Before she could spit out either a caustic answer or actual spit, Neil spoke. “I will talk to her, alone and that’s final.”
This time it was Fred who muttered under his breath. Neil didn’t bother to question him; he was too antsy to care what Fred Trigg thought about anything.
Sadie and Gayle, whose last name Neil would later find out was Houghton, were on the wide, sweeping front stairs, moving slowly up when Neil found them. Gayle wasn’t used to the thin atmosphere and her breath came quick. Although she seemed a little dizzy, she wore a tremendous smile and her words of gratitude flowed out until she was gasping for breath.
“Just tell me where Jillybean is, please. That’s all I want to know.”
Right away she said: “She’s in Missouri. The last time I saw her was about two months ago, but I’m not exactly sure since the days just sort of flow together. We were in this town…I don’t know the name, I just know it was south of St. Louis by Highway 44. She saved me and my daughter and these friends of ours from this horror of a woman who was making zombies on purpose. She had us chained up in the basement of this house…it was terrifying. Even being a sex slave was better than that.”
Gayle went into some detail concerning the rescue and the days that followed, in which Jillybean grew even weirder than she had been, and then took off out of the blue. But Neil wasn’t listening.
Although he had been expecting something along those lines, the words: two months hit him like a punch in the gut. He grew queasy and had to clutch the railing. He could hear Fred’s annoying voice in his head: You wasted thirty-five hundred to find out Jillybean was in Missouri two months ago? We already knew that. And you know she could be anywhere by now. She could be across the ocean for all you know.
The worst part of the story wasn’t the two months, it was the fact that Jillybean had found Ipes. If she’d had him for two months, that meant she really could be anywhere. She could’ve walked all the way to Colorado from Missouri in that time. Hell, she could have crawled.
Which could only mean one thing: she wasn’t coming back.
“Ok, Gayle. Here’s what I want you to do: I need you to tell this story again to a group of people, only this time do not mention the zebra. Just forget it, like it’s not a part of the story at all. You got it? I put my ass on the line for you and I’m only asking this one favor in return.”
“Sure, sure, anything.”
Neil brought her into the council room, what used to be the hotel manager’s office. Here she told her tale and dutifully left out the zebra. Almost immediately, Fred made a stink over the lengthy time lapse.
Snapping his finger as if he were an embarrassed mom trying to quiet her children in church, Neil said: “This not the time, Fred. Save the arguments for the commission meeting.”
As she wasn’t a member of the commission, Sadie had waited outside the door as she had before—with her ear pressed to it, or so Neil guessed. Now, he asked her to show Gayle to the admin building, where housing would be assigned to her.
The minute the door was closed behind them, Fred started right in. Neil let him go on, not contradicting a thing or making a single rebuttal. Grey made them for him. “You heard the lady. Jillybean hasn’t found Ipes yet. She’ll still be looking down that river. I think we should go after her.”
“We?” Deanna asked, raising an eyebrow. “You’re not going anywhere. Not until you’re healthy again.”
“I’m getting stronger every day, and I owe it to Jillybean.”
“And I want him to go,” Neil said before Deanna could mount a verbal comeback. “I need someone reliable, someone who can take care of Sadie. We all know she’s going to want to go again.”
Suddenly Fred quieted and even tried to make suggestions about where they should start looking and what they should pack. Neil saw right through this. “While Grey is gone, I’ll choose his temporary replacement. There won’t be a need for elections.”
“Maybe now, but what happens in one month or two?” Fred asked. “What happens if they don’t come back? There has to be a cut off period. I’m sorry, Deanna that we’re discussing this but it has to be done beforehand so we all know what’s what.”
“I can do two months,” Neil said. “Although I’m sure it won’t be needed, Deanna.” She thought otherwise and railed until Fred and his friends left. Only when it was just Grey, Veronica and Deanna left in the room did Neil tell the truth: “He won’t be going after Jillybean. I, uh, have a confession. Gayle lied about Ipes. Jillybean actually found him two months ago.”
