“I played a little kickball and some tetherball. You know.”
“I bet you were one of the best,” he told her. It was nice, but untrue. She had never been particularly big, strong or fast, and, unlike the boys who reveled in dirt and enjoyed a good sweat, she preferred games where her innate talents could shine. Few could rival her in hide-and-seek, for instance.
She shrugged off the compliment. He didn’t notice; his eyes were set faraway, dream-like. “It may sound terrible, but the apocalypse has been somewhat freeing for me. I got no more money issues, no more people telling me what to do, no more responsibility. For most people it’s all about death and pain, but that’s life anyway. We all die. We all get hurt. We all feel sadness.”
“You don’t look too sad,” Jillybean noted. She didn’t hear even a hint of sadness in his voice. “Because you really aren’t. You said you didn’t have parents, which means you didn’t have to watch them die. You also didn’t have brothers or sisters. And since you bounced around mining and farming and playing ball, you didn’t have a wife or kids. You didn’t really lose anyone, did you?”
He lifted one arm in a what-can-you-do half-shrug. “Nope. I’ve been lucky and smart. I don’t stick with groups because they all get ripped apart one way or another. And I don’t make any long-term attachments, you know, girlfriends, that sort of thing, because someone always ends up hurt. And I definitely don’t take in strays.” He shot her a look just in case she missed his meaning.
“I’m not a stray. I have a home.” Possibly, she didn’t add. All she had to do to fit in back in Estes was prove that she wasn’t a crazy murdering sociopath.
I could be a character witness for you, Ipes said. I could tell them that you haven’t killed anyone for almost two weeks. That’s practically a record for you.
She was about to agree that her self-restraint had become nearly superhuman, but Christian had begun speaking again: “I keep to myself except for the occasional trade or the quick roll in the hay here or there when the opportunity presents itself. It’s all for the best. I get to roam around doing my thing.”
“And what’s your thing?” Jillybean asked with a hint of nervousness. Her friend Ricky hadn’t just shown her his family jewels, he had shown her his “thing” which had been just as weird.
“Living the high life,” he said, with a grin. “You saw that McLaren. Back before the apocalypse, that baby was just a dream. Only mega-rich dudes could afford those babies. Same’s true for this scope.” He held out his rifle to show her the fancy scope attached to it. “State of the art thermal scope. Guess how much it was?”
She couldn’t even begin to shrug before he answered his own question. “Almost eight thousand dollars. Look at it. It’s a freaking thing of beauty.”
It looks like a gizmo to me, Ipes said. Like one of them video game toy thingies.
Jillybean was equally unimpressed, and the more she thought about the race car of his, the more she thought it really wasn’t a practical car. She didn’t bother telling Christian this, partially because he seemed to love it so very much and partially because he hadn’t stopped talking about this fancy type of whiskey that was a hundred dollars a sip or the priceless sword he had carried at the beginning of the apocalypse that had once belong to some famous revolutionary general.
“And look at these.” He fished in his backpack for an eight-inch white tube. She was surprised when he let her touch it. “Go on, open it.” Inside was what looked and smelled like a very large, brown cigarette. “That is a Gurkha Black Dragon. A thousand dollars a piece.”
“It smells icky.”
He chortled over this observation as he cut off one end of the cigar and lit the other with a gold lighter, puffing at it like an asthmatic dragon for a few seconds. The smell of smoke wasn’t altogether bad, in fact she found it intriguing.
A sigh escaped him. “I know. It’s captivating, isn’t it?”
“Maybe a little. So, that’s what you do? You go around in your fancy car picking up fancy stuff?”
“That’s not all I do, but it’s what I like to do. Just like jumping off bridges is what you like. To each their own is what I say.” It seemed like a very shallow sort of existence in Jillybean’s mind and she was about to say so, however just then Christian added, “As long as you’re not hurting anyone, I say do what you want.”
