“I-I won’t go away and I don’t think I can forget anything. I’ve got a real good memory. It’s not really eidetic; that’s what sorta means photogenic…oh, right Ipes. Photographic. I don’t have that except a little. Either way, I won’t forget you or the big monsters or Darwin or none of it. And we shouldn’t sit here and wait…” For you to die—she bit that off, quickly and choked as she did.
She attempted a second smile, this time through pursed lips so the quiver in them wouldn’t show. “We don’t have to go to Minnesota. Ipes just thinks we should do something, you know, something nice. For you. Oh! I know what we can do. It’s something you’ve always wanted to do.”
“Busch Stadium,” he said, with just the tiniest grunt of laughter. A shade of his old smile crept back, only to slip away. “It’s probably too far. If I got infected four hours ago, I only have a few hours left.”
“It hasn’t even been four hours and I know how far it is to St. Louis. I saw a sign! It’s only 134 miles. If we hurry, we can make it.”
The smile grew brighter until it was at full force. “Okay, let’s do it. Maybe this will turn out to be nothing and if so, we can always come back and loot the town. And I know we can get some racing slicks for the P1 in St. Louis. We’ll be the baddest duo on the road.”
His excitement and energy lasted only an hour. This was long enough to jumpstart the truck with the purple flames, fill it with gas and get twenty miles up the road. As the minutes ticked away, he grew tense and angry. Sweat ran from his thick hair and built up in the hollows of his eyes.
Jillybean dosed him with enough Oxycontin and Tylenol to put a normal man in a coma, however Christian seemed barely affected. For the next hour, she plied him with more pills and quarts of water. Nothing helped, except talking about baseball. Despite her ignorance of the game and the lack of any desire to ever learn anything about it, she encouraged him to talk as he weaved the truck up Highway 67.
He rambled on and on as they dodged traffic jams and monsters and piles of trash that made little sense being on the highway. He talked about players he had been fans of, which was boring to the little girl, and he talked about the myriad of rules, which had her fighting to keep her eyes open. It was only when he started to explain about batting averages and slugging percentages and ERAs, and splits and ratios and all the other numbers that made up the game that he piqued her attention.
Math always excited her. “But if a batter gets on because of a fielder’s choice, that still counts against his average?”
“Yep. It sucks.”
Her many questions and growing enthusiasm kept him semi-lucid until just after they passed a sign that read St. Louis 21 MILES. “What did that say?” he slurred, looking back. A second later, the truck crashed into a guard rail. “What was that?” he cried, glaring around. Sadly, his hazel eyes were almost black now. “Who hit us, damn it?”
Jillybean tried to tell him that they had run into a metal rail, however he was borderline delirious at that point and growing more and more dangerous with every passing second. He even pulled out a long-bladed knife and held it as if ready to attack the windshield.
“I was wrong, Jill,” he told Jillybean. She had to drag her eyes from the knife.
“A-a-about what?” she stammered. Ipes had fallen to the floorboard during the crash and she was all alone. Christian looked as though he could change over at any second.
He squeezed his eyes shut as hard as he could and his teeth made an awful grinding noise as they clenched together. “Darwin,” he growled, surprising her with the answer. She had expected more baseball talk. “You should go to Darwin. Yes.” He smiled, suddenly. It was a maniac’s grin. “You can learn a lot there. You can learn how to live. I wish I had gone. I wouldn’t be here now if I had. I would be with my kid. I’d be dead for sure, but I would be with my kid and that would be okay. It would be an okay way to die. Instead I have this.”
For a second, Jillybean thought he was going to slash his own throat with the knife. Instead, he fumbled with shaking hands at the door latch, pushed his way out into the evening and dug in the bed of the truck for his M16. “Don’t watch,” he warned in a hoarse whisper. “The pain’s getting bad. Really bad. And it’s not going to get any better.”
He didn’t shoot himself there on the ground. The city was twenty-one miles away, so he climbed up into the bed to catch just a grey glimpse of it on the horizon. “Remember Darwin,” he told Jillybean.
