She paused to make sure he was keeping up with the simple analogy and he nodded for her to go on, already caught up in it. “A proper book couldn’t be written without exact rules and logical laws, otherwise everything would be gibberish. But nothing is ever gibberish in this book. We have explored this book cover to cover and always find the laws never vary, or if they do, it’s because of something we hadn’t thought of before. But the one thing we just can’t seem to wrap our heads around is where the book came from to begin with?”
“Who made God?” Stu asked.
“Yes. We ask the question from within the book. We form the question thinking the rules and laws within the book bind everything outside of it as well. But look at any book in a library. Isn’t the author greater than the book? He chooses the language, the sentence structure, the punctuality and all the rest. You might say he is bound by his language, but he really isn’t. Supposedly, Shakespeare made up words all the time. The point being, God is not governed by the same laws of physics that govern us. In fact, by definition God is omnipotent and is not bound by any law, thus it is perfectly plausible that either he has always existed or created himself.”
“I actually followed that,” Stu told her. “You dumbed it down perfectly.”
She laughed again, tiredly and then yawned. “I think I can sleep now. Thanks.” He walked her to the Saber, wishing he could hold her hand, but it was too cold and hers were stuffed down into the pockets of her coat. “You coming?” she asked when he made no move to step on board.
Had this been any other night he would have said yes and perhaps tried to kiss her. He’d been wanting to kiss her for some time now, but one thing after another kept getting in the way. Now, she was dead tired and still a little yellow in the eyes from her liver disease. It wasn’t the right time.
“No. Someone should watch over the patients.”
“Yeah.” They stared at each other until a strong cold breeze killed even that. “Goodnight. Wake me by nine. Promise.”
He promised but didn’t wake her until it was after ten and the sun was a third of the way into the sky and he had hooked up the last of the IV bags. He turned them all down to slow drips to keep them from backing up with blood. The forty-one ex-slaves were the first ones awake. The stronger of them were tending to the needs of the weaker ones, checking their IV bags and changing their clothes if they’d been incontinent.
The other people were sprawled across the floor; if they weren’t part of a family, they were usually left on their own. The ex-slaves wouldn’t even look at them and the stronger people generally acted like the weaker ones weren’t even there as they went to fix themselves breakfast.
When Stu told her this, Jillybean leapt up in such a fury that Eve nearly got out of her mental cage. She was so close to the surface that she spoke through Jillybean’s lips, “Kill one of them. It’ll teach the others respect. I’ll do it if you can’t. Please, let me.”
“Shut up!” Jillybean hissed, pulling a knife from her pocket.
“Hey, cool your jets,” Stu said. “Remember the stars. Remember what you told me about the stars?”
Her eyes came back into focus and she was able to smile. “I thought the book was far more poetic.”
They were still looking into each other’s eyes when Mike asked, “Stu, you read a book?” He sounded shocked, as if such a thing as reading was beyond a man like Stu.
This broke the connection. “He read part of it,” she answered with a dimple showing in one cheek. “Perhaps the best part of it. Either way, we should get to work. Stu, go get your people in hand. Mike get me that same crew you were with last night. I know Willis and his friends will bitch, but I don’t care. I need every able body. Jenn, come do something about my hair.”
It had been a quiet morning with only the far off sounds of the dead breaking the calm—it suddenly became even quieter. As long as any of them had known Jillybean, she had never given a single thought to her wild hair. Her cheeks went a little pink as she cast a furtive eye towards Stu. “I just…it’s just, I’m queen now. Shouldn’t I look presentable? Respectable?”
Jenn tried to imagine her with long straight hair. The image wouldn’t come. She wouldn’t be Jillybean. She wouldn’t have that slightly mad, slightly innocent look about her. She might even look like a full adult.
“I don’t know if I would change it, if I were you,” Jenn said. Flanked behind her on either side Mike and Stu were staring hard at Jillybean as well; both were nodding in agreement. “It’s you. It’s who you are. You know, sorta wild. It keeps people guessing what you’re about.”
“Oh,” she said with a final glance towards Stu. “If everyone’s sure. I’m going to take a shower. Thanks for setting that up.” This she said to Mike, who had rigged a hose from the last of the heavy bladders. It was a cold shower and a light one but she needed it.
As always, she dressed in black, though this time she added knee-high black velvet boots and a three-quarter leather coat. She made sure she had her necessities tucked into her wild mane, or on her belt, and then sauntered into the warehouse—the pettiest of petty kingdoms—turning heads when she did. The coat and the boots and the pure darkness of her outfit made her white skin stand out even more and there was something both dangerous and regal about her.
When she asked for every able person, she actually meant anyone who could stay on their feet for an hour straight. This did not amount to many people. Out of two hundred and forty-one people, herself included, there were only sixteen she considered able.
Jillybean took fifteen of them, leaving only Jenn to manage the overflowing aide station. It seemed like a huge task but there were at least a dozen people who could be rated semi-abled who could work for a few minutes at a time.
“And besides, you just have to keep them alive,” Jillybean assured her. “You’re the only one I trust to handle the job.”
