The Queen of the Dead

by Peter Meredith

  A combination of stark greed and wonderment at his amazing luck came over him and it showed in his wide smile. Instead of being punished, she was giving him a bonanza. He would have the power over who got fed and who went hungry. Who left to scavenge with one bullet in their guns or with twenty. That was real power! With that much power it wouldn’t be long before he had the true control of her little “queendom” or whatever she was going to call it.

  “It sounds great. I’ll get right on it. I’m stronger than I was letting on to the Corsairs. Jimmy and Rondo are, too. Hey, do you think they could be, like my assistants?”

  She smiled benignly at Willis. “Of course. It’s a big job I’ve asked you to take on. Jimmy will be our weapons master, in charge of our weapons and ammo, and Rondo will be in charge of medical supplies and equipment, while you, Willis Firam, your main job will be as my commissariat. It’s a very important job, one with great responsibility.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” the three said, almost in unison, bobbing their heads and grinning like foxes who had just been put in charge of the henhouse.

  Jillybean beamed, clapping her hands together. “I’m so glad I can count on people of the highest integrity for these positions. Thank goodness you three aren’t petty, vindictive, little sneak-thieves. Thank goodness you three would never, ever, ever consider stealing a single bullet or the smallest damned crumb off my table. Because if you did…” Their smiles dried up as she suddenly seemed filled with a terrific wrath. “Well, let’s not think of all the terrible things I would have done to you, because that won’t happen, right?”

  “Never,” Willis said.

  “Exactly. But to be on the safe side, you know, so that you are never accused of anything of the sort, you will keep a running inventory of everything we have—in writing and these books as well as your properly kept storerooms will be subject to frequent inspections and audits.”

  Frequent inspections and audits? “Great,” Willis said, blinking dazedly, feeling as though she had pulled the rug out from under him. It turned out that the job he had volunteered for wasn’t nearly as powerful as he had assumed. He was to be a clerk. And there was going to be paperwork. Books. His stomach turned at the thought.

  Stu Currans was nodding, appreciatively and Mike wore an open grin, while to their right, Bubbles, looking somewhat lost, gave out a weak laugh. She really didn’t have much clue as to what was going on. First the new queen had smiled at Willis, and that was good, then she glared like she wanted to peel his flesh off with her teeth, and that was bad—yet now others were smiling and the queen seemed satisfied. She just wanted to be liked and so she laughed not expecting the new queen to even look in her direction. But she did. To Bubbles’ dismay, the satisfied look dimmed, replaced by sadness.

  “What are we going to do with them?” Willis asked. He leered openly at the two slave girls who’d been standing off to the side, clutching themselves. “I ask as a professional. They are property. You know, goods and services. I’d say they fall under the uh, jurid-diction of the quartermaster.” He was grasping at straws, hoping to find some way to make his miserable position better.

  “The word you meant is jurisdiction and, no they are not property. We will not keep slaves. Temporary slaves, penal slaves, for want of a better name, will be under my control. All other slaves are hereby freed. Stu, if you will see to that?” She waved him closer and she whispered in his ear, “Separate them from their former owners. Find a place for them to stay.”

  “There may be some bad blood because of this,” Stu warned.

  She sighed. “Yes, evil begets evil. But it has to stop somewhere. Oh, I was hoping to make you my chief law enforcement officer. I hope that’s okay.”

  Stu honestly didn’t know what to make of the offer or really of anything that was happening. She had taken this queen business by the bit and was running with it full out and it was great, from a certain point of view. These people needed her. They needed her intelligence and her unrelenting energy, but what would happen when Eve came back? Would she tear apart all of Jillybean’s hard work out of spite? Would it be one step forward and two back? More than likely.

  “I’ll do it,” he said, feeling as though he really didn’t have a choice. She had a velocity to her, an impetus that carried people along in her wake that was impossible to stop.

  She seemed relieved. “Good. Good. I didn’t want to presume.”

