Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned

by Meredith, Peter

  “I was just trying to get you back on track, Eve. You are right about the Bishop. He’s got to go. He has too much power over them. They’re almost like the Believers. You remember the Believers, don’t you, Sadie?”

  She would never forget the Believers and their insane leader, Abraham. “But they were crazy. These people are just, I don’t know, religious. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing,” Ernest admitted, softly. “Nothing at all, right up until their leaders use their religion to further their own evil desires at the expense of their own people. That’s what Abraham did and that’s what the Bishop is about to do. Ask yourself, why hasn’t he surrendered?”

  “Maybe he’s going to,” Sadie said. “We haven’t even talked to him yet.”

  “One thing is clear, you shouldn’t talk to him,” Ernest told her. “This isn’t your bailiwick. And it’s not yours, either Eve. This takes a cooler head and a clearer vision, because we all know what will happen if they don’t surrender.”

  Eve grinned. “Yeah, we get to attack. We’ll wipe them off the face of the earth and then nobody will ever tell us no again.”

  Sadie pushed her back. “Wrong. We aren’t going to destroy an entire town. Jillybean won’t allow it. And I won’t allow it.”

  The two young women squared off, glaring at each other. They were almost evenly matched; Sadie was faster, but Eve was unpredictably deadly.

  Ernest climbed off the recliner to come stand between them. “You’re wrong, Sadie. If they don’t surrender and we don’t attack, our Corsairs will turn on us. They just spent three days of back-breaking labor creating a river and they expect a reward. If they don’t get one, it’ll be a ‘stray’ bullet during the heat of battle, or a knife in the back in the dark of night, or maybe Leney or one of the others will grow a pair and arrest you.”

  “And you think killing and enslaving a thousand people is the answer?” Sadie cried. “No! I won’t stand for it and neither will Jillybean.” She pushed past Eve, stormed through the tiny kitchenette and into the even tinier bathroom, yanking open the single drawer by the sink.

  Eve saw what she was going for and sucked in her breath. “Don’t! They’ll pull you under, too.” Sadie only lifted a single shoulder in response and dropped three pills into her palm. “What about our liver?” Eve begged. “The yellow is coming back. She’s hiding it for now, but all the make up in the world isn’t going to keep our liver alive.”

  Next to the bottle of Zyprexa was Jillybean’s new makeup bag. She had taken to painting her face.

  “It’s only temporary,” Sadie said and swallowed the pills. In a fury, Eve grabbed a heavy medical book and flung it at her. It flapped like a dead bird and thumped heavily against the wall. As Eve grabbed a second one, Sadie slammed the door. She put her weight against it and waited, expecting to hear another book hit or maybe the crash of Eve’s boot.

  Instead, she heard something completely unexpected: Christmas music!

  Chapter 36

  To put it mildly, Sadie was freaked out. Through the door, she could hear a woman singing Silent Night and it didn’t make a lick of sense.

  “Eve?” she whispered. “Is that you?”

  The only answer she received was a sudden rush of feet drumming past the door. She leaned back and then leaned in again as the cadence of the feet changed and the sound dipped. “They’re on stairs. What the heck is going on?” She stepped back from the door and was surprised when she didn’t knock into the little sink.

  Spinning, she saw that she was no longer in the trailer’s cubby-sized bathroom. She was in an entirely different bathroom, one that was large and strangely, brilliantly white. It was clean! It wasn’t the “mostly clean” one saw now that water was drawn by hand, it was aseptically clean. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere, not even on the window panes.

  It took her a moment to realize that there was something different about the windows: the curtains were pulled wide and the black-out curtains were nowhere to be seen. Instinctively, Sadie dropped to one knee, her senses tuned to catch the slightest movement of shadow beneath the door, the soft growl of a distant zombie, or the sour smell of a bandit’s breath.

  Her senses didn’t need tuning; they were inundated.

  Immediately, she smelled bleach, window cleaner and lavender soap. Beyond this was a woman’s perfume and something that had her mind reeling. She couldn’t believe the aroma was real, but: “Oh my God. Cinnamon rolls!” Closing her eyes, she breathed in deeply and all the scents were still there.

