Stu’s mind should have been going a mile a minute, but instead he felt slow and stupid as he tried to come to grips with what she had said. “How do you know they’re coming?”
“Because we know evil,” Jillybean answered in the strangest voice she had ever used. It went up and down the scale, somehow hitting only discordant sour notes. “We know how it thinks. We know its anger and its fear. We know its lust for power. Jenn is right to see death in the signs. If we are correct, this can only end in death.”
Jillybean paused, staring out, her eyes filled with the fire. Suddenly, more than ever, Stu wanted to believe signs and omens were nothing but bull, only he had a terrible feeling that Jenn might have actually seen something significant.
Was there any chance she could unsee it? Or perhaps see a way around their fate? Or to see…
Jillybean broke in on his thoughts, in that disconcerting voice, “Jenn tried to hide the severity of her vision, only she’s too innocent for lies. It’s what we love about her. She’s such a dear, dear lamb. A lamb so easily led to the slaughter.” For just a moment a hateful look emerged from the netherworld of Jillybean’s subconscious. Slowly, her head wagged until the look was gone and there was balance again, though it was a precarious balance.
Stu didn’t want balance, he wanted answers even if they came from Eve. “And you want us to fight the Corsairs?” he demanded, baiting the evil out of Jillybean with a contemptuous snort. “You want to fight them with a bunch of sick, diseased people? That’s ridiculous.”
“Are you calling me ridiculous?” she asked, her words forming crystals of ice as her eyes darkened until there wasn’t even a suggestion of Jillybean within them.
This was Eve and Stu knew he had to tread carefully if he didn’t want her to go from talking to stabbing. “I was calling the situation ridiculous. Are you really on board with a battle? Or is this all Jillybean?”
“It’s never all Jillybean!” Eve snapped. “Though that’s what she wants you to think. Oh, man I hate her guts. She’s always taking the credit for everything, but the truth is, that stupid little bitch couldn’t make it on her own. She’d still be talking to that dumbass zebra if it wasn’t for me.”
Eve was quite prepared to go on, expounding on Jillybean’s many faults however, Stu hadn’t summoned her to hear an hour long diatribe.
“So you want a battle? You know, these people…your people are too weak to fight. You won’t be queen of anything if you do this. Is that what you want?”
He felt altogether shoddy for going around Jillybean like this, but her plan to take on an army of Corsairs with a few hundred people who had been on death’s door two days before was, well, it wasn’t right. They’d be slaughtered.
Eve scratched the underside of her chin for a moment considering. “I do like the idea of being Queen—do this, do that! Off with her head!” She laughed and it was a cruel, sordid noise that rang like someone was drumming on a kettle. “But at the same time a battle sounds wonderful.”
She looked wistfully off at a scarred landscape of blood and broken bodies, where the sky was the color of smoke streaked with the yellow-green of chlorine gas. She could almost smell the spent powder and the gangrene turning the stumps of limbs black. A sigh escaped her and she smiled. “I just can’t decide.”
Stu growled, “Then what good are you? Do you at least know how she plans to fight them?” A detached and altogether flippant shrug was her answer causing Stu’s fist to ball in a display of useless anger. With an effort he controlled himself and asked, “Okay, do you at least know how many are coming?”
Eve turned her haughty gaze towards him and her smile gave a hint at the coming of winter. “All of them, I don’t doubt. Enough to grind us under their heel. Enough to make an example of us. That’s what they want. They want everyone to fear them. It’ll be an orgy of blood and it won’t be quick, either. It’ll be like a feast. Course after course of torture and rape. Oh, they are absolute gluttons for rape. It’s sick what they do to the women, but it’s nothing compared to what they do when they get a girl, you know, a young girl like Jenn.”
She was about to go on when he choked out, “That’s enough.”
Everyone knew what the Corsairs were like. They had a wicked reputation for unimaginable horror. It was a reputation they cultivated and built upon every chance they got. It was this reputation for evil that had allowed eight of them to take over the warehouse and its two hundred and forty people. It was this reputation that filled Stu with terror.
