Generation Z [Book ]

by Peter Meredith

  They went steadily up into the hills, where the trees crowded in on the road and the darkness gathered. At first, Jenn was nervous and couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder at the creature, afraid that it would suddenly regrow its eyes and toes and attack.

  “Why don’t you go check on Stu?” Sadie said, trying to calm her. “I got this.”

  Stu was zonked out, but she was alarmed to find that his IV had run dry and now blood was going back up the line. It sent Jenn into a worse panic than before and she ran to tell Sadie.

  “That’s nothing. Here, take over for a bit.” Before Jenn knew it, she was holding the antenna and nearly wetting herself as George came at her, its arms flailing.

  She crossed herself and then practically fled from the thing. She just couldn’t walk as calmly as Sadie had in its shadow. If the thing tripped, she would be crushed. She kept at least twenty feet between her and it and even that seemed too close. With the dark and her attention divided, she tripped even more than George.

  When Sadie came back, Jenn pushed the antenna into her hand and began to babble in relief, “How’s Stu? He isn’t going to bleed to death, is he? I just pictured him filling up that bag with his blood and then it popping and…”

  “He’s fine. How about you?”

  “Me? I’m, I’m, I don’t know how I am. It’s been a tough couple of days, that’s for certain and now…” She paused to look back at George and lost her train of thought. It was just so horrible. Normally, the dead look in the eyes of the dead made her skin crawl, but the gaping holes in George’s face were even worse. In the dark, the holes looked like they went straight into its skull, yet it still walked.

  It reminded Jenn of what Sadie had said earlier. “What is it like in her head?” she asked.

  Sadie sucked in a breath. “It’s like a nuclear reactor. It’s hot all the time unless she’s sleeping, and she doesn’t sleep like a normal person. At the most she gets five hours a night and when she’s up, she’s always, always thinking. It doesn’t look like it, but her mind is always racing.”

  Jenn’s mind never raced like that. “Are you as smart as her?”

  “You would think so since we share the same brain and all, but no, I’m just me, the same as I was back when I was alive.”

  “Back when you were alive?”

  Sadie sighed; it was the sound of ultimate exhaustion. “Oh yeah. I died ten years ago. I got shot by some jerk but I stayed because Jillybean needed me. I just hang around keeping an eye on her, but when she’s stressed I try to step in.”

  “S-so are you saying you’re a ghost?” Jenn snuck a peek at the older girl, but her wild hair hung over her face casting it in shadows. It was like she didn’t have a face at all. A shiver went right through Jenn.

  “I think so. Either that or a spirit. But don’t be afraid. I would never hurt a friend of Jillybean’s. She needs friends. Hey, let’s not talk about me anymore. What’s going on with you and Mike?”

  Jenn and Mike had been studiously avoiding the issue of “Jenn and Mike.” There was definitely an attraction on her part and yet, if they made it back to San Francisco there could be no “Jenn and Mike.” It was why she was constantly squashing her feelings for him down deep.

  “Nothing. He’s just a friend,” she lied.

  Sadie stopped and with George blindly stomping at them, she inspected Jenn. After a moment, she laughed softly. “Please. You like him and he likes you. That’s why he’s taking point, to keep you safe. I know you two have a screwed-up deal but don’t make it worse by lying to each other.”

  George was now right on top of them. Jenn grabbed Sadie and pulled her along. “We shouldn’t even be talking about this, especially now, out here. You and uh, Jillybean are too loud. There could be more of the dead around.”

  “Unlikely. They don’t like hills and need a reason to climb them and to stay in them. They tend to flow like water, always collecting in low places.” No sooner had she said this, than Mike began flashing the laser pointer at them. Sadie quickly stopped George by tapping it on the head. It turned its blind eyes upward and swiped at nothing with its stumpy hands.

  Mike came hurrying back. “The road is blocked. There’s like twenty zombies down there.” He looked up at the wooded hills on either side of the highway. “We’ll never be able to get the cart up there. We’ll have to go back and find a way around.”