She was choking on tears and sniffling back boogers by then and couldn’t speak over a squeak. She nodded and he said, “Alright then.” Although he had long arms, he was shaking with the disease and he couldn’t get the barrel aimed right and pull the trigger at the same time. The bullet that exploded out of the gun took out his cheek and right rear. It knocked him flat on his back, where he moaned and dribbled a puddle of dark, dark blood.
The sound of the gun shot echoed for miles and rang in her head threatening to tear her mind apart.
But she couldn’t give in to the desire to slip away and let whatever dark thing inside her take over. She had a job to do first. Christian wasn’t dead. Seven-year-old Jillybean had to kill him, and she did it properly, her eyes wet, but blank and her hands steady. She was somewhere else when she pulled the trigger. She was imagining a magnificently green baseball field in Darwin, Minnesota. The bases were snowy white and the air smelled like brats and hotdogs sizzling on the grill.
The End
Author’s End Note:
The Queen told this tale in a flat monotone voice. It came out quickly, without emotion or even inflection. It was almost as if she were speed-reading a story of someone else’s life. I tried to ask her questions however she only blazed right through and I had to struggle to catch up. The only time she allowed the least bit of emotion was when she was repeating, verbatim, the rookie batting stats of Christian’s favorite players.
She wore a smile for a few moments after she’d stopped speaking, perhaps remembering the taste of ballpark grilled brats. She then stood up and walked to the far end of her cell and faced the wall. After a minute, I assumed she was reflecting. After five, I thought she was rudely dismissing me. I stayed of course, saying nothing, not making a sound.
We were an odd pair. I, the esteemed writer, she, the imprisoned sociopathic queen. I both loathed and admired her. It was the little girl she had once been whom I loved. She was the reason I came back every few months and risked my life to talk to her.
When the Queen finally turned, she surveyed me, taking my measure as she always did, making me feel transparent and utterly worthless.
“That was unexpected,” she said. To a woman who could foresee a person’s thoughts and actions five minutes before they actually thought or acted, this was a compliment.
“Indeed,” I replied. “Chris Turner wasn’t nearly as imaginary as I thought. He was Christian, wasn’t he? He was Christian to a T. Athletic, brave, carefree, handsome.” My eyebrow raised slightly at the last word. She saw it of course and knew exactly what I was implying.
As she made no move for a few seconds, I had to wonder if I had carried my familiarity a touch too far. Her smile told me I had not. “Yes, he was all that, and more. He was perfect in every facet, except one. He was unlucky. He had the misfortune to have met me.” Her chin dropped and for a moment, I caught the sparkle of a tear.
They had known each other less than a day, and that was thirty-five years before, and still she had feelings for him. It was strange to me to see even a single tear from the woman who was secretly called the Ice Queen.
“What did you do after he died?” My question concerned Darwin, Minnesota, however her mind was still taken up with Christian.
“I buried him in Busch Stadium. He played centerfield so I figured I would bury him there, only when I arrived I discovered there was a mounded hump already right in the middle of the bases. Naturally, I assumed someone had beaten me to the spot and that there was someone buried there. So, I picked a spot ou
t in the grass, which, coincidentally enough is where the position of centerfielder is actually played.”
“Oh,” I said, not knowing what else to say. As far as I could tell, the game of baseball had died and had been buried along with Christian Niederer; I knew next to nothing of the sport.
“There wasn’t anyone buried in that mound, either,” she added, speaking softly, almost to herself. Her blue eyes had taken on a dreamy state. “I realize only now that the mound was just the pitcher’s mound.”
I said, “Hmmm,” in answer to this bit of trivia, paused for just a moment and then began to ask, “After that, did you…”
“Did I go to Darwin, Minnesota?” The Queen was back. She smiled without warmth. “If you had asked me that question yesterday, Ezekiel, I would have laughed and asked Darwin where? Today I will tell you that yes, I have been to Darwin and Christian was right. I learned a great deal. Even though it only played through my subconscious, what I learned changed how and why I lived.”