“That’s enough?” Eve laughed, a shrieking cawing sound. “What? Are you afraid to hear the truth? What a pathetic loser! What a complete wimp! And you have the nerve to doubt us? You doubt our fortitude? You doubt our conviction? Why do you think she chooses battle? Because death is the only good choice you have left. If you puss-out and run they’ll hunt you down. They’ll get the weak ones first, but in the end they’ll get you, too Stu Currans. Then, instead of going out in a blaze of glory, they’ll drag your sorry, cowardly hide out from beneath some rock and they’ll make you scream like a pig.”
He knew she was right, which was why he desperately needed a third choice. “So you of all people choose battle? Even though you don’t have a chance of winning?”
“First off, doorknob, you should know by now that I never lose. I’m sure you’ll all die horrible, horrible deaths, but I’ll be fine. I always am. Jillybean will think of something to save herself. Either that or she’ll have some fool throw his life away for her. Do you know anyone like that? Someone she has eating out of the palm of her hand?”
Stu was that fool. Eve saw the second this struck him and her peals of laughter were louder than ever. They rang out and echoed along the empty buildings causing a few of the shambling dead to pause on the way to the fire. She didn’t care and she didn’t care about Stu, which bothered him greatly since she wore Jillybean’s face, and made him feel worthless with Jillybean’s lips.
“I’m tired of you,” he told her. “It’s time you crawled back down into the pit where Jillybean keeps you.”
“I’d like to see you try to make me. I know your tricks. All you got are math and science, and I know more about both than you ever did. Tell me, hick, you ever learn to read? I’m talking books without pit-chers.”
Stu took a calm breath and the calmer he became the more nervous and guarded she grew. “Do you remember last night?” he asked when her smile slipped away to nothing.
Her eyelids drew down into wary suspicious slits. “Parts of it. I remember blood. Lots of blood. And I remember a knife, but not the good kind of knife. It was the tiny kind. Tiny but so sharp that it could go through flesh as easy as drawing a line with a pencil.” She hesitated, unsure of herself. “Why? What happened last night? Did you wet the bed again? Did wood-ums have a bad dream?”
She was on surer footing making fun of him and the sadistic smile was back as she prepared to dish out more. Stu was an easy target because he never fought back. Jillybean had him turning in circles, chasing his tail just to please her. “You’re like a dog, you know that? You’re her little poodle that fetches and rolls over and…”
“You were with me last night.”
Three unconnected and incoherent syllables fell out of her mouth before she took control of her tongue again and demanded, “I was where?” He didn’t say anything, he only smiled and smiled and smiled while she became more furious by the second. “What happened?” she seethed.
The smile remained fixed, however he added the smallest shrug which told her everything. “No! We didn’t.”
“Yes,” he said, quietly, “we did. You remember.”
The way he said this, so calmly, so softly, he was like a hypnotist and she couldn’t help herself. Her eyes lost their focus as she tried to remember. She could see herself stepping over the rail of the Saber, no not stepping, she had straddled it, so she was face to face with him. “We kissed,” she said, distantly feeling that ghost of a kiss.
He stepp
ed closer, standing tall above her. Again, he said, “Yes,” and now he bent and their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.
It was the tiniest and the softest of kisses, yet the sensation of it grew until her lips were warm. Eve wanted more. She wanted to remember more and this was her undoing. The more she wanted it the more she faded into the background.
It was Jillybean who touched her own mouth, smiling at the memory of the night before. The memory had been a good one, so it was strange that there was a touch of disquiet running through her, and there was something not quite right the way Stu looked at her. He was trying to be cool about something. She knew when he was trying as opposed to simply being his natural cool self.
“Eve is gone,” she told him, carefully noting how his demeanor swiftly changed. He went from cool to cold. “What did she tell you? You know she can spin a lie as easily as breathing.”
