Logic won out over wishful thinking. “No. I’m sorry but I won’t do it. I am going to be a mother and I-I, that’s not something I can do. I hope you understand. There are some girls among us who will. Should I let them know you’re available?” Her voice shook the entire time.
Duke Menis glared. “You understood what I wanted when you came in here, which begs the question: why did you bother? Why did you waste my time?”
Deanna drew herself up to her full height which didn’t quite reach the man’s chin. He was as tall as Captain Grey, however since he carried a haughty anger in his eyes, he seemed so much more dangerous. Once again her hands betrayed her. They began to twist together in knots as she answered: “I came because you asked and because we need you, however I won’t give up my integrity, not even for the life of my unborn child. I don’t want her coming into the world the daughter of a whore.” She might have been conceived that way, but that didn’t mean she had to be born that way.
“Commendable,” the Duke said in a way that conveyed that he didn’t feel it was commendable in the least. Despite his face being covered in a shaggy growth of beard, or perhaps because of it, he could be very frightening when he glared. It was a harsh enough look that Deanna stepped back from it and unworked her hands long enough to again take her pistol grip under her sweating palm.
He sneered at the move—then grunted—then finally laughed: “Ok, you are a better bargainer than I would have guessed. Take your hand off your gun and I’ll go scare us up some dinner. You still want dinner, correct? I have this spindly little guy who somehow lived through all of this. He’s so small I could break him with my bare hands but that boy can cook. He can cook whatever you want, but I’ve already asked for steak. I hope that’s ok. I shouldn’t make assumptions but I can’t help but think that all the vegetarians are dead, if not from the zombies but from starvation. It’s not like tofu grows on trees, right?” He laughed at his own joke while she seemed bewildered.
“Steak?” Deanna asked as though the word was foreign.
A big grin from the Duke. “Yes, steak. Besides the gas and the ammo, I also have vast herds of cattle and goat. See? You shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss my overtures.”
Deanna was still hung up on the very idea of steak and slowly shook her head. “I hope I wasn’t dismissive. I just...Uh, I mean, you wouldn’t want a whore as a duchess. I mean...I’m sorry, but I’m a little turned around.”
“Here, sit,” he showed her to a leather couch. It was soft and cool and helped clear her head. She smiled up at him and then it was his turn to look confused. “You’re right. I wouldn’t want a whore for a wife, but, uh, how about I go check on dinner.”
He left and was gone for so long that she was beginning to think he had forgotten about her. She wandered around the front room of his suite and had to refrain from looking in the desk drawers. Though she really wanted to, she was absolutely certain he would come bursting through the door and catch her red-handed. To kill time she looked at the books on the shelves; all were books on law. She cracked one and amused herself by trying to understand a page opened at random.
The law had to do with easements on private property and was unreadable since it seemed to talk in three directions at once and frequently used words like heretofore instead of normal English. It was difficult to come across a single clearly written sentence.
Menis did indeed burst in, his eyes raking over everything, quickly. Deanna jumped only slightly. “Dinner ready, I hope?” she asked. She wanted to eat, beg one more time for the fuel that they needed and then get out of there. In the back of her mind she kept picturing Captain Grey waiting for her, wondering what she was doing. He knew she had been a whore and he had to be thinking the worst.
“Yes, it’s on its way up now. What’s that you were reading?”
His eyes kept scanning around, looking for things out of place, Deanna assumed. “Just a book on state laws. It’s ridiculous and complicated, and a wonder that anyone could do anything back then.”
“My way is better,” he said. He went to the book, gave it a glance and then reached out his hand for her. Just then there was a knock. Deanna pulled her hand back quickly as a flash of guilt lit up her insides. Although she was expecting dinner, she had a sudden, irrational fear that it was Grey on the other side of the door; she folded her hand primly on her knees. It was the Duke’s chef and he was indeed thin. His bones were so prominent, that his face resembled a skull. He grinned that skull face in Deanna’s direction.