  Ecstatic, she reached for the doorknob, but then her ears began to pick out their own details: a squeal of happiness, deep laughter, the crinkle of paper, a horn honking, and a rumble that caused her skin to flare in goosebumps.

  “That’s an airplane,” she said and rushed to the window. Sure enough, there was an enormous metal bird disappearing into patchy white clouds, leaving behind a long stretch of fading thunder. When it was gone, she marveled at the scene below her: a winter wonderland, complete with a snowman in the yard, trees gilt with white, crystal spears hanging from the gutter, and a boy shoveling a driveway three doors down.

  “Where am I?” she wondered. Home, a voice whispered in her head. It felt perfect and it sounded right, and yet it wasn’t. Her home had been a cramped little apartment in New Jersey where she’d been raised by an overworked single mom. She rarely saw her father until, that is, when he wanted to use her to catch runaway slaves. No, this wasn’t her home. This was the home of a happy, well-adjusted family—and she was trespassing. She didn’t belong here.

  Sadie was just testing the bathroom window to see if it would open without making too much noise when she heard, “Jillybean, hun, can you get your boots on?” It was a woman; a mom. Jillybean’s mom. That meant they were in Jillybean’s house.

  It was only then that Sadie realized she had been in the house before. She had lived in it, in fact, after Ram had been killed and they had escaped from New York. “I peed in that toilet,” she said, in something of foolish, reverential awe. She had to stop herself from touching the porcelain.

  “What about the presents, Mommy?” Jillybean asked, in a voice very different than her usual one. It was high and sweet.

  “They’ll still be here when we get back. I want to drop off some of these rolls over at Mrs. Bennett’s.”

  “But the presents! All I gotted to open was Ipes and he thinks there may be more zebras in some of them packages. Like a herd of ‘em. A herd is what means a whole lot, like a hundred, and it wouldn’t be fair…”

  Her dad interrupted in a booming voice: “Boots on, Jillybean or some of those presents are going to stampede their way over to the Goodwill.”

  Sadie cocked her head and listened as someone small climbed dejectedly up the stairs. “He’s only playing, Ipes. We’ll save your family, I promise. They won’t go over to the Goodwill. Say, you ever have a cim-im-nim rolls before?”

  The urge to open the door and see Jillybean as she was before the apocalypse was too much. Sadie cracked the door as the little girl walked by. She was so tiny it broke Sadie’s heart. She wanted to rush to Jillybean and crush her in her arms and tell her that everything was going to be alright.

  It would be the biggest lie ever told. Her life would be hell. Her world was only months from being destroyed and everyone she had ever called family would be dead. And the death wouldn’t stop with her parents and friends. Everyone she would meet after the apocalypse would be dead as well, everyone but Neil, that is. She could still count on him.

  When Jillybean went into her bedroom, Sadie crept along the hall and watched through the open door as she pulled tiny pink boots over her adorable footy pajama pants, then hunted around for mittens. Sadie jumped when Jillybean’s dad called from the bottom of the stairs: “Hurry up, Jillybean. They’re getting cold.”

  Sadie darted to the side as the little girl, her hair flying in every direction, came bursting out of her bedroom. She had left Ipes behind in her rush. S
adie waited until the family was crunching through the snow before she went into the room. It was even more vibrantly pink than she remembered.

  The zebra was splayed, face down on the bed. It looked dead. “Ipes?”

  He came to life, jumping up so quickly that Sadie leapt back, thinking that the tiny stuffed zebra was about to attack her. She had never seen him move in real life and it was horrifying. “Sadie? What are you doing here?”

  “Jeeze, that’s crazy,” she said, her face queered up as if watching a pigeon puking. “Where does the sound come out? You don’t have a mouth.”

  Ipes touched the underside of his bulbous nose where his mouth should have been. “It’s best not to think about that sort of thing. So, is something going on up there? Is that why you’re here? Wait! Did Ernest trap you down here? Did he trap all of us? Oh boy, this is bad. Really, really bad.”

