Neil was pale as a ghost when the last woman shook her head. Listlessly, he said: “It’s the decision of the court that Jillybean will die. May God have mercy on your soul.” He turned to an Asian lady who held three capped needles in her hand. “Do it, Margaret before I change my mind.”
The lady was slow to come forward; Eve saw this as cruel and cursed her. Jillybean knew better and saw the sadness in the lady’s eyes. She didn’t want to have to do this and neither did any of the people on the panel. Even in death, Jillybean realized she was hurting people. She was tired of it all and wanted her life to be over with but at the last second Eve’s fear of what came next proved too great.
“Stop!” she cried with sudden wretchedness as the first needle was uncapped and its deadly point neared her flesh. “I’ll do it. I’ll agree to your stipulations.”
Neil grabbed Margaret’s arm in a grip of steel keeping the needle from advancing. “Do you agree to all of them?” he demanded.
“I just said I would,” Eve said. “Here, you can have her.”
Just like that, Jillybean found herself in her own body. It felt foreign and frail and sort of rickety, like an ill-made robot in a science fair. Her hands were shaking and her chest was quivering. There were tears in her eyes and on her cheeks. “It—It’s me,” she said to Neil who was staring hard at her.
He wasn’t so quick to believe her. “Where, specifically did we first meet?”
“Atlanta, outside the CDC. You were going to give me to the Believers in exchange for Sadie.” Jillybean turned to look at her apocalypse sister. “But you wouldn’t let him.”
Sadie choked as tears began flowing. “I couldn’t do that to my sister. Is she still in you? Can you feel her?”
Jillybean nodded. “She’s watching me and listening.”
“Can you control her?” Grey asked.
Now, Jillybean shook her head. Eve had become too strong for her to control and she knew the reason but wouldn’t admit it. Before it was her fear that brought Eve about; now, it was her guilt and her shame. These couldn’t be fought or overcome like the fear had been. Guilt and shame were poisons rotting her strength, tearing her down, making her weak in the mind.
“I killed the general,” she admitted in a tiny voice like a mouse’s. “I thought I was saving the women but I know now that I wasn’t. They’ll never be saved. They’ll never be free.”
Captain Grey stepped forward; he was covered in bandages—she was sure that she had something to do with them and she tried to turn away. He stopped her with a gentle hand. “Let’s not worry about that right now. That’s the past and nothing can be done to change it. It’s better if we deal with what we have before us. Let’s hear your plan.”
Doubt suddenly flooded her chest. “I don’t know if I have one. I was close to thinking of one but then the general died and Eve took over and...I sort of forgot all about it.”
The assembled adults glared at her and she knew that they were feeling tricked. Inside her, Eve grew perilously large, threatening like the demon she was; she hissed: You had better think of something quick or your good buddy, Mister Neil will kill you.
Thinking up a plan was impossible right then. With the fury of the adults emanating through the air, and Eve’s monstrous presence, and the killing needles just feet away, looking sharp and oh, so deadly, and with her own guilt overshadowing everything, Jillybean couldn’t think of a single thing.
Neil was the only one who hadn’t glared. He stayed perfectly calm. “How about this? Let’s return to the hotel. We’ll go up to the cupola and see if the view and the map jog your memory. We’ll go, just the two of us, oh, and Sadie, too.”
He wanted her to go to the scene of her most heinous crime? How was that going to help? She was sure her guilt would over-shadow everything. “Yes, we can do that, but just us two, Mister Neil, please. I don’t want Sadie to see where the bad stuff happened.”
The glares and the hateful suspicion grew in the adults. They thought she was planning some sort of escape. “No,” Captain Grey told her. “You’ll not go alone with Neil. I will go as well and I will evaluate any plan.” Even injured as he was, Grey was a deadly man and no one second guessed him and so, five minutes later, the three of them were treading slowly up the dead-quiet stairs of the hotel.