This shut Jillybean up. She had hurt thousands of people, which meant she was the last person to comment on someone’s life choices. “I guess that’s smart. Maybe I’ll start doing that sort of thing, too.” In a way, she already was. She had cast herself loose from her family to find her best friend and since then she really hadn’t been in a rush to get back. To put it bluntly, she had dillydallied for the last two weeks, moving somewhat westward in fits and starts, without ever committing to actually traveling.
“Sure,” Christian told her. “It’s a great life. Just remember, don’t start batting those baby blues my way. This is a one-man traveling show. Now if you have an older sister, maybe our paths might intertwine a bit longer.”
“I do, but she’s all the way in Colorado.”
He paused with his cigar clamped between his lips. It kept them from puckering as he said, “Colorado, hmmm. There’s a lot of rumors out of Colorado lately.”
Jillybean felt a little tremor start on the edge of one shoulder and track across her back to the other. She remained perfectly still, except to raise her downy eyebrows. “Oh really? It’s been months since I was there. Did something happen?” Like did the largest bandit kingdom in America drive ten-thousand zombies against a small outpost in the Rockies, only to be defeated by tremendous courage and the terrible genius of a seven-year-old? She didn’t dare ask this.
“Just that there’s been trouble,” he answered. “Probably nothing to worry about. From what I hear, it ended well. I might even take a trip up there…in a few years.” He added this last part quickly, even though Jillybean hadn’t reacted. “Right now, I’m on a baseball stadium tour. It’s pretty boring stuff; you wouldn’t like it. St. Louis is next on my list. Busch Stadium is supposed to be pretty with the Gateway Arch visible over the centerfield wall.”
He wore a peculiar dreamy look as his hands came together like he was holding an imaginary bat.
“Man, I would’ve given anything to play in the bigs. Fifty thousand people going crazy, cheering, screaming your name. Girls throwing their…” He stopped suddenly seeing Jillybean eye him curiously.
“Throwing their what? Did girls play baseball, too?”
He shook his head. “No. They’d just throw things to you if they liked you. But that was in the bigs. The girls in some of those little crap-hole towns I played in, eeesh! Ten years in the minors and I’ve seen my share of girls that make some of the zombies look good. And on dollar beer night, it would get downright ugly.”
“I think I’d want to see other places than just empty baseball stadiums,” Jillybean said. “I don’t really know what, though. Everyone talks about seeing New York but it was really scary.”
“Oh, I have a full list.” He had it out in a second. “The Eiffel Tower. The Empire State Building. The Sahara Desert. Kodiak Bears on whatever river they fish at. The sunset from the Golden Gate Bridge. The Pyramids.”
Other than bears, the only thing she had ever heard of were the pyramids. She’d had a geometry book that had a picture of them in it with an accompanying caption: The Pyramids of Gaza, Egypt. Of all the mathematical sciences she had explored, she had found geometry, with its simple formulas, the easiest subject she had ever studied. Strangely, geography was one of the more difficult.
At a certain size, maps existed in the abstract. Borders were invisible lines that no one cared about anymore, oceans were vast, impassable barriers, and distance had regained a sixteenth century perspective. A trip to Egypt was something to dream about, not something a person would ever undertake.
“I know the way to St. Louis,” she told him and pointed north. “I can take
you there if you want. It’s kinda dangerous if you’re not careful.”
He threw his head back and laughed a great belly laugh. She understood perfectly that it must be a little weird to be given advice about danger from a little girl. She was used to it; she had to put up with it from a stuffed zebra who had never been to preschool. Still the advice was clearly needed. His bright shirt, his way of walking, tall and direct, and his booming laughter had already caught the attention of some of the monsters in the town.
She saw three of them lurching their way.
Without a word, she slunk down and to the left next to a row of strange, frantic plants growing in chaotic confusion. They were in a farmer’s field where a twenty-acre crop of overgrown soybean plants had mingled with shoots of corn, high, thrusting sunflowers and cottonwood saplings. Added to all of this were old dead branches and viney weeds. The long orderly lines of plants were now unrecognizable. They had become ugly, melded, greenish walls that marched on further than she could see.