I pressed her for what she meant, I cajoled, kissed up, and begged, but she only smiled enigmatically. I knew her. She was going to make me travel all the way out to Minnesota to find out what made Darwin special. Naturally, I exhausted every piece of reference material available to me before I even considered going. Nothing mentioned the town which was not even a dot on most maps.
I went to her cell twice more before she escaped, and during both interviews she mentioned Darwin; each time with that infuriating twinkle in her eyes. The town grew in my mind until I realized that I would have to go. I had to find out what could change a person’s life so completely.
During the early spring following her escape, I set off with a trading caravan that wound through the High Sierras and then through the Rockies to Denver. Once on the plains, I found another caravan that was on a trading mission through the Azaels and out to the Missouri River crossing at what had once been the Colonel’s Island. Only the rusting barbed wire remained. Even the scorch marks had been buried by nature.
Going north from there, I was on my own. Three weeks later I found myself sitting in Darwin, picking fishbones from my teeth and contemplating the thing that had filled my head with such wonder and had magnetically drawn me across the country.
Before reading the faded sign, I didn’t know what I was looking at. It was an immense brown ball sitting in the deteriorating remains of a gazebo. The sign read: Largest Ball of Sisal Twine Built by a Single Person. Official World Record.
“What the hell,” I whispered and flicked a fishbone off my tongue. I couldn’t understand why I was there. For the tenth time, I went to the ball and ran my fingers over the ridged exterior. “What the ever-loving hell?” I yelled and thumped the meaty part of my fist into the ball. Once again, I walked in a circle around the ball. It looked the same coming or going.
I stayed in Darwin for three days and left without a clue as to why the Queen had sent me on the longest wild goose-chase in the history of wild goose-chases. I had to assume that I had either angered the Queen or I had been talking to Eve. Either way, I was in a fury for days, months even.
I was still angry when I came across the Queen a little over a year later. She was a guest of a bandit king, while I had taken a wrong turn, a very wrong turn. This time it was I who was behind bars. It was a decidedly unpleasant experience. It made sense to swallow my anger.
“Ezekiel,” she said, holding out her hand. I didn’t hesitate to kiss it as I desperately needed her on my side; the word “spy” was being used in conjunction with my name.
Her appearance had changed since I last saw her, shaven and clad in soft, pink velvet. Her hair was shoulder length and growing wilder by the day. From head to toe, she was dressed in black; it made the alabaster of her skin almost glow. Her hand was softer than I remembered and I had to force myself not to cling.
“I’ve seen your pages concerning Christian. They were good, but I noticed you left out everything concerning Darwin.”
Since the work hadn’t been published, this meant she had gone through my belongings; a gross violation of my personal privacy. “Well…” I said, struggling for an answer that wouldn’t alienate the one person who could help me.
While her smile remained friendly, her eyes blazed into me with such intensity that I withered and dropped my gaze. She said, “Hmmm,” and turned slightly, touching the bars of my cage. “You didn’t understand.” It was a statement—not a question or a guess, but a statement. Although I had kept my destination secret, both before and after, she knew I had gone simply by looking at me.
The statement had been oddly touched by sadness, which only made me feel worse. Truly stupid people made the Queen sad.
“No, I did not understand and I still don’t understand. Why would Christian want you to go to see a ball of twine? And why did you want me to go? The only thing I can guess is that maybe it was some sort of running gag, or that I had angered you in some way, or that…”
She was shaking her head. “What did you see there?”
Suddenly I was worried that I had made a three thousand mile trip and had missed something glaringly obvious. “I saw the ball.” She nodded for me to go on. “That was it. There was nothing else in Darwin. The only thing that makes that town different from a thousand others just like it is a useless ball of twine 12 feet in diameter.”
