There was a roar from the soldiers that Neil didn’t understand. There was now one less barrier the zombies had to cross. Still, there was some excitement in seeing such an unusual and large scale demolition occur. And there were real things to cheer about: not a single wall had fallen during the night and the casualties had been exceptionally light.
Neil decided a nap was in order and he left Sadie in charge. He would have preferred to have Deanna running things but she was still bedside with Captain Grey. Neil probably could have asked her to come back to work, but his guilt was too great for him to venture back into the hospital.
Worried that Michael would find him if he went back to his own place, Neil found an open room at the Holiday Inn and threw himself down on a dusty bed and fell asleep so quickly that he couldn’t remember actually closing his eyes, however his lids did indeed drape over his eyes and were still so heavy upon waking that it took an act of will to get them a third of the way up.
He glanced at his watch and saw the time was two in the afternoon. He was so out of it that he was only slight curious as to what exactly had woken him—then he heard the thin crackle of gunfire. It was intermittent, coming and going, and it quickly drove the sleep out of his head.
Within seconds, he was out the door and staring fearfully eastward in the direction the shots were coming from, expecting to see the hills swarming with enemies, but only seeing trees and rocks, which was to be expected because of: A, the distance and B, the fact that the shots were so infrequent and isolated; this wasn’t a major battle.
Still, he was nervous enough to seek out the source, which turned out to be the defensive line astride the Big Thompson River. General Johnston beat him to the trouble spot and looked as though he was going to drill holes in a young lieutenant with just his eyes. The young man was wilting under the pressure as he tried to explain the situation: the bonfires weren’t working anymore.
The brilliant Colorado sunshine had dampened the effects of the bonfires so that they were practically useless and now the river below the Red Gate was becoming congested with the undead, and was once again the most dangerous place to be in the valley. Accordingly, General Johnston shifted forces.
This was the first crisis of the day and for the valley that amounted to a very good thing. For the next few days the walls held steady while the sun blasted down. It was an uncommonly hot end of July and the men fought to exhaustion while the civilians labored away. With their limited fuel supplies reserved for what could be a long retreat, the civilians were forced into back-breaking labor.
Carting water was a never-ending dreary chore. The civilians hauled jugs, two or three at a time, up steeply sloped roads. The new demand for firewood was nearly as bad since every aspect of the wood gathering had to be carried out by hand: hewing trees, sawing their trunks, splitting logs, and then hauling the wood to the various walls and hotspots took half the labor force.
Still no civilian wanted to trade places with the soldiers. The men fought at dizzying heights where a slip meant a horrible death, or they fought in the icy river that numbed them to the bone and made their movements slow and unsteady. And what was worse than swinging a heavy length of pipe for six hour stretches until their hands bled was the smell and the flies.
At times the flies swarmed in clouds so dense that the sun was hidden and the hum generated by the millions of tiny wings could drive a person mad. While the smell of the tens of thousands of decaying bodies, bloated and putrefying in the hot sun, quite literally caused grown men to pass out.
Yet the people of the valley, both the soldiers and civilians, toiled heroically and if there was ever a complaint, the complainer was usually frowned upon and on at least one occasion was punched in the face.
Neil seemed to be everywhere, always encouraging, always supportive, always trying to find a solution to the hundreds of problems that sprang up on a daily basis. The people rallied to him; it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for him to be cheered when he showed up. It was the general consensus that the people of the valley were “winning,” however, that was defined. Two things were certain, they weren’t running away and they were holding their own.
Five days of hard work slogged by but at noon of that fifth day things changed for the worse. The Azael, sick of waiting for the zombies to break through to the valley, attacked in force, driving in the thin line of soldiers that held a portion of the eastern ridgeline. With the sounds of a thousand guns going off in the hills, men were pulled from the all-important job of securing the walls in order to beat off this new attack. Neil didn’t hesitate to jump in his Humvee, fully intending to head to the scene.
It wasn’t until the barrel of a Beretta jabbed him in the temple did he realize that this really was “his” Humvee, the same one that had been stolen from him by Michael Gates days before, the same one he had been avoiding like the plague.
“You killed my wife,” Michael breathed into his ear. There was whiskey on his tongue that did not blend well with the powerful stench of unwashed armpits. “Say it, you piece of shit. Say that you killed her.”
The guilt had been on him for days, and it was actually somewhat of a relief when Neil said: “Yes, I did.”
Chapter 26
Jillybean
For the Azael, the days passed in sullen fear and dwindling expectation. After the destruction of their big guns, they prepared for the next “big” attack by fortifying the hills above their two little sections of the river gorges. They dug fox holes that were plain to see and built walls of fallen trees, generally being too lazy to cut down live trees.
Jillybean watched their progress and found it laughable. The log structures were so clearly manmade that they drew the eye, and the foxholes could be spotted from a hundred yards away since the Azael lazily piled the dirt in big mounds right in front of them. The fresh turned dirt stood out against the pine backdrop as blatant as sin.