  “You come in here and make yourself queen, but you didn’t want to presume?” Stu laughed at this in the soft way of the hill people. She laughed as well and then Bubbles laughed which killed it.

  “Start with these two,” Jillybean said and then turned her sad eyes to Mike. “I need the boat brought in and unloaded. Take the four prisoners. Also, Willis, Rondo and Jimmy will help and I’m sure they know a few others who are stronger than they look. Once that’s done, I’m going to need a cleaning station set up and…”

  From that restless mind poured every step necessary to get her kingdom up and going. It was a long list of steps; an exhausting sounding list and those around her grew tired just listening to it for it was already getting late in the evening. When Jillybean realized she had been speaking aloud without let up, she caught her tongue.

  “We’ll do our best,” Mike said and left with Stu and the others to begin their labors. Others drifted away, afraid to be caught up in work they were sure they lacked the energy to endure. Three that remained were Jenn and the two ex-slaves. Jillybean waved them closer and saw, that up close, with the stronger light of the fire full in their faces, they were much older than she had supposed them to be.

  Both were in their mid-thirties while she had assumed them to have just scraped the lower edge of their twenties. It was their make-up and style of dress which had formed the illusion.

  They were properly nervous being this close to Jillybean. After all, they had been in the room when Eve had threatened to blow them all up. In fact, Johanna Murphy, the rail-thin woman who’d had her nearly nonexistent breasts thrown out the entire time, had actually wet herself when Tony had fired that big gun of his. She had thought: this is it, and had been sure the crazy girl was about to blow them all to hell.

  But the crazy girl had only smiled. The bullet had come so close that little tufts of her hair had fallen onto her shoulder and she had only smiled. It took a lot to impress Johanna. In the last dozen years, she had seen a hundred guys as tough as Tony had been; she’d seen her share of bare-knuckle fighters and quick-draws and big talkers—and had been raped by quite a few of them. But she had never seen anything like this girl.

  Johanna couldn’t stop staring at her.

  “What are your names?” Jillybean asked. “Your real names from before.” In a shy voice Johanna gave her name, but Bubbles looked confused by the question.

  “Diamond is the name I had before. I-I was a dancer. You know, a dancer for men. Like an exotic dancer.”

  Jenn did not know what that meant, thinking she was a foreign sort of dancer. Jillybean had crossed the entire continent and knew many things she wished she didn’t, the knowledge of what an exotic dancer being one of them. “And you’d like to keep the name, Diamond?” Diamond nodded, afraid that if the queen could take her name, there was no telling what else she could take.

  “And you, Johanna what did you do before?”

  It took Johanna a moment to remember there had been another life before this one. Back then, she used to like to say she was a “persistent undergraduate.” For five years of partying college life she had always been preparing to fling herself in one direction or another. Then the dead came and instead of flinging herself anywhere she was dragged here and there. No one ever cared about the school she had gone to or the odd jobs she had worked back before. All they cared about was that she was too small and timid to fight, too easily fatigued to hunt and too weak to till the land.

  The first group she’d been with had been annihilated, and the second enslaved. After that she went from bei
ng human baggage to human chattel, her worth diminishing with every rape and every sale.

  “I was in school.”

  “For?”

  “Different things,” she said, feeling dreadfully ashamed. There was little left to her now save for the knowledge she was able to please men. Being freed by the queen had quite untied her mind which was awash in fear.

  “That’s good because we will need someone with a knowledge of many different things. For now, you and Miss Diamond will be our assistants.” The two women glanced at each other, both clearly afraid they wouldn’t be able to handle the role. “It’ll be okay. We’ll show you what needs to be done. I will be initially working triage. I’ll need Jenn to start the IVs going. Everyone I send to you will need one.”

  Now it was Jenn’s turn to worry she wouldn’t be up to the task. Jillybean put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s a piece of cake. You’ll see.”

