The Undead World (Book 8): The Apocalypse Executioner

by Peter Meredith

  “We have some bad luck on this one, Boss,” Wilson whispered as they stood next to each other, emptying their bladders. As much as he wanted to, Grey wasn’t about to agree. Displaying pessimism was no way to lead.

  “We’ll get our chance,” he assured, but they didn’t.

  The snow had cleared up sometime during the night and the sun was brilliant and the sky a perfect blue. Smitty moved them out after they had scarfed down a quick and very light breakfast.

  As usual, Sadie rode in the first truck and as she had their one device to pick a lock, the soldiers remained trussed and impotent. The one speck of good news was that by noon, they crested the final peak and far below the land was flat and open.

  It was also snow-free. The two trucks managed to pick up the speed and roared out onto the plain.

  “We’ll escape tonight,” Grey told his men. “If we start early enough, we should be able to free at least three of us. Four or five would, of course, be better so everyone keep your eyes open for anything that might be able to pick a lock.”

  They had little chance to find anything that day. They sat in the open bed of the truck for fifteen hours, their asses turning numb. They stopped their eastward trek only twice for “piss-breaks” as Smitty called them, and both times the bathrooms were checked by the bandits before the soldiers were escorted in.

  Eventually as the sun started to go down behind the mountains, Grey was forced to realize that they would simply have to rely on the sliver of metal that Sadie carried—but then they came across a slaver caravan.

  Immediately, Smitty pulled over down the street from the trucks—there were seven immense trucks, very similar to the ones that had visited Estes Valley the week before. They were basically armored buildings on wheels.

  “Everyone out!” Smitty balled, dragging Sadie from the truck. “Line up the prisoners. Let’s have a quick look at ‘em.” They were lined up and for the most part, Smitty gazed at them with satisfaction in his eyes. Then he came to PFC Keene and he made a face.

  “Let’s see them with their shirts off. Uncuff ‘em.” While the other slavers kept their guns pointed at the prisoners, Bill went down the line of men and unlocked their cuffs. Smitty began to nod. “Okay, better. Now, drop and give me fifty.”

  “Are you joking,” Grey demanded, growing angry. “It’s bad enough that you have my men standing around, shirtless, in forty-five degree weather, but now you want to humiliate us?”

  Smitty looked shocked that Grey had the temerity to say anything at all. “First off, dip-shit, these are not your men. You all belong to me. Get that through your stupid shaved heads right this second. If you don’t believe me, keep standing there and see what happens. For every man still standing in the next ten seconds, I will give fifty lashes to that guy there.”

  He pointed to Raoul, whose eyes widened, but otherwise didn’t move. “Test me,” Smitty continued, “and you will lose. Ten, nine, eight…”

  Grey believed that Smitty would do exactly what he threatened, and with escape perhaps hours away, there was no need to battle wills. “Squad! Drop and give me fifty.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Smitty said. He then turned to one of his men. “Mike, keep buffing them up until I get back. I want them to look like fucking Adonises. Oil them up if you have to.”

  As Grey and his men were doing pushups to “buff” themselves up, Smitty hurried Sadie into the nearest house. A minute later, they were out again and rushing to the next.

  When they came out of the house, Sadie was no longer in her customary black garb. She had on a pink tank-top and it was altogether obvious that she was without a bra beneath. Worse was that she had traded in her black jeans for an atrociously short skirt that barely covered the top of her thighs. It might have belonged to a sixth grader.

  Red-cheeked, Sadie pulled at the hem as Smitty hauled her along by the hand. “Okay, let’s see what we can get for you guys,” he said, gleefully. They were pushed toward the waiting traders. “Don’t speak to them,” Smitty warned. “I don’t care if all they ask is your name, you don’t say a goddamned word. I’ll answer for you and whatever my answer is will be the truth. If I say you’re twenty-five and you can speak fucking Swahili, you just nod your head.”

  “We understand,” Grey said, “But you’re making a big mistake bringing the girl. She’s not a common…”

  “Stop!” Smitty said, clear as day. The formation stopped just shy of the traders. Regardless of the eyes on him, Smitty turned to Grey. “You just earned fifty lashes for your man. Do you want to make it a hundred? I’ve seen men bleed out with a hundred lashes. It ain’t pretty and it’s a waste of a good man, but I will fucking do it, if you open that sewer of a mouth of yours one more time.”

  Grey’s jaw clenched and his eyes lit with an unholy fire of vengeance, but he kept his mouth shut.