“I don’t think she did this time. She told me the truth about why we’re going to San Francisco. She told me that the Corsairs are coming. Was that a lie?”
She turned to stare at the fire again. That raging fire had been her last memory before Eve had come. She remembered thinking that fire was beautiful in its way. She had always liked fire. “Man’s first complex tool,” she said, indicating the blaze. “If Greek mythology is to be believed it was given to us by the Titan Prometheus and in return for his benevolence he was tortured by Zeus. Every day he had his liver eaten by an eagle and every night it grew back.”
“Are the Corsairs coming?” The fact Stu repeated himself was not lost on her. He was outraged that she had kept the coming attack hidden from him.
Jillybean’s mind was, by necessity, compartmentalized and the part of her that had grown so fond of Stu wanted to apologize. That part of her wanted his smile back. She was desperate for it. He was falling for her and it had been never since someone looked at her the way he did.
And she was falling for him right back—and that was all well and good, yet a different part of her noted that the smoke from the burning fire had swung around. The winds had changed. Whatever global phenomenon which had kept the winds coming from the south had relented at last. If Jenn knew what Jillybean did, the girl would have proclaimed the winds another sign, and not a good one, either.
The Corsairs were coming but how close they were was anyone’s guess. Jillybean only knew that the winds which had been against the Corsairs were now with them and she could picture black sails billowing outward as they filled with air. In her imagination there were hundreds of them, so many they blotted out the sky.
“I will explain everything once we are away,” she told him, turning from the fire and from Stu, striding back towards the warehouse.
“You mean you’ll explain once it’s too late, don’t you?” He said this with his voice raised almost, but not quite, yelling. Stu so rarely raised his voice that it stopped her when probably nothing else would have.
She grew quiet and still, utterly unruffled in the way only she could get. It was in these elusive moments that Stu thought no one ever seemed more fit to be queen than she. “It’s already too late,” she whispered.
This sounded so ominous that whatever he might have said next was struck from his slack mouth. Before he could recover, she turned and marched on. He jogged to catch up, falling in silent step with her.
His mind kept spinning, very much akin to a broken record. The words: it’s already too late ran in a useless loop over and over again.
In stark contrast, she was deep within herself, running down the possibilities contained within the dwindling choices left to her. Of course each choice contained sub-choices and each of these held even more, so that the permutations of possibilities ran into the hundreds. Most were dead ends, literal dead ends in truth as their only logical conclusions would lead to the death of her people.
She was still hunting through the immense number of permutations for one that would end in some form of victory over the Corsairs when they made it back to the barge where people were milling about.
Immediately, she began issuing orders in a long, continuous string. And although she might have been described as a whirlwind of activity before, it was nothing compared to the frenzied mania that gripped her now.
Every able and slightly able hand was called for, organized into teams and driven to the breaking point. Twenty of the cargo containers were emptied completely, cleaned until they were as dirt free as a ballroom floor, jacked up and then trundled out on heavy duty steel dollies.
As the only confirmed mariner in the entire group, Mike was put in charge of getting the containers on board the barge. The ones Jillybean had chosen were twenty feet long, seven feet wide and weighed five thousand pounds apiece, and since there were so many of them, they had to be set on the deck perfectly.
Using field glasses, Jenn watched him work from the roof of the warehouse three hundred yards away. Having been up all night, she should have been resting instead of staring at the boy who was doing a man’s job.
That was how she looked at him and in no way did she think the term “boy” disparaging. How could she not think of him in such a way? He was almost always with Stu who was very mannish with his leathery skin and his hard stare. Compared to Stu, Mike had a childlike temperament and was as cheerful as Stu was grim.
She was sure he thought the same as her. Compared to Jillybean, Jenn was practically a baby. Other than her name and her style of dress, Jillybean was a complete adult. She was an accomplished surgeon, a scientist and now a queen. Jenn was just Jenn; she was only fifteen and hoped to remain, at least mentally, always something of a girl.