“Dinner for two,” he said, wheeling in a cart upon which were a number of covered dishes. “The steak is perfect and the mashed potatoes are to die for.”
Menis pushed him away. “That’s enough Willy. I have it from here.” On his way out the door, Willy the chef, cast another look at Deanna, his grin still wide and unnerving. “Don’t mind him,” the Duke said. “He’s harmless. I just hope he doesn’t die too soon.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Deanna asked as the Duke pulled her chair back from the table for her. The courtly gesture was odd coming from the bear of a man.
The Duke waived his hand at the door. “Willy’s not contagious or anything. He’s got anorexia. I know what you’re thinking: but he’s a dude. Seems they get it too. I never knew. It’s sad, but you can’t ask for anything better than a skinny chef. You know he hasn’t been pawing at your food.”
When she was seated, he lifted the covers from the plates to reveal two steak dinners complete with buttered mashed potatoes and corn. There was even a side plate of roasted asparagus. The smell was amazing and she was happy that her stomach didn’t start growling again.
“Well, it all looks so good,” Deanna said. Out of respect for his position, she waited for the Duke to start before digging in. The steak may have been the best thing she’d ever put in her mouth and she chewed slowly enjoying every bite. As she worked to keep herself from groaning in pleasure she wondered what the other refugees were eating. Their supply of canned goods was dwindling and they had been picking over the least desirable choices for the last two days; soon they’d be down to a hundred cans of lima beans.
While the steak was great, the mashed potatoes were only average. They had a sharp tang to them. “The butter is made from goat’s milk,” the Duke said as she swallowed her first mouthful wearing something akin to a grimace. “Drown it with pepper and it’ll taste pretty good. It’s something of an acquired taste.”
Deanna tried a bite with pepper and found he was correct. “Will I have to pepper this as well?” she asked indicating a glass of milk next to her plate. Its color wasn’t exactly the pure white she was used to.
He laughed and then shrugged. “Sure you can try. It’s goat’s milk as well. Sorry, but we haven’t found a single milking cow. Holsteins I think they’re called. I’d give my right arm for a milking cow. Willy does wonders with the goat juice but I sure do miss real butter and ice cream and all of it.” He went on speaking for the remainder of the meal as Deanna polished off her plate. She had a strong hankering for seconds, however her belly was so full that it was uncomfortable and she didn’t want to squish little Emily.
“I’ve talked this entire time,” the Duke said around a mouthful of steak. “Maybe you should tell me something about yourself so I can eat.”
For the next ten minutes, Deanna told about her inconsequential life in Wisconsin and then she began a series of lies concerning her time after the Apocalypse. “Mainly,” she said, “it consisted of a series of lucky coincidences. I met up with a few women, uh, around, Chicago and then we met some more in Ohio and that’s when we found Neil and...” She was about to add Captain Grey’s name, but the Duke’s eyes narrowed and she faltered “...And uh, he told us about Colorado.”
“Where did you cross the Mississippi?” he asked. His eyes were shrewd and glinting.
“Way to the south. There was this guy who wanted to charge an arm and a leg in Missouri, so we went south and found a boat that was still wo
rking.”
He drummed his fingers on the table and watched her closely. “Did you see the River King’s compound? In Missouri? Do you have any idea of its strength?”
“No. Neil did all the talking.”
“Yes, about Neil. How does he end up being in charge and not the soldier? That doesn’t make much sense to me.”
Deanna tried to give a simple shrug, however it came across as muscle spasm. She was growing ever more nervous at the number of questions he was asking; if she misspoke in any way there would be trouble. “We had an election is all and, at the time, Grey hadn’t proved himself to the group and so Neil won.”
“But he’s since proven himself? How?”
She blinked and her mouth came open, uselessly. It was so hard to think with the Duke staring right into her face looking for her to trip up in the least way. “He...there...Uh, zombie fighting. He’s really good at fighting the zombies.”
