Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned

by Meredith, Peter

  Instead, every one of them ran their boats ashore, although none made it. Their deep keels hit the sandy bottom while they were still thirty yards out. As anyone with even a passing knowledge of physics could have guessed would happen, the boats spun broadside to the shore when the first wave hit them. Each boat was thrown onto its side when the next wave struck.

  Their weaponless crews straggled to shore and stood uselessly, staring at the Queen’s ships as they formed up in a double line facing north. No one could understand this strange formation until a black smudge appeared among the clouds. With a sinking feeling in his gut, Boschee turned his glasses north and saw his beloved Courageous. It was within the pack of sixty ships sailing back from Muir Beach and directly into the next part of the Queen’s trap.

  Everyone but Boschee began screaming and waving their arms for the ships to go back or to run away. Boschee was too sick to his stomach to do anything but watch as the inevitable came to pass. Even the wind was the Queen’s ally it seemed. It swung around from the northwest, shooting the sixty ships down to their doom.

  “I can’t watch,” Boschee said, turning away. He was the only one turned away and thus was the only one to see the crest of the hill opposite from them swarming with men. A wave of adrenaline washed over him with a zinging sensation as every inch of his flesh tented in goosebumps. Before he knew it, panic had set in. Not fear, or overblown anxiety, it was raging, mindless panic.

  He found himself tearing up the hill behind him, running for his life without a thought for anyone else. Just a few feet shy of the top of the hill, someone saw the Queen’s soldiers and let out a cry. Then all hell broke loose. Hundreds of guns went off at once. Men on either side of Boschee were killed in that first volley. More were killed ahead of him and rolled down the hill.

  Like some sort of sick version of Donkey Kong, Boschee found himself leaping over bodies as they spun down at him and dodging bloody heads that seemed to be bounding everywhere as though his fellow Corsairs were bowling them.

  By some miracle, he made it to the crest and had every intention of going down the other side just as fast as he could, only Captain Larson grabbed him. “What do we do? What do we do?” he screamed into Boschee’s face.

  “I-I-I don’t know.” He had no idea. In the old days, before the zombies, he’d had no affinity with the military and knew next to nothing about tactics and strategy. All he saw was a line of people looking to kill him.

  It was up to the Black Captain to take charge. While Boschee was still gasping and running his hands over his body, trying to find the gun he had dropped while racing up the hill, the Captain appeared. “Get up, Boschee. Take command of the left flank. We need to make a fighting withdrawal.”

  “To where?” Captain Larson demanded, shrilly. “Our boats are gone, damn it. She destroyed them…”

  Before he could finish the curse, the Black Captain drew one of his .44 Anaconda in a silver blur and shot him in the guts. The bullet was placed perfectly, missing all of Larson’s major arteries. He would die, that was a given, it was just a matter of how quickly. Larson was still staring down at the blood leaking through his coat when the Captain turned him around to face the enemy.

  “Die with some damned usefulness,” the Captain snarled, using him as a shield as he watched the sea battle. The northern fleet of sixty ships, led by The Revenge, had mistaken the smoke coming from the burning ships for clouds. Almost at the last moment, the captain of The Revenge realized his mistake and, in a fine display of seamanship, spun his ship on a dime, dodged two torpedoes, and then zipped out of there, chased by three more, none of which could catch her.

  By a stroke of luck, the Queen failed in her battle of annihilation. After dropping off their troops, one of the Corsair ships had run aground on Muir Beach and it had taken an hour to get her free. Thus the sixty ships had not been in the initial trap as they should have been, and now they were fleeing, racing either into the wind or out to sea as if the furies themselves were after them.

  In reality, no one was after them. The Queen’s luck had soured again as a good percentage of her fleet was almost frozen in place, fighting desperately against both a change in the tide and the wind. The captains were doing everything they could to simply not be thrown on shore like their victims had been minutes before.

