She spent the night in the old woman’s home, though not in her bed. It felt haunted to Jillybean, and so, she camped it in the kitchen. Beds really weren’t her thing and she liked to be near the back door just in case a quick getaway was called for.
The next morning, she declared herself ready to make the trip to Fort Lenard Wood. She had food, gas, water, candy and two sticks that she could tie to her lower legs to help in the driving process, something she would later change to children’s wooden blocks, which she glued one on top of the other and then glued to each pedal so that she could reach the gas and the brake.
Her one problem just then was the fact she didn’t actually have a car. Another search was required, but she couldn’t find one with enough of a charge left in the battery to crank the engine over. She wasted four hours searching for a vehicle, but after a lunch of cat food sitting in some dark garage next to a dead Camaro with four flats, she had to accept the fact that she was searching in vain.
She went back to the newest of the cars she had found: a red one with the word KIA emblazoned in a number of places. She popped the hood and gazed down on the battery with it twin poles: positive and negative.
As she stared, her mind centered, becoming so focused that Ipes fell from her hand, plopping on the floor of the garage with a small thump, the exact sound one would expect to hear when a toy zebra was dropped. The stare went on for three and a half minutes and in all that time Ipes simply lay inert and, for once, inanimate.
She blinked out of her fugue state, thinking that not even a second had passed. “Oh, sorry, Ipes, but you can’t play on this floor it’s all dirty and stuff. And there could be rats, you never know.”
You’re the one who dropped me, sheesh. So, you’re gonna need magnets?
She didn’t seem to notice that he had read her mind. “And some copper wire and at least two bikes…tools, like those grabber things and the ones that go back forth with criick, criick sound.”
Socket wrench?
“Yeah, that’s what I said. And I’m going to need a hammer to smash things with.” The house that was attached to the garage had everything she needed, including the magnets. Jillybean knew all about magnets and where to find them. The average home had more than she would ever need. The problem was getting at them.
Everything with an electric motor had batteries, but they were always encased in hard plastic and surrounded by electronics and gizmos.
She started with the Dyson 320 Upright vacuum cleaner found in the hall closet. The hammer made short work of the plastic housing of the motor. Once exposed, she used a paperclip from her hair to find the magnet. Next a screw driver was used to pry it out—it seemed awful small, not even the size of her thumb.
I don’t think that’s big enough, Ipes said.
“Yeah.” She knew the basics of creating electricity, having read all about the subject in one of her big people books. The process was simple: spin a magnet within a field of copper wiring and, good morning mama, you had electricity.
But this was book knowledge, purely theoretical in her mind. She had never actually made electricity before and didn’t know how much wiring was needed and how big the magnets had to be in order to charge a car.
Ipes wrinkled his nose at the one magnet. I’d get more. She had to agree. Tucking the magnet into a pocket, she went into the living room, happy to see the old-fashioned turntable and the row of records. She had never actually seen or heard one play and thought it looked clunky, which she hoped would equate into a larger magnet.
It turned out to be smaller than the one from the vacuum, however the magnets in the speakers were each the size of her palm. She clacked them all together and still didn’t think the odd blob of magnets was big enough. Only after she tore apart two televisions and the refrigerator did she feel she had enough.
The clump was the size of a man’s fist. Now she just had to get it to spin and this was where the bike came in. Using the socket wrench, she popped off the back tire, whereupon the bike fell right on top of her. Ipes snorted and then noticed he had an extra stripe of grease on him.
Ah, man, he whined.
“Serves you right for laughing!” Jillybean griped as she crawled out from beneath the bike. She gave the mishmash of metal a good long look before she decided she would have to hoist the back and stabilize the front. She would need a clamp to super-glue the magnets to the sprocket and she would need a coat hanger to form a stiff structure to hold the copper wire snugged in a loop around the magnets.
The easiest part of the entire operation was the copper wiring. A fifty foot extension cord gave her all she needed. Everything else, from the hoisting to the coat hangers was a pain, literally.
She was scratched, bruised and covered in grease and what felt like reptile skin from the super-glue that had somehow got out of control and seemed to be everywhere. Ipes made sure to keep a straight face as she mounted the bike, acting as though it were a skittish bronco that was apt to boot her off if she sneezed.
“Here goes,” she whispered and started to pump her legs, going faster and faster, her eyes on the spinning magnets, afraid that something would break and she would either fall or something would jump into the chain and take down the entire contraption—in her mind, when this happened there would be zapping sparks and possibly an explosion.
The magnets didn’t spark at all. They just went round and round. Jillybean followed the wire with her eyes as it hooked to the jumper cables…there was smoke at the connection.
“Oh…um, Ipes? Is that normal?”
None of this is normal! Maybe walking isn’t such a bad idea. Think of all the fresh air and the exercise you’ll get.
As she was already sweating with the work, she didn’t think she needed too much more exercise, though the fresh air sounded good just then. The smoke trickled up grey and stinky and the wires had begun to glow from the heat, still, she kept on pumping for all she was worth. The hood light had begun to blink on and off!
