Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned

by Meredith, Peter

  Finally, at about eight in the morning, the last of the zombies was slain and the survivors of the long night could look about in stunned horror. Thousands of the creatures had been destroyed. Their stinking, bloated bodies were everywhere and, sadly, among them were fallen Knights. As the men gazed about with tears in their red eyes, Bishop Wojdan and his four priests marched onto the battlefield and began administering Last Rites to the fallen.

  Troy knelt to pray and in seconds everyone but Leney was kneeling as well. So as not to look too out of place, he plopped down on the muddy ground and stuck his legs out. He didn’t have any idea what they were praying for. “Mercy from the Queen, maybe. That’s what I’d be asking for if I was them.”

  Leney began to trace the outline of a zombie footprint. The thing was over two feet long and right in the middle of it was a human shoe print that, in comparison, looked like it belonged to a toddler. The individual prayers were followed by a group prayer in which the Knights formed impromptu kneeling circles. Leney didn’t join. He lay back in the mud, closed his eyes and fell asleep. Troy kicked him awake a few minutes later. “About time,” he grumbled.

  Troy glared. “It’s morning, Corsair, you can leave now.”

  “Whoa! Where’s all that Christian love I keep hearing about? And where’s the thanks? I killed a freakin’ gob of those things. If I hadn’t, who knows how many more of you woulda been killed.”

  The glare on Troy’s face faltered. “You are right. You fought by my side with what passes for bravery among the Corsairs. Breakfast is the least I can do. First we must check on the wounded.”

  Strangely, at least to Leney, there weren’t many wounded Knights among them. During the battle, he had been oblivious to the young women of the stretcher teams who had been running here and there among the zombies and the soldiers, scooping up the more seriously wounded.

  The pair found the hospital crowded, and were not let in. Commander Walker was sitting on the steps outside. One arm was in a sling and his face drooped with exhaustion.

  “What’s the final count?” Troy asked him.

  A long sigh escaped the man before he answered: “Twenty-seven dead, thirty-one wounded and infected, twenty-two seriously wounded and not infected. It could have been worse.”

  “Almost a fifth of us,” the Knights Sergeant said, in a whisper. No one looked at Leney, which was good since he didn’t know exactly what he was supposed to be feeling. If the Queen thought that he was going to suddenly get all chummy-chummy with them just because they had fought together, she was going to be disappointed. In his view, they had been chumps before the fight and were still chumps now. Despite his general dislike for them, he wanted to give them advice: Give up now, because it’s only going to get worse. He didn’t bother. They still didn’t understand what they were up against. If they had, they would’ve been begging him to intercede on their behalf.

  “She’ll be coming soon,” he told them, gesturing in the direction of the low sun.

  Troy peered east past the bodies and the ruined wall. Somehow he managed to look handsome even with the ash and blood covering his face. “Is she coming to fight?”

  Walker knew better. “She’ll be coming to demand our surrender.” He sighed and stood. “We should get cleaned up. I don’t want to look like scrubs when I tell her she can go pound sand.”

  Leney rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t if I were you. Listen to me. All this, the wall and this little fight, that was her being nice. She was just toying with you. She could have crushed you if she wanted to.”

  “Then why didn’t she?” Troy asked. He was too tired for outrage or any back and forth. He wanted the truth.

  Leney wasn’t going to give him the real truth, which was that Jillybean was popping pills like they were candy to keep her other, more violent, personalities from taking over. So far, he had counted four other people in her head, and two of them were frightfully dangerous: Eve, the chaotic evil girl who couldn’t go ten minutes without setting something on fire or lighting off a bomb, and Ernest who fell under the lawful evil alignment. He was a perfectly ordered, perfectly cool, perfectly logical murderer. They both frightened Leney.

  But they couldn’t know that about her, yet.

  “Because she doesn’t like to kill her people, but that doesn’t mean she won’t. I guarantee that if you piss her off you’ll all be dead by this time tomorrow. Your only choice is to surrender.”