  The Queen was also in danger of letting a good portion of the Captain’s soldiers slip through her fingers. Yes, the hundreds of Corsairs at Rodeo Lagoon were completely trapped, however Boschee had upset her plans by coming in a long, somewhat uneven wave instead of a compact one of three or four smaller columns. The very nature of the straggling meant his Corsairs were spread out so far that sweeping around them to ensnare the entire group in one great net was proving too much for the inadequate number of men assigned to Captain Ryley McCartt.

  McCartt had half the number of men as the Black Captain and a concerted effort on his part might have turned the tables. Neither he nor Boschee could see this, however. The growing darkness as well as the shock of the sudden attacks had blinded them to the weakness of their enemy. All they saw were their own exhausted men being ripped apart by what looked like an invincible enemy bearing down on them.

  “Up there!” the Black Captain yelled, pointing at a hilltop a half mile in their rear. “Get your men up there.”

  Boschee was shoved to the left where the men were either cowering behind the slope of the hill or fleeing down the backside of it. He knew he had to take control and make decisions, but the only thing he could think about were the bullets hissing just over head, and the screams all around him, and the drumroll of gunshots.

  He ducked down next to a man whose face was unrecognizable because of the blood covering it. “Hey,” Boschee said, grabbing his arm. “We have to get up to that…” The man fell over to stare up at the clouds as rainwater filled his open eyes. There was a hole in the side of his head from which half his brain had come shooting out. “Son of a bitch,” Boschee whispered, leaning back from the body. He looked up at the next man, who opened his mouth to say something only instead of words, a great blast of blood and teeth came out, splattering into the mud.

  “Hey, what? What the…what the…” Boschee said, blinking as mud and sand kicked up into his face. It was like someone was throwing rocks at him, skipping them across the side of the hill. After the fourth or fifth rock zinged past, it dawned on him that he was being shot at.

  But by whom? And from where? He gaped about trying to make sense of the explosions and the tremendous din of a hundred guns going off at once. One of those hundred was being aimed at him. Which one? Which one! For a few seconds, he turned in place looking for the shooter. Then panic took over his mind again and he went running off down the hill, followed by the entire left side of the line.

  He fairly flew down the hill, but when he hit the face of the next hill, his pace turned into that of a crawl. An agonizing crawl made worse because men above him kept sliding down into him and because he couldn’t stop looking over his shoulder. They were coming and they were coming to kill him. Ten feet from the crest, his prophecy came partially true.

  The Queen’s soldiers had crested the hill he had just fled from and were shooting up and down the line, killing almost at will. Boschee looked back in shock and fright…and then in anger. He was sure he saw a man he knew among them.

  “Rat-faced Ronnie!” he thundered once he was safely behind a boulder. “I see you, damn it! What do you think you’re doing, attacking your own people?”

  This caused something of a truce among the two sides as they waited for Rat-faced Ronnie to answer the charge. Rat-faced Ronnie did indeed have a narrow face and could only grow an ugly, thin little bit of fur on his upper lip and a wispy, childish beard on the tip of his jutting chin. His cheeks went suddenly red at being singled out.

  “You don’t know!” Rat-faced Ronnie shouted back. “She can’t be beaten. She knows everything, Boschee. She knew you guys were going to attack right here and she knew where t
he fleet was going and everything.”

  Boschee knew this could only mean one thing: she had a spy close to the Captain. It also meant another opportunity. If he could find out who it was, the Captain would probably make him a lieutenant for sure. And if he could turn the tide of the fight right here, there was no telling how far he could go.

  “Listen Ronnie, if you come back to us we can win. Think about it. The Captain will reward you beyond your wildest dreams. Anything you want, you’ll get.”

  Rat-faced Ronnie laughed. “That’s what she said you’d say! She warned us that you guys would make all sorts of promises you couldn’t keep. She said it was a sign of desperation and that we shouldn’t believe you. She said that we only got crumbs before and now that’s all you got left. Crumbs and lies.”

  “Does a ship sound like a crumb to you, Ronnie? I can get you a ship. Think about that. It’s what you always wanted.”

