Brad took them north for a few hours and then swung them west, so that the sun was blazing right into their faces. Jillybean slept, her face calm for the first time that day. She was pitiful even in sleep. There were raccoon circles under her eyes and she was so pale Grey could see blue veins showing through her skin. At least in sleep she appeared sane.
Eventually, Brad guided them onto a highway where a sign pointed them to a town called Ringwood Station. According to the sign they were eight miles out. Seven miles later, with the sun touching the far horizon, they came upon the town’s limits. It wasn’t delineated by signs or the sudden appearance of buildings to show they had arrived and yet there was an official marker: hanging from a telephone pole were the bodies of eight people. They had been hung by their hands.
Oddly, they hadn’t been hung from individual poles, though there were many along the road. They had been strung up in a clump, so that they looked somewhat like fish on a jig string. Even more disgusting was the fact that they weren’t dead. They were zombies but judging by the bite marks on them, they hadn’t been strung up as zombies. Each new victim had died, jerking and squirming among rotting living corpses that had eaten off of them slowly. It seemed a very hard death.
Brad pulled over with the dangling corpses in full view. Grey started to slow, however Neil pointed for him to go further on. “Not with Jillybean here,” he whispered. Grey motored them another hundred yards before pulling over. For some reason, this put Brad in a foul mood.
“You just can’t go where you will,” he said, leaning out of the driver’s side window and yelling over the top of the truck. “The Duke won’t put up with it and you saw back there what he does to those who break his laws.”
“Thank you, but the warning seems unnecessary,” Neil answered. “We’re paying customers and we have done nothing that can be construed, by any sane person, as unlawful.”
“Who says we’re sane?” Brad laughed. “This is a crazy world now, Neil. It would be good for you to come to grips with that.”
Jillybean whispered: “I could live here if they’re crazy.”
Neil wanted to say something to that, but Brad said: “The town’s a little further on,” and then ducked back into the truck. He spun dirt behind his wheels and sped down the road, where, in the failing light there appeared to be a grey wall between them and a little town. It looked clotted and shifted like a river fouled with the refuse of a million backed toilets. It smelled like that, as well.
It turned out to be another horde of zombies, trudging in an infinite circle around the town. Their feet had worn the dirt into a trough that was already several feet deep. Beside them at hundred yard intervals were more of the riders. Their wings sprouted silver lines that dazzled when the light struck them. They kept the zombies moving and could, at a command, send them washing over any enemy.
Brad stopped the truck convoy well back. “Wait here,” he said to Neil in the lead truck. “I have to get permission from the Duke for you to enter the town.”
“Duke?” Neil asked in surprise. “I thought you had a king.”
“We do. It’s one of the ways the Azael has grown so large so quickly. Among the other benefits of joining, the King offers titles to those leaders who command large numbers of men. It’s all about vanity, and stroking egos. You’d think American men wouldn’t be so quick to jump at the chance of a title, but they are. I’ll be back soon.” He gave his horn a beep and the winged riders kicked and prodded the zombies back with their spears until there was a hole big enough for the truck to zip through.
The renegades waited in the dusky dark. The first stars were beginning to poke through the veil, when Brad returned, this time in his Camry. The women were no longer with him. Instead, three armed men, looking surly and dangerous sat in the car. “The Duke has agreed to see you, but be warned, he’s in a mood. It seems things on our western border aren’t nearly as calm as they had been.” He said this while giving Grey a significant look as he walked away.
“What’s that mean?” Neil asked when Brad left, fading to a dark shape. A second later, he was gone and there was only the sound of him opening his car door with a creak and a thud.
“More tricks no doubt,” Grey answered. “Another way to scam us. If there was really open warfare, they wouldn’t have said anything. They would’ve slit our throats in our sleep or drugged us and sold us into slavery.”
Jillybean snorted at the idea. “They could try.”
Next to him, Deanna gasped and when he looked over, there was a flash of silver. The seven-year-old was holding a knife as long as her forearm and the gleam from it was nothing compared to the wicked look in her eyes.
Chapter 15
Sadie Walcott
They crossed through the zombie barrier in silence with everyone huddled down. In the lead truck, the other girl in Jillybean sulked in a silent and dangerous fury. Her knife had been snatched from her by the lightning quick hands of Captain Grey. She rode with a bitter twist to her lips and narrowed blue eyes. In the next truck, Sadie shook on the inside as she listened to the mob of zombies. They were a reminder of what she had done to Lindsey. The dark-haired teen was a killer just the same as Jillybean, but she didn’t have the luxury of hiding her sin and evil nature behind the skein of a phantom inside her. No, Sadie had to embrace the fact that she had murdered and not just once.
She knew there had been other ways to get out of the predicaments in which she had found herself in besides pulling that trigger those six times. Every time the sun fell and the others slept, she had gone over the evidence meticulously and her inner jury had always come back with a guilty verdict. She was a criminal. Perhaps an unconvicted criminal but a criminal nonetheless.