  “Back to where, Magoo? The only road we passed was three miles back and not only was it much smaller than this, it went south instead of west. No, we aren’t going back. We’ll go through them. We’ll ghost through them.” She tipped Jenn an intimate wink. Jenn let out a tepid, “Ha-ha.”

  Mike didn’t see anything funny at all. “First of all, stop calling me Magoo and second, going through them is a terrible idea. Sure, going around may take some time, but…”

  “But nothing,” Sadie snapped. “The road was much smaller and if you’re afraid of a couple of dozen dead-heads on four lanes, you’re going to piss your pants if we run into three on a dink county road like that was, Magoo.”

  Before Mike could spit out a curse, Jenn put up her hands. “Everyone calm down. Maybe, uh, maybe we should talk to Jillybean. I don’t want to upset you Sadie, but you did say she was smarter than you. Maybe she’ll have a better plan than either of the ones we’ve heard. How, uh, how do we get her back?”

  “I’m not mad,” Sadie said, lifting one shoulder in a half-shrug. “But I really doubt you’ll like what she has to say. And you know how to get her back. Just ask her a question.”

  “What sort of question?” Mike asked.

  Jenn knew. “What is the first cranial nerve?”

  A grin crossed Sadie’s face and she lifted that same shoulder again. “That one’s easy. Do you know how often Neil asks these? It’s the smelling nerve.”

  “That’s not what it’s called.” Jenn had no idea what it was called, but was sure there was no such thing as a “smelling nerve.”

  “Of course, it is. It’s called the ‘old’ something. Wait, it’s the old factory nerve.” Jenn shook her head and Sadie, who looked both confused and angry, began to mutter, her eyes as slits.

  After a moment she smirked. “It’s the olfactory nerve.” Jenn began to shake her head again. “It’s okay. It really is the olfactory nerve. Where are we?” She spun slowly, paused when she came to George standing, grey and still, like a stone statue. She looked around him at the cart. “And how is my patient? Have you looked in on him recently?”

  “We have,” Jenn answered, leaning closer, trying to see if this was really Jillybean. “He’s sleeping. We have a bit of a problem.” She explained what was going on.

  “Sadie was right. We’ll go through them. I brought the ghillie suits for exactly this reason. If you’d like, I can demonstrate the effectiveness of them.” Jenn had no intention of walking through a pack of the dead, ghillie suit or no ghillie suit. Jillybean read her expression. “Follow me.”

  Without waiting, she walked straight down the road. Just after a turn, the highway dipped and there in a low point were thirty-two zombies. Most were sleeping on their feet, while a few were on their hands and knees on the side of the road eating the remains of a deer, chewing endlessly on its bloody hide or gnawing its bones down to nothing.

  “Pay close attention,” Jillybean said, before pulling the ghillie suit over her head. The net hung down, hiding her completely. Very slowly, she walked straight towards the dead.

  Jenn crossed herself and Mike muttered, “Holy crap,” as she walked through the group, turned around and walked back.

  Jillybean grinned when she saw their expressions. “Hopefully you’re not chalking what you just saw to supernatural entities. It’s really very simple. What do we know of the dead? They eat, they sleep, they kill. But what do they kill? Do they kill trees or rocks or buildings? No. They kill people. As long as you don’t look or sound like a person, they ignore you. The Russians knew precisely what they were doing.”

 
“The Russians?” Jenn asked. She had heard of the “The Russians” but didn’t know anything about them other than they had been “our” enemies at one time. They were like the Corsairs in her mind.

  “Oh yes. It was the Russians who created the virus in the first place. They called it the Super Soldier serum. They wanted a way to make their soldiers bigger, stronger, tougher. They wanted them impervious to pain and immune to the elements. They got zombies instead.”

  Mike glanced back down the road, squinting as if he could see the beasts. “How do you know?”

  “I almost killed the guy who made all this happen. His name was Yuri Petrovich. He’s one that got away.” She sighed and then smiled. “That’s water under the bridge. Let’s concentrate on getting past these guys.”

  Jillybean gave them a very brief tutorial on how to act when walking through a bunch of zombies, which boiled down to go slow and keep quiet. She had Mike lead the way and the only thing she let him carry was the laser pointer. He looked like he wanted to walk through the crowd of dead about as much as a cat wants a bubble bath.