  Boschee chanced a look from behind the boulder. Rat-faced Ronnie was too far away to read his expression, but Boschee took his hesitation as a good thing. If one man doubted, it would infect the rest. The battle would pause long enough for everyone to remember they were on the same side. Once that…

  “Whose boat would I get, Boschee?” Rat-face asked. “Yours? Would you hand over The Courageous? Because I don’t think you will. I don’t think any of you captains will.” The other ex-Corsairs around him agreed with him; Boschee was losing them.

  “I might be able to get you the Orca, Ronnie. It’s no lie. Larson’s dead and the Orca needs a new captain. It could be you, Ronnie. All you have to do is put down your guns. Just for a little bit. Once we get all this straightened out; once we put this bitch queen in her place, I guarantee that you will get the Orca.”

  Again Rat-face Ronnie hesitated as the rain came down in torrents and the wind began to howl. Just as Boschee thought he was going to reel Ronnie in, another man on the far hill shouted, “What about me? I want a boat, too.”

  This was followed by another man demanding a ship, and a third, then a fourth. Rat-face Ronnie had never displayed more than average intelligence before that day, but just then he took the reins of the battle in his hands.

  “He’s lying! He can’t give us all boats. Hell, he probably can’t even give any of us the Orca. None of us are even on the officer list. And what would her first mate say about getting passed over? Wes is a mean son of a bitch. We all know he’d hold a grudge.”

  “We can switch him out, Ronnie. You’d be able to pick your own men. Your friends can crew her. I can guarantee that.”

  “Your guarantee and your promises are meaningless. They’re just empty words compared to what the Queen offers. She’s offered us something like the old days. Like how it was, before. She doesn’t call me Rat-face. She let me kiss her hand and when I did, she called me Ronald.”

  “And you’d trade that over having your own ship?”

  Ronnie let out a harsh laugh and pointed to the west, where dozens of wrecks filled Rodeo Lagoon. “You see all that? She is the Queen of War. She can’t be beaten, Boschee. The Orca, The Courageous, The Red Death? They are all doomed. If I took the Orca, I’d be better off slitting my own throat.”

  Chapter 19

  Mark Leney watched all this through the scope of his M4. He had the crosshairs lined up on the back of Rat-face’s head, just in case the conversation didn’t go exactly as the Queen had envisioned. She hadn’t known who would be speaking to whom, but she had known with uncanny precision that it would happen.

  Watching it unfold had caused the little hairs on the back of Leney’s neck to lift, making him wonder whether she had something going for her besides her intelligence. Something otherworldly or perhaps inner-worldly, like a second-sight or ESP.

  Although not nearly as superstitious as the Hill People or the Islanders, he was still a sailor and few sailors were wholly without their superstitions; for instance, he would never consider challenging a light wind by whistling, since it was the surest way to kill it altogether. Ever since he had first laid eyes on her, his gut told him there was something about the Queen that spoke of destiny. It was a vague feeling that suggested it was not necessarily a good destiny, or even her destiny, that he felt.

  Not everything had gone her way, after all.

  Leney was close enough to her to know that it had been a trial condemning her three closest friends to death. He also knew that she found it repulsive to have to rely so heavily on ex-Corsairs to fight for her. She had to force her face from becoming queered-up whenever the likes of Sticky Jim and Deaf Mick were around.

  Even this battle, as masterful as it had been so far, showed that destiny was not completely on her side.

  Just when she could have ended the war at a stroke, the wind and tide had thrown their allegiance into the Black Captain’s camp. Instead of destroying the Corsair fleet completely, half of it had escaped. From his place on the crest of the hill, he could see the Corsair ships fleeing north. They were beating against a strange wind that was quarter-on for them, but hammering directly into the face of the Queen’s ships.

  Unless something drastic happened to the Corsair ships, they would getaway. The only question was whether they would head back to Muir Beach and await the Black Captain or would they just run all the way to Grays Harbor with their tail between their legs.

