The zombies, three ragged things with pus oozing from their eyes and their torn, bleeding skin hanging in strips, went around the tree, searching in the strangest way. It looked as though they were trying to catch a bug that kept jumping out of their reach. Then they left just as quickly as they had come. He had never seen anything like this sort of behavior in a zombie.
Intrigued, Ernest got up and went to the tree to see what it was they had been after and yet, despite going every inch of it, he saw nothing. He turned back…and nearly screamed. A zombie was right there, not five feet away.
His pistol came out of its holster so quickly it caught the creature between blinks. “Don’t shoot me Mister Ernest, it’s just me, Jillybean,” she said stepping back.
“Oh God, Jillybean,” he said, his finger slowly came off the half-pulled trigger. “You scared the heck out of me.” He meant it. His heart was going a mile a minute.
Grinning she came forward and touched his arm as if to see for herself that he was real. It was really him and it was really her, though she had gone through a radical transformation in the last day and a half. She was gaunt as a stick figure and her blue eyes were ceaselessly twittering, going from here to there, never holding to one spot for more than a second. Beneath one of the haunted blue orbs a muscles was bouncing up and down.
Her eggs had indeed been scrambled, he thought. He pretended not to notice. “How’d you sneak up on me like that?”
At first she didn’t seem to understand the question—another bad sign—but then the light bulb went off behind her eyes. “Oh, that was simple. I used the monsters to distract you on account of I didn’t know if it was you or someone else. You could’ve been a bad guy. And you know what? You scared me, too. I never seen someone pull a gun so fast. You were like a cowboy or something. Mister Captain Grey is more of a precision gun shooter. That’s what means he doesn’t miss but I don’t know if he’s superfast like you. How’d you get so fast?”
Ernest wasn’t about to tell the truth; he had practiced day and night because he had known early on, that killing, even the killing of his fellow humans, was going to be the new normal. “I think I was born that way,” he said and then changed his answer quickly, “or maybe I was pumped up by the zombies. Were you following them? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Nope. Ipes was worried but I wasn’t because I have this.” She showed him a little tool that wasn’t much larger than her hand. At first he thought it was her idea of a weapon but then she thumbed a button on it and a little beam of light shot out.
“Holy smokes,” he said, laughing quietly. “A laser pointer.”
She reached out and touched his arm again, saying, “Yeah, that’s what it is all right. I saw a video, you know, back when they had TVs and stuff. It was about cats chasing this sort of light. It works with monsters and cats now.”
Ernest grinned at her. “My, you are clever,” he said, trying to fake genuine feeling. He felt nothing for her. What was the point? No matter what happened to the River King she would have to die. Eventually, she would find out what part he had played in her capture and when she did, there was a good chance that she would be vengeful. Jillybean bent on revenge would be an unholy sight.
“Thanks for calling me clever. I guess that means smart, kinda. But I don’t know if that’s true. I’m having trouble thinking up a real good way to free the prisoners. I have one way but I don’t know if it’ll work right. It’s only supposed to scare the guys who are, you know like guarding them, but I’m ascared that they might get too ascared and start shooting. That would be bad.”
There was no way in hell he was going to allow any plan to free the prisoners to go through, but he was curious. “Scare them? How?”
“Monsters,” she said scratching a speck of mud from her nose. “I have about four hundred of them ready to go but, once the bad guys start shooting, I don’t know what will happen next. Probably something bad.”
“Four hundred monsters?”
“Yeah, they are attracted to more than just cat-beams of light. They also like sound. I have a boom box going in a tree. They’re all gathered around in this big circle. It’s weird looking, you know?”
“I bet,” Ernest said. Inwardly he was marveling and doubling down on the necessity of killing this girl. It was like standing next to a Bengal tiger, but one that didn’t yet realize that it was a tiger. And of course when it did find out… “What are you going to do with them all?”
She beamed her laser pointer at a flower and said, “I have, like a hundred spotlights set up along this path that goes to the school. I got ‘em connected to all these square batteries; 9-volts I think they’re called. They were very heavy because of the fact that I had so many of them. Anyway, I was going to use the twinkle lights like before, but the store was out of them, which means I just got the normal ones and I’ll have to turn them on and off by hand. Maybe I’ll use extension cords. I don’t know yet. “
Maybe her eggs aren’t as scrambled as I thought, Ernest said to himself. “Where did you get the batteries? From a store around here?” The only place in town was nothing more than a hole in the wall that had long ago been stripped of everything of value. It couldn’t have been what she was talking about.
“No, I had to go all the way to Fort Campbell. It wasn’t easy. I got this thing called a Smart Car, only it wasn’t so smart. You couldn’t fit barely nothing in it… Oh right, Ipes. I mean you couldn’t fit anything in it. I wanted to use a different car but I couldn’t get the engine battery out of the smart one and I had to leave all my good bombs back there at the base.”
“Good bombs?” Ernie felt something catching his throat. “No, wait, don’t tell me. I don’t think I want to know what you think are good bombs.”