Unlike real adults who seemed to just exist more than actually live, as a girl she got to discover life and the world as if it had been invented just for her. In particular she got to discover love. And her love for Mike had been a slow burn with many stops and starts, and with a hundred distractions in the form of death and zombies and desperate battles.
But it persisted steadily and was the reason why she sighed with dramatic sweeping breaths every time she stole away from the few remaining patients in the warehouse to come up and spy on Mike.
He and thirty others were gathered around one of the containers, working with handspikes, shovels and metal pipes to push the heavy box right up against the edge of the barge.
The rest of the people were going back and forth in long lines emptying the warehouse of food, ammunition, weapons, water, medical supplies and everything else that wasn’t nailed down. They were like ants, trudging without pause. They were tired and pasty in the white light.
They made Jenn sad and once more she shifted her gaze to Mike. He was golden from thousands of days spent on the deck of one boat or another and when he got the container set perfectly his white teeth flashed. Jenn smiled along. However, something caught her eye that killed the smile entirely. It was the smoke from the fire.
Just as Jillybean had foreseen, Jenn took one look at the burning building and the shifting smoke and felt a tremor go through her. Did it have meaning? she asked herself. “Not everything does.” Still the juxtaposition of Mike’s beaming smile with the black smoke heading their way dampened her spirit and she was just about to head back down when Shaina came through the stairwell door.
Shaina stood, swaying gently, almost drunkenly, holding to the knob, as if her rickety body was uncertain whether it would keep her up. When she decided she wasn’t going to faint or fall, she squinted around in the bright light until she saw Jenn.
“I hate to bother you, but we was gonna get Miss Rebecca a shower but she doesn’t wake up no matter what. She ain’t dead at all, but I think it’s a coma that’s got her, but I’m not the expert like you and the Queen.”
Jenn wasn’t an expert either, not even close to one and wished no one had wasted time coming to look for her. She rushed past Shaina, nearly knocking the frail woman over with the wind of her urgent passing, and was down the zigzagging stairs in seconds.
Mi
ss Rebecca was dreadfully pale while at the same time a grey pall seemed to hang over her. Jenn looked around and saw the line of marching people across the warehouse and picked out the fittest of them. “James!” she yelled, her voice booming in an echo. “Get the Queen!”
He ran off at the double, while Jenn knelt down next to the woman. At first it was simply because people were looking and she wanted to appear as if she were actually doing something. Then she realized that Jillybean would have expectations of her.
At the least she would expect Jenn to take her pulse. She tried to find the radial pulse at the wrist but simply could not get a feel for it. The now familiar thrum would come and go, ghost-like. Jenn was forced to bend over the woman’s torso and put her head to her chest to hear the heartbeat which was uncommonly slow and strangely jerky in its rhythm. Her breathing was slow as well.
While she was bent over her, Jenn noticed a stale smell and upon further examination saw that she had not just wet herself, she had drenched herself.
Jillybean came hurrying up just then, accompanied as always by Stu. Just as Jenn had guessed, Jillybean wore the exact look of expectation she had imagined. Jenn told her of her findings which cast a cloud over Jillybean’s face.
“It sounds like she’s suffering from hypokalemia. It’s a condition caused by a deficiency of potassium. Normally it’s treatable but now, here, I don’t know. But what if it’s something else?” She walked away suddenly, her hands forming a steeple beneath her chin as she paced and thought.
“What else could it be?” Jenn asked.
This stopped Jillybean. “Was that a question or a statement?” Jenn blinked in confusion and Jillybean answered herself: “If it’s a question, the answer is it could be a hundred things and she’ll die before we figure it out. But if it’s a statement, a very self-assured statement I might add, then we get to treating her.”
She paused and Jenn wondered, Is she putting this on me? “Is the treatment hard?”
“It’s actually simple. We put a nasogastric tube in and force feed her a mash of potatoes.”
The Queen of the Dead Page 31