  He was waving his flappy hooves over his head in excitement and getting loud. Sadie wanted to pat him on the top of his spiky mane to calm him, however the idea of touching a living toy was too off-putting. She wrung her hands together to resist the urge. “No, he didn’t trap us. He’s been weak ever since Jillybean put him in his place.”

  Ipes’ narrow shoulders drooped in relief. “That’s good. I was worried that…hold on. If you’re down here, who’s running things up there?”

  “I am…I think.”

  Ipes rolled his beady black eyes. “You think? That’s not how this works. You can’t run things from down here. You have to get back up there before Eve does something bad.”

  “That’s the thing. Eve’s getting strong again. We need Jillybean. Can you send her back up?” A happy, chirping voice from outside floated in. Sadie went to the window and saw Jillybean and her parents coming back home, trudging through the snow. The little girl was trailing by a few steps, trying to leap from one of her father’s footprints to the next.

  Suddenly Ipes was at Sadie’s side. He sighed, saying, “I just love her so much at this age. She’s so perfectly innocent that it’s heartbreaking.”

  It was, and Sadie found herself staring until the happy family disappeared from sight and could be heard moving about below them. Then there came the sound of Jillybean running up the stairs.

  “Hide!” wailed Ipes, as he ran for the bed.

  The desire to hide was so great that it was practically an unquestionable demand. From Sadie’s perspective, she was literally in Jillybean’s bedroom. Everything was so amazingly real that it didn’t feel as though she was striding around in a dusty, thirteen-year-old memory or in some sort of hazy, ever-changing mental delusion. Everything about the room from the baseboards to the crown molding was so perfectly exact that it felt undeniably authentic.

  Even the fear of getting caught in Jillybean’s bedroom was substantive enough for her heart to start racing. There was no way that she, a teenaged goth chick with a spiked mohawk, was going to be able to talk her way out of a trip to the police station, something she didn’t have time for.

  She also didn’t have time to find a proper hiding place. The room was sparsely furnished: a bed that was both narrow and extremely low to the ground, a squat dresser with unicorn decals decorating the drawers, and a nightstand that held a tiny lamp that used a bulb that was smaller than Sadie’s thumb.

  The only place to hide was the closet. Sadie ducked in and knelt among ballet slippers, cowgirl boots and a brand new pair of pink Keds. They were the same pair of shoes that Jillybean was wearing when Sadie first met her. By then they were scuffed and muddy and stained slightly grey from seawater. She was just reaching out to touch them when the door burst open.

  At first, Jillybean didn’t see Sadie. It wasn’t just that her all black attire blended with the shadows, Jillybean was also dancing on one foot trying to get one of her snow-boots off. When she did see Sadie, the girl stumbled back, her big blue eyes looking cartoonishly large in her fright.

  Before she could scream—clearly what she was planning to do—Sadie put out both hands and said, “It’s me, Jillybean. It’s me, Sadie. We’re sisters, remember?”

  Just as it would throughout her life, fear did not linger long with the little girl. It slid off her like rain from a duck’s back. “I don’t have a sister. Why is your hair like that? It looks pokey. And anyways, if I had a sister she wouldn’t wear black. I like pink and sisters always like the same things. Becca’s sister Janine is a red-head just like Becca and neither of them ever wear red or pink, because their mom says they’ll look like pigs if they do, which I think is real mean.”

  She paused as if to hear Sadie’s thoughts on the subject of Becca and her sister. “That is mean. And to go back to the whole ‘sisters’ thing, we’re not really sisters, we just call each other that, because I swore I would always treat you like a sister. You made me pinky swear on it.” Sadie held out her pinky, crooking it slightly.

  “Are you sure you got the right house?” Jillybean said. “A lot of these houses look the same. My mom calls them cookie cutters and that’s what means they look the same. Maybe you meant to be on Highview Drive. That’s the next street over that way.” She pointed south. “There’s some kids that way, too. Some are big and ride bikes.”

  This was going nowhere and was eating up precious time. Eve could have massacred half of Highton by then.

  “No. I’m in the right place and I have the right girl. I need you to come back with me.”

  “Back where?” Jillybean asked, taking a step away.