  One dreadfully slow step at a time, he went forward until he was within ten paces of the first beast, then he slowed down even more, going so slowly that Jenn caught up to him. She wanted to go faster. In fact, she wanted to race out of there. Being close to George was one thing, being close to so many had her right on the edge of panicking. There were so many of them that they could literally tear her to bits in seconds and eat her, bones and all, in less than a minute.

  There was a horrible finality to the thought that had her heart beating frantically. She could feel her pulse in her fingertips and in her ears. She was so scared that she couldn’t help herself; she reached out to touch Mike. She needed to feel something real.

  He jumped and his breath hitched in his throat. The closest of the beasts, an eight-footer had been sleeping, now it woke with a breathy growl. It was a hideous thing with only half a face. The rest had been eaten off and was now a crag of ugly scars and exposed bone. It turned its one glaring eye on Jenn and reached out a long-clawed hand.

  Too late Jenn realized she might actually look too much like a shrub. The dead ate plants after all, when they couldn’t get small girls that is.

  Chapter 32

  Jenn Lockhart

  Giving up the entire useless charade, Jenn wanted to sprint away only panic had her in its grip and she couldn’t move. As the hand came closer and closer she found herself petrified with fear.

  She was staring death right in its one eye when suddenly that eye blazed red. Mike had used the laser pointer. With a roar, the beast stabbed its fingers into its own eye, its elbow hitting Jenn’s shoulder with the force of a ram, knocking her to the ground.

  The beast, blinking its one eye, reached for her again, only Mike used the laser pointer, casting a red dot onto the ground to her right. The beast chased after it, turning from them. The other dead things glanced over with expressionless eyes not having seen the dot when Mike flicked it on and off quickly.

  Jenn lay on her side, breathing in shallow ragged gasps until the beast moved away, then, with shaking hands she slowly pushed herself up. Mike stood still as a statue until she was on her feet. Even then, he didn’t move. He let her walk out of what felt like a death trap, first.

  When she was safe, he waited for Jillybean who had the toughest job of all: moving George through the group. She made it look easy, though a few of the dead meandered close to gawp at the strange, moving bush.

  “So, will you trust me from now on?” Jillybean asked when they were a quarter mile away, the sweat cooling down their backs.

  Mike didn’t hesitate to say that he would. Jenn was slower to agree. She had nearly died. That was the complete truth. She had been within an inch of being killed. As always, Jillybean seemed to be able to look right through her. “You set yourself on this course and it’s a dangerous one. We could have gone back to Bainbridge. We still can if you want to. But if we go forward, you have to trust me.”

  A nod with downcast eyes was all Jenn could give. Jillybean clapped her hands. “Good enough. Now let’s get moving. We have a lot of ground to cover before daylight.”

  The three of them, and George, fell into the march. Mike in front, Jillybean with the antenna, poking the creature every fifteen minutes and Jenn walking next to the cart. She claimed it was to keep an eye on Stu, however, the real reason was because she had embarrassed herself in front of Mike and was frankly afraid of Jillybean.

  She believed wholeheartedly that Jillybean was haunted or possessed or whatever the right word was. And when the Coven found out, there would be trouble.

  Her fear continued mile after mile until Jillybean called a halt and checked on Stu herself. He woke up for a few minutes, his eyes slipping in and out of focus. “Okay, let’s cut you off,” Jillybean said. “Too much of Mama Jillybean’s poppy concoction can be a bad thing.”

  At Jenn’s look of alarm, Jillybean shook her head. “Nothing a couple of hours of sleep won’t cure. I’ll be right back. I have got to wee.” She stopped them near an old farm house and ran inside.

  While she was gone, Jenn poked her head under the skiff. “You okay? Do you need anything?”

  A spasm of pain crossed his face as Stu tried to rearrange himself among the boxes. “No, I’m good. Don’t worry about me.”

  He had always been so tough that she didn’t see just how much pain he was in. Jillybean saw it all. She came out of the house with her arms loaded down with dusty-smelling blankets and three pillows. She made a bed for Stu in the cart and when he laid back down, he was asleep in a blink.