  His sincerity radiated past his hideously scarred and tattooed face and they believed him, though neither knew what to do about it. Ultimately, the decision to fight or surrender was the Bishop’s.

  Troy walked back to his little apartment in brooding silence. He was kind enough to find a fresh set of clothes for Leney, and even made him a somewhat grainy sandwich, made from hand-milled wheat and chicken salad. Leney was still wolfing it down when there came a cry from the lookouts.

  The Queen was coming.

  Chapter 35

  No one knew whether she was coming to fight, or to bargain, or just to gloat over the effects of her diabolical handiwork. Walker wasn’t going to take any chances and ordered the Knights back to their battle stations.

  Leney accompanied Troy to his station where they discovered that his recon team was down to just him, Chris Baker and Bob Duckwall. Eric Gothier had one of his arms torn off and had died before a stretcher team could get to him, and Shamus McGuigan had been bitten by one of the beasts and had lost most of one shoulder. He was still alive, but it was now only a waiting game to see if the infection took him.

  Sometimes it didn’t. His chances were somewhere around one in ten-thousand.

  The three of them, with Leney in tow, went to where the front gate once stood. Now there was only debris and corpses. Flies buzzed around in great black clouds and vultures wheeled silently above.

  Duckwall, who had a pair of binoculars pressed to his face, informed everyone within earshot that, “She’s putting up a tent!” He looked again and said, “Well not her, exactly. She has a small company of soldiers. Yep. That’s a tent and…and…Lord bless me, she has zombies with her. They’re just standing there, not attacking people or nothing.”

  Practically everyone turned to Leney. He could only shrug. They had been a surprise to him as well when she had turned up with them the day before. “She uses them sorta like draft horses. And yes, we think it’s weird, too.”

  “That’s not weird,” Troy said, putting his hand out for the binoculars. “That’s unnatural is what it is. And it’s probably a sin.” The Guardians agreed and, to a man, they crossed themselves and kissed their glittering crosses. There were mumbles about “witchcraft” and “sorcery.”

  Leney goaded them, saying, “Some call her the Queen of the Dead. They say she can summon them at will and that they will do her bidding. They also say that she sacrifices small children to them.”

  “Really?” Duckwall gasped, with such solemnity that Leney burst out laughing.

  “No, of course not. Look at them. She’s blinded them and popped their eardrums. They don’t know up from down.” Everyone looked to Troy for confirmation and he agreed that they did indeed seem to have been mutilated. This didn’t have the impact he or Leney expected. The murmuring and the worried glances continued as the tent was being set up.

  It was a great white canvas structure that leaned with gravity down the hill, but was pushed by the gentle wind into a more vertical position. In every way it was more of a pavilion than a tent. Along with the tent, there were two of the boxy campers and what these were being used for spawned an entirely new set of rumors.

  The rumors gained outlandish momentum when two figures were seen picking their way down the hill towards the town. Skinny, one-armed Aaron Altman carried a white flag, while next to him was Donna Polston in a charcoal grey pantsuit. The two paused just shy of where the carpet of dead bodies began.

  Striding out to meet her were Bishop Wojdan, his four priests and Commander Walker. They picked their way through th
e bodies as though they were trying to avoid giant piles of dog crap. When they came through without falling, Donna went to one knee exactly as the Queen had instructed and kissed the Bishop’s ring when he offered his hand.

  She waited until Aaron did the same thing before repeating her rehearsed lines: “Queen Jillian wishes to invite his Excellency, Bishop Wojdan to speak with her. She also welcomes Knights Commander Walker, Knights Sergeant Holt and your chief surgeon to attend.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wojdan replied, “Unless she is ill, we cannot afford to allow any of our medical staff to leave. As you might have guessed, they are hard-pressed because of the many injuries we have sustained due of the Queen’s actions.”

  “This is why the Queen would speak to your surgeon. The hands of the Queen are the hands of a healer. She is an accomplished surgeon. I speak from experience, she operated on my arm after I was shot by a Corsair and I am practically good as new.”