“What? So, where is she?” Deanna asked, puzzled. “Why didn’t she come back? Oh, I guess she’s still crazy, isn’t she? That poor girl, she really could be anywhere. Wait, so if Grey is not going after Jillybean, where are you sending him?”
“We need supplies, badly. Munitions, fuel, everything, especially since I, uh, ha-ha after I just gave so much of it away. If it gets out how low we are on everything, it’ll invite an attack by every two-bit dictator out there.”
Grey nodded. “It definitely will and we can’t risk it. Alright, if I go I’ll need to pick my own team.”
“Just make sure they can keep their lips sealed,” Neil advised. “Speaking of which, I can’t expect Fred to keep his mouth shut about how much I paid for Gayle’s release, so I’m going to pre-empt him. I’ll get ahead of the scandal by releasing that information myself. It’ll help that we can add the fact that we are rescuing not just Jillybean but Gayle as well. Thirty-five hundred is a lot, but for two people, maybe we’ll be able to squeak by.”
In the days that followed, Fred did everything in his power to turn the population against Neil, and there was a lot of talk about electing a new governor, however his bacon was saved by an unlikely person: Gayle Houghton.
Tirelessly, she sung not just Neil’s praises, but also Jillybean’s. She built the little girl up into something almost mythical and when people mentioned her insanity, Gayle said: “Someone with that level of genius might look insane to normal people, simply because we can’t understand it.”
That usually did the trick right up until someone mentioned Ipes or Jillybean’s murder of General Johnston or the baby, Eve. Gayle always changed the subject to Neil when the conversation went against her.
He had no greater cheerleader than Gayle and when he tried to tell her it wasn’t needed, she answered: “I owe you my life. I owe you everything.” She gave his arm a warm squeeze and her fingers lingered, touching him in a way that made Neil’s heart run a little faster.
“Oh…okay,” he stammered. “I have work to do. So, I guess, I’ll, uh, see you later then.” When he left her, she wore a smile, but it wasn’t a real one. There was hurt in her eyes and he had to ask himself why he had snubbed her so obviously. It wasn’t the fact that she had been a sex slave—she’d been dragged into it involuntarily and no one, especially the women in the Valley looked down their noses at her for that. Many of them had done some very questionable things to survive.
“We all have,” Neil said as he walked away. Neil’s list of wrongful acts was as long as anyone’s and some of the choices he had made could only be called evil. A large part of Jillybean’s insanity rested squarely on his shoulders. No, he wouldn’t pass judgment on Gayle.
Suddenly the obvious answer came to him in the form of an image. A very beautiful image. Sarah’s face came to mind, only for the first time he realized that her face wasn’t as tight and crisp as it once had been. It was a little blurry. How long was her hair, exactly? And her ears… they were small, but how small.
He was beginning to forget what she looked like.
Chapter 7
Captain Grey
Grey’s seven-person team left the day after Gayle gave her testimony to the commission. There wasn’t much need to wait longer. An expedition of this nature didn’t need months or even weeks of planning. There was too much unknown outside the bounds of the valley to make plans beyond the obvious: what to bring, where to go and how to g
et there.
The regular groups that went down into Denver to scavenge never strayed too far beyond the suburbs. It was too dangerous. Sometimes the plains teemed with the undead in the thousands and sometimes they were eerily empty and silent, and always there were slavers lurking in the ruins of the outlying towns, ready to snatch the unwary traveler.
Grey’s plan was to strike north through the mountains until he got to the Wyoming border, where he would head east to Cheyenne. Not a lot of people knew there was an Air Force base just west of the city. The main reason for this was that there wasn’t a single runway on the base and no planes or helicopters, either.
Warren AFB was home to the 90th Missile Wing, meaning they were all about inter-continental ballistic missiles—nukes, in other words. Every one of which was pretty much useless now. The people who operated the computers were all dead taking their passwords and encryption codes with them to the grave.