Ipes cried out: It’s working! Keep going. Though she wanted to say: No duh! she was too winded. She was too tired to even hold her head up. It hung, lolling back and forth, her chin on her chest and the arches of her shoulder blades poking up like the flesh colored stumps of what had once been angel wings.
When she couldn’t take it any longer, she leapt off her bike, jumped into the KIA and began pushing down on the wood blocks on the right—five pumps and then she turned the key.
On the first attempt, the engine only said: row-row-row. Ipes screamed in excitement. More gas! Keep going!
Grimacing, as if turning the key and pushing down with one foot was harder than it looked, she kept going until the engine caught, flooding the garage with a haze of blue smoke.
She had been prepared to zip out of there and so now it was only a matter of disconnecting the cables and raising the garage door before she choked to death on the smoke. For a moment, she glanced down at the mini-generator she had created and considered taking it along with her.
In the end, she took only the magnets and the wire. It had been an amateurish attempt and she was a little embarrassed by it.
Don’t be, Ipes told her. As he would get car sick if he couldn’t see out, his battle station was sitting on the dash. Briefly, he turned from keeping an eye out for monsters and smiled at Jilly. Not very many adults could have done that. You should be proud.
“I just wanted it to be better.” In fact, she wanted it to be perfect. Did that make her like the old grandma? Would she die like the old grandma as well? Running with wide eyes and her dentures clacking up and down, her…
Watch the road, Jillybean, and don’t think about any grannies. You’re going to be fine. Now where is the nearest of your stashes?
The nearest was the grandma house; she didn’t go in. The stash was under the porch. She got it and left without looking in any of the windows, suddenly afraid to see a ghostly image of the dead grandma staring out at her with blue eyes…with Jillybean eyes.
Ipes warned her again to watch the road as her driving "skills" were put to the test. "Sorry, sorry. Look out, please. Get out of the way...ugh!" The KIA a stubby four-door without much in the way of power, swung back and forth all over the road as Jillybean fought to correct her over-steering by using more over-steering, culminating in a shriek of metal as she hopped a curb and broadsided a post office.
Try the middle of the road, Ipes suggested. If you hit them, you hit them. At least you're not going so fast that they’ll explode. It’ll be more like bowling for monsters.
She was afraid to go fast and barely pressed the top block, goosing it every once in a while to keep the KIA moving at just under twenty. She left the monsters behind, at least the ones who lived near the old granny’s place. It made her wonder if they were her neighbors and if so, did that make it worse that they probably ate her?
Ipes corrected her once more and she went back to focusing all her attention on driving. By the time she had picked up the last of her stashes, she had gained enough skill to usually keep the KIA in the middle of the road, and most of the time she could dodge a single zombie here and there.
Still the KIA was a gruesome red/black sticky mess with a hunk of scalp stuck under the lip of the hood. The scalp flapped in the wind like a leaf from a maple tree and it was all Jillybean could do not to stare at it and think morbid thoughts.
Was the zombie that went with the waving flap stuck under the car? Or worse, had it somehow crawled up from underneath and was now in the engine compartment, waiting to leap out at her like some sort of horrid jack-in-the-box.
Again Ipes snapped but this time the images hung up in her head and lasted until the sun was half hidden by the endless trees and she finally saw a sign for Fort Leonard Wood.
Six more miles, Ipes said with worry in his voice. Are you okay? You’re not your usual self.
Did she even know what her usual self really was anymore? How do you lose two months or three months or however long it was and not wonder that your usual self might be crazy? Only she didn’t feel crazy, she felt afraid, and for good reason.
There were real monsters outside her window. They had killed the old grandma and a billion others just like her and they would kill Jillybean too. She could see it happening so easily in her mind’s eye: Jillybean running, her fly-away brown hair, flaring and streaming behind like a lion’s mane that had gone to seed. She could see Jillybean’s old Keds and hear them slapping on the pavement, strangely like a palm coming down on a pile of poker chips, and she could hear her breathing get harsher and more ragged and more desperate.
It was the sound of a person who couldn’t go on. It sounded like a person about to be eaten, because beneath the ragged breath and the slapping feet was the sound of the monsters moaning. At first it had been a low sound, a background rumble, only gradually it had grown so loud it took over her mind…
Jillybean! Ipes shouted.
She jumped, accidentally spurting the KIA faster as her foot jolted outward in alarm. “What? What is it?” she asked, her breath coming fast and sweat dripping from beneath her hair.
I just wanted to point out that we’re here. You made it.
Chapter 9
Jillybean
As Fort Leonard Wood was primarily a training facility for combat engineers, its layout was confusing to the little girl. It seemed as if hundreds of building projects had been begun all at once and not one finished. There were countless open areas where bulldozers and cranes and graders and other monstrous green hunks of machinery just sat lined up in front of fields of sun-blasted dirt.
But there was no other equipment to actually make anything. And there weren’t any materials, either. There wasn’t any brick or stone or rebar or bags of cement. Just open fields one after another each lined very neatly with machines to move dirt.