Grey moved at snail’s pace. He was going so slowly that Neil looked over Jillybean’s head with a questioning look. Grey said nothing though a message passed between the two men. Jillybean knew because of the way Neil tried to pretend that he didn’t read anything in Grey’s expression.
They’re trying to give you time to think of something, Eve said. So get thinking!
That was a relief. Jillybean’s first thought was that they were going to throw her off the roof when they got to the top and she was unable to spit out a plan in two minutes. Dying from the morphine sounded much better.
In spite of the slow speed, they eventually passed the point where General Johnston had died and made it out onto the cupola, a small dome covered open room at the very tallest point of the roof. The view was fantastic. In the east, the sun was just broaching the horizon, casting the entire valley in a topaz hue while in the west the world was still dark, more shadow than shape.
They’ll go west if I can’t think of anything, Jillybean thought. She saw their fate clearly: They’d go west, into the shadows of unknown where nothing grew but scraggly pine and thin mountain grass. With their livestock slowing them down, they’d be chased from place by the surging zombies and if they ever came to a place where the road was destroyed by a landslide or a flood, they’d die.
“What do you think, Jillybean?” Neil asked, holding out the map of the valley.
“I think that’s the prettiest sunrise I’ve ever seen,” she answered, turning from the dark part of the world. She had no plan and couldn’t remember what she had been thinking two days before when she had led Neil and the general up there.
Figuring that this was going to be her last sunrise, Jillybean made the most of it. She hooked a naked foot on the railing and leaned out, watching the light gradually eat up the darkness. It progressed in a slow fashion and Jillybean couldn’t help see that this was exactly how the zombies were going to sweep over everything: from east to west, straight across the mountains and beyond to that unknown land.
Just like the light, there was no stopping them...and did it even make sense to try? Of course not.
“That’s better,” she said as the plan evolved right before her eyes.
Chapter 32
Neil Martin
After hearing the bare outlines of Jillybean’s plan, Neil settled in next to her and looked out over the valley. The sunrise was beautiful but he didn’t see it; his eyes were unfocused and his mind was busy filling in the details that would make her plan a success.
It really didn’t take much. The plan was simplicity itself. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this a long time ago.”
Captain Grey came to lean on the railing on the other side of Jillybean. “Don’t beat yourself up,” he said. “What she’s suggesting is completely counterintuitive.”
“For you maybe,” Neil replied. “You’re a soldier, I’m not. It’s a little embarrassing that I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.” And it’s more than a bit frustrating that I have to keep relying on a seven-year-old, he said to himself. Aloud he added to Jillybean: “I just wish you had come sooner and under better circumstances.”
The little girl hung her head and refused to look up or say anything. Awkwardly, Neil rubbed her back. “Don’t blame yourself. This is my fault. I should have never let you go back to the Azael...and I should have relied more on my own wits and I should...”
“Stop it, Neil,” Grey said. “Like I told Jillybean, that’s in the past. Look to the future and be thankful that we have one and be thankful that Jillybean has one as well. The plan is good. We should go tell the others and get working, there’s a thousand things to do.”
At
a much quicker pace, the three went back to the clinic, where they found the judiciary panel seated outside, waiting. Sadie looked fearful and then when Neil gave her a smile and a nod, she broke down crying, turning away. Most of the panel didn’t understand that the tears were tears of joy and grew grim until Grey explained how they were going to save themselves.
“That may take care of the zombies,” a woman named Teresa said, “But what about the Azael themselves. They still outnumber us three to one and the little girl’s plan leaves us even more vulnerable than before.”
A few of the others agreed. Jillybean, looking puzzled, said: “It doesn’t leave you vulnerable. I know that’s what means unsafe. All you have to do is...wait...if I tell you this part of the plan, too, can I get more of them French Toasts? Eve ate it all and I didn’t get to have any.”