Christian and Jillybean were somewhere in the middle of these rows, but with the plants growing so high, it was hard to tell exactly where. “What are you doing? Do you have to go to the…” Christian started to ask. Then he saw the danger coming. He wasn’t exactly overcome with fright. Casually, he lifted the rifle to his shoulder.
“We could hide you know,” Jillybean said. “It’s almost always the safest thing to do.”
He flicked off the safety and said, “Here’s a little something you should learn. Always kill them when you can.”
She was just about to reply when he fired the gun and blasted a fist-sized chunk from the head of the first of them. It collapsed, its legs and one arm spazzing in a sickening manner. The two others were shaggy and disgusting female monsters which came on even faster, excited by the gunshot which echoed in the still air.
The air was not still for long. It was soon rumbly and growly. Jillybean lifted slightly so she could see beyond them and over a little swell in the field.
“I agree,” Jillybean said. “You should, but only when it’s safe. Look.” She pointed past the two closer monsters at the mob of ragged undead coming behind them. Even more suddenly began to crash through the wall of shrubs across from them. They were filthy, more brown than grey as if they had just risen up out of the earth.
4-
“Ahh, son of a bitch!” Christian growled, giving a long look around. “This is why I don’t pick up strays. If you weren’t here, I’d just run away. No harm, no foul.”
“Please run away,” Jillybean urged as the two female monsters drew closer. Somehow, they had both retained their bras and no other stitch of clothing. “I’m not in any danger.”
Unless he keeps shooting and you keep talking, Ipes reminded her.
Much to Jillybean’s disappointment, Christian wouldn’t leave her. “No. It wouldn’t be right. I told you about karma. I’m pretty sure that if I let you die, it’ll be bad ju-ju for me. Just sit there and try not to be a problem.”
You heard the man, Ipes said.
“I did.”
So why aren’t you sitting there not being a problem? What you’re doing looks a lot like a problem to me.
As Christian stood, firing his rifle and knocking down zombie after zombie in a wonderful display of marksmanship, Jillybean had grabbed the gas can and was dousing the wall of shrubs just behind them.
If you use up all his gas, he’s gonna be pissed off, Jilly. Jilly? Jilly! She used up all the gas.
“I had to,” she told him, pulling out her own lighter—a battered Zippo she had painted flat black. She lit the bushes. Christian turned to stare as twenty linear feet of shrubbery went up in a roar of flames. He choked when he saw the empty gas container tossed to the side. “I had to,” she explained. “You don’t have enough bullets.” By doing a quick, five-second analysis using two random subsections of the attacking monsters, she had calculated that there were at least a hundred and six coming at them, and she knew Christian had only brought along three magazines. Even if he killed one with each shot, there would still be at least sixteen to deal with, though she figured it would be closer to double that number because no one was that good of a shot.
“And now I don’t have enough gas!”
“I had to use it to save you.”
“I don’t need saving. I’m the grown-up!”
In her experience, grown-ups needed saving all the time. She ran and grabbed his hand, thinking she would pull him to a four-foot section within the flaming wall of fire where she had not poured any gas. There was a gap near the ground to crawl through. She yanked on his hand and he yanked back. She strained even harder; it was like trying to pull an oak tree through a door and she almost pulled her own arm out of its socket.
“We have to go!” she shouted. The summer had been a dry one and the plants might have gone up even without the gas. She could see his pursed lips and knew he was saying, Hmmm though she couldn’t hear it. “What’s there to think about?” she demanded. “The smoke will hide us. We can escape.”
“I know, which is why I was thinking that this might be a good time to take off. Most of them would come after me and you could go do what you like to do on your own.”