“Exactly,” she said, with that same sad smile. “It’s a ball that weighs 17,400 pounds. The man who built it went round and round that ball, wrapping it for four hours a day, every day for twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years. It was his sole achievement. His entire life’s work.”
None of this was news to me. I had seen the damned ball with my own eyes. “It doesn’t seem like much of a life to me.”
“Exactly!” she cried. “That was exactly the point of the journey. That man literally went in circles every day of his life, building a monument to the tenacity of mediocrity. It practically screams: Average! With the technology available, he could have built his own pyramid. In twenty-nine years, he could have built twenty-nine houses for the poor. He could have done almost anything to inspire greatness, instead, with the freedom given to him, he wrapped twine around more twine.”
I felt her meaning slowly dawning over me. “Christian didn’t want you to be average? Is that why he sent you on this…quest?” Wild goose chase would have been a poor choice of words just then.
“That’s right. He saw something in me. He wanted me to be great and I’ve tried to live up to that expectation. The question Ezekiel, is can you be great? You’ve been given the unique opportunity to see the extremes: on one hand, perhaps the most wasted life imaginable, and on the other you’ve seen my life. Which would you choose?”
I answered honestly, “Neither. I think a happy medium would be best.”
She grinned and there was a touch of Eve in it. “And yet you find yourself here.” She tapped the bars. “It’ll take more than someone existing somewhere in the complacent middle to get out of here alive. If you don’t find a spark of greatness inside you, I’m afraid you won’t last a month. I’m sorry to say that Mago is reopening his arena.”
A cold shiver swept me. I wasn’t cut out for the arena. It would chew me up and spit me out. “Will you help me?” I asked her. Begged was closer to the mark.
“Mago has been kind enough to offer me shelter. Do you really expect me to throw his hospitality in his face?” With half the country hot for the Queen’s blood, I knew she would never consider it. My chin dropped. “Ah, don’t be like that. You’ve been studying for years. If I could get out of here with ease, I know you can too.”
She left me with the warmest smile she had ever given me. Mine in return was weak and brief. I had no idea how to get out of this prison or any prison for that matter.
Ezekiel Cross
The Prison of Mago The Mad
April 29th 2050
***
The story of Jillybean can be found in the 10 book series: The Undead World as well a
s its spin off series: Generation Z. If you enjoyed this story, please take the time to leave a positive review on Amazon and maybe your Facebook page. If you didn’t like it there may be no helping you. Please call your mom and tell her you love her.
Now that you’ve read this and have caught up on all my other zombie books, maybe I can suggest The Sacrificial Daughter.
Jesse Clark is about to find out there is something worse than being hated and friendless in a new school: the murderer living next door. Having just moved to Ashton, Michigan she’s shocked to discover that it’s home to its very own un-convicted serial killer. Flaunting the police, the killer roams the forests in search of his next victim, looking for that 'special someone'. This year that someone is Jesse Clarke.
Stalked by a ferocious murderer and set against an entire town, Jesse's life becomes a torturous hell that only grows worse when she falls for the one boy who can't possibly love her without killing her.
What the readers say about The Sacrificial Daughter:
"If you want a fantastic story about a girl with guts, this is it."
"A powerful, emotional book. The story builds along with Jesse's suffering until I just wanted to chuck the book at the wall and punch the first human I come across..."
"Emotionally, it's a study in loneliness executed with power I haven't seen since Ender's Game (and maybe not even then).”
Chapter 1
There was something behind her.
In the forest.
A sound came out of the black shadows of the pines. A small sound, a human sound. It was the sound of a branch running along nylon. It was an accidental sound and it stopped quickly. Whoever had made it hadn't meant to. They wanted to be quiet instead. They wanted to be sly and slick.
It brought her up short. Jesse spun around, peering into the dark, holding her breath, trying to listen with every part of her. Even her skin seemed sensitive to the least vibration of the still air. Nothing stirred.
The Undead World (Book 12): Jillybean & The First Giants [An Undead World Expansion] Page 10