“You don’t have to explain anymore,” Neil answered. “The follow-up aspects of the plan are fairly obvious. I think we got it from here. And yes, I’ll make more French Toast for you.” Actually Neil had the same fears as Theresa but he vowed he would figure things out on his own...either that, or he would see what Captain Grey was thinking on the subject. The soldier had been very quiet on the way back; it was obvious that he was musing over the plan and its details.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be making her another meal,” Teresa said, looking down her nose at Jillybean. “Plan or not, she is a killer.”
Neil bristled: “I will make French Toast for anyone I please. Your job is done, Teresa. The panel has fulfilled its purpose. Justice, as unanimously voted upon, has been rendered. Everyone report to your supervisors and prepare for a very long day and an even longer night.”
The panel broke up until only Grey, Deanna, Sadie and Jillybean were left behind. “Jillybean still needs to be locked up,” Deanna said. “I’m glad that you are cooperating but we all know the danger.”
“I’ll do it,” Sadie said. “And I’ll make her another breakfast. I know you’re going to be busy, Neil.”
Busy was an understatement. First came a long meeting in which all of the army officers and all the civilian supervisors were present, sitting on fancy white-backed chairs in the ballroom of the Stanley Hotel. Just like the judiciary panel they were cautiously optimistic when Neil explained the first part of the plan; however, they cheered when Captain Grey explained the second part.
Only one man didn’t: Fred Trigg. “To go back to the earlier part, you’re making it sound like it will be a piece of cake but you’re talking about constructing, like a four mile wall. That’s impossible.”
“Actually it’s closer to nine miles,” Neil said, “And no, it’s not impossible, just very difficult. The good news is that some of the walls are naturally occurring. Where the hills are steep enough we’ll count those as walls. Now, I don’t want to hear the word impossible again and I don’t want to hear how something can’t be done, I want to know how it can be done.”
“May I interject?” Deanna asked. “I’m not being unrealistic or pessimistic, I just want to state a fact. Building these new walls will, by necessity, take away from our efforts at building the walls across the highways. You can’t do both at once since they use the same man power and materials.”
“How long will the current walls hold?” Neil asked.
Deanna shrugged and it was an army major who answered: “Thirty-six to forty-eight hours, give or take. With the bonfires going at night it takes the pressure off, however it sounds like you want to reassign the wood crews. If that’s the case, then I’d say twenty-four hours.”
Neil smiled despite feeling the sweat building up in his arm pits. His choices were impossible: maintain a slowly eroding defense that had been sapping the strength and life from his men, knowing that the end result will be a coordinated retreat to a destination that was still unknown, or he could risk it all on a chance at victory.
“Then we had better work like fiends in the next twenty-four hours,” Neil said, making the split second decision to hang their fate on Jillybean’s plan. “From this moment on, there will be no breaks. We will not sleep and we will not rest until the walls are complete. I want the night crews woken and if I see a single man sitting on his ass or taking a smoke break, he will be arrested.”
He then began assigning duties. Most were the same: “Take your team and find me cars. I need at least two thousand of them.” When he said it like that, it did indeed sound impossible, still he kept a confident smile on his face until he came to Deanna. “Get about a dozen of your most trusted people,” he said in a whisper. “I need to know exactly how many linear feet of wall we need.”
In other words, he needed to know how screwed they were.
He would have to wait five hours for the exact length to be compiled. The walls were going to be very long since both I-34 and I-36 had to be lined with walls of one sort or another. Cars were the obvious choice to use as a medium. They were more or less portable in that they could be pushed, towed or fed enough gas to be jumped and driven on flats to where the flipping crew, a group of twelve men, waited to dump the remaining gas before they worked the car into position and then heaved it, by muscle alone, onto its side.
Each car was an individual link in the wall.
Neil tried to be everywhere and tried to oversee everything which of course was impossible since the walls were being built along two separate highways. Deanna caught up with him just after 2p.m. Her look was so intentionally neutral that Neil was afraid to ask.