  They found an empty section of the vast warehouse where there was little but dust, a clutter of old trash, and a line of pallets leaning one upon another like half-fallen dominoes. This was to be their hospital. They left the two ex-slaves to set up lanterns and to arrange the medical supplies and lay out the clean sheets brought from the Saber.

  Theirs was the easy job. Jenn followed Jillybean into the heart of darkness where the smell staggered them despite their masks. Five minutes before, Jenn would have claimed to have had unlimited faith in Jillybean’s powers as a doctor but then a woman came staggering from the shadows, looking like a creature partially in the nether-world already.

  “You should sit,” Jillybean said, starting to pull off her backpack but the woman would not hear it. She shook her head, drool swinging in an arc. She pulled them further until they came to one of the great sixty-foot tall shelves where the people slept like bees in a hive. The woman tried to mount a ladder but lacked the strength and could only point a ghostly hand upwards.

  Three stories above the concrete floor, where the stench had formed a distinct haze, they found the woman’s child, a scarcely human stump of a creature all aglow with fever. Each section of the shelves were big enough to hold a little dresser, a few hanging items and a mattress. The boy’s mattress was sunk in, holding a brown pool of his filth.

  “Guhh,” Jenn said, gagging on the septic air. It permeated her mask, and slunk right up her nostrils, turning her an ugly shade of green. It was then that things began to grow dim and thoughts became fleeting. Jenn felt as though her soul was trying to leave her body to get away from the horror in front of her.

  Jillybean also seemed affected; she stared for a long time, her face growing tighter and tighter. “We don’t have time for this,” she whispered to herself.

  Jenn was sure she must have misheard her, but her head was reeling and she found herself gulping down the horrible air, as her stomach began clenching and unclenching violently. Afraid she was about to vomit or faint she started back down. “I need a moment,” she said between clenched teeth. “I’ll be right back.”

  She was halfway down when she heard Jillybean hissing and with her head spinning Jenn wasn’t sure but it sounded like she had said, “I know, but you can’t just kill him.”

  Jenn was nearly hyperventilating now. There was no pretending otherwise, she was going to vomit and faint, it was just a matter of which came first. At ten feet above the ground she started to lose the feeling in her hands while at the same time she could feel her dinner coming closer. “Oh lord,” she whispered and then dropped the final five feet. She clawed away her mask, hurled in a great splatter, adding to horror of the place, and then fell to the side of the mess. Somewhere in the process of passing out, she heard:

  “But if we don’t and there are more like this one, how many people will die in the end? We have to kill him.”

  Chapter 24

  The cold woke Jenn. She looked up and saw the stars shifting and bobbing. It was a moment before she realized she was being carried.

  “Mike? What happened? Am I…I’m not hurt, am I?” Other than an ugly taste in her mouth, she felt fine.

  “No. Jillybean wanted me to get you some air. It was pretty awful in there.” He paused, staring around the lot, his eyes lingering on the exploded pole. Then he looked at the Saber, where the penal slaves and five warehouse folk were hauling out the heavy water bladders.

  All of them had gaped at the black boat, when he had first pulled it out of the dark. “You’re from that crummy hill top,” one of the Corsairs sneered, thinking they had only picked up the Saber from the wreckage of the battle.

  “I’m not, actually. And that boat is the one we took from Grays Harbor, right out from under your noses.” Mike was inordinately pleased by their reaction. He knew that the rumors, the true rumors of how they had come by a Corsair boat would circulate and add to their mystique.

  Mike was about to mention this to Jenn when a thought struck him: was this why Jillybean had left the last four Corsairs alive? So they could see the boat and tell the tale? Had she thought…”

  “You can put me down now,” Jenn said, breaking in on his thoughts.

  He gazed down at her without setting her down. By the way she had her cheek resting on his chest, he could tell she really didn’t want to be put down. She was comfortable and safe.

  “Don’t worry, you’re not heavy.” She really wasn’t. And, as he had spent most of the day sitting on a boat he had plenty of energy. “I’d hate to put you down and have you faint again.”