She figured the town would be pretty much a repeat of Cape Girardeau. There was evil in the eyes of the winged riders. They were definitely not angels, they looked on the renegades with greed and a hungry lust. Sadie shrank back whenever they trotted near, keeping low so that she couldn’t be seen above the sill of the truck’s window. On her lap, baby Eve squirmed to see outside. She was curious about the sound and smell of the horses clopping along, but Sadie kept her even lower. There had been too many lies on Brad’s lips so far for her to trust him concerning infants or anything at all, really.
Once they were through the barrier of undead, the town was maybe a hundred yards further on. It consisted of a main street where a few old buildings stood: a grey concrete courthouse, some rundown storefronts, a school, a theater whose marquee read: Ron’s House of Ill-repute, and a McDonald’s that no longer possessed a single whole pane of glass. The grounds around it were littered with shards and trash. Running parallel to the center of town were three or four side streets, which were mostly populated by a smattering of houses. Everything was black in the town; not a light shone. There were quiet voices in the dark and every once in a while there would be the flare of a match and they would catch sight of the orange ember of a cigarette.
They drove to the courthouse and pulled up in front. It had once been a stately, though dour building with sturdy columns and flags flying. Now it could only be described as scary. Sadie came down out of the truck and huddled behind the other renegades, holding Eve in such a tight embrace that the baby made a face and tried to push away. She even made a fussy noise, something that was most unlike her.
“Here, let me take her,” Deanna said. She seemed to have materialized out of the dark and she was suddenly there, pulling Eve away, although Sadie wanted to keep hold of her and use her as a shield to keep the world at bay. Deanna seemed to feel some sort of relief with the baby in her arms. “That’s better. I need a little sanity and Eve is just precious. Yes, you are precious, aren’t you?” The baby replied by reaching out and grabbing Deanna’s slim nose.
“What do you mean by sanity?” Sadie asked, though she need not have. Everyone knew about Jillybean. The little girl failed at hiding her mental instability but her genius had proved valuable time and again, and that overro
de everything as far as the renegades were concerned.
Deanna looked to the first truck where Neil was helping people down from the bed. Jillybean was just a little smudge of a shadow next to the larger one that was Captain Grey. They were holding hands. A spark of jealousy zipped through Sadie. No one held her hand. Her apocalypse mother was dead. Her apocalypse father was too busy shepherding the renegades through a dangerous world. Her love, Nico had been murdered, and her apocalypse sister was crazy and looked as if she wanted to kill her. All she had was Eve, but the baby, in truth, belonged to no one. She was just as happy in Deanna’s arms as she was in Sadie’s.
“It’s you know who,” Deanna said in a whisper, of course meaning Jillybean. “She’s acting, um, worse than before. If that’s even possible. It’s so damned sad to see what she’s going through.”
Another spark of jealousy. Sadie was barely treading water in a quagmire of depression and no one cared enough to notice. “Yeah,” she said to Deanna. She couldn’t muster any more of a response.
Deanna jiggled Eve on her hip as if there was nothing more to say on the subject of Jillybean and she was probably correct in this. No one had time for mental illness anymore. It was a ‘first world’ problem and they were all living south of the third world now.
In spite of the dark, Brad managed to look impatient as the renegades disembarked from the trucks. He stood with the three men he had brought with him and his sighs were the loudest thing in the night, even louder than the moaning coming from the darkened courthouse. The windows of the building were boarded over and there was some sort of dark material draped over the entrance and just before that were the columns and the chained zombies. There were four heft stone columns, two on either side of the door, and affixed to each by chains was a zombie.
To enter, Sadie saw she would have to pass within inches of the two closest zombies.
“Finally,” Brad said when the last of the renegades had climbed down. “Let’s get go…”
“Not just yet,” Neil Interrupted. “Veronica, Marybeth and Michael, stay with the trucks. Allow no one to touch them.”
Brad let out another sigh, adding: “Neil, if we were going to steal the little crap you have left, those three wouldn’t be able to stop us. But if that makes you feel good about yourself, have it your way. Everyone else, follow me and stay close. Single file.”
“Can you watch Jillybean?” Deanna asked Sadie as Brad started forward. “She doesn’t like to be around the baby.”
Then don’t bring the baby near her, Sadie wanted to say. That would’ve been rude, something Neil would frown upon. “Sure,” Sadie said and went to where Jillybean was standing next to Captain Grey. “Can you come with me?” she asked the little girl. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to hang out with you. How long has it been?” It wasn’t a good question for either of them. There had been a day or two after Sarah and Nico had been killed when they had sat, listless and brain-fogged in the same truck as Grey drove into Alabama. Since then their lives had been a chaos of kidnappings, explosions and blood.
“It’s been a while, I think,” Jillybean said as she swept her eyes around, noting Deanna standing off to the side with Eve. She also squinted at the Goth girl and saw the pain in her bearing. “It’s hard to tell, though I would say it’s been about twenty.”
Sadie put an arm around the girl and began to guide her to the back of the line. “I’m sorry but you’re a little mixed up. It hasn’t been twenty days.”
A sly smirk crooked Jillybean’s narrow face. “No, that’s how many people we’ve killed between us since we’ve got to really hangout. Without school and summer break, days don’t mean too much anymore. I find it easier to remember the people I’ve killed. I bet you do too.”
