This last brought cheers from the renegades.
Brad was all smiles, warm assurances and glib talk of an easy trip across the plains under his guiding hand and to the renegades, whose reality had been constant strife and storms, his words were all sunshine and rainbows. They were happy at their sudden good fortune and, as they climbed up into the baking hot five-ton trucks, they were giddy and laughed. Even Deanna, who looked upon Brad with all the suspicion a sparrow has for a cat, managed to smile in hope.
They plowed down the road, the Camry leading the three trucks, and Neil was just starting to think that this time everything was going to be all right when he glanced in the side mirror and saw the second truck in the line flashing its lights.
“Oh, boy,” he whispered. Louder he said: “Grey, you better stop. Something’s wrong.”
There were four of them in the cab. Sitting next to Grey was Jillybean, who had been on her best behavior—meaning she was acting like her old self. Neil was next to her and then came Arlene staring lifelessly out the window; she was even whiter than ever and there was perspiration in her lank hair. She had to be feeling the virus start to kick in.
Out of habit, Neil supposed, Captain Grey pulled over to the side of the road. It wasn’t at all necessary, there wasn’t any other traffic on the road besides the usual scattering of stalled-out cars that sat low and hunched on flat tires. From a distance, they had a predatory look, like lions on the verge of pouncing. Up close, the illusion gave way to reality. Invariably, the cars were littered all around with brilliant shards of glass and, most of the time, the ground was strewn with the possessions of the one-time owners. This never failed to depress Neil. Though what was worse was when the road was stained black with old blood or when there were bones bleaching in the sun on its hot surface or when they came across ragged sheets of discarded skin looking like rat-chewed piles of dusty clothes.
Grey stopped just opposite one of these metaled corpses. It had been someone’s baby. A four-door Mercedes which, at one time, had the same value as the average three-bedroom house. Now it sat covered in dust, its tires flat and the trunk popped open. Lying on the hood was the half-consumed corpse of a baby boy. From one of the windows, a torn, blue blanket flapped in the breeze. The captain didn’t give it a second glance as he leapt down out of the cab.
When his door slammed, Arlene jumped a little and then looked around as if just coming awake. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, dully, and opened her door. She eyed the dead car on a “just in case” level and then climbed out, favoring her wounded leg.
As leader, Neil couldn’t just sit there, worrying, he had to go and actively worry. “Stay here,” he said to Jillybean, though he didn’t know why. The land was parade ground flat. The road had been cut between two immense farms and, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but fields. These were in that halfway stage in their reversion back to nature: stalks of corn sat in clumps here and there, but they were wild grown and stunted from lack of proper watering. Between the clumps was waist-high prairie grass: bull grass and poke mixed with windblown wheat and barley. There were no zombies in sight.
The honest truth was that Jillybean was likely the most dangerous thing within ten miles.
Jillybean didn’t answer Neil or even acknowledge he had said a thing. She simply stared at the baby on the Mercedes. The staring was another side effect of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that she suffered from. It was seemingly harmless, but Neil liked it less than the plotting looks she would give him. What would happen if the staring became permanent? What would happen if that big brain of hers just shut down forever? Death, obviously.
“Hey, Jillybean, look at me.” He gave her a gentle tap on the shoulder. Anything more would have had her leaping out of her trance with her claws raking at his eyes.
Slowly she turned her head and began blinking. “Do you think Mister Brad will let me ride his horse?” she asked.
“I don’t know, sweetheart. He’s not riding his horse anymore. He’s in that Camry.” Neil pointed at the car. Very slowly, as if the girl was drugged, she turned to look out the front window. “I think one of his men back at the barn has the horse.”
“The horse was better,” she whispered. There was a pause and then she said in a deeper voice: “I agree.”
Neil kept the smile glued in place. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” Her eyes clicked over from the tired look to the plotting one in a blink, but she tried to hide it by giving Neil what she thought was a smile. It was really a combination of a sneer and a look of disgust. It wasn’t pleasant. “Ok, then,” he said when he couldn’t think of anything better, and then left her.