Just like Mike was the only one she trusted to pilot the Saber up the Sacramento and then through the tricky waters where the smaller, faster American River joined it. And Stu was the only one she trusted to truly guard her back. He was the toughest man she’d known in years and in a way, it worried her. Tough men who were also good men were extremely rare mainly because they had the awful habit of dying young.
Jillybean wanted to make only four stops that morning, one at Mercy Hospital, which was a mile from the American River. The next stop would be at a touristy area where four hotels sat glaring severely across from one another, and the last two would be any sort of sporting goods store or plumbing outfit between the two.
They brought their own large-wheeled carts from the warehouse, each placed just so on the deck of the Saber under Mike’s unhappy supervision—he would have preferred nothing heavier than a dandelion head on board, and he had fretted over every scrape.
There was no dock or pier along that stretch of the river and the deeper part of the channel was so narrow that they could get no closer to the bank than fifty feet. Everyone looked at the water in apprehension and then at Mike. “What are you waiting for?” Willis asked. “Just run it up there. A little sand won’t hurt it none.” Diamond and Johanna heartily agreed with him as did his two friends. Everyone else fell into the category of not wanting to get wet but not wanting to say so and thus kept quiet.
“We can’t risk the boat,” Jillybean stated. “We anchor here.” The four Corsairs went in first and the carts were handed down to them. The others went in, one at a time, each making a face of dire pain as the chest-deep cold water shocked them. When Jillybean went to climb over the bow, Stu stopped her and had her climb onto his shoulders which she did, gratefully. Diamond and Johanna both begged for rides in the same manner and had a few of the men tussle over the chance.
It was a quiet tussle, however. They were out in the open and although most of them were armed they did not want to do anything that might attract the dead. Diamond and Johanna were particularly frightened of the beasts and clung miserably to each other, their
eyes twitching at every sound. There were many terrible aspects to being a Corsair slave girl, but facing the dead had never been one.
Their fears came to nothing during the hike to the hospital, which was uneventful thanks to Stu who guided them through a debris field of a city. Although the buildings were structurally intact, the streets were a fantastic mess. Nine major highways fed into the city and in the final days of the apocalypse millions of people had flung themselves here and there, going every which way.
They had been like stampeding herds of buffalo constantly rushing away from danger or even the whisper of danger. People were desperate to get out of the city; people were desperate to get in; some thought there was safety to the north and some to the south—it had been all chaos. Safety had been an illusion because there was no safety in any direction. Death was everywhere, gas on the other hand had been nowhere and it hadn’t taken long to turn the city into one massive traffic jam.
Old dusty cars lined the streets, sitting so close to each other that in many cases they were irreversibly locked, bumper to bumper. Even the side streets were clogged. They hadn’t gone four blocks before they found their way utterly blocked. Moving slowly and cautiously, Stu crept up onto a Ryder truck and gazed down both directions and saw what amounted to a metal and glass wall. Ahead, he saw more streets blocked.
“Getting to the hospital won’t be a problem,” he said when he’d slid back down. “We’ll be able to lift the carts over the cars. Once they’re full, we won’t be able to.”
Everyone looked at Jillybean, most of them thinking they were done with the trip and most of them happy to be. They were cold and wet, and although they couldn’t see the dead, they could hear them just fine and the sound was enough to raise the hair on their arms.
They looked at Jillybean, but she was looking past them and their little problems. Blocked streets were nothing; they were a nuisance compared to the obvious danger around them. Didn’t they see they were surrounded? Didn’t they see how every one of the buildings in this city was teeming with shadows and each seemed to hide some sort of laughing, mocking beast. They had been getting louder and she was sure everyone could hear the taunts of Murderer! Baby Killer! Bow to the Queen of blood!
“What do you think, Jillybean?” Stu asked. “Should we try further up river?”
He had to ask her a second time and when he touched her elbow she jumped. “What? Up river?”
“I was thinking we should try to find a hospital further up river. Every side street is blocked. If we try to come back this way with full carts…” He left off with a shrug.
She shook her head to clear it as the whispers retreated back into the darkness. They had retreated but they weren’t gone. They were only hiding, waiting for everyone to look away. Jillybean put on her best fake smile. “What’s wrong?”
Stu gestured at the cross street which was as full as the main street they were following.
“Um,” she said, wondering what she was missing. Half the stores around them had their windows boarded over with inch-thick planks of plywood—wasn’t the solution to their problem obvious? “Jenn, you see it, right?”
Jenn smiled and tipped her a wink. “I’m actually embarrassed for them.”
Jillybean was as well but it wasn’t right to be mean about it. “Sorry about that,” she said to Stu and then shot Jenn a look. Shockingly, Jenn shot one right back. A dirty look. “I don’t know what’s gotten into…” Jillybean started but was surprised again as Stu grabbed her arm.
“Do you need to sit down for a while?” he asked.
“The way Jenn’s acting isn’t right. I think there’s something wrong with her.”
Stu pulled Jillybean away, moving beyond the bumper of the Ryder where they saw that it’s rolling door had been forced open. An entire home’s worth of goods had been pulled out and littered the street. There was something indecent about seeing a little pair of underwear resting on a car antenna.