  “I wish I had thought of that,” Jenn said.

  “You’re too hard on yourself. You’re just fifteen years old and despite that, you’ve shown remarkable courage. Why don’t you move George along the rest of the way? It’s only another mile or so and the more you’re around the dead the more you’ll come to realize they aren’t all that scary.”

  Jenn didn’t think she would ever come to realize this “fact,” not if she lived a million years. Still, by the time they made it to the town of Elma and the Chehalis River, she was far more relaxed around the creature. “What are we going to do with him?” she asked when George had dragged the cart down to the river’s edge.

  “He’s served his purpose. I say we let him go,” Mike said. “He’s basically harmless.”

  “No,” Jillybean said, quietly. “We kill it. Always kill them when you can safely do so.” It seemed cold, but neither Jenn nor Mike argued. After unhooking the rope, Jillybean tapped the beast until it fell in a little washed-out gully. While it was trying to right itself, Mike dropped a heavy rock on its head.

  Jillybean was suddenly all smiles again. “Let’s get this boat in the water.” Even though it wasn’t much more than a fast-running stream, it was a wet and cold job getting the skiff and Stu into the water. Then they just let gravity take them away. With the water so shallow, the cart shuddered and banged along in their wake sometimes floating and sometimes running on its bicycle wheels.

  Eventually, as smaller streams emptied into the Chehalis, the water grew deep enough to float the cart. It was an easy trip at that point but slower than Jillybean had expected. It was four in the morning when they came to Gray’s Harbor and found a long rambling town hugging the northern shore.

  Running the batteries low, Jillybean purred the skiff along until they smelled smoke. Stu was finally roused. “That’s coal smoke. Do you know if they have a coal-fired generator? If so, they might have spotlights just like Bainbridge.”

  Jillybean didn’t know and decided to err on the side of caution, slipping the skiff in among the trees crowding the bank. “Mike, stay with Stu,” she said. “Pull the boat and the cart out of the water. Jenn and I will get the lay of the land. No, no arguing. Jenn is the quietest and right now that’s what we need.”

  Jenn took an M4 with a night scope while Jillybean took her funny dart shooter. The two made their way through
the town, following the coal smell. Being stealthy in Hoquiam wasn’t easy. A battle had been fought there and not a battle between man and zombies.

  Men had fought each other with guns and tanks and bombs of all sorts. The eastern portion of the town was in ruins. Where the streets weren’t clogged with the burned-out husks of Humvees and armored personnel carriers, there were either craters the size of swimming pools gaping the streets or their way was blocked by toppled buildings.

  Jenn was both awed and disgusted by the destruction. Here and there were heaps of bones taller than herself, as if bodies had been bulldozed into piles and left to rot.

  “I don’t like this,” Jillybean whispered as they came to one of the piles. There was a strangled quality to the words and Jenn looked at the young woman through her scope. Even accounting for the greyscale, Jillybean didn’t look like herself. Her eyes, always very large, were popped wide open. She didn’t blink as she stared at the bones.

  “Hey, it’s going to be okay,” Jenn said, putting her arm around the girl’s shoulders and squeezing her in a hug. “We need you to stay with us, Jillybean. Eve and Sadie can’t help us, we need you. Stu needs you. Come on. Let’s get away from all this.”

  Jenn pulled Jillybean past the bones and across the front of a roller rink. She thought about going inside but, she didn’t have the foggiest notion what a roller rink was and because the word “roller” sounded like there would be things that would trip them up in the dark, she pushed on. Beyond that was a small engine repair shop that stank of oil even after so long. She could only imagine how filthy it would be inside.

  She kept going and simply moving seemed to be what Jillybean needed; she grew less shaky and her eyes began to clear. Jillybean was herself again by the time they came to a river. “This is it,” Jillybean said, as she scoped the far side. Across the water was a hedge of tangled wire. A little beyond that was a wall of cinderblocks ten feet high and then there was another wall, this one twenty feet high. Stationed every hundred yards or so was a guard, their heads just visible above the second wall.