The arm thrown around Jillybean’s shoulder went altogether stiff. Sadie pulled it back as if she thought the little girl had become suddenly diseased, and in a way, she had. She had a mental disease that was eating her up and making her dangerous. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sadie said. “I haven’t killed nearly that many and neither have you. And…and it’s not really a proper subject.”
“Well you killed those five guys in cold blood.” She held up five fingers, splayed, each one distinct, each representing a murder victim. “And you murdered Lindsey. Everyone knows that. They talk about it. They whisper it when you aren’t around. They think you’re really tough, though I don’t know why. You were tough, once. Remember the hand grenade?”
A jolt went through Sadie’s thin frame. She had forgotten about the hand grenade. How many people had been in the hallway on the cruise ship when she had tried to kill Cassie? Four? Five? Jillybean looked as though she was reading her thoughts. “When you talk in your sleep, you always apologize five times. It’s very stupid and dumb, that’s what I think. You shoulda killed them. I think you shoulda killed more of them. They deserved to die.”
“I don’t care what you think,” Sadie hissed, giving the girl a little shove. Jillybean fell back, causing a murmur to stir up in the dark. Crazy or not, the renegades looked to Jillybean for too many things and if it came down to it they would kill for her. They would kill out of fear. They were afraid that they didn’t have what it took to survive. They depended on her. They needed her. “Watch her,” Sadie said to the renegades nearby. They were dim shapes against a dark background and she couldn’t tell one from another, though it hardly mattered to her just then.
Sadie couldn’t stand being around any of them. They reminded her of the old people, the people from before the apocalypse. They had done nothing while they had watched their country slowly strangle on itself. If the apocalypse hadn’t come along something else would have done them in. She walked down the long line of her fellow travelers, trying not to look into their shadowed faces, and when she came to the last, she just kept walking into the darker shadows of the town.
She found an old diner to lean up against as she waited for the renegades to trickle into the courthouse. The diner was very old world. It came complete with cracked leather booths, a juke box, a long nicked-up bar and a black and white tiled floor that seem coated in a twenty-year layer of grease. It was dingy and even with the dark it looked like it had been abandoned years ago. Sadie wanted to slip into it and spend the night alone. The very idea of the courthouse was galling to her. She was sure there would be just more of the same within its forbidding walls: people hurting other people, people scrambling to take advantage of every word and every situation.
She wasn’t in the mood to fight for survival. She wanted to be alone…except she was afraid to be alone. All her life she had glommed onto the nearest person and grew to become like them, much like a chameleon. With her friends in school, she had become Goth. With Jack, at the beginning of the apocalypse, she had become a thief because he was, with Neil and Sarah, she had been a daughter, and a damned good one.
When she was left alone, she was a killer. Experience had taught her that.
She could fit in with the Azael if she wanted, but what kind of life would it be? They gave all the appearance of being little more than cutthroats and thieves. Calling them “opportunists” would be a kindness they didn’t likely deserve. Unfortunately, Sadie didn’t have much going for her with the renegades, either. Most associated her with her father, the River King and blamed her for their capture. This was never spoken aloud, but she saw it in their eyes and heard it in their whisperings.
This left being alone as her best option, but there was her deadly nature to consider.
“Not tonight,” she whispered through gritted teeth. She had dwelt upon her guilt long enough—it wasn’t getting her anywhere.
The renegades slowly filed between the zombies at the door and Sadie waited against the diner until there were only the three guards Neil had posted by the trucks left in the night. Reluctantly, she went to the courthouse door and, keeping her arms close to her body, she passed between the zombies. The door was noiseless as it opened. Beyo
nd the door, she found herself in a box of a room the walls of which had been fashioned from burgundy velvet curtains; more than likely liberated from the town theater.
There was an exit of a sort marked by brass lamp stands. There were no bulbs in the lamp stands and the dark of the curtained room was so deep, the brass barely threw off enough color to allow the metal to be judged as brass.
Sadie went to the far curtain but did not stride through; she only cracked the curtain as light streamed across her pale face. The renegades, as if they were taking a tour of the courthouse, were walking in a line and looking all around as though the place was more than just a converted government building. It once had marble floors that gleamed and dark wood walls that glistened with polish. Now, there was no more gleam or polish. The building had been converted into a combination of a warehouse, a strip mall and an apartment complex.
It was very strange to Sadie. Every one of the offices had their doors flung wide and in them, smiling people in multi-hued scarves beckoned:
“Come see. I have cold water, wine and Fig Newtons!”
“I have beer! Real beer! The cans are certified as unopened!”
“Ammo…get your ammo here. I have all calibers. Guns, too. Everything you need to survive whatever tomorrow brings.”
Each room was spilling over with merchandise. Coats, frying pans, tents and bottles of penicillin were stacked alongside rifles and spears and baby powder and everything else one could imagine. What struck Sadie as exceptionally odd was that the offices were barren of all normal office furniture, however each had a mattress or two leaned up against some of the wares; the proprietors slept in the rooms with their merchandise. In the bigger offices that seemed like a fine idea, but the smaller rooms just seemed jumbled.
The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) Page 16