Chapter 24
After only a week, a miraculous change had occurred on Bainbridge. The island that had been gripped with an all-consuming fear of an assassin was now gearing up for their version of Thanksgiving as if nothing had ever happened.
The talk of murder died down quickly, being replaced as the topic of choice after the third day, by the announcement that Mr. Durnel had produced a bumper crop of blackberries and that he would be donating a hundred pounds of it to the Fall Festival—on Bainbridge, the main concern was who was going to win the annual pie-eating contest. The betting was running hot and heavy.
Very quickly, the assassination became old news and was rarely discussed. It was an unpleasant topic all around. Few people believed there had been an assassin in the first place. There certainly wasn’t any evidence there had ever been one. There were no clues or eyewitnesses, and no shadowy figures had been seen lurking near Neil’s house or anywhere else for that matter.
The prevailing wisdom was that Neil hadn’t been murdered at all, but had been killed because of his own foolishness.
“He’s the one who let her keep those ridiculous beasts chained up in that school of hers.”
“What did he expect? You play with fire, you’re gonna get burned, and if you play with zombies…well, it’s just sad is all.”
“Who would bother attacking Neil Martin in the first place? I mean, without Jillybean, who is he except some creepy little guy?”
Everyone figured Neil had accidentally allowed himself to get scratched by one of the zombies and either made up the story about an assassin because he was embarrassed or, that in his growing delirium, he had become paranoid. It was so much easier and much more pleasant to focus on the positive. And everyone loved the Fall Festival. Along with Mr. Durnel’s blackberry pies, there would be vats of spiced pumpkin beer, sourdough pretzels by the twenty-score, apple fritters, and turkey done up in a dozen ways.
Along with the food and the pie eating contest, there was the Fall Float Parade to look forward to; it had been getting wilder and crazier every year. There were also dozens of games, the archery and crossbow contests, and the annual talent show.
The mood on the island during the previous week was one of growing anticipation, not one of fear.
Deanna Grey knew better. She had seen the razor blade, she had smelled the sickening stench of the zombie blood on it, and she had touched the underside of Neil’s doorknob where the glue had dried in little ridges. There was no doubt in her mind that someone had tried to kill him; tried and failed.
Neil Martin was still alive. Sort of. He wasn’t quite human and he wasn’t exactly a zombie either. He was something in between and whatever that something was, it wasn’t pleasant.
For the first three days, Neil had slipped in and out of a fever-induced delirium so intense, that more than once, Deanna had reached for her gun, telling herself that “this time” she would end his misery. Each time she had hesitated just long enough for some sanity to creep back into his bleary red eyes.
On the fourth day, she returned to the dark school with its terrifying grunts and howls, to find him in the process of escaping his chains. His hands were bloody and torn to ribbons from trying to twist an eye-bolt from the wall. It was halfway out when she walked in.
“Thank God it’s you,” he whispered, squinting up at her. “Were you kidnapped, too? What’s going on? Where’s Emily? Hey, what are you waiting for? Help me out of these chains, damn it!”
Deanna was frozen in the doorway, her mouth hanging open, a look of pure disgust on her face. It had been many years since she’d seen someone turn from human to zombie, but it wasn’t something she would ever forget, and yet she had never seen or heard anything that looked like Neil before.
He had always been small; now he was hunched and contorted, looking more like a rabid animal than a man. The hospital johnny that he wore was soaked with sweat and plastered to his body. His straw-colored hair was limp and greasy. His disfigured face was ashen except for his lips which were bloody as well. He had bitten his tongue and there was blood in his teeth. What was worse, however, was the blood dripping from the corners of his ferocious red eyes.
Neil had become a monster.
“You weren’t kidnapped,” she told him from the doorway. “Someone tried to kill you. They infected you.”
He immediately forgot his chains. Sitting back against the wall, he scratched his scarred nose, leaving a dripping red smear across it; he didn’t notice. “That’s right, I remember. There was a razor blade and they cut me on the…” He lifted his bleeding hands and stared in amazement as if noticing the flayed flesh for the first time. “Did they do this?”