“Weird,” she commented as she drove by the last. “I’ll never understand the army.”
You understand that, don’t you? Ipes asked, pointing with a hoof.
Where the forest opened up next was a shooting range. “Of course. Army mens have to practice. That’s what means they’ll miss if they don’t shoot a lot.”
And where there’s shooting ranges, there’s got to be bullets, Ipes said. Do you see any bunkers? The afternoon had slipped into a quiet dusk making it especially hard to see the dirt covered mounds that marked where ammo bunkers would be.
“No…maybe we should look in the morning. It’s a little freaky out here.” She couldn’t put her finger on why she was so nervous, but the absolute quiet had her driving faster than was smart. Ipes asked if she would have preferred the moans of a thousand zombies.
“That’s a silly question. Of course not. And speaking of which, we’re probably making a racket. We should find a place to hide for the night.” Ipes raised a fuzzy, black brow at her use of the word “hide” instead of sleep, but he didn’t say anything.
She pulled onto a side road where she could see the rusting corrugated roof of a two story warehouse rising just over the trees. To the left, the road opened up on another range where the firing lanes were being overgrown with weeds and shrubs. Jillybean guessed that in another year all of the ranges would be swallowed by the forest, hidden forever. There was already a quiet timelessness to the place as she stopped the car and climbed down from the pillows.
A row of derelict sheds sat lined in front of the crumbling warehouse. Their doors were flung, their walls bent and many had strange holes in them that made it look as though nature had taken her fury out on them. Had all of this destruction happened in the last year? Was that possible?
It almost seemed to Jillybean as if she had stepped out into some distant future where she had accidentally come across the relics of some primitive culture.
“Spooky,” she said with a little laugh. Ipes only shrugged his droopy shoulders. “Well, it’s spooky to me.”
I don’t see why. I can’t hear any zombies and I don’t think anyone would live in there. I bet there aren’t even any rats in there.
She didn’t have much of a choice of accommodations and so she tip-toed towards the front doors of the building, angling slightly to her right so that she didn’t come on them from straight on where she could be seen.
No, it was best to move in the shadows. It was best to be Jilly-mouse and scamper and flit from cover to cover. She edged to the building, and slid along it, ready to bolt at the first sound. Only there was no sound from anywhere around her, except a hidden metallic creak that came whenever the light wind managed to slip down between the trees.
When it did she froze, clutching Ipes in a death grip. Hey, chill, Jill. You’re bending my mane. Jeez, you’ve given me a comb-over.
She didn’t apologize. That would make too much noise. Trying to “chill” she took a breath before easing to the door and poking just enough of her head around the corner so that she could spy inside with one blue eye.
What she saw didn’t ease her fear. The inside of the warehouse was gloomy: shadows casting shadows. It was so dark that it was hard to tell what was what. Slowly her eyes adjusted and she saw gouged and pitted workbenches, and there were dusty green machines with knobs and chains and cutting blades. There were big bins that had been knocked on their sides. They looked like faceless mouths that had just retched up spews of metal.
The floor had a fine litter of metal across it. Mostly nuts and bolts of all sizes, but there were also hundreds of odd scraps that looked terribly sharp.
“I’ll think I’ll sleep in the car,” she said.
Wait, Ipes said as she started tip-toeing back towards the KIA. Hold on now. Wo
n’t it be cold? And…and it won’t be all that safe. Those KIA people didn’t spend a lot on the windows. They’re pretty thin. Any ol’ monster could come by and punch them in.
“Lucky for us there ain’t any monsters around here.”
Ipes corrected her English, but she wasn’t listening. There weren’t many monsters and for some reason, that bothered her as well. Everything seemed to bother her. Her nerves were on edge and she didn’t know why.
That night, after a dismal meal of cat food and beans, she slept in the car. The wind picked up just before two and she huddled in a shivering ball as it howled. The storm brought with it an early snow that was mostly cold mush that made driving the next day annoying.
The KIA refused to stay to the center of the road, though it didn’t help that she over steered a few times and spun in big out of control circles. It wasn’t until Ipes said in her daddy’s voice: Steer into the skid, that things became manageable.
The first part of the day she spent heading south, which was pretty much the opposite direction of the rest of the base. And yet, the trip bore unexpected fruits. Because it just seemed to meander through the forest, uselessly, almost no one had gone south on that road and there were a number of unplundered properties with overgrown driveways that could only be seen by an alert person going slowly along.
Jillybean was barely making steerage in the KIA. A fine dusting of snow sifted down from clouds that seemed so close she thought she could reach out and stir them with a rake. The snow and the heavy clouds had made her nervous again and so she put-putted along and was moving slow enough that she was able to see the gap in the trees that could only have been man made.
By then, the gas gauge was far into the red and so she went down the drive to the house, praying for a miracle consisting of cookies and gas, with Ipes fervently praying for the former. He was so loud in her head that she had to hush him—although the noise in her head was loud, all around her the world hung in an eerie snow-muffled silence.
The Undead World (Book 8): The Apocalypse Executioner Page 8