“It’s longer than we thought,” she said as soon as she was close enough to whisper. “We have six miles to cover and if we average cars at eleven feet long, we’ll need about three thousand of them.” Neil choked and his heart skipped in his chest. “Yeah, that was my feeling as well,” she murmured. As he struggled to grasp the number, she went on: “In light of that, I sent my team to make a survey of the number of cars available in the valley and the surrounding towns.”
His mind was whirling and the number three thousand ran in circles. That was just too many cars. He figured that they had already used over a thousand on all the different Red and Blue walls. There couldn’t be that many more left, certainly not three thousand. “Recall your team,” Neil said. “I can tell you already we don’t have enough. What we need are ideas.”
The two stood there for a minute in silence both pondering options. Finally, Deanna shrugged. “We can look at pulling up some fencing. There were some rolls of it at the Department of Transportation.”
Five miles worth? Neil wondered, not bloody likely. He kept his skepticism hidden. “Good, start there, but don’t end there. We need out of the box thinking. Talk to your crew. Brainstorm and report back to me as soon as possible. Oh, and include Grey in this. He was hobbling around earlier trying to help, but only getting in the way.”
“He was out of bed!” She turned on her heel and stalked away in a fury.
“Don’t forget the wall,” he said. She didn’t turn, she just waved a hand. Neil watched her hurry off to the hospital and silently wished Captain Grey good luck. He then went back to the Stanley Hotel. The place was morgue quiet and a little unsettling being so deserted. Neil had sent all of his staff, except one radio operator, off to work like everyone else. The sound of his footsteps echoed and he took more care to walk softly as he made his way to his office and stared at his useless desk.
After a few seconds, he tiptoed to the map room where he traced the outlines of the two highways as they merged in the center of Estes. He whispered: “Three thousand cars.” They would never find half as many. He then went to the cupola and looked out at the valley, hoping an idea would come to him as it had Jillybean. The afternoon faded around him and yes, it was true that he was ignoring his own dictate about working continuously, however he hadn’t really been helping. He had been out there just so that he could be seen “working,” for the sake of appearances.
At six, when the sun was hanging pendulously over the mountains and sinking fast, Deanna found him. “I knew you
’d be up here,” she said. “When you weren’t with Jillybean, this was the first place I looked.”
“And?”
A pained expression washed over her face. “Our wall is going to come up short...alot short.”
Neil grew irate. “How short?” he snapped.
“Two miles, maybe more. Fences aren’t big in Estes; most people use those split wood fences, you know, those log deals?” He knew what she was talking about: a single log held up at either end by two smaller crisscrossing logs which were embedded in the earth. They wouldn’t stop even a single zombie.
“Did anyone come up with any better ideas?”
She sort of half nodded and half shook her head. “Kinda. We’re going to use barbed wire. There’s tons of it when you get out of town a little ways.”
“But....” He read the “but” easily in her eyes.
“But, it’s all old and rusty and snaps easily if you apply too much pressure, which means we will need more than three strands per fence.” She wasn’t done with the bad news, that much was obvious and so he gestured for her to keep going. “Yeah, ok we also have a post problem. We can’t string the barbed wire on nothing so posts will have to be dug and, if we have any hope of them staying in place they’ll also have to be cemented in place.”
Neil felt panic coming on. “Cemented! It’ll never dry in time. And do we even have that much cement?” She shook her head. “What about trees? We can run the barbed wire around trees.”
“We’ve already thought about that. Even using trees we come with the two mile figure. The bottom line: we won’t be finished when Blue Gate 6 falls. I was just out there. The wall is half-stacked with zombies already. It’ll be a miracle if it lasts until morning.”
“And Red Gate 4?” Neil asked.
“Because of the steep slope we built it on, it’s holding steady. And so are the smaller overflow areas. For reasons we don’t know, these have been trickles compared to the last week.” She paused and a pained expression swept her. “Neil, we have to abandon this idea. It’s not going to work.”
The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7 Page 33