Fred Trigg, hanging out of the back of the five-ton asked Neil as he hurried by: “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t tell from here, now can I?” Neil answered, just managing to hold in his irritation. “Do me a favor and keep everyone in the truck. I know it’s hot, but if this is nothing, we’ll want to get moving right away and rounding everyone up is like herding cats.”
Someone said: “That’s not fair. They get to get out.” People from the other trucks were climbing down to stand around the back of the middle truck. Neil didn’t like the look of it. The way the men stood and pointed and the way women held themselves anxiously, meant it was undoubtedly a mechanical issue.
Grey came trotting back to the first truck. “Flat tire,” he announced to everyone. “Michael doesn’t have a spare and…crap, neither do we. Let’s hope Ricky’s got one or it’s going to get cramped.” Thankfully, the last truck in line had a spare. It was unslung from beneath the undercarriage and rolled to the middle one. Soon Captain Grey was sweating with the rising heat of the day, and cursing as he tried to loosen the dozen lug nuts off the shredded up original. They seemed welded in place.
“Is there an issue?” Brad asked, jovially. Wearing his strange shift of scarves, he came strolling up, drinking from a water bottle, the sides of which were damp with condensation as if it had just been pulled from an ice chest. Neil stared at it in open desire; he couldn’t remember the last time he had a cold drink. Just looking at it, made him suddenly parched and he swallowed what felt like equal parts sand and sweat.
“Just a flat,” Grey answered. He looked up to see the water bottle. His eyes narrowed before he went back to the lug nuts. “It’s nothing we can’t handle.”
Brad chugged the last of the water, ran a multi-hued sleeve across his mouth and then casually chucked the plastic into the ditch beside the road. “Good. We have a long way to go before we can get to the first safe zone in Stafford. You don’t want to get caught out on the prairie when the sun goes down. There’s no telling what may happen.”
In spite of the warning, he didn’t seem worried. For a good part of the time they were stranded there, he sipped his cold drinks or snoozed in the shade of the truck while the three very friendly women who had accompanied him in the Camry went among the renegades with smiles and pleasantries. They were very charming and chatted harmlessly about supposedly inconsequential things. Neil watched nervously, afraid that someone would let slip where they’d been and who they were; there were times when the renegades had all the innate sense of a flight of pigeons.
Surreptitiously, Neil gathered a member of each of the different factions: the Gates family, the prisoners freed from Gunner’s prison, and the women who had escaped from The Island. They stood behind the last truck looking confused about Neil’s nervous behavior.
“I know I’ve said this before, but we need to tell everyone not to talk to Brad or his women about anything more serious that the weather. If it gets out who we are and where we just came from, we’ll be screwed.”
“We’re not idiots,” Ricky answered. “Everyone knows what’s at stake.”
When they slipped back to join the others, Ricky was proved, at least partially incorrect. Twenty three of the renegades were chugging from cold water bottles and exclaiming that they had never tasted such refreshing wa
ter in their lives.
“Tell me those are free,” Neil hissed in a whisper to Sadie who was sitting in the shade, fanning Eve with a shirt.
Her Goth look appeared to be wilting with the July heat. “I wish. They’re asking ten per bottle.” She shook her head as Neil blanched at the waste. “Why do we bother with them, Neil? Sometimes it just doesn’t seem worth it to me.”
It was a good question and one that Neil had asked himself a number of times. All of the fighting and the scrambling and the constant hurt had taken a toll on them. Neil was battered physically, Jillybean was cracking mentally, and Sadie was starting to break emotionally. She had kept a stiff upper lip when Ram had died, and, when Nico and Sarah were murdered, she had managed to keep up a façade of toughness, but now that she had killed in cold blood, she walked around in somewhat of a fog. The only thing that seemed to keep her sane was Eve, whom she kept within arm’s reach day and night.
“I don’t know why we bother,” Neil admitted. “Maybe it’s because we’re supposed to be the good guys.”