“No, you did. Neil, I’m afraid they’ve made you into, I don’t know what. Something like a zombie. Does it hurt?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, touching his face again, leaving more smeared blood. “I feel kind of weird. And pissed off. Yeah, I am pissed. That’s what I’m really feeling. Who would do a thing like that? Huh? Do you know and you aren’t telling me?” Before she knew it, he was up and straining at his chains, dark blood dripping onto the floor.
She took a step back, ready to run if the chains failed. “I really don’t know, Neil,” she said, holding her hands out, palms facing him. “I wish I knew. I really do.” She had racked her brains over the question. The answer wasn’t as obvious as one would think. Neil had piled up a great number of enemies during the early years of the apocalypse. It could have been any of the hundreds of Believers still alive, or one of the thousand Azael who had been released at the end of the war in Colorado. Or perhaps it was the child of one of those killed? Or a spouse or sibling?
Deanna could only hope that it was the latter. With revenge out of their system, they would probably be done killing, especially if Neil were to quietly disappear, which was, sadly, his only real option. The people of Bainbridge would put up with a lot, however living next door to some sort of zombie-human hybrid was not one of them. They would drive him from the island if they found out—if they didn’t kill him outright, that is.
As a friend, the idea was horrific; as governor, she understood. As much as people liked to think they were civilized and far removed from their primitive history, they were in fact ruled by their fears, justified or not. In this case, the fear was justified. Deanna certainly felt the cold edge of it up and down her spine whenever Neil’s savage anger erupted, which was frequent when the subject was on their past enemies.
He was much calmer when she brought up the Fall Festival. Neil even became wistful, which was something to see. It was like watching a shark pausing over the remains of a surfer to consider its life.
Still, the talk of pumpkin beer and pies calmed him enough to allow Deanna the opportunity to retighten the eyebolt with a pair of vice-grips. “It’s for the best,” Neil agreed, giving her a sad, bloody smile. “Until I get better.”
“Exactly,” she replied, offering him one of her politician’s smiles. He used to make fun of them because they were so obviously fake compared to her genuine smiles. This one; however, he soaked up. When she stepped away after tightening the bolts, she could feel a trickle of sweat down her back.
He wasn’t going to get better. It was a sad fact, one that her daughter refused to believe. “I don’t see why not,” she told her mother, that evening when they were alone in the Governor’s mansion. “He’s not getting worse, right?”
Deanna really didn’t know. She didn’t understand what Jillybean would call “the mechanics” of being a zombie. “He’s not dying anymore, if that’s what you mean, but that doesn’t mean he’s getting better. Zombies don’t get better.”
“Yeah, because their brains are dead,” Emily countered, stubbornly. “And Uncle Neil’s brains aren’t dead. He can talk and everything.” Deanna didn’t mention that “everything” also included spitting blood as he vowed to rip people’s heads off. Emily wouldn’t have listened, she was already concocting plans to house Neil ind
efinitely within the school. “Not as a prisoner, but sorta like a caretaker over the real zombies.”
“That no one sees? Just like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame? It’s not a life I think he’d like to live.”
“We should ask him, don’t you think? He should make that decision, not us.”
It was kid logic. She couldn’t see beyond the moment. What if Neil was dangerous? What if he decided to stray at night and was caught? What if he accidentally infected someone? What if one of Deanna’s political opponents caught wind that she was keeping a “creature” in the school without informing anyone? They might all be hounded from the island.
All of this was counterbalanced by the simple questions of friendship: What if Neil didn’t want to go? What if he was lonely or afraid out on his own? What if he got hurt out in the wilds and there was no one to help him? Deanna didn’t know what to do and she hesitated—the fourth day turned into the fifth, which turned into the sixth and then the seventh.
She had delayed killing him and now she delayed telling him to leave, even though he wasn’t getting better. His anger remained volcanic and volatile. Anything could set him off: a wrong look, a misplaced word, even the sound of the other zombies.
