The box landed behind them and immediately began to vibrate and bounce around, making a crazy laughing noise that went on for ten seconds before it began to speak again: “OOH. Elmo loves to be tickled there most of all. Hee-hee! He-ha!” It carried on, laughing and jitterbugging all over the ground.
Fascinated by it, the zombies forgot about the man who had disappeared through the bushes and the small green and brown plant that had gone with him.
The two went through a couple more lines of shrubs before racing north towards the town. Christian, his head on a swivel, looking left and right, a brick-sized rock in his right hand and his M16 in his left, began to grin as they got close to the small blip of a town. Soon laughter began chortling out of him.
“W-Was that from a Tickle-me Elmo? Did you really open one up and pull out its mechanical guts?”
“Guts? No, there wasn’t any blood or icky parts if that’s what you mean. It was just fluff mostly and that thingamajiggy. I needed something that would last a while but not use up too much in the way of batteries. It only uses two double AAs. I also got a Leaping Joggle Hopper, which goes a lot longer but it uses three of ‘em. And I got…have, sheesh Ipes. I have a few wind-up toys that’ll do the trick in a pinch.”
He began to nod appreciatively. “That’s some smart thinking. I might have to pick up a couple of those.”
“And you need a ghillie suit.”
He shook his head. “Hiding isn’t my style. I’ll fight or clear out. Trust me, I’ve been around long enough to know that hiding just gets you trapped and that’s the last thing anyone wants.”
“No, uh-uh. That’s the cool thing about the ghillie suit. It can also get you untrapped. It can let you walk right past a whole buncha monsters. Really, it’s true. I can walk right down the middle of that town and be perfectly fine. Wanna see?”
She yanked her hood back over her head so that only the tip of her nose was visible beneath all the strips of cloth. She started to break from the lines of shrubbery, but he pulled her back. “No, don’t do anything stupid. There sure do seem to be a lot of zombies for such a dinky-ass town. They’re crawling all over the place.”
“A-S-S is a bad word,” she said, giving him a hard look, “and that’s what means you’re not aposed to say it in front of children. Especially when you didn’t need to say it. If you had just banged your thumb with a hammer, that’s one thing but to just curse? Mister Neil would’ve called that crass and that’s what means…”
“Mister Neil can kiss my A-S-S,” Christian said. “Tell him I said that next time you see him. And tell him he needs to keep better track of his rag-a-muffins. They shouldn’t be roaming around getting in trouble and telling adults how to speak. If I want to say ass, then I’ll say ass all the ass-long day. Got it?”
We could kill him, a voice behind her whispered. She stole a quick look over her shoulder and saw only another of the long line of overgrown soy plants. The voice hadn’t really come from behind her and she knew it.
“No,” she said, under her breath before tilting her head way back and glaring up at Christian. “You know what I think? I think you need to apologize and that’s what means saying you’re sorry.” He snorted, rolled his hazel eyes and shook his head in amazement all at once. “Does that mean you’re not going to say you’re sorry?”
“Not to a kid who thinks she can tell me what to do. That’s not how the adult-child relationship works. The adult tells the kid what to do, where to go, and how to act, and you do it or you can leave. It’s as simple as that.”
She crossed her arms over the kitten printed on her green t-shirt. “Wanna know what’s even more simple? When you’re bad, you apologize. That’s what both my mommy and daddy said. And my old teacher Miss Monfit said that, too.” She assumed that ascribing the quote to an actual teacher would end the argument but Christian had the audacity to laugh.
It wasn’t a belly laugh or a snide laugh, but it was enough to turn Jillybean cold and again she heard the voice inside her head: When he’s sleeping. Do it then. Use the knife. Nice and quick like you know how.
She squeezed her eyes shut as hard as she could. She squeezed until her eyeballs hurt around the edges. This quieted the voice. But it would be back. It shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Stress was bringing it out of its hiding place. The fact was that Christian was a poor choice as a first companion. He was too bull-headed and too much her complete opposite. Jillybean thought it was a good idea if they went their separate ways.
