered meant lucky, he found it heartily worrisome. Parking the barge in the middle of the San Francisco Bay would be considered a direct threat to the Islanders and the fact that it was Jillybean commanding it would bring the Hill People into what might normally be a squabble among fishermen.

  He needed to know the truth, but at the same time he owed her a debt that couldn’t be repaid. She had saved his life and the lives of the Hill People, whether they wanted to admit it or not.

  It’s why he cheered along with the rest and worked harder than anyone to get the barge afloat even though his gut churned with anxiety.

  Jillybean directed operations and the task of clearing the mud went quickly. Post hole diggers and hand augers bored holes into the mud, and when filled with water the mud became sloppy enough for buckets and the endlessly working hose to carry it all away.

  Then it was a matter of sliding the barge off the embankment. Chains were rigged, and the Saber, operating under a full press of sail, was employed, as was the strength of twenty hydraulic jacks and the backs of a hundred people.

  There was a moment of uncertainty as the chains went taut and the mast of the Saber bowed from the immense strain. But gravity was on their side and the mud which had been their enemy only minutes before was now slick and acted as a lubricant. The barge, which had been mostly in the river anyway, slid the rest of the way in.

  Everyone cheered except for Mike who now had fifty tons of floating metal to arrest before it plowed into his beloved boat and turned it into a pile of fiberglass kindling. In a nifty piece of sailing, he not only darted the Saber out of the way, but also brought both vessels up into the sluggish current.

  It was noon and everyone thought they were well ahead of schedule and ready for a break. They were wrong. Jillybean had more plans for the barge. Although it seemed to be an immense ship, she knew that with two hundred and forty people aboard, and all their supplies, it would shrink quickly.

  Luckily, as they were in the industrial side of the city, there was no lack of cargo containers. These metal boxes, some as long as sixty feet and others mere cubes, ten feet on the side, were scattered everywhere. From the deck of the barge Jillybean could see a hundred of them easily. The only difficulty was in finding ones not riddled by rust.

  While the others rested or went back out into the city for a hundred new items she suddenly needed, she and Stu went in search of whole containers. She found it strange that within a line of seven of them, where each had walls of crumbling orange metal, she discovered one that was almost entirely intact. She flagged it and moved on to the next group. These were nestled along the back of another warehouse, looking like a row of piglets nursing at a sow.

  Here she found two more that would do.

  Stu barely gave the containers a glance. He had come with her to protect her. Jillybean was not just small and weak, she would also become so engrossed in her projects that she would sometimes miss obvious things around her, such as the presence of the dead.

  The clamor of getting the barge afloat had attracted many and she was quite oblivious to them. It wasn’t until Stu grabbed her round the middle and hoisted her bodily up onto one of the containers that she even noticed them. “How inconvenient,” Jillybean grumbled with an impatient frown when she saw the dozens of walking corpses coming after them.

  “Sometimes I wonder about you,” he said. “You can see every little detail about a person so that it’s like you’re reading their minds but you missed those zombies.”

  She slid back from the edge saying, “I would’ve noticed them if you weren’t around, but since I knew you were keeping watch what was the point of me watching as well. If I had a cat would I sit outside a mouse hole next to him holding a frying pan?” He had already said as much as he ever did and only shook his head.

  She patted him on the chest. “Maybe I should be thanking you for saving me. That would be more polite.”

  He had saved her though they were far from safe on the container which was only eight feet in height, in other words many of the beasts were actually taller than the container. Their long arms could stretch nearly all the way across the top of it.

  She and Stu dodged to the edge of the container to get away from the diseased claws grasping for them. “They sure do appear hungry,” she said with a grin and then pinwheeled her arms as she stepped on one of their hands and lost her balance.

  Stu grabbed her and for the moment they were safe again. The moment was brief as the angry beasts began rocking the seven thousand pound container trying to toss them off. They leapt to the next container four feet over and before the monsters could even think about swarming it they leapt to the next and then the next which was far less sturdy than the previous three.

  Its roof and sides were composed almost completely of rust and its rectangular form was more illusion than substance. The roof collapsed under them and only their thick layers saved them from being torn to pieces from the jagged remains of metal. They fell into the dank interior and Stu was up first, dragging her to her feet before charging through the remains of the far wall. It came apart around him and he let his momentum take him through the next where he punched a human-sized hole by leading with his shoulder.

  Instead of attacking the next container wall, he and Jillybean ran through it to where its open door fed into another warehouse. Behind them the dead were tearing apart the containers or throwing them to their sides, screaming in rage.

  Stu was ready to run, however Jillybean hesitated. The warehouse was an utter mess. There were a dozen more containers here and all the varied items that had once been in them were now out of them and strewn everywhere.

  Anything of real value had long before been taken; all that remained were wilted stacks of cardboard, nested in by a colony of rats, toasters by the thousands, enough computer monitors to build a staircase to the moon with, and car parts; crates and crates of useless fan belts and alternators and headlights that were forever destined to remain unlit.

  Jillybean took this all in with her usual perception and then proceeded to toss it out of her mind. Her eyes were on the cargo containers, all of which were unmarred by rust. “Perfect.” She had a vision of the barge, its flat hold filled with these containers which would in essence double the deck space.

  “Not perfect,” Stu said, over the sound of the
dead tearing apart the rusting containers to find them, which they would eventually if the two didn’t keep moving. He dragged her on through the warehouse to the front where the mess continued unabated. In a trashed-out front lot, two eighteen-wheelers were joined at the nose, melded together by a crash that had sent both drivers flying through the windshields. They had in essence, traded places though all that remained of either of them was a leg bone jutting from one of the cabs.

  The closest truck still bore the Ace-True Value logo. It had been emptied with great energy by a gang of desperate people years before, which in a way was helpful for Jillybean as she did not have to dig beneath layers to find three cases of varnish and the hand dolly that went with the truck.

  “This will do for a distraction.”

  Stu, lugging the dolly, trailed after Jillybean as she set off for the tallest building on the far side of a crowded bridge and without the least qualm, set the upper floors on fire.

  With so many gallons of what smelled like fermented varnish spread around, the building went up like a torch. Even in the bright light of day it was an immense beacon that drew the dead. From a block away, the flames danced in her eyes, transforming them and her into something not exactly normal.

  It seemed to Stu that Jillybean and Eve were almost in complete balance. Her face registered both a distant approval and a wicked grin. What was more, the flames seemed to hold her spellbound. Minutes went by and she only stared as if hypnotized.

  He was pretty sure that if there was ever a time to get information out of her, it was right then. “Why are we going back to San Francisco?” he asked in the softest voice he could manage.

  Her head turned slightly, her eyes still locked on the fire. “To fight the Corsairs of course.”

  The answer, given with complete certainty was like a stab in the heart and he blurted out, “The Corsairs!”

  “Yes. They are coming for us. Thousands of them.”