With that thought guiding her, she ignored the footprints and the blood and headed back to the house, only to pause as she made it to the snow-covered drive. There were more tracks in the snow on the other side of the drive. They were small, which meant they had to be hers.
Where they led: to the back of the house was obvious. Where they came from wasn’t so obvious, they went up to the road and then disappeared behind the trees.
“Did I walk here?” she asked aloud. As she didn’t know where “here” was, she thought that it was entirely possible. On a whim, she followed her tracks back to the road and saw that she hadn’t walked, at least not far.
Sitting about a hundred yards up the road was a Ford Focus in midnight blue, the very same car she had siphoned gas from the day before. It had been sitting in the garage of the house that the three bad guys had been broken into. How on earth did it get here?
As this seemed the sort of puzzle that she should understand, she trudged to the Ford, her little face sprouting lines of worry the closer she got. The Ford was banged up in a way it hadn’t been the day before…if it had only been a day since she saw it that is.
The front bumper was stove in, the passenger side mirror had been torn off and there were huge gouges on both sides. It suggested strongly that she had driven, but had she been chased? The idea stopped her in her tracks and she shrunk down, listening to the forest and the world beyond.
There were no human sounds, only natural earthly ones, birds and squirrels scampering around after the first snow, sounding foolishly excited, but not afraid.
Jillybean continued to the Ford and looked inside, hoping to see Ipes. He wasn’t there and, really, nothing else of importance was either…except the bottle of gin sitting on the passenger seat. That hadn’t been there before. She went to reach for it and the hidden memory came to her:
She had decided to kill the leader and had sat in her cupboard next to the oven waiting with endless patience. She waited almost in a transcendental state. Time meant nothing to her. The cold meant nothing. Next to her, Ipes was only a bit of cotton and some fluff. She waited with part of her mind attuned to the leader’s movement and the rest utterly unfocused.
An hour passed in this strange conscious state before the leader finally got up from the table. “Gotta take a leak,” he mumbled. The chair scraped back and his boots were loud on the kitchen tile. Jillybean was fully aware by then and perplexed. The man had not crossed either towards the hall bathroom and nor did he go to out the sliding door.
Strangely, he went to the basement door but did not go down it. He stood on the top step and started peeing down into the dark. It was an odd sound and triggered the same urge within Jillybean.
The urge to pee was easily ignored. She was too focused and the danger so great that had Ipes been sentient, he would have been screaming his head off for her to run away as fast as she could. Instead she moved softly toward danger. The gun was six feet away and the man only three feet beyond that.
He stood on the top step with one hand on the dusty edge of the doorjamb above his head, while his other hand held his penis and pissed in an arc. He seemed to enjoy the fact that his urine reached almost to the floor of the basement. With his attention on his childish antics, he didn’t see her slither from the cupboard and nor did he see her step slowly across the floor, making sure to place each foot just so.
Despite how careful she was, the floor creaked beneath her. Quick as a wink, his head spun to the side. She had no idea what she looked like in the dark; he was just a hulking form with glints for eyes. She had to appear as nothing more substantial than a shadow.
To his credit, he didn’t jump in fright. However, he did jump for the gun. She was closer and faster and her focus was on it completely. She didn’t think about Ipes or snow storms or her next meal. She didn’t think about Sadie or Mister Neil or poor dead baby Eve or the evil Eve who had lived in Jillybean.
Her mind was on the gun and she snatched it up. The thing was heavy and clumsy—exactly how she expected it to be. She knew the trigger would be too difficult for her tiny hands to pull back without spoiling her aim and so she stuck the hammer against the kitchen table and shoved with both hands, just as the man lunged still with his penis sticking out of his zipper and dribbling pee.
His hands flailed for her, but she danced to the side the heavy pistol up and pointed at his chest. The moment of action ended as abruptly as it began.
The leader stood somewhat bent over, ready to spring at her, one hand on the back of a kitchen chair, the other on the counter. However, he didn’t spring. “That gun is on safe,” he said.