“I’m sure he is,” the Duke said. “Better than Neil, obviously. Which leads me to my next question: Neil has been bitten. Those scars all over his face, they’re from zombies. I’d bet my life on it and that must mean he’s immune and there’s only one place you can get immune and that’s in New York. When were you there?”
“I-I wasn’t. I-I, they might have been, I don’t know, but I’ve never been to New York, not even in the old days.”
His eyes bored deep into hers as he asked: “What about as Sarah? Did you ever go then?”
Her fear disappeared in a blink of confusion. She didn’t know anyone named Sarah. Neil’s ex-wife might have been named Sarah, but the stories concerning her were taboo, in fact all the renegades were in a similar position. No one talked much about the early days of the Apocalypse; too many good people had done questionable things to survive.
“I never went by that name, sorry.”
The Duke looked long into her eyes, before he grunted: “Ok, then.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a reward notice that had been handed out to any number of bounty hunters in New York. She read it and exclaimed in a joking manner: “I’m not thirty-six! And I’m not five foot-four, either.” Although the description for Sarah Rivers wasn’t very close to matching Deanna, they had Sadie down to a “T”, including her name. Thankfully, Sadie had been slow to come into the main courtroom and probably hadn’t been seen by the Duke.
“I had to ask. There are rumors about these fugitives. Supposedly, they’re exceedingly dangerous. And I can’t have...”
A sharp pain struck Deanna low down in her guts and she interrupted him by gasping loudly. “It’s probably nothing,” she said, at his look of alarm. The pain was already fading and she smiled as brightly as she could to cover over the grimace that lurked beneath the facade of her pretty face. “Now about that fuel, where were we?”
“You were playing hard to get,” he answered. “Have dinner with me tomorrow and I will consider a thirty-five percent interest rate.”
Twenty four hours was a long time for the group of renegades to sit on their deadly secrets, especially with only the promise of ‘considering’ thirty five percent. “Promise me thirty percent and the trucks fueled tomorrow and I say we have a deal.”
He stuck out a big paw. She shook it as a new pain cramped her belly. The Duke surprised her by standing and helping her out her chair. “Until tomorrow, then,” he said, cutting the dinner shorter than she had expected. She figured that he would try more wine or suggest a walk, or a bath, or something. The most he did was stop her at the door, kiss the back of her hand and look so long into her eyes that she grew uncomfortable.
“Good night,” she said, pulling back gently so that once again her hand was in her control. She left him to hurry downstairs, and all she could think about was what Captain Grey was thinking. The word whore kept spinning through her mind.
When she reached the main hall on the first floor where all the peddlers ran their shops she was surprised to see that it was filled with the renegades who were all chatting freely.
She took one step into the hall and then doubled over. It felt as though a hot knife had lanced into her gut. Her forehead glistened with sweat and she could feel her pulse hammer in her temples. Something bad was happening to her.
Sadie suddenly appeared out of the crowd. “You ok?” she asked.
“You have to hide,” Deanna answered, remembering the reward flyer. For a moment the thought of it overrode the pain, but it was only for the moment. She dropped to her knees and grabbed herself hissing: “Oh my God! My stomach.”
“What’s wrong? What happened to you?” Sadie asked, coming down to her level, her dark eyes wide with worry.
“I-I don’t know, but don’t worry about me. The Duke has a reward flyer with your name on it and...” A new pain was followed by a new gasp. Deanna fought through the pain and pushed Sadie away. “The reward is for five thousand. People will kill for that much. So go, get away and hide in the trucks or something.”
People were staring now, and through the gaping crowd Neil shoved his way. What he saw made him pause for a second and stare as well. Then he began yelling at the people around him: “Do you mind! Give her some damned privacy. Go on. Look somewhere else, the show’s over.”
“It’s ok,” Deanna said. “I can get up.” She tried but she was overcome with dizziness. The world began to spin slowly.
“No, stay down and don’t move.” Neil turned to Sadie and whispered: “Get Captain Grey...no. Forget that. Go get Marybeth Gates, and hurry.”