  The Bishop steepled his fingers beneath his round chin for a moment in contemplation. “I will agree,” he said, and then asked the youngest of the priests: “Would you be so kind as to fetch Denise.” The young man was off like a shot and back again with a harried and somewhat angry Denise Woodruff. She’d been a nurse back before the apocalypse, but ten easy years in a pediatrician’s office, giving out shots, band-aides, ear drops, and lollipops had dulled what skills she’d had. When the zombies had come she had adapted and relearned much of what had lain dormant inside her. Still, she was no one’s surgeon.

  “Do we trust her?” she whispered to Troy as they made their way through the mass of bodies.

  Leney, who hadn’t been mentioned at all and was irked enough about it to invite himself along, spoke loudly enough for Donna to hear, “I would trust the Queen. She doesn’t think of you as enemies, exactly. You’re more like wayward children. Or like that prodigal son guy. She knows you’re going to come crawling to her, eventually.”

  Donna Polston shot him a glare. She had been briefed by Jillybean on what to say and what not to say. That anyone was going to “come crawling” was definitely something that would have fallen into the what not to say category.

  “If you’ll follow me,” she said, hoping that no one would take Leney seriously. She led them to the pavilion where three operating tables were set up. Each had a tray filled with surgical tools next to it. She had them wait in the tent and was gone for a strangely long time.

  After five minutes, Denise decided to inspect the tools, while Troy went to the far tent flap and gazed out at the zombies, of which there were four. They were on their hands and knees eating grass like cows. Leney came with him and grunted, “What’d I tell you? Nothing scary about them now.”

  It was another five minutes before Donna returned, walking behind the Queen, who was garbed in black as always.

  Leney cleared his throat and made a show of kneeling. Walker came to attention, while next to Leney, Troy obstinately crossed his arms. Denise, who was shocked at how young the Queen was, didn’t know what to do and looked to the Bishop for direction. He didn’t notice. He was staring intently at the wild-haired girl. She was different that morning. Her eyes were shifty and her demeanor wavering between haughty and nervous.

  “Your Highness,” Wojdan said, with the slightest bow of his head. It was the action of respect between equals, which she copied.

  “Your Excellency,” she said, very quickly. “Thank you for coming. I know there is much for both of us to do this morning, so I will cut right to the chase. She…I mean I have kept my promise and have torn down your walls just as I said I would. I demonstrated last night that I have the power to destroy you with ease. Will you please capitulate and come under the protection of the Queen?”

  She had spoken with little inflection, almost as if she had recited memorized lines. It was strange to Wojdan and he paused a full minute before answering. She began to fidget under his gaze. Like a kid, he thought to himself. Or like a normal eighteen-year-old. And this wasn’t any normal eighteen-year-old.

  “Protection?” Wojdan asked, eventually. “My dear, it’s obvious that the only person we are in need of protection from is you.”

  It took a few seconds for the Queen to react, almost as if she was waiting for someone in another room to radio a response into her head. When she did react, it was as abrupt as it was unexpected. Her smile, which had looked fixed in place with invisible thumbtacks, turned into a nasty sneer.

  “You have no idea how right you are.” Her right hand dipped into her long coat while her left slipped behind her back.

  For a second, Wojdan thought she was about to pull a gun or a knife or even both. His reaction was limited to a general stiffening of his muscles. Troy was just as taken by surprise, however his reflexes were better, and although he was a few steps behind the Bishop he jumped in front of him.

  The Queen’s body convulsed, her head snapped to the side and one shoulder went up. “Fine!” she hissed, but what she meant by it, no one knew. She turned back and stared at Troy, her blue eyes glittering with a strange malevolence that he had missed the night before. “The boy scout,” she purred.

  “Your highness!” Donna fairly shouted in the Queen’s ear. “Jillybean! Can you come with me?” The Queen jerked again, looked nervously about and allowed herself to be led away.