Deanna went back and forth on what to do about him, while Emily weathered it all with unfailing loyalty. Even though her class was putting together a “Mondo” float for the parade, she removed herself from school and spent her days with Neil, trying to find some concoction of Jillybean’s that would calm his moods. “I know she’s been working on something for her own use. She told me about it once, but I’m afraid I wasn’t listening as closely as I should of. You know how she uses all them big words.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Neil snapped. “Just start giving me some of whatever and we’ll see what works.” It was a profoundly poor method of finding a cure for anything and had Neil been his old self, it would’ve killed him. Emily crushed pills and added them to a honey and water mixture in what she jokingly called “potions.” Poison was a more accurate term.
She wasn’t entirely stupid about her methods. She started with small doses of everything. She started off by giving him 30 milligrams of Lithium. After an hour-long wait in which he was just as surly as ever, she gave 30 more. When that didn’t do much of anything, she added 20 milligrams of Haldol.
“How do you feel?” she asked, gazing intently at him over the rim of her safety goggles. Along with the goggles, she wore gloves and a white lab coat, and in her hands she held a clipboard and pen. This was science, after all.
“Nothing. The same, I think. Let’s try some more of that last stuff.” The Haldol didn’t work and neither did 50 milligrams of Thorazine or forty milligrams of Prozac. His only reaction to any of it was to puke up a golden mess of the nastiest vomit Emily had ever smelled. Neil licked his lips, saying, “Not bad. It tastes better coming up than down. Put that in your clipboard, will ya?”
He dipped a finger in the spew and she turned away as quickly as possible before he could taste it. “I’ll, uh, go fetch some towels,” she said over her shoulder.
Day six and seven were more of the same, except she added Pepto Bismol which helped…to a degree. After that point things became even worse; sweet pink vomit was the horrible result and Emily lost her lunch twice. After that, she kept stacks of towels handy. The most successful potion she made was a four-drug cocktail that didn’t do much for his anger issues; however it did make him sleepy, which was better than nothing.
While Emily was busy with Neil, Deanna ran herself ragged. The Fall Festival took a lot of planning which entailed a lot of lengthy meetings, which took up a lot of time. In the few moments she could cobble together for herself, she combed through the records of the nearly sixteen hundred people living on the island, trying to narrow down suspects who had come from Georgia, where the Believers had been, Missouri, where the River King had once ruled, or Nebraska, the home of the Azael.
There were surprisingly few. It turned out that cross-country treks in the middle of an apocalypse were a rare event. No one claimed to have come from Georgia, eleven people listed Missouri as their state of origin and sixteen had admitted coming from Nebraska. Of those twenty-six people, twenty of them had made it to Bainbridge well before Neil and could be ruled out.
Deanna visited the remaining six in person, showing up without notice, hoping to surprise one of them into tipping their hand. All six were as sweet as could be and she spent the rest of the day with her stomach aching from all the pie she was forced to swallow. Her stomach also bothered her for a separate reason: if the assassin wasn’t from Bainbridge, where had he come from?
“The Black Captain,” she whispered, feeling dread creep into her belly. The Corsairs had been their boogeymen for years. The pirates had cost the last governor her job when they had descended on the Sound in a series of raids that had stripped Bainbridge of most of their boats.
In fear, the great wall had been erected with Deanna nominally in charge, though it was Jillybean who drew up the plans and oversaw every inch of its construction. It was a monumental work that had propelled Deanna into the Governor’s office. It had also nearly broken Jillybean’s carefully pieced-together mind. She had lived and breathed the wall into existence at the expense of her mental health.
Still, the wall had done its job. Since the Corsairs couldn’t hope to defeat it, they had kept to the Pacific for years.