Jillybean guessed that this was a lie. “If that were true, you would have taken it from me by now.”
“You’re a pretty smart little girl.”
“And you’re not as smart as you think you are,” she shot back. “If you were really smart, you wouldn’t be a slaver and a thief. I want my stuff back.”
He finally straightened, lifting his hands in front of his chest, his palms out towards Jillybean. “Sure thing, of course but first, why don’t you point that just a little bit away. We wouldn’t want it to go off accidentally.”
The gun did not waver. “That’s true. I want it to go off on purpose. That’s why I’m pointing it at you, and I will keep pointing it at you until I get my stuff back.”
“Pointing a gun at me won’t get your stuff back. You see, I’m not afraid of you and I’m not afraid of getting shot. That being said, I don’t want to get shot. It’s unpleasant. So, this puts us at an impasse. Do you know what an impasse is?”
“That’s what means we’re stuck, right?” When he nodded, she went on: “But we’re not stuck. I can make you call your friends. There are six bullets in this gun. I can shoot you five times just to hurt you and still have one left over. I don’t wanna do that, but I will.”
The man stared at her for a long time, his face dark and shadowed except for the glints of his eyes, his face was like a devil’s face to Jillybean. “That’s pretty cold,” he told her and then moved to sit down. Through reflex alone, she almost shot him. “I’m just going to sit. Hands will be on the table. Good. See? You have nothing to fear from me.”
“I know.”
The calm way in which she said this made him lean back and whistle. “You really are something, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am something.” It was true that just then she didn’t feel like a “someone.” She didn’t feel like herself or like evil Eve or Ipes or anyone. Since she didn’t understand the term “cold,” she would have used the term “empty” to describe herself. Her emotions were switched off. She wasn’t afraid or angry or sad. She was determined. She had made her decision to get her stuff back and she was going to, no matter what.
“I think we are at an impasse,” the man said. “You won’t shoot me. You’re a little girl who’s afraid and all alone.”
“Yes, and I need my stuff.”
“But I can’t get it for you like this. If I go back there with a gun to my head, those other guys will let you shoot me.”
Jillybean actually believed this. “Because you’re a mean person.”
He shrugged. “Yes, I suppose, but nowadays everyone is a little mean. It’s the only way to survive.”
She knew that this was definitely a lie. Mister Neil and Sadie weren’t mean at all and Deanna was always nice and so too was Captain Grey, though he was also a bit growly. Really, the only person who had been mean in the valley had been Jillybean.
“Not everyone has to be mean, but I guess it’s true for some people. Some people and some kids have to do bad things sometimes. I think shooting you would be bad, so please call your friends and tell them to bring back my stuff.”
He shook his head and simply said: “No.”
“Please!” she insisted. “I don’t want to be bad.”
The man didn’t seem to understand how much danger he was in and Jillybean didn’t know what to say to get him to realize i
t. Probably there wasn’t anything she could say and so with her little lips cast down at the corners, she aimed the .357 with one eye closed.
She had hoped to hit the man in the shoulder, thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad, only he must have guessed her intentions and tried to leap up. The bullet struck him in the crook of his right arm and blasted out the back of his elbow. He sat back, his glinty eyes now wide and for a moment there was only stunned silence as their ears rang with the crash of the pistol.
Then he screamed so loudly that Jillybean took a nervous step back. He screamed and screamed until Jillybean began apologizing. The apologies went unheard and he kept on screaming until she cocked the gun a second time and advanced on him.
“You need to hush, mister. You’re gonna bring the monsters and they’ll eat you.”
“Fuck you!” he yelled. “Look what you did for fuck’s sake.” His right arm sat in his lap, bleeding like a fountain of ink. In the dark it was hard to see what sort of damage she had done. “I can’t move it. Damn it! You hear me? It doesn’t work and there ain’t any surgeons running around anymore to fix it. You…you bitch…you turned me into a cripple!”