At the unspoken decision Ipes’ beady eyes flew wide.
Are you sure? Just because he doesn’t have the best manners doesn’t mean he can’t be useful. He’s pretty handy with that gun. And you saw that car of his. He must be the best driver in the world. Think of all the cool places we could go. We could go to Disneyland, huh? I bet that’s on the way to the Pyramids. We could stop by and see the sights and ride the rides. What do you say?
“And be treated this way the whole time? I don’t think so, Ipes. Sorry, Mister. Christian, sir, but I think it’s time for me and Ipes to leave. Good luck with the car an’ all.” She stuck out a hand with stiff formality.
Once again, he performed the scoff, eye roll, and head shake. “Fine by me. Try not to get yourself killed.”
“You try not to get yourself killed,” she muttered after she had hidden herself beneath her ghillie suit, slipped through two more rows of shrubbery and was slinking away along a different lane. A part of her really was worried for him. He still wore the remains of the shredded white shirt, which was a beacon that she could see easily through the thicket ahead of her.
While she was creeping along with her usual patience, he had darted forward and was practically at the end of the fields. Speed, strength and stamina were his strong suits, but just then he faced open ground dotted with milling zombies. She figured that he would have no choice but to adopt her style. She was wrong. Christian darted out from the fields, heading toward the town as if on a line. He went straight down a dirt road, running easily, even as he came up to the first of the dead. Her next assumption, that he would kill the monster, was also wrong. At the last moment, he juked to the side, leaving the creature sprawled, face-first in the dirt.
This occurred once more to a second zombie and the rest were simply left in his wake as he added a touch of speed. Then he was gone, hidden by the buildings and the crammed together one-story houses.
I can’t believe he really left us, Ipes said, in shock. He is an adult for goodness sakes!
“We both know that doesn’t make you a good person. And he did make it super clear he didn’t want children around.” Jillybean sighed, feeling an unexpected ache of loneliness.
You still have me, Ipes said. What more does a person need than her very own zebra? And I’m a talking zebra to boot.
Jillybean agreed with more conviction than she felt. She was out in the wilderness of America for a reason, and it wasn’t to make friends. She was out there so she wouldn’t be a danger to anyone ever again. So far, she’d been able to deal with the solitude because she had Ipes and, up until she had seen Christian, she had thought he was enough.
“I’ll get used to being alone again,” she told herself as she tromped through the weeds, approaching the small town. It was so small that she could see right down the little two-lane road that cut the town squarely in half to where the fields started up again. “Hmmm,” she said, with pursed lips. It wasn’t much of a town and would likely be a bust as far as scavenging went. Christian wasn’t going to be able to get his tires here. “But I don’t care about that,” she told herself.
With her uncaring attitude forcibly in place, she moved to the southern half of the town. Christian was stirring up trouble in the northern part, however she pretended she chose the southern part because of its lack of monsters. “Even monsters become curious when they hear people snooping about,” she explained to Ipes.
Sure, that’s the reason, he said, which earned him a glare. I’m
just saying there’s not much here to snoop over. This is all industry and manufacturing. Look. Where are we going to get a new bike around here?
From the fading signs, it was obvious that the town supported two main businesses: a furniture manufacturing factory, which took up a fifth of the town all by itself, and a tremendous grain and feed concern with towering silos that could hold an ocean worth of grain.
Everything else surrounding these two businesses went towards assisting one or the other. Transportation franchises, a pallet depot, a lumber yard, machine shops and more. Everything was tiny compared to the two big companies. The houses were especially so. They were squat little buildings with tin siding and hollow aluminum doors. In most respects, they were not much than glorified shacks, sandwiched between businesses, which must have a dismal way to live.
The houses were certainly not kid-friendly and of the first six houses she poked her head into, not one sported a single family picture. The seventh, sitting in the very shadow of one of the mega silos, had a few battered toys in the yards and a rusted bike cast down in the weeds. She stood over it with a thoroughly dissatisfied look on her face. The tires, having peeled away from spotted rims, sagged lifeless as well as airless.