It would take more than a Jillybean caliber genius to hack into the secure computers and get them up and running.
But that didn’t mean there weren’t valuable items to be found there. There had to have been military security protecting the base, at least a company’s worth, and that meant guns and ammo. The only question: was any of it still there?
Had the base been overrun by one huge wave of stiffs? Or had the men taken what they could carry and run away? Or were they still there, hiding in some deep bunker?
He aimed to find out. Other than Sadie, his crew was all military, men he had fought alongside for the last year. He trusted them to keep their mouths shut, when and if they returned, that is. No one said a word or complained about the sudden change in mission, in fact, Grey was sure they were all secretly relieved. Though it was true that Jillybean had saved the valley, they weren’t going to forget the murder of General Johnston who had been a father figure to all of them.
To save fuel, they took only one truck: a big black Dodge with an extended bed and a winch in front. Even with an over-sized cab two of them had to ride in the back at all times where it wasn’t just uncomfortable and cold, it was also dangerous.
Mountain roads were treacherous with steep drops on one side and looming cliffs on the other—the cliffs were the more terrifying of the two. The undead did not care about heights and had no fear of falling. When they saw humans, they attacked regardless of any other factor.
They found this out the hard way at noon the day they had left the valley, as they were winding up the face of some unknown twelve thousand foot mountain. The constant switchbacks and the deadly hairpin turns were bad enough but the mountain road was also strewn with boulders. It looked as if giants had been using them to play a game of marbles.
Since he knew that it would take only one to break an axle or ruin a tire. Grey was tooling along at an easy twenty-miles an hour, dodging the rocks. With his concentration squarely in front of him and the sun near vertical, he hadn’t glanced up in a few minutes and didn’t see the dozens of zombies crowding the road above them.
His first inclination that they were in trouble was when the beasts started “raining” down, splatting across the hood or thunking loudly on the cab. Immediately everyone began screaming all at once, some telling him to stop and others pounding on the dash for him to go faster. Right then, he could do neither.
Grey dodged the truck as far to the right as he dared. When the edge of the road disappeared from his view, he used Lieutenant Wilson’s reaction to gauge how close he was to the sixty-foot drop. Wilson, who had happily taken the window seat an hour before after their first stop, was now leaning back, his face elongating as if he were preparing for one titanic scream once they went off the edge. Grey could understand. Wilson’s view wasn’t of a forest but of a thousand spears pointing straight at him.
The terror warping his face was the signal Grey was looking for. With gritted teeth, he eased the Dodge a few inches back to the left as the truck swished along the gravel, feeling as though the passenger side tires were half on air and half rolling on just a few blades of grass.
Meanwhile the screams of his men had died away, leaving only the grisly wet thuds of the undead falling to splat onto the road. When they hit, regardless of the bones jutting up out of their grey flesh, the zombies began crawling after the truck.
Although it felt as though they had been riding along the edge of the drop-off for a mile, it was really only a minute before they were clear of the immediate danger, however ahead of them was another hairpin turn that would send them straight up to where the remaining zombies were stumbling down the pavement to greet them.
Grey stopped the truck. “We’re going to have to make some room, so everyone get cozy. Sadie, get on Wilson’s lap. Same for you Hendricks. Cuddle up with Raoul and try not to like it too much.” He leaned out the window where the two men in the back were white-faced and clutching their guns to their chests.
“I ain’t never seen nuthin’ like that,” a sharp-shooting PFC named Keene said. He had a thick “porn star” mustache that quivered as he spoke. “They was just raining down on us. I mean…I ain’t seen that before.”
“Well, now you have,” Grey remarked. “We’ve made some room in here, so come on get in.” They piled in, still shaking from the experience. Once everyone had bitched their way into as comfortable a position as they could, Grey put the truck in four-wheel drive and drove uphill, trying to gain enough momentum so that when he plowed into the beasts he wouldn’t lose headway.