  Troy followed until he reached the edge of the tent, where he was greeted by two fearsome-looking Corsairs. He wanted nothing more than to bash their heads in, but they were on a diplomatic mission and so he smiled and stared past them as Donna pulled the Queen into one of the trailers. When the door opened, he saw that the inside seemed to be upholstered in foam.

  “What is that?” he asked the Corsairs. Neither would answer and nor would Leney. He only plastered a bland look on his scarred face.

  Donna returned and bowed to the Guardians. “The Queen is not feeling herself, but she will be out in a moment.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Troy asked. “And what was with that trailer? It was padded. They used to joke about padded cells being for crazy people. Is she one? Is she crazy? She was kind of weird like that last night.”

  Donna was not ready for these sorts of questions. They had not been part of her briefing. Still, she figured they would find out about the Queen sooner or later. “She is a little crazy,” she said, holding her fingers an inch apart. “But that’s not a padded cell. It’s what she calls a sensory deprivation chamber. She gets, uh, excited when over-stressed.”

  “Perhaps she should consider a different profession than being queen, then,” the Bishop advised.

  “It’s too late for that,” Donna said. What they didn’t know was that if Jillybean ever stepped down as queen, Eve would step in to fill her shoes and that would be a hundred times worse. The truth was, Jillybean or Eve: “She can’t be stopped,” Donna told them.

  Troy doubted that. He could stop her right then if he wanted to. He could kill her without trying, if it wasn’t a sin, that is—and she knew that about him. Is she using our own morals against us? The thought was disquieting. A nonbeliever didn’t have to worry about rules or morals. They were unburdened by the thought of higher consequences, of anything greater than themselves. The only thing that truly mattered was their immediate lusts. They could do anything. Anything.

  “Is she dangerous?” he asked. “I mean really dangerous at any time at all?” He was worried for the Bishop. The man was too trusting when it came to the Queen.

  “She’s only dangerous to her enemies,” Leney answered, not knowing just how wrong he was.

  Even then a part of Jillybean was hungry to wipe out every last Guardian. “We need to kill them,” Eve said as soon as Sadie walked into the windowless trailer. “Starting with the Bishop, mister high and mighty, himself. I say we use poison and tell people it was a heart attack. We have stuff that’ll do the trick, right?”

  “We’re not killing anyone,” Sadie shot back. “Where’s Jillybean? Is she here?”

  “Of course not
!” Eve yelled, as she picked up a candlestick and hurled it at the wall. Because of the triple layers of acoustic foam it bounced away harmlessly, which only made her angrier. “She’s off in Neverland playing make believe with that stupid zebra, which is fine with me. She can stay away forever. I just don’t see why you’re in charge instead of me.”

  “Because you’re crazy,” Sadie answered

  “How am I the crazy one? She’s the one who talks to a stuffed animal. And she’s the one who hangs around with dead people. Sorry Sadie, but you don’t belong here. You need to cross-the-hell over to the other side. Run into the light, bitch.”

  Sadie bristled, her dark eyes flashing. “You want to have a go at me? Come on! I’m not the only one who’s dead. I was there when Neil threw you into the fire. I watched you burn.”

  “Take that back! Or I swear…”

  “Enough!” Ernest called out, his voice little more than a strident whisper. In the middle of the room was an immense leather recliner, looking like the throne every middle-aged American man had once dreamed of owning. Ernest was settled into it, though he didn’t look comfortable. He reclined stiffly, as if he were in a dentist’s office. “You know why you’re not in charge, Eve.”

  Eve rounded on him, her wild mass of hair flowing around her head as if they were snakes and she the Medusa. “Who asked you, Stick-boy?” She laughed and advanced on him, seeming to swell in size, while he shrunk, looking so small that if she snapped the recliner back into an upright position, he might fly across the room to splat against the wall.

  Ernest was not the man he’d once been. A week before he’d been the giant. He had crushed the others into tiny windowless boxes and had run Jillybean’s body as if it were his own. But she had found a way to take his power and now his voice was small and his presence barely more than a shadow.