He wants to leave me in the middle of all this? Her eyes went to slits as her mind turned to a dark place where there was nothing but screams of rage and howls of pain. It was in this dark place where she kept the murderer. She tried to tell herself that she had expelled the beast, but that was just a lie that allowed her to sleep at night. The murderer was still there, eager to get out, eager to kill. In fact, she was eager to kill Christian. She would use the bowie knife, cutting the tendons behind his knee when he turned to run away. He would fall and the monsters would be on him in…
Jillybean! Ipes yelled. He was loud and his voice was very daddy-like. It brought her back, but it did so with a touch of reluctance.
Ashamed of herself, she couldn’t look at Christian as she said, “You can still run. I won’t hold it against you. But you better hurry.” Every second drew the undead noose around them ever tighter.
Indecision gripped him until he finally groaned, “We’ll talk about it later, but I wasn’t going to ‘run.’ I was going to draw them away. There’s a difference, you know.”
He’s talking now, Ipes hissed, frantically. He said later, so why is he talking now of all times?
“I don’t know. Through there, Christian and shut up for all darn it!” She pushed him towards the gap. Instead of crawling through the gap, he charged through the whole shrub, more like a football player than a baseball player. Jillybean leapt through behind him, and behind her came a raging wave of undead, howling and spitting.
On the other side of the flaming wall, the two of them found the exact same thing, more monsters crashing through the lines of shrubbery in a long wave. Jillybean and Christian were caught in the middle.
The smoke from the fire was like a low mist that cast the entire battlefield in a grey pall. It threw the undead beasts into such a state of confusion that the two waves collided and monster attacked monster with such savagery that the two humans were almost lost in the chaos.
If she had wanted to, Jillybean could have slunk away, hidden from the world by her ghillie suit. For his part, Christian could have raced through the crowd untouched. Neither gave in to the temptation.
“Follow me,” Christian hissed. He stooped and picked up a rock. With it, he smashed in the head of the first zombie that noticed them. The bloody rock bounced away. He then used the butt of his rifle on the next creature, smashing it square in the face and knocking it down. Although it fountained black blood all over Christian, it didn’t die and nearly tripped him up as he ran past. Stumbling, he fell into the next row of shrubs but bounced off the thickest part of it.
“Through here,” Jillybean whispered and shot through a narrow gap.
The gap was kid-sized and when Christian tried to get through, he lost half of his white t-shirt. The sharp bran
ches tore it open in three spots and one particularly grasping branch refused to let go and had to be broken off by hand. It was just as well in Jillybean’s opinion; a white shirt had no place in a world full of monsters. It was just silly.
This new lane between the shrubs was populated only by a handful of zombies, most of whom were so lame that they were having trouble getting through the plants. Jillybean had little to fear from them. Still, there was no time to rest. The battle between the two zombie waves had ended as quickly as it had begun and now monsters were going in every direction, their nearly useless brains bewildered by the smoke and the fire, which was burning merrily, and would likely eat up the entire length of the twenty-acre long lane.
“This way,” both Christian and Jillybean said at exactly the same time, both heading for different holes in the next line of plants. They grinned at each other before each took their own route to the next lane. There were more zombies here, faster ones.
“Put that zebra away and find a rock,” Christian ordered.
What’s he think you’re going to do with a rock? Ipes asked as she stuck him in his usual spot on the side of her ghillie-hidden pack. You can’t run around lugging about a big rock. And what good would one rock do against them?
Six shuffling, groaning monsters were heading their way; two to the right and four from the left. Beyond the next line of shrubs, there were probably dozens more more and behind them were the hundred they had just escaped.
Fighting could not be the answer.
Jillybean reached into a side pocket of her backpack and pulled out a strange-looking black square that was slightly larger than the palm of her hand. Flicking it on, she gave it a squeeze. “OOH, Elmo loves to be tickled,” the box announced, loudly.
Christian had been stooped over, picking up a rock. At the sound of the voice, he jumped and spun in surprise. He stared with a slack jaw at the box. Jillybean pointed through the next line of shrubs. “Get us through there.” She then tossed the black box into the air and began to push Christian.
The Undead World (Book 12): Jillybean & The First Giants [An Undead World Expansion] Page 4