  “I’m not going to faint, not out here.” The stench of a few hundred decomposing bodies fouling the air was roses compared to the stench inside. It hadn’t been just the smell, either. The last couple of minutes had a vague, dream-like haze to it. She could remember climbing up the side of the shelf and pulling back chicken-wire as if the ten-by-seven shelf had been a pen of some sort. And she remembered fiddling around trying to remember where she had stuck the flashlight and then, when she found it, she immediately regretted it—she regretted the sudden memory of the boy in his pool of feces. It hit her hard and she gagged, not knowing if she could go back inside.

  Mike set her down and she walked in a small circle. “Take your time,” he said, hoping to soothe her, but ruining it by adding, “We’ll be at this all night. Did you hear that list she’s got for me?”

  “I’ll trade jobs with you,” she said. His lips parted and he expelled air loudly in an abortive attempt at a laugh. He hoped it was a joke. It wasn’t, but she knew he was even less suited to be Jillybean’s assistant than she was. Besides, his job required strength that she didn’t have. She sighed. “I should get back in there.”

  “And I should get going with those guys. They slack off the second I’m not watching them.” The two gazed at each other for a moment, a long lingering moment that might have lingered half into the night, only just then Willis came over, dragging a cart with a bulbous, humped water bladder resting on it.

  His stare was knowing and deviant, and very off-putting. “I should go,” she said with a little wave. He matched the wave. That little thing, made her feel, well she didn’t know how it made her feel. She had never been in love before and she had never done that thing that she knew other girls did, where they sat around and talked about boys; which they thought was cute and who liked who.

  How she wished she could be doing that instead of heading back inside to what had to be the worst job in the world.

  She found Jillybean leading what looked like a frail old man by the arm. Like the boy, he too was covered in horrible brown gunk. “Grab a pair of gloves, kiddo. These walking piles of crap need love, too.”

  “Piles of…Jillybean? Is that you?”

  “Nope. Jillybean has left the building. She made like a leaf and got the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Eve?” Jenn asked, cautiously.

  The girl in black threw back her head and laughed. “Are you kidding me? Do you think Eve would actually touch one of these guys? No way. She might disinfect the place, but only if we let her use
a flamethrower. No, she tried to come back, took one look at what was going on and left. That’s called being a weak little bitch.” This was Sadie, the toughest part of Jillybean.

  And what different laughs the three had. The original only smiled at jokes since she found the punchlines blatant and foresaw them a mile off, she laughed only if she were infused with joy. Eve’s laughter was always mocking and cruel, designed to inflict pain, and Sadie laughed at anything and everything, from the silliest pun to the dirtiest joke, most of which would be of her own telling.

  “I hate a weak little bitch,” Sadie went on, “especially when there’s work to be done. That’s what I always loved about Neil. People think…hey, what’s wrong? Don’t even think I was calling you a weak little bitch. Yes, you puked and passed out. So what? The important thing is you came back. That shows you have rectitude.”

  “Rectitude?” Jenn asked. “I guess that’s a good thing?”

  Sadie shrugged. “I’m not sure. It’s a word. I know that. Jillybean never keeps words up here that aren’t real words. Either way, I meant it as a good thing and that’s what counts the most.”

  She did mean it and it did count the most to Jenn. She was about to thank her when Sadie gave her a jab in the side with a surprisingly pointy elbow. “So, what’s the what? I got these two bimbos calling me ‘your Highness.’ What’s up with that?”

  “You made yourself into a queen,” Jenn explained.

  “Whoa! That’s crazy even for Jillybean. But hey, queen, I like it. All rise for Queen Sadie.” She let go of the shuffling, dying man to give an odd little cupped-hand wave. Then she saw Jenn shaking her head. “What? We aren’t calling ourselves Queen Sadie? Oh jeeze! It’s not Queen…” Here she lowered her voice. “It’s not Queen Jillybean, is it?”

  “Right now, it’s just Queen or ‘The’ Queen.”