“Why her?” Deanna asked, feeling lightheaded and unsure of herself. As far as Deanna knew Marybeth didn’t have any medical skill.
Neil squatted awkwardly in front of her. “You’re bleeding,” he whispered, shooting his eyes to her pelvis. She looked down at herself and saw that the crotch of her blue jeans was dark with blood. Terror filled her mind to such a degree that she almost didn’t catch what Neil said next: “If Grey finds out you’ve been raped he’ll kill everyone here.”
“But I wasn’t raped,” she said. Suddenly her head lolled to the side as if her neck had turned to rubber. “I didn’t have sex at all,” she said in low mumble, the words feeling like marbles in her mouth. Nothing was making sense just then, however it seemed important for her to get that point out though she couldn’t remember why. The world was beginning to dim. She was barely able to add: “This is because of my baby. I must be spotting.” It sure seemed like a lot of blood to be simply spotting but since her eyes kept closing and her brain was well past foggy, it was hard to tell.
Neil stared down at her in shock. “You were pregnant?”
She wanted to say: I am pregnant, only it came out in a mumble and he didn’t seem to hear. The next thing Deanna knew, Marybeth was there, kneeling in front of her, wearing a face full of motherly concern and then she saw Captain Grey sprinting down the hall with his med bag slamming into people.
Deanna wanted to tell him that she hadn’t done anything wrong but she slipped away into the deepest sleep of her life and, as she slept, Captain Grey could do nothing except wait helplessly as Deanna’s body expelled the tiny person that had been growing inside of her. Emily was dead.
The news of her pregnancy, her now failed pregnancy, was all anyone could talk about and it was generally considered a tragic but natural occurrence right up until Eve was also found dead, swaddled in her blankets.
Chapter 18
Jillybean/Eve
Although Deanna’s bleeding ended around midnight she went into a sleep that Captain Grey called a ‘coma’ and she did not wake up. In a show of generosity, the Duke gave three bags of Lactated Ringers for Grey to administer intravenously. He also had some rooms cleared out in an elementary school just down the street, where the renegades could stay.
Deanna was laid out on a cushioned couch in what had once been the principal’s office. Grey never left her side that night except once to use the bathroom and once more when Eve was found dead and even then he refused to leave Deanna unguarded by
anyone he didn’t trust. He planted Neil in a chair, held him down as though he had glued him there and needed a few moments for the glue to set, and then, growling like a wolf, Grey told him not to move under any circumstances. “Even if the building catches fire, you don’t move a damned muscle. Is that understood?”
Sadie spent the sleepless night huddled in a pile of corn in the back of one of the trucks. When the sun rose she peeked out long enough to ask a bustling Neil how Deanna was doing. He only shook his head, gravely. When she asked how he was doing, he only stared outward like a painting of someone sad. He seemed altogether flat and without depth. She hugged him, but wasn’t capable of more. Her face was tear-streaked and her hands were without proper nails; she had chewed on her nails and torn at them until the cuticles were bleeding.
Despite the fact that he cried almost constantly, Neil was everywhere, doing anything that would keep him from thinking about Eve and Deanna. He was jittery and easily agitated. His eyes were red as a demon’s and his voice was tight and high. As the night progressed, he grew hoarse until he could only grunt and point if he needed something. As leader, there was much to be done. The renegades kept him on his toes. At word of Eve’s death, many went into hysterics and babbled or cried in fear, thinking that the Duke had poisoned them somehow. Others vowed revenge and began plotting, but most of them just stood around gossiping and gabbing.
These talkers were the most dangerous as they rarely checked to see if there were ears listening in the dark. Neil was kept from grieving over his daughter or sinking into a depression simply because he lacked the time to even come to grips with another death.
This left Jillybean alone for most of the night. She had ‘woken’ a little before midnight to find herself standing next to the couch where Deanna was lying motionless. The little girl blinked and looked around, completely confused at her surroundings. Her last memory had been of when she was prowling about the Duke’s quarters in the courthouse building. There had been many doors, most of them locked.
The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) Page 19