Even when they bothered to camouflage their positions the effect again suffered from their laziness. Instead of cutting fresh limbs to drape over their holes, they used fallen limbs; the big patches of brown leaves or strange arrays of dead sticks didn’t blend naturally.
Then there was the trash that accumulated more and more every day. It was glaringly obvious from a distance, while at night the soft orange embers given off by the chain-smoking sentries could be seen at a quarter mile. Anyone walking up on the hill would see what appeared to be a long line of fire flies strung across the top of the ridge. But no one...no enemy, really actually did walk up on the hill.
Each morning there came from the collected Azael a mix of curses and sighs of relief. They hadn’t been attacked, thus the sighs, but on the other hand, the zombies hadn’t progressed more than a bare fifty yards, which brought out the curses.
By the third day people began to walk about with an air of ugly hanging over their heads; scowls accompanied the curses and tempers were short—no one enjoyed life tenting it on the highway, eating lukewarm cans of beans and drinking stale water that had to be hauled up from Horseshoe Lake twenty miles away because the red taint running down the rivers.
On the fourth day no one sighed with relief that they hadn’t been attacked. Every one guessed that if they hadn’t been attack by then, they weren’t going to be. This meant the focus was squarely on the progress of the zombies which was more than disappointing and the curses were thusly all the greater.
People began to mutter among themselves and blame was splashed about wetting even the princes of the Azael and, of course, Jillybean as well. One of the chief blamers was the king who called for the little girl. She was accompanied by Duke Menis, who considered her to be his personal property or maybe a pet that could do tricks. Kay was brought along as well to ensure that Jillybean cooperated. For the last five days, the higher ranking men had availed themselves to the women on the bus, studiously ignoring Kay and her battered face.
Regardless, whenever a prospective ‘lover’ came onto the bus, Kay sat on her seat wi
th her knees drawn up like a child who thinks the floor is lava, and yet it wasn’t just this overly defensive façade that Kay strived for, or her bent nose and scarred face that kept the men away. It was also Jillybean, who sat next to her and who could wilt even the strongest libido with the unsettling way she looked at a man; she seemed capable of looking straight into their perverted souls.
Kay made sure to keep her close except when she was called upon by the royal Azael, then she did her best to find an excuse to be somewhere else. On that fifth day the duke grabbed Kay by the hair and growled: “Stop your whining or you’ll never need a dentist again.” She dropped her chin and skulked along behind the duke until they were in the presence of the king where, to her immense relief, she was forgotten.
The king was seated with his brothers around a number of folding tables which were covered with rings of moisture from the many beer cans that were being drunk from. The king had five empties in front of him, a fresh one in his hand and his cold, unfeeling eyes on Jillybean. “You said they were going to attack,” he growled.
Without realizing it, Jillybean stepped back. The duke shoved her forward, and she stumbled. There was mean laughter. It coaxed Eve out from the dark, wet grotto of Jillybean’s mind. The other girl began a whispered hissing that made her skin crawl. There were words in the hissing but Jillybean couldn’t quite make them out, though she was sure that they were evil words, murderous words.
Jillybean squeezed her eyes shut and forced the fear out of her body. After a breath she boldly answered the king: “Yes I did, and they would have if they were smart and I think they are. It suggests…” She bit off her sentence, realizing she was again offering information that hadn’t been demanded. She was under no obligation to do so.
“It suggests what?” the duke asked, grabbing her arm and giving it a shake so that Jillybean was nearly thrown off her feet.
She wanted to glare. She wanted to give in to the other girl inside her who was still hissing, although in a quieter little snake sort of voice, advocating for daggers in the night, razors across the soft part of their throats, or a “found” grenade finding its way into the king’s tent in the darkest part of the night.
In spite of the evil coming off of it in waves, it wasn’t easy ignoring that voice just then.
The voice made sense. These were her enemies. These were people who deserved to die. But she was not a killer, she was a good girl; that’s what her daddy and mommy had always told her. And she believed it. Too bad being good was so difficult. Killing was easier. Killing was primal. Killing was a solution to so many problems and Jillybean felt the urge to give in. She bit it back.
“It suggests that they are weaker than we know,” Jillybean said after a brief pause.
“My thoughts exactly,” the king said, stroking his beard and gazing at each of his brothers in turn with his shrewd eyes taking their measure. “I’m beginning to think we should attack.”
What a coward, Jillybean thought. He can’t make a decision without the morale support of the people he views as inferior. She was pretty sure that it was her own mind thinking this, however there was a tinge of Eve to it...a tinge of evil. It wasn’t pleasant at all.
The brothers in turn, knowing that he was looking for their opinion, did their best to pass the buck. While many of the six brothers shifted their eyes away, Paulus suggested that Menis had been saying the same thing just the day before. That’s right, two others said, simultaneously as the rest nodded eagerly.
Menis grinned in a sickly sour manner and amended his previous words: “I only suggested that we should attack under optimal circumstances.”
The king hesitated, seeing that there wasn’t a real advocate for attack among his brothers, and again Jillybean mentally labeled him a coward, though a second later she wondered if that was really fair. He hadn’t been born a king and nor had he had any real training as one. He understood only bullying, threats, and overwhelming power, none of which had caused the brave men and women of the Estes Valley to capitulate as expected.