Jillybean really was very sorry, but was shocked when the man actually started to cry. “Don’t cry. It’ll be okay. We can wrap that up and…” She had put the gun down and took a step towards him when he lunged at her, left-handed.
He caught hold of her shredded-up monster coat and when she pulled away, a length tore off and he fell to the kitchen floor, moaning in pain.
“You are mean,” Jillybean hissed. “You’re just like that bounty hunter and he was evil and nasty and he deserved to die.” She shied around him and went to the gun on the table and this time she aimed for the head. “You will call your friends or I will kill you.”
“Fuck y…”
She pulled the trigger.
Chapter 13
Jillybean
The thunderous blast shocked her and when she blinked, she found herself standing outside in the snow, the sun blinding her. Tears ran down her face, but she didn’t sob or cry out in misery. She had too much self-control for that. Putting her hand out to the Ford, she steadied herself and waited for the tears to pass.
“I killed him, just like I killed Dave and probably Perry. But I’m hiding the memories from myself. Is that a good thing? Is that healthy? Or will I explode later and go super-duper crazy. Mister Neil said that was a possibility. He said I could be a super-nova. Though that doesn’t sound that bad, if you ask me, right Ipes?”
Again, she had forgotten that Ipes wasn’t with her. He was more important than any bad memory. She had a bazillion of those and there was only one of him.
“Do I check the house for him?” she asked herself, afraid that checking the house would lead to finding Perry’s dead body. Her only other option was to check the car she was standing next to or go search for the KIA, which was likely parked in back.
Since the Focus was closer, she opened the passenger side door, pushed aside the bottle of gin and sat down, almost stepping on a little homemade gizmo. It looked like a poorly constructed school science project with coat hangers bent in a crude circle holding copper wiring that had been braided into a thin rope.
As crude as it was, the wiring was tighter than the last one and the circle of bent hangers was smaller. “That couldn’t have been easy. I probably…” She glanced down at her thumb which had suddenly throbbed. She had cut herself making the gizmo and reflexively she stuck her finger in her mouth—just as she had the night before…
The echo of the gun still thrummed through her body as Jillybean sucked her thumb. The taste of blood was copper and clean and the pain, disappointingly minor. It was nothing compared to what she had done to the dead man in the kitchen. His screams, just like the gun, still seemed to hang around her like a black cloud.
Don’t think about it, Jillybean, Ipes advised. Concentrate before you hurt yourself again. Remember, tetanus in a real thing. The zebra had climbed out of the cupboard on his own and had tottered past the dead body and out into the garage where Jillybean, with a handful of wire and three coat hangers had been gazing down on the Ford Focus considering how she was going to get it moving.
“What’s ethanol? Is that like alcohol?”
I think so.
“So, this thing runs on alcohol? Do you think if I stuck some of those grode-up drinks in the gas tank, it would go?” Ipes had only shrugged his shoulders. “You’re not much help,” she groused. “And you weren’t all that much help with that man, neither.”
What can I say? I’m just a tiny zebra. I was scared. So…what are you going to do with this car? A fast getaway? Very smart. I’ll go check out the alcohol and see if any says ethanol.
“We’re not doing a getaway,” she answered, beginning to work on her electricity making gizmo. “We’re getting our stuff back and before you say anything, we’ll find them the same way they found us. They had to have left tracks in the snow, too.”
Ipes must have guessed that she wasn’t in the mood for joking around and so he left to look over the different bottles of booze in the house. Eventually, he came back with 151 rum. It’s seventy-five percent alcohol. Maybe it’ll work.
Jillybean knew all about percentages and fractions, what she didn’t know about were blended gasolines. Earlier, she had siphoned all the gas she could from the Ford, but from experience, she knew that there would be some at the very bottom that couldn’t be sucked out. On average, it was about ten ounces. She poured in the rum and could only hope the mixture would be close enough.