Jillybean waved a hand at him as if shooing a fly. “Oh they’re not that bad. There are these really big blocks of C4. I think they’re called…”
“I said, don’t tell me,” he admonished lightly. “It makes me go light in the head thinking about it. And besides, this is all moot. We don’t have the manpower to rescue anyone. It’s just you and me; that’s not enough. What we should be doing is helping your other friends.”
“What do you mean?” There was hope in her eyes that hadn’t been there before.
“Neil is alive,” Ernest said. “And so are Sadie and your friend Captain Grey. They escaped from prison. I overheard the guards,” he said gesturing at the school. “They were talking about all the shooting last night. It was a prison break and everyone got away.”
Her lips pursed for a second and her eyes seemed to stare away into the distance. She then said in a misty voice, “How many got out? Including the men who do the fighting?”
“I think thirteen altogether.”
The look on her face remained constant as she mumbled, “I know, Ipes.”
“What does Ipes know?”
She blinked as if coming awake. “Oh, nothing. He’s just acting paranoid. That’s what means ascared of all the wrong things. Oh, gosh darn it! Now, I don’t know what to do…wait! If Neil and Captain Grey escaped, don’t you think they would come here to free the prisoners? That’s what I would do, I think. But, if they were here, I would have knowed it. So where are they? Do you think they left me behind?”
Ernest made the smallest gesture suggesting he was clueless as well, but he wasn’t. He had a really good idea what they were doing and what they were after. “I also overheard the guards talking about a bridge. A new one. They called it a paw-tune, I think.”
“Pontoon,” she corrected, raising an eyebrow. “The king has a pontoon bridge…and I bet Sadie must’ve found out where it is. That makes sense, but not the part about Neil. How did you know about him? He wasn’t in jail with the others.”
At the insightful questions Ernest drew a blank. He started flapping his lips uselessly until Jillybean suggested, “Did you hear the guards talking about him?”
“Yes, that was it,” he said, quickly.
�
��That’s what Ipes thought.” The little girl was quiet for over a minute, her blue eyes again losing their focus. Ernest remained still and unspeaking even when she shook her head at the zebra. “No. We can’t be chickens now. We have to be brave like lions. I have to help my friends, Mister Ernest. Do you…you know, wanna help me?”
The tic beneath her eye was jittering worse than ever. She was afraid he’d say no. “Yeah, of course,” he said; she was playing right into his hands.
She grinned and looked like she wanted to touch him again but held off. “First things first,” she said. “We have to get to the Smart Car and then we have to cross the river.”
“The River? How do you plan on crossing that?” He made sure to put on a show of fright at the idea. It was bad acting but she was seven and didn’t seem to notice.
She was already moving away with silent steps. Over her shoulder, she answered, “Ipes says we’ll get lucky and find something or some way to cross without too much trouble.”
“Just luck? That’s his plan?”
“Yeah, we get lucky sometimes, like how we escaped out of that school when it was surrounded.” The way she said “we” caught his attention and for just a flick of her eye she looked nothing like a tiny seven-year-old orphan in rags. In that brief moment she looked like a master spy with the coldest heart he had ever run up against, but then a butterfly fluttered between them and she followed it as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
“I got lucky too,” he said. “I went out to take a leak in the forest and before I knew it all these guys were coming right at me so I hid.”
“That’s what Ipes thought,” she said, simply. “The car is not too far. We should be there soon.” She bee-lined through the forest for a couple of miles until they came to a dirt path with two ruts in it that were quickly being swallowed up by nature reclaiming its own. Much like the girl, the Smart Car had been camouflaged with lathered mud.
Ernest glanced in and saw that the passenger seat was stacked with brick sized blocks of C4 and in the tiny rear area were cylinders with the words Naptalum—Extremely Flammable—Danger in large, bold letters along their metal hides.
“You can drive,” she said, handing over a single key that glinted in the light. “Only first you have to get rid of the pedals I made.” There were wood blocks glued to the gas and the brake pedals, while on the seat was a stack of encyclopedias with a pillow tied to the top.
Ernest started pulling them out of the way, while Jillybean went to the passenger side and climbed up to take a perch on the C4. She patted the explosives and said with a frown, “This is all they had left, barely enough to blow anything up.”
Even after the barge, she still had the hankering for explosions? Ernest simply could not understand the girl. “So, which way?” He squinted through the dirty windshield as if trying to make up his mind. “Maybe north along the river? We might get lucky, right?”
She agreed and he took a meandering route up the east bank of the Mississippi so it wouldn’t look too suspicious when he “found” the boat he had left hidden in the brush days before. Though he was trying to be cool, he was anxious to get across the river. She was desperate to as well. She wore her worry like a winter coat; heavy on her tiny shoulders and wrapped all around her. Yet she didn’t press him to hurry. She and her zebra just sat pensively on the C4 her eyes going oddly blank at times and the tic dancing endlessly.
When he got near the hidden boat, he made an excuse, “I have to go pee-pee.” He was only gone for a few minutes and when he came back to the car and told her about the exciting news of the boat, she smiled broadly and allowed herself to be led away.
“I knew you’d get us lucky,” she said as they came up to it. The boat had been untouched and the soft ground around it completely unspoilt save for his own size 9 footprints, and yet he could swear she wasn’t the least surprised at seeing it.