King Augustus faced real leaders. Both Grey and General Johnston had been trained to lead men into battle, sometimes, to lead them to their deaths.
Into the silence, Jillybean said: “Hhm,” realizing that all of their past enemies: Yuri in New York, Abraham in New Eden, the River King, and now Augustus, had just been normal men a year before. They had been like her daddy had been, or like the mailman who came around every day wearing a pith helmet, or like the sweaty, crack-bearing plumber who fixed their sink once.
This prompted an internal question: was her enemies’ collective evil a natural and, perhaps, an expected thing? Was this a normal reaction in men thrust into power without warning?
She was sure that she would not be able to glean the answer from history because as far as she knew there had never been a zombie apocalypse before. She could only ferret out the answer from what she knew of humans in general, which suggested the evil she was experiencing should have been predicted, though certainly not condoned.
The Azael were governed by fear: they feared the zombies, of course, but they also feared their neighbors whether enemies or not. And they feared running out of supplies and they feared that someone would take what they had by force. That fear made them aggressive and they had, not really chosen, but rather accepted Augustus perhaps because of uber-aggressiveness.
The king was staring at her and it was a few moments before she noticed. “You have something to add?” She dropped her eyes to the highway and meekly shook her head. “Well fuck,” the king said, sighing moodily. Remembering his beer he drained it as if it was water and then chucked the empty aside. “What we’re doing isn’t getting us anywhere, so here’s the plan: we’ll attack. They are weak, they have to be. Since you started this mess, Menis your men will lead the attack. And since Paulus fucked up with the guns, his men will reinforce yours.”
Now that he was committed, Menis became suddenly, and strangely eager. “As you wish, brother. I’ll have a thousand men ready in thirty minutes.” He grabbed Jillybean and went stumping off at a fast clip with Kay trailing along, forgotten by everyone and glad for it.
Menis went right for his tent where a number of people, Brad included, were sitting in a group playing with a deck of cards and some round disks—they weren’t playing Go Fish, the only card game Jillybean knew. They all jumped up as Menis began shouting to: “Assemble the men!” Jillybean pictured plastic soldiers in pieces that had to be snapped together.
She made sure to keep out of the way as a great commotion struck the camp. The Azael were running all about and no one seemed to care if Jillybean was stepped on or had her head smacked with the butt of a rifle. Menis stood for a moment watching before he ducked into his tent only to come out seconds later with a gun and a map, both of which he threw down on the card strewn table.
“Do you know anything about warfare?” he asked Jillybean after pouring over the map.
“No mister, Duke Sir,” she answered. “I don’t understand war at all. Why would people kill each other for no reason? It doesn’t make sense. There are other places for the Azael to live besides...”
The duke threw a handful of poker chips at Jillybean. “If you aren’t going to be any help, shut the fuck up.”
Jillybean mumbled a: “Yes sir.”
She didn’t want to help him anyway and wished she could go back to the bus which was the closest thing to a home she’d had since she had left her house in Philadelphia months before. She had left behind the great big doll house and Todd the turtle, and her mom who was still lying in her bed, and would forever.
It had been a mistake to ever leave her house. They shouldn’t have gone to New Eden in order to try to save Sarah. Not only had Sarah died, but Nico had died as well. A lot of people had died in all that time since she left home. The thought made Jillybean very sad and she dwelt in her sadness as the duke’s soldiers came together to form five long rectangles of men standing shoulder to shoulder down t
he road from them.
The duke stood in front of them and he yelled stuff that Jillybean couldn’t hear and he pointed away to the west at things Jillybean couldn’t see. The five groups then turned to the right in an uncoordinated fashion and began marching.
“Hope they forget about us,” Kay said in a soft voice though no one was around except the creepy, bone-thin cook who had poisoned Deanna.
The two were not forgotten. They were forced to walk along behind the Azael and were yelled at by the duke if they ever fell too far back. Since he still had a terrible limp, he rode an ATV as far as he could but was forced to give it up when they came to the last ridge controlled by the Azael. He then had to climb like everyone else.
Jillybean found the steep hill a challenge, but not a particularly difficult one, though she did have an advantage in that she carried nothing at all while the soldiers huffed along under the weight of their weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammo. They also carried water and food, shovels and flashlights and all sorts of items that only weighed them down.
Finally, with the sun straight up above and the air hot enough to melt butter right into nothing, they topped the rise and stood looking across at another ridgeline a mile away. Other than a few hills, it was the last barrier between them and the Estes Valley.
Had Jillybean been in charge, she would have advocated for a night attack. She held Captain Grey and, as an extension, all the soldiers of the valley in such high regard that she didn’t think it was at all smart to cross the relatively open land between the two ridge lines in the full light of day.
She wasn’t the only one who thought this either. Practically all the soldiers cast fearful glances up at the looming line of hills as they walked. Lucky for them, they weren’t being terribly led. Brad Crane was first down their side of the ridge; he kept to where the scrubby pines were thickest.
The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7 Page 27