After exhaustively charging the car’s battery with her bike/magnet/wire gizmo, she cranked over the engine and it sounded terrible. Bllatt! Bllatt, brrrugh, brrugh bllatt.
“We better hurry,” she said, grabbing her backpack, the pistol and the extra rounds that the dead man in the kitchen had been carrying in his pocket.
Ipes took one look at the stuttering engine and whispered: Oh, boy. We’re going to get stuck in the snow for certain.
“If we don’t go, we’ll be stuck in the snow for weeks if not months, so hush,” Jillybean said. “I need positive thinkings.”
I’m positive we’re going to freeze to death, he mumbled.
She ignored him, her mind too focused on what she needed to live. The people who owned the home had been childless and so there weren’t blocks or toys available to glue to the gas and brake pedals, which really didn’t matter as she had no time to wait for glue to dry.
She guessed that she had a quarter of a gallon of “gas,” and had no idea how far it would get her, so she grabbed the only implement in the house that was the right size for her needs: the fireplace poker.
The trip started off with a bang and a crash as she backed into the side of the garage on her first try. Rakes and shovels came crashing down, as did a wall-shelf filled with tools and cans filled with long-congealed paint. It rained down with an ear-shattering sound, causing her to panic and shove down harder on the gas with her poker.
She hadn’t corrected her steerage and so she hit the corner of the house: the sound of the metal tearing against brick, coupled with the hideous noise of the engine had her nerves on edge, making her shoulders squinch upward and her face cave into a cringe.
The ghastly noise had one plus: it drove out the sound of the gunshot and the man’s awful screams that had been replaying in Jillybean’s head over and over.
She felt almost free as she spun the Ford in a wide reversed turn that culminated in two crushed trashcans. Leaving a trail of blue smoke and an obscene blatt, she bounced onto the road only to sideswipe a tree, which knocked her straight.
Her perfect alignment with the road didn’t last. She swept down a hill and for some reason, her back tires decided, completely on their own, to careen wide, so that she was pointed at the side of the road, but driving forward. This seemed to defy the laws of physics as she knew them and, properly freaked out, she shifted the poker from the gas to the brakes, whic
h immediately sent her into a spin.
Ipes went flying, screaming for her to stop, only she couldn’t stop. The car went round and round until it slammed into a tree on the side of the road. As was proper, Jillybean had on her seatbelt, so the crash was more or less only jarring to her and she was clear-headed enough to keep the engine from stalling out like it wanted to.
“Maybe we drive slower,” she said, as she tried to maneuver the poker back onto the gas with shaking hands.
From the footwell, Ipes asked: You call what you were doing driving? I don’t think anyone else in their right mind would. But it was kind of fun…just don’t do it again.
She didn’t. The collision with the tree had bounced her back onto the road and, once more, she began following the tracks laid out by Dave and Perry. It wasn’t a long trip, maybe only eight miles, but the last half mile was scary. The Ford’s engine began to hitch and sputter worse than ever as it slowly ran out of the “gas” she had fed it.
Eventually it died on a gentle slope and she let it coast along until she saw smoke rising up from behind the trees on her right. “Wait here,” she told Ipes. He said nothing and didn’t even twitch as she got out of the car with the heavy gun in her hand.
Slowly she made her way around to the back of the house, creeping along near the tree-line that abutted the property. She didn’t actually need to sneak. All of the windows were covered and the two men had a huge fire going; she could hear it from outside. It covered the sound her small feet made in the snow.
The rest of the memory came quickly to her: silent as a wraith, she slipped in from an unlocked back door, tiptoed to the living room and surprised the two men who were relaxing, Dave on a couch and Perry in a recliner.
“I want my stuff,” she said. They jumped in fear and then stared at her in bafflement, so she repeated: “I want my stuff. That’s my KIA out back. You guys stoled it and that’s what means you’re bad. But I won’t hurt you if…”
The Undead World (Book 8): The Apocalypse Executioner Page 12