Although she had built the thing, Jillybean did not trust the wall as the be-all and end-all of the Island’s defense. She had advocated for open war against the Corsairs and when that was repeatedly shot down by Deanna, she had pushed for covert operations against them. “They are a cancer on this world and the wall is little more than a band-aide,” she had insisted. “Sooner or later, they will have to be dealt with.”
“And now she’s gone and done something,” Deanna said, sweeping back her golden hair, and gazing at the wall through the trees. Her gut told her that was the case and yet, logically the attack didn’t make sense. Why would they come after Neil Martin? Only a handful of people knew Jillybean well enough to know how much she depended on him, and they were all people Deanna trusted.
“So that leaves me where?” It left her feeling uselessly paranoid and distinctly powerless. There was almost nothing to investigate. She didn’t have witnesses to question or even a suspect to beat a confession out of. And she couldn’t throw her people into a state of fear by making unprovable accusations against the Corsairs. If she shouted that the “Sky is falling!” right before the Fall Festival and the Corsairs didn’t suddenly show up with their fleet, she would be toast.
The best she could hope for was that someone would notice a strange man in black lurking in the ruins of Seattle, preferably someone wearing an “I Heart Corsairs” T-shirt. Until that happened, she could only continue doing what she had been: nothing at all.
That fact had not been lost on the actual assassin, Eddie Sanders. It didn’t make sense. Couldn’t a blind person see that he was guilty? He went about with what felt like a lie stamped on his face in the form of a smile. When he nodded at his neighbors, the simple act was a lie and a confusing lie at that. What did the nod mean? That they were compadres? Friends? That they had something in common beyond proximity? Couldn’t they see they were nodding to a murderer?
And when he commented blandly about the weather to Danny McGuinness down at the harbor, wasn’t that a lie, too? Eddie didn’t care about the weather. Rain or shine, he was still a killer. And when his “friend” Todd Karraker had him try his freshly brewed pumpkin beer, the sip tasted like bile, pumpkin flavored bile, but bile nonetheless. The acid burned all the way down. Everyone else seemed to like it and so Eddie smiled his lie and went along with them, even though he was on the verge of vomiting.
Everything was a lie with Eddie. Really, his entire life was a lie. He even secretly questioned his wife, Gina. How could she love a murderer? Or had she been faking her love for him all these years? If not, what di
d that say about her? What sort of woman would stay with a sleaze-bag like him?
Gina knew he was struggling, and she did her best to console him and he pretended it helped, but it didn’t, not for a second.
His week had been hell. He had not slept through the night once, and was generally up by three in the morning, staring at the night sky, his mind blank, his soul nothing but an empty shell. His hair had begun falling out and the bags under his eyes had progressed from purple to nearly black. Every morning as the sun crept up, he would go out on his stoop and puff nervously on his morning cigarettes.
He smoked more every day, until his mouth felt raw and his throat was in tatters. He even smoked when he was out scavenging and hunting. It was terribly stupid; then again, he was stupid. For most of his life he’d considered himself slightly smarter than the average guy, only that had been a lie as well. It had to be. A smart person would never have let himself be blackmailed so easily.
Exactly one week passed before he saw the smoke again. Just like last time it drifted up from behind the Alki Point Lighthouse, across the chilly, still waters of Puget Sound. It wasn’t a wavering grey feather this time. Now it was an angry black column that couldn’t be missed…by anyone. Surely someone would suspect what it really meant. Eddie began to shake. It wasn’t a tremble that made his cigarette dance; nor was it a shaking fit that came on gradually and left again in the same manner.
No, he saw the smoke and the next thing he knew, he was shaking from head to toe, his entire frame rattling. The cigarette dropped, unheeded. The fag was no matter to him. He couldn’t have taken a drag from it if his life depended on it; his lungs were undergoing the same sort of seizure attacking the rest of him. He began to choke on nothing.
The fit went on and, in a disinterested way, he realized he could die. That thought didn’t bother him for a second. He had naively thought that once he had killed for the Corsairs they would leave him alone to live his life in peace. He was a fool and a fool didn’t deserve to live.
Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned Page 24