Sadie dropped her chin at the idea of being a good guy. “Good guys don’t murder unarmed prisoners,” she said in a whisper.
“It wasn’t murder, Sadie. You know that. What happened might lie in a grey area, I don’t know, but it wasn’t murder. You were being held against your will in an armed camp. Legally speaking, nothing you did was wrong.”
“I killed Lindsey and I k-killed strangers, Neil. I killed people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and I killed…I killed a man when he was on his knees. He had given up, Neil.” She began fanning Eve faster, blowing the wisps of her hair back and forth. “He said he wouldn’t tell. He said I could go and no one would know, but I couldn’t trust him, so I killed him. I shot him in the back of the head, execution style. Neil, do you know what that makes me?”
“Human?” Neil said as quickly as he could before she could spit out the words: an executioner. “You did what you had to in order to save me and to save Eve and Captain Grey. I think we both know what would’ve happened if you had let that man live.”
“What about the guard at the front door? Or what about the man I ran into out in the parking lot? Or the guy on the stairs? What about them? I killed them all. I didn’t even say a word. I didn’t ask them their names or if they were nice or anything. I just killed them one after another. Bang, bang, bang! At first, I was ok with it. You know I was like you. I made excuses and pretended that it was ok. Now I dream about it. In the dreams, I just kill people. They’re not even bad guys. Sometimes they’re not guys at all.” Her eyes flicked to the baby.
She was whipping the shirt over Eve now and the baby girl was blinking in confusion. “Hey! Slow down there,” Neil said putting out a hand to slow the shirt. He tried to smile with his warped and butchered face; Sadie glanced at him once and then pressed the shirt to her eyes.
“In my dreams, I’m like Jillybean. I just a….” She choked, a muffled sound through the shirt.
“How are you like Jillybean?” a woman’s voice asked. Both Sadie and Neil jerked and glanced up to see one of Brad’s women standing above them. It was one of the bushy brunettes. She had a knapsack filled with cold water bottles. She held one out to Neil. “Please take one. Brad says they’re free for you.”
“No,” Neil said. “Thank you, but no. We can’t afford…I mean they can’t afford it and I don’t want to set a bad example.”
The woman seemed pleasantly perplexed by his answer. “I could hide it for you and they’ll never know. Here, I’ll put it in this scarf.” She took a scarf from her chest, revealing a surprising amount of cleavage. Neil’s eyes slipped down to take in the supple curves, but only for a second and then he shook his head and acted as though the baby was of greatest interest. “Suit yourself,” the woman said. She too looked down on the baby and broke into a wide smile. “Is this Jillybean’s sister?”
Neil kept quiet, letting Sadie answer, hoping she would find some ray of happiness in talking about the baby. She was slow to answer, and spoke only a single word: “No.”
The brunette cast a quick look back to where Brad was sitting, surrounded by the renegades. They had roused him and now he was laughing and smiling and was quite the contrast to dour Captain Grey who worked nearby with a snarl on his lips. “Can I hold her, please?” the woman asked. There was a note of honest desperation to her and after only the slightest hesitation, Sadie held up Eve like an offering. “She is precious,” the woman said, speaking almost to herself.
For just that moment, the woman was herself. Her guard came down and Neil saw her perhaps as she had been before the apocalypse: pretty, sweet, motherly. By her look and the ease with which she had taken Eve, he guessed that she had been a young mother. This begged the dreadful question: where was her child? He didn’t want to know the answer.
“How did she manage to live, I wonder?” the woman asked. “And Jillybean…are her parents alive? Are they among you?”
“No,” Neil answered, reaching for the baby. “And if you don’t mind that’s a touchy subject. I would prefer not to talk about it.”
The woman’s false exterior sprang back into being. “I will not pry then, but what about you? Neil, is it? Those look like bite marks on your face. Were they from a zombie? Does that mean you’re immune? News of a vaccine has reached our ears, but there are so many rumors that we don’t know what’s true.”