“I need you to get a hold of yourself,” he whispered. “You left Jenn back at the warehouse, remember?”
Suddenly Jillybean did remember. A cold wave struck her as she asked, “Then who is that?” The girl pretending to be Jenn had parked one ass cheek on a faded dust orange Datsun. She wore a sly smile, one that was full of evil mischief.
Stu didn’t have to look to know she was seeing things. “The only women here are you, Diamond and Johanna. Jenn’s not here. Do we need to take a break? It’s okay if you need to.”
Jillybean hammered her eyes shut as hard as she could, her teeth gritted from the effort. When she opened her eyes, she saw there was no trace of the girl. “No, I’m good we can go on.”
He watched her carefully as he asked, “But what about the blockage? You thought there was a way around all this?”
“Not around, but over. We’ll take down some of these planks off the windows. They’ll act like ramps. If we chalk the bottoms and strap everything tight, it shouldn’t be a problem. Just a little more work, and who’s afraid of a little more work?”
It wasn’t work that she feared. It was the return of the girl, and she did return. They had just pulled down the second of the plywood planks when Jillybean caught sight of her in the depths of one of the stores, a galleria where overpriced pictures still hung from the walls or were plastered flat within acrylic, standing on pedestals.
She was behind one of these. Jillybean caught a glimpse of that awful smile, but in the dark, her auburn hair seemed brown and her blue eyes looked bigger and her chin sharper. It was a moment before she saw that it wasn’t Jenn she was looking at, it was herself.
Chapter 26
She didn’t need a break, she needed a cure. For ten years she’d been able to put off the worst aspects of her mental aberration by keeping to herself, by reducing her stress levels and by taking her carefully preserved stockpiles of pills. These three crutches were gone now.
“I don’t want to delay us,” she told Stu.
“You’re either taking a break or we’re going back.”
And have two hundred more murders on my conscience? she thought. “I’ll compromise. I will take a break and catch up. Leave Mike with me if you’re worried.”
He was worried and Mike stayed, leaning against the Ryder truck as nonchalantly as he could manage. It wasn’t as if he were afraid of the slip of a girl…not exactly. She was dangerous, that was true enough. In fact, when he considered it she was probably the most dangerous person he had ever met, mostly because you just didn’t expect violence from someone with such large innocent appearing eyes.
She sat on the stoop of a Kinkos with her eyes closed. He grew bored in two minutes. “Whatcha doing?”
“Silent meditation,” she answered without opening her eyes
“What’s that?”
She slumped, her eyes coming open. “Just something I’ve been trying. Without success.”
“Sorry. I can be quiet. Though I should know how long you plan on doing this for.”
“Don’t be sorry and don’t be quiet. In fact, I want you to talk to me about sailing. How to sail, in particular.”
The request made him distinctly uneasy. “Why?” he asked, unable to hide the suspicion in the single word. He had a perfect picture in his mind’s eye of Jillybean absconding with the Saber and leaving them stranded.
“Not to steal our boat, I assure you. I don’t need to know how to sail to steal it. I could let the current carry me. No doubt I could let it carry me right out to sea with minimal activity on my part.”
“Oh, I doubt you would get that far. There’s far more to steering a ship than just current. Gerry the Greek used to go on and on about angles.” Mike adopted the voice of an imbecile, “The angle of the wind will cancel the angle of the tide if the angle of the rudder is pitched just so many degrees and the sails are canted at blah, blah, blah. It’s all very mathy the way he describes things.” He gave a thumbs down while holding his nose. Then he remembered that Jillybean liked math. “Not that the
re’s anything wrong with that,” he added hurriedly.
“I take it you didn’t learn from Gerry?”
“Oh no. My dad taught me back when I was a kid. I was lucky I got to learn on the Calypso while everyone else was learning on this junky little sunny. My dad was a great sailor even though he was self-taught. He didn’t talk about angles, he talked about feeling the boat, like it was a part of you.” Mike broke off with a long look at a very old sunset that only he could see.
When he started talking about boats again, he was only partially aware that Jillybean was even there. At some point she had begun walking and he had come along without a pause in his narrative. She had no need to direct the conversation since there was no conversation. It was a lecture delivered with all the enthusiasm of someone in love with their subject and they both reveled in it.
Jillybean felt free of the lurking shadows as she became engrossed in Mike’s mind which was surprisingly deep when it came to sailing. He became poetic though she was sure he would be insulted by the comment.
Not even the passing of a pair of zombies derailed his train of thought and after she had thrown a marble far down a side street to distract them, he went on again without let up until they reached the hospital and found the others waiting anxiously.
“I could tell you more later,” Mike said, “but only if you really want to hear.” She actually wanted him to continue even then since he had distracted her marvelously and she feared she would need even more such distractions as the hospital was an exceptionally frightening place to both a displaced mind and to a normal one.
The darkness within was full, wide and deep. Candles barely pushed it back and when it did it revealed ugliness that struck a chill deep into all of their hearts. Something dreadful had happened within the walls. There were dried blood stains everywhere and there were bones still draped in rags. Frequently the rags were the remains of gowns worn by patients, but some were green or blue or pink scrubs.
The Queen of the Dead Page 25