“It’s too big for me, either way.” It was a big kid’s bike. It had ten speeds and funky handle bars shaped like a ram’s horn. What she needed was a bike with a basket in front, a banana seat and tassels. “Let’s go on to the next house, for all darn…”
The end of her sentence lodged square in her throat as the air shook from an enormous sound. It had been a monster’s moan, only the monster would’ve had to be epic in size to make that noise. Instinctively, Jillybean sank down on her haunches and peered through the strips of cloth dangling in front of her eyes. The moan repeated and it was followed by a hollow, booming crash. Both sounds were like nothing she had ever heard before.
Was that a monster? Ipes asked. He was shaking as badly as she was. If so, it’s a monster the size of a blue whale.
“It’s coming from in there.” She pointed at one of the mega silos and then bent well back so she could see the top of the hundred and ten foot building. She had been in a silo before and hundreds of people had died as a result. The memory of that terrible night made her hesitate.
Why hesitate at all? You heard a noise. So what? There are lots of noises. We don’t have to investigate them all. And do you expect to find a bike in there? No, of course not. The only thing you’re going to find is something bad.
He was probably right about that. Still, she was drawn to the noise, her curiosity pulling her little feet forward, her common sense, keeping her huddled within her ghillie suit. There were three of the skyscraper sized silos and each of these had smaller, barn-sized attendant silos that surrounded it like little moons. The smell emanating from the closest was physically repelling.
It was so bad that it acted like an invisible buffer, gently urging her away, somewhat like the wrong end of a magnet would. Pulling her shirt up over her face helped a little, just enough for her to wobble dizzily forward, her teeth clenched and her throat locked tight against the vomit that threatened to come up. In a way it was an unnecessary torture that she was compelled to endure. The mystery was too much for her.
Each of the silos had doors of steel that seemed small compared to the enormity of the buildings. She went to the closest of the mega structures and although its door was thrown open, it was the least inviting place she had ever seen. In front of the door were piles of bones and half-rotted corpses. The flies lifted off them as she approached and formed a shadowy cloud that buzzed, alive and angry.
She couldn’t look at the piles. The millions of maggots writhing over them gave the illusion that the corpses were still moving and that one might just reach out and grab the little shrub-looking girl. Instead, she kept her eyes on the door, where a sound rumbled on the very lowest range of human hearing. She could feel the sound in her chest.
The source of both the sound and the horrific smell was a perversion of humanity that was beyond anything Jillybean had ever experienced before. An infinite number of flies filled the silo and their ceaseless hum drilled deep into Jillybean’s insane mind. They covered every inch of the interior in a black carpet and that included the zombie. She knew there would be one, but she was not prepared for the size of it. It was enormous, a mountain of a beast, at least eight feet in height, which was shocking enough, but it was its girth that was beyond Jillybean’s comprehension.
Jillybean had seen a hippopotamus once and as fat as it was, it was dwarfed by this zombie. Obese was not a word that could describe a belly that was twelve feet in circumference. It had rolls of fat undulating over more rolls of fat. Its arms were long, but so big around that they seemed stunted, and its head, although the size of a beachball, looked like little more than a button atop its gigantic torso.
In spite of its great size, Jillybean didn’t see it at first. Beneath the layer of flies everything was a uniform brown: the zombie, the walls, even the hill that the zombie lay on. The hill, which took up a quarter of the silo, sloped up and away. It consisted of equal parts feed grain, maggots and feces, and the zombie didn’t care which it shoveled endlessly into its gaping maw.
Are you seeing this? Ipes asked in a hollow voice. It’s eating a mountain of poop. P-double O-poop. And maggots. I’d puke but it would eat that, too. I know it. It would be like dessert for it. Like the cherry…urp…here it comes…
Jillybean stared upwards trying to ignore Ipes as he retched. High above her, she saw a brown line like a stain. It was where the grain had been. Unbidden, the formula to find the volume of a cylinder came to her: V = π r2 h. Simple. So simple that the numbers filled themselves into her head. Rounded down, she estimated that the beast had eaten 17,000 cubic feet of seed and who knew how much poop.