He hammered into them, the truck shaking and rumbling as the bodies became fleshy speed bumps. Perhaps worse than the bouncing was the sound their nails made as they screeched against the metal. It went on and on.
“Now I’m wishing I had a cow-catcher on the front of this thing,” Wilson yelled over the noise of the engine and the wailing moans of the zombies. Having found it at a burned-out dealership in Boulder, the month before, it was technically his truck. “I was going to put one on, only we had that war and I just plain forgot.”
“Would’ve been helpful,” Grey said and then was forced to down shift as the bodies began to pile up in front of them. The truck responded with an extra spurt and they lunged ahead only to be brought up short with a crash that almost sent Sadie through the windshield.
Her eyes went crossed for a moment. “What the hell was that?” she asked, rubbing the welt on her forehead. “Did you hit a fire hydrant?”
At first, he was as confused as she was. It was impossible to see the road ahead as it swarmed with the undead and all around them hands slapped the windows, leaving smears of pus. Then he remembered the boulders.
“Oh, balls,” he hissed, yanking the truck into reverse and throwing an arm over the seat. Downhill was infinitely easier. Compared to the rough corpse-paved road of seconds before, it felt as though they were gliding on clouds. He went back down to the hairpin turn. Slowing just enough not to kill them all, he turned the car around and then took the remainder of the road to the next turn at an easy pace, dodging the crawling zombies, but not at the expense of hitting one of the boulders.
“I need another little cliff for them to lemming off of,” he said in response to the raised eyebrows. He found one a few hundred yards further on and turned the truck around to point back uphill, keeping as far from the cliff face as possible.
Then came a wait of several minutes in which everyone stared up at the cliff, like tourists waiting on a Bigfoot sighting. The air in the truck, piled with so many sweating men, became a little stagnant.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but one of you is not using deodorant,” Sadie mentioned, breaking the tension. “And by the way, it’s probably a good idea to start now that you’re all adults.”
Everyone glanced around until Wilson proclaimed, in pure innocence: “It’s not me, I promise.” This set the men to laughing so hard that the truck began to rock on its springs. They were still chuckling when the first zombie toppled off the cliff to land eight feet from the truck.
The sound it ma
de when it hit the pavement killed the mood. Grey began to tap lightly on the horn, coaxing more and more of them off the cliff’s edge. A few went the long way, lurching down the road, perhaps drawn on by the pull of gravity, however an ungodly number fell to land in a growing mound near the truck.
Grey edged forward so that the creatures would have solid pavement to land on where massive injury was likely and death from head trauma possible.
The steep drop mangled the zombies horribly, though they didn’t seem to mind. Dragging shattered limbs, they crawled to the truck and began scratching or hammering on the doors. At first it was a nuisance, but then as the numbers grew and the threat escalated, Grey climbed the truck over the squirming bodies in front of them and, once again, took on the sharp hill with its hurdles of boulders and zombies.
This time it was a far easier assent and in twenty minutes they crested a ridge where the land fell away on all sides, giving them a fantastic view of the world.
“Let’s get some air,” Grey suggested, climbing out of the vehicle. It had been only half a day in the truck and already his muscles and limbs were stiff. Although the air was biting, turning his breath to plumes of white, walking around the summit helped to work out the kinks.
The men either smoked or bull-shitted about this girl or that back in the Valley, until Lieutenant Wilson saw Sadie’s discomfort. “You boys sure do like to run your mouths. Let’s put out those cigs and get the truck cleaned up.”
In the long bed, among the rifles, crates of ammo, packs, boxes of food and all the rest of the items needed to keep a squad in the field, were three gallons of bleach and two rolls of paper towels. Wilson set the men to wiping down the now dented and scratched up truck.
Sadie pulled her M4 rifle from the pile and started heading back the way they came. “Doing a little guard duty?” Grey asked as she walked by.
The Undead World (Book 8): The Apocalypse Executioner Page 6