“Yeah I guess,” he said. “We better hurry and get our stuff, we don’t want to be here when the owner gets back. That might be trouble.”
Jillybean took one look at the boat and said, “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. It’s already been sitting here for a few days. You see all the pollen? That yellowish stuff is pollen; that’s what means the boat has been here long enough to get a lot on it. And see the mud at the front keel-thing? It’s sort of set. It’s not wet and that’s what also means it’s been here a long time.”
“I can’t argue with that. Thank goodness you’re with me or I would be a nervous wreck. Now, stay here and keep watch, just in case, while I load up the boat.” After emptying the Smart Car of its remaining gas, its battery, and its bombs, the pair of them jumped in the boat and slipped slowly across the river. There were too many zombies to simply plow across. At first Jillybean catalogued all of the stuff Ernest had left in the boat earlier that week: five gallons of extra gas, the car battery, ammo for his twenty-two, and a radio scanner.
“This stuff will sure come in handy,” was all she said before she sat down at the front of the boat with her knees drawn up to her chin like a little gray lump of mud. On her back was a school bag that might have been pink at one time. It was now as tattered and filthy appearing as the rest of her.
Ernest steered for the truck he had left, aiming the boat for a warehouse dock close to where he had left it. At the sight of the warehouse a shiver ran up the little girl’s back as though someone had crossed her grave.
“You think so, Ipes?” she asked.
“What did he say?” Ernest wondered, sitting forward.
Jillybean glanced back at him and said, “Oh, just that this is a dangerous kind of place is all. But I told him there was too much marsh everywhere else; that’s what means all the ground is mushy and can suck you in like quicksand. Quicksand is sand what’ll kill you.”
“You should tell him not to worry. I won’t let either of you get hurt.”
The little girl smiled at this and when they came to the dock she went up the ladder with her zebra between her teeth and then transformed in a blink to appear like the undead. She even began to moan and a second later another moan joined hers. A zombie came to stand right next to her at the side of the dock and yet she didn’t even flinch.
Ernest was all too human looking as he sat in the boat. The zombie took a step off the dock, went head over heels, and struck the side of the fishing boat with a dull sound as if someone had thrown a wet cantaloupe at a gong. A second later, another zombie pitched off the side to splash the water right next to Ernest.
Jillybean transformed back into a little girl and smiled down at him. “There are a few more all the way at the end but it’ll be okay. Throw me the rope.”
He tossed up the line and Jillybean ran it around a metal cleat bolted to the dock. She then stomped away leaving Ernest to wonder what she was doing. Grabbing the heavy car battery he struggled up the ladder in time to see Jillybean going right at another pair of zombies. Even though he was fully planning on killing her, his heart was in his throat as she staggered right up to them and then, amazingly, walked right between the two.
They acted as if she were invisible! As soon as she was behind them, she spun and shoved the first of the two, sending him tumbling off the dock into the river. The other stiff turned just in time to be knocked in as well. Jillybean didn’t give him a second look as she strolled back to Ernest.
She was all smiles until she saw the sweat on his brow and the heavy battery he had lugged up the ladder. “That’s the hard way, you know,” she said. “You should use that other rope and pull the bombs and stuff up. I can show you how. It’s not so hard.”
In no time she had fashioned a crude pulley out of one of the cleats. She tied one end of the rope to a heavy box of C4 and then, using her own body weight as a counterbalance, she dropped off the side of the dock and up came fifty pounds of explosives just as neat as you please. She sat in the boat grinning up at him; he noted that the tic was gone and the haunted look was replaced with one of prid
e at her achievement.
He matched the smile, but under his breath he whispered, “Fuck.” Here he was a teacher and yet he hadn’t once considered such an easy contrivance. “Archimedes would be proud of you,” he told her as he unloaded the C4.
“Arcky-who?” she asked.
“Just some old-time dude who liked this sort of thing. Never mind, it’s not important.” When it was unloaded she untied herself and the box slid back down to the boat where she immediately started filling it again. She then scampered up the ladder, retied herself and slid back down, bringing up the next load.
In this way the boat was unloaded in minutes.
“Excellent,” he said. “Now wait here while I go get us a car.” He started to turn away but saw that she was digging out the scanner from the pile. “You actually think your friends are going to do any broadcasting?” He certainly hoped not. If they started spouting their mouths off over the radio there’d be a hundred hunters on their trail in minutes.
She nodded to his question and said, “No, they wouldn’t, but the River King will. I’m sure of it. He probably doesn’t know or care if anyone listens to him.”
“Right, but if we’re trying to find your friends, listening to the River King will only make us a step behind. We need to come up with a different plan.”
Again she took a while to think and her face clouded. “Ipes can’t think of anything except that being a step behind is better than nothing.”
Ernest glanced down at the zebra. He was staring blankly out at the water. After waiting for Jillybean to say more, Ernest grunted, “I hope this doesn’t sound mean, Jillybean, but I’m a little disappointed in your lack of effort. I don’t believe you’re thinking this through all the way. These are your friends, not mine. You know them better than I do. Where would they go? What would they be doing? How do we get in contact with them?”
The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades Page 29