The girl and her zebra stared for nearly a minute in complete revulsion and were only jolted from the sight by the sound of a gunshot. “Christian,” Jillybean whispered. The name was swallowed up by the sudden explosion of sound and fury coming from the creature. She expected it to move with something of a sloth-like lethargy, however the opposite proved true. It was deadly fast.
5-
It roared so loudly that Jillybean was both partially deafened and stunned. She was still cringing when she saw the thing charging headlong for the door. A light, unheard shriek escaped her as she ducked away and ran leaping over the smaller piles of corpses before hiding behind one of the larger ones.
She tucked into a little ball and watched from beneath her drawn hood as the titanic creature plowed into the door.
The door was larger than an average door, but the beast was so huge that it got stuck, but it wasn’t for long. Greased as it was in its own filth, it slowly squeezed through the door and, as it did, great gouts of feces and grain spewed from its mouth in a fountain.
“Oh, by golly,” Jillybean whispered in complete revulsion. She began gagging, loudly. Its eyes were tiny in its huge head; like pig eyes, she thought as it turned and looked right at her. It had heard her!
Don’t move, Ipes whispered. It can’t see you. Just remain still and it will think you’re a bush. Just a tiny bush. This was a lie that was proven seconds later when one of its huge arms suddenly “popped” out of the layers of fat. It reached a huge hand towards her.
She was ready to bolt but Ipes forced her to be still, but she couldn’t, not entirely. Her muscles quivered and her heart raced so fast she thought her flesh was pulsing with the beat. Thinking that her hair was giving her away, she slowly ducked further into a ball until she was completely hidden beneath her hood. Still, the thing reached and slowly squirmed its great bulk through the door. Ten seconds before it finally spilled out of the silo, her nerves shattered. She leapt up and ran for the house with the rusting bike and the scattered toys.
Along with toys there were chuck-holes in the yard and she tripped in one, going end over end as the beast let out a roar. It was so loud that it
felt to her as though it was yelling right over her shoulder, but when she turned it had just slipped from the silo and was now charging her way, its layers of fat flapping up and down. It was immeasurably faster than she was prepared for.
Fear surged through her, turning her numb. Running on wooden feet, she pelted for the door, betting her life that it would be open—it wasn’t. The knob held firm as if it had been welded in place. There was no actual porch, only three cement steps and a black wrought-iron railing, which she leapt over and sprinted for the side of the house, dodging between an old Camaro sitting on flats and a pokey juniper bush. The frothing, horrible beast was right behind her.
Small and quick as she was, she was able to take that corner with ease. The beast could not control its momentum and plowed into the Camaro full force. Twelve hundred pounds of fat and muscle smashed in the driver’s side door and shattered every window and knocked the car back four feet with a grinding metallic squeal. The monster didn’t even seem to notice the car. Its piggy eyes were filled with a fire of hate. All it cared about was eating her in one gulp.
The thought turned her numbed muscles limp. She ran, but it felt like she was going slower and slower, as if she were running in mud or sand. Somehow, she made it to the backyard before the monster ate her. There was a tall wooden gate that was partially opened; she darted through it with the monster so close that when it slammed its full weight into the door, it sent planks and shards of wood flying.
She was hit by a chunk of two-by-four and sent sprawling. Going with her momentum, she rolled and was up again, her size eight Keds kicking up dirt as she ran, looking back over her shoulder. The monster had fallen among the debris of its own making, but was already getting to its feet.
The door! Ipes cried. Unlike many homes, this one did not have a sliding glass door leading to the backyard. The door was wood with a square window taking up most of the top half. It would take the monster all of a second to destroy it completely and yet Jillybean felt relief flood through her: the door sat miraculously canted open a few inches.
The Undead World (Book 12): Jillybean & The First Giants [An Undead World Expansion] Page 5