  Leney guessed that few of his old friends among the Corsairs would dare to cross the Captain while he was still breathing and still had an army at his command. Leney turned his scoped rifle back around to the action at hand, which was beginning to pick up again. The two sides were nearly equal now, with about six hundred men a piece.

  Unfortunately, for McCartt, Leney didn’t see him winning this battle, at least not in the manner that the Queen expected. Although there were hundreds of dead Corsairs strewn over the muddy hills, the remainder weren’t ready to give up just yet and it would take an actual attack over open ground to defeat them.

  McCartt was leading a hodge-podge force made up of ex-Corsairs, who weren’t thrilled with the idea of killing their one-time friends, a few hundred Santas, who were still getting used to the idea of serving a queen and weren’t sure how they liked it, and a handful of Hill People, Islanders and Sacramento men and women who had demonstrated surprising stoutheartedness, but were still civilians at their cores.

  Still, McCartt had the Queen in his corner and she had both a keen sense of human nature and an eye for terrain.

  From her commanding position on the bridge, she could see the entire battlefield and with her radios she was able to direct the action. “Captain McCartt, pull half your force back and send them along the base of the hill you’re on. It runs for about half a mile before it reaches a trail that cuts northwest. If your men hurry, they can flank the enemy and cut them off. Over.”

  McCartt had always been a yes-man and instead of arguing about the extreme difficulties involved in maneuvering raw troops under fire, he simply said: “Roger. Out.”

  Leney turned his scope to the east and spotted the trail that the Queen was talking about. It looked firm, but Leney had his doubts. So far, everything had been absolute muck and he guessed that a “dirt” trail would be twice as bad—but if it wasn’t…an interesting set of opposing ideas occurred to him and before anyone else could volunteer, Leney keyed his radio and said, “I’ll lead the flank attack.”

  If the trail turned out to be an impassable bog, the attack would fail miserably without a shot being fired—something he could blame on the Queen or the weather. Either way, he would be relatively safe and still be able to make a claim of bravery and dedication to duty.

  On the other hand, if the trail wasn’t a complete mess, he saw how a flank attack could be a spectacular success and if it was, he would make sure he got all the credit. Both options were preferable to staying with McCartt’s force. A flank attack would only work if the enemy was “fixed” in position and the only way to guarantee that was to engage it, which meant attacking up the barren face of
the hill across from them.

  That would take actual, no questions asked, bravery. Leney’s bravery took only two forms: the “what’s in it for me” variety, or the “I don’t have any other choice, so let’s do this,” option. This particular mission fell within the first category.

  Moving along the safe side of the hill, he took every other person—unless that person happened to be a woman, then he ignored her and went on to the next. In his mind, one of the perks of being a Corsair, current or otherwise, was that he could be a complete sexist and never even contemplate apologizing for it.

  Despite his clear preference for male soldiers, two women joined his battalion: Colleen White and Ashtyn Bishop. He kept them because they were both young and pretty, and because he suspected that the Queen had ordered them to go, probably to keep an eye on him.

  “Don’t fall behind or you’ll get left,” he warned them, raising his voice as the rain picked up.

  The two young women looked cold and wretched, and at first they lagged badly at the back of the formation, lacking the brute strength needed to heave their legs from the deeper mud pits. Leney really would have left them, however a few Sacramento men, led by Steven Yingling, went back for them and basically dragged the pair over the deeper sections of mud.

  Soon they were all slogging along at a snail’s pace. The ex-Corsairs, like their cousins on the other side of the hill, were drinkers and smokers, which saw them staggering like drunks after a few hundred yards. Had it not been for the trail, which turned out to be a clay-gravel mixture, the flank attack might have ended before it began.

  It was nearly full dark before Leney got his men, and two women, into position. The fighting around the Lagoon during this hour and a half had been almost nonexistent as the two sides dug in. In the middle of the battlefield, McCartt had tried two frontal attacks with heavy losses. Now it was Leney’s turn. Even with surprise on his side, he wasn’t looking forward to ordering an attack.