Neil didn’t know how to answer that without giving away the fact that he had been to New York recently. That could lead to many questions that he shouldn’t answer. “Car accident actually. If you’ll excuse me, I have to get this show on the road.” As he handed Eve back to Sadie, he gave her a covert, warning look not to say too much. He then went to where Grey was straining at the rusted-over lug nuts. “What can I do to help?”
“With your hand and your arm, I doubt there’s anything.”
With barely a grimace of pain, Neil lifted the arm that had been dislocated, not quite a week before. It was stiff but useable. The hand where his left ring finger had been bitten off was another story; it was a constant nagging pain that never left him, even in sleep. “I’m doing better. I can get you some water at least.”
He retrieved the water from the truck and, though it was hot as piss, it seemed to help Grey’s mood. Nothing helped the lug nuts, however. Brad offered the use of another truck—at a ridiculous price, of course. Grey turned him down. Brad then offered to bring out his personal mechanic, again at a hefty cost. Grey just shook his head and went back to work. Finally, after a delay of nearly two hours, the last of the lug nuts came loose. Quickly, the spare was hefted into place and the old shredded up tire pushed to the side of the road.
Then Grey was barking orders, yelling the renegades into their trucks. Hot and tired, Neil, Deanna and Grey climbed up into the cab. They were about to leave when Neil realized he hadn’t seen Jillybean in all the time they had been pulled over and she wasn’t in the cab. “Stop! Where’s Jillybean? And where’s Arlene?” A shiver ran up his back as he pictured what Jillybean could be doing to Arlene even then.
Grey let out a groan over the further delay. He had worked the hardest and his BDUs were sponge-like with sweat. Deanna patted him on the thigh. “Me and Neil will take care of this,” she said and then, much to the surprise of both Grey and Neil, she climbed over the soldier, her full breasts practically in his face, and hopped out through the driver’s door.
“Well, ok,” Grey said.
Neil went out the easy way, muttering: “Lucky bastard.” He expected Jillybean to be quickly found: she was likely in the same truck with Sadie and Eve, or perhaps playing a game with ten-year-old Joe Gates with whom she had an uneasy friendship.
She was in neither spot and Arlene was nowhere in sight. Deanna and Neil checked beneath the trucks and in their hot and crowded beds, asking the sweating and annoyed renegades if they had seen either. No one had and when they reached the back of the third truck, Deanna was panicking. She star
ted to run to the nearest stand of corn when Joslyn, who was in the last truck and standing high up on its back gate, cried: “There she is.” Joslyn pointed back the way they had come and far down the road, Neil could just make out a little lump of yellow.
Both Neil and Deanna took off at a run, though with the heat baking up off the black top, they were quickly exhausted and staggering. Neil felt near to passing out by the time they came up on the little girl. Strangely, she was carrying a piece of black rubber from a tire in the crook of her arm where Ipes had used to sit. When Neil turned her around, he saw that her eyes were vacant and unfocused.
“Hi,” he said gently. “Where are you off to? Just taking a stroll?”
She blinked slowly as though just waking up. She looked around without recognition as to where she was. “I don’t know. She had an idea about wheels and…and that’s all I remember.”
“Do you mean Arlene?”
“Who…oh, no, not her. I mean the other girl. You know.”
The mention of the other girl within Jillybean never failed to elicit a painfully fake smile from Neil. He was at a loss about what to do with this other person. He hoped that by doing nothing and ignoring the problem it would just go away. So far, that hadn’t been working, but Neil wasn’t going to give up. They were still on the road. They were still fleeing from danger and there was no way of knowing what danger was still before them. When they got to Colorado, things would be different and he would reevaluate her situation and perhaps his plan to deal with it.
“That’s ok,” Neil said, soothingly. He reached out and brushed a stray strand of her fly-away brown hair from her eyes and added, “No harm, no foul.”
Jillybean shook her head. “But I think there will be harm,” she whispered as though disgorging a vital secret. “She wants to hurt people.”
“And she hasn’t seen Arlene?”
Jillybean shook her head. This was both good and bad. They were still missing one renegade.
The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) Page 8