  Sadie almost answered with: Back home. That would have been silly. Jillybean was home. She had built her own little slice of heaven. It was the perfect day: Christmas presents in the morning, a fire to warm the toes after an afternoon of sledding, a turkey dinner to stuff her belly and an evening of cuddling with her parents switching off between reading to her and tickling her. She would never leave on her own.

  It would be up to Sadie to make it happen.

  “Back here. There’s a doorway to another world. Come see.” Jillybean was properly skeptical and yet, she could be counted on to give in to her curiosity. She edged forward to peek past the strange girl. There was no one faster than Sadie. In a blur of black cloth, she darted out a hand, grabbed Jillybean’s wrist and pulled.

  For a second, Sadie was able to yank Jillybean’s forty-four pounds forward with expected ease, but just as she crossed the boundary of the closet door, Jillybean’s weight seemed to multiply a hundred-fold. She held herself back from the doorway, easily, an icy gleam in her eyes.

  “You’re a kidnapper,” she accused. “I’ll never go anywhere with you. And wait till my daddy catches you. He’ll make minced turkey meat out of you.”

  Sadie was suddenly flung back by what felt like a huge, invisible hand. She jumped up as Jillybean slammed the door shut with a bang that echoed inside Sadie’s head. The tiny closet was perfectly black. Not a mote of light escaped the edges of the door. It was as if the door and the closet itself had ceased to exist.

  A hot clot of fear came to life in her belly. It wiggled and spun, growing larger. Ever since she had died, Sadie didn’t like to be trapped in dark places. It hit too close to home. She didn’t reach out for the doorknob, she attacked the closet door and exploded out of it, her breath coming in great gusts.

  She took one step and nearly pitched face-first down a short flight of stairs. They were the stairs leading from the sensory deprivation trailer and consisted of only three risers. She managed to catch herself before face-planting.

  “What the hell? How long was I gone?”

  Go back, a voice whispered inside her head. Although the voice had been wavering and ghost-like, she knew it belonged to Eve. It was always easy taking advice from Eve; Sadie would just do the opposite. She began walking towards the pavilion, hoping she hadn’t been gone too long.

  Leney saw her coming first and went down on one knee as soon as she entered the tent. Donna cleared her throat and called out: “The Queen!” and did the same.

  The Queen ha
d been gone for seven minutes, which had been seven wasted minutes to Denise Woodruff. She didn’t have time for kneeling or crazy queens, though she did need help desperately. She had four fractures to reduce and cast, two broken skulls—one with increasing inter-cranial pressure, suggesting a brain bleed. And finally, a Knight who had been crushed beneath a heap of the beasts for an hour and was urinating blood. Denise looked over at Troy and since he was standing at attention, she did as well.

  Bishop Wojdan inclined his head and asked, “Are you Queen Jillybean?”

  Sadie started at the question and looked down at herself, afraid that she was wearing her old goth skin. Her shadow was topped by an explosion of hair; she was in Jillybean’s body, so why the question?

  “I took the liberty to explain something of your condition, your Highness,” Donna admitted, nervously, afraid of who was really in charge in Jillybean’s head. “It seemed necessary because of the circumstances.”

  Sadie wasn’t sure what circumstances Donna was talking about and she was doubly unsure how to proceed. Her job had always been as a place keeper, there to keep Jillybean’s body alive and kicking until she got back. Everyone knew she wasn’t smart; that she wasn’t equipped to make real decisions. And she didn’t like the entire business to begin with. Threatening good people wasn’t right, even if was something of a necessity.

  But what about what Ernest said? This voice was louder, stronger. Your men will turn on you and when you’re gone they’ll swallow the Guardians in one bite. A snapping sound, like a steel bear trap closing, erupted almost in Sadie’s ear, making her flinch. Eve was getting too close to the surface for Sadie’s liking. And you’ll do nothing about it. That’s because you’re weak. Everyone knows it. It’s why your own men will frag your ass if you don’t…

  “I am the Queen,” Sadie said quickly, speaking over Eve.

  It wasn’t completely a lie since she and Jillybean were something of a package deal, and yet Wojdan rumbled in his throat, a sound that suggested he didn’t believe her. “I take it that ‘hmmm’ is you thinking over the offer?” she asked.