  “Good,” Smitty said, smiling directly into Grey’s fury. He then glanced at one of his men. “Go get the whip. If anyone else steps out of line, we’re going to use it right here, right now.” No one said a word.

  Satisfied that he had cowed everyone into obedience, Smitty marched them the final fifty feet, stopped them in a line and went to greet the traders, alone.

  “He found the pick,” Sadie whispered to Grey, causing his shoulders to slump. “I’m sorry,” she went on, “He wanted me to change clothes and I didn’t think I’d get it back and so I stuck the pick in my mouth and…and I didn’t know he was going to check my teeth, but he did, and…”

  And now there was no way out of their predicament. “It’s okay,” he lied. “We’ll think of something. Just, uh, buck up.”

  “Yeah.” She smiled through her misery and fear as the traders came to inspect them.

  It was the single most humiliating five minutes of Grey’s life, though it had to be a hundred times worse for Sadie. The trader looked her over—all over. He lifted her shirt and her skirt, going so far as to sniff her nether regions. She bore it all with the fiercest look Grey had ever seen on her face and for a second, he felt bad for anyone who had the balls to buy her because he was pretty certain he wouldn’t keep those balls for long.

  The talk went back and forth for some time, but in the end, Smitty set the price too high for his prisoners. He didn’t seem all that upset as he marched them back to the trucks.

  “Just seeing what the market will bear,” he said to his men. “Let’s get everyone locked up…oh and let’s do a complete search of the men. I want every pocket checked and their mouths too.”

  Pecos snorted and said under his breath: “I’m not doing a rectal search. I’d rather just shoot these motherfuckers.”

  Thankfully, a rectal search was not done. The prisoners were thoroughly searched and then handcuffed once more before being loaded onto the trucks.

  Because of the proximity to the traders, who were likely also bandits, Smitty had them drive deep into the night until they were well into Nebraska near a town called Ogallala. There seemed to be a veritable army of zombies milling around the town and as the two trucks approached, they swarmed in thick as the stunted, brown cornstalks that covered half the state.

  Smitty calmly rolled down his window and shot a flare into the evening sky, creating a red sun that slowly fell to the earth. As the beasts turned to stare, he drove in and around them, without touching a single one.

  A second flare was needed as a distraction before he found a clear area north of the town where a house sat in among a forest of bushes that had grown taller than the eves. The prisoners were hustled in to spend a supperless night in a room stripped of everything but the floorboards and the dust. They had their blankets and nothing else.

  That night was harder on them than the previous five. The snow had finally pushed out onto the plains bringing with it a biting cold that the thin blankets mitigated but did not hold back altogether. They shivered and shook and pressed in on each other, so that the people in the middle were warmish but unable to move and the people on the outside
were half frozen.

  What made matters worse was that what little sleep they did manage to get was disturbed every one and half hours. The oncoming guards woke them to check their cuffs to make sure that they were still secure. The only thing good about the night was that Smitty didn’t follow through with his threat to lash Raoul.

  Grey vowed not to give him a reason to. He would play the subservient slave boy right up until he got his cuffs off and he had the upper hand, then he’d crack some skulls—that was the plan at least, except there was never another opportunity to get free.

  Another freezing day was spent in the back of the truck, shivering beneath their blankets as the blue tarp flapped over their heads. The snow petered out around noon when they crossed the Missouri River and moved on into Iowa.

  Somewhere in the great flatness that was Iowa, they stopped to eat. Their dinner from the night before, their breakfast and their lunch was rolled into one meal that consisted of two cans of uncooked corn that the soldiers split between the six of them.

  More zombies slowed their eastward progress and it was a very cranky Smitty who led them to another farmhouse for the night. They were only fifty miles from the Mississippi River and Rock Island, where the Colonel had set up his new base.

  The soldiers went hungry again that night and even the bandits were on low rations. “Quit your bitching!” Smitty snarled at his men. “Everyone will get fed tomorrow.”

  He then stomped over to where the soldiers and Sadie were seated in the corner of the living room. The temperature had dropped into the teens and with the wind howling, Smitty had them all in one room. “One more day and then you’ll be outa my hair. Unless of course you guys make trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Sadie asked, sounding as if she were looking for ideas rather than things to avoid.

  “Let’s not focus on that. Instead, I want you to focus on what’s going to happen to you if you do. If I can’t sell you to the Colonel, then I’m going to need to dump you for the best price I can get. It’s not cheap running back and forth across the country, so to cut my losses I’ll sell you to one of the caravan traders. You know about them, don’t you?”

  Sadie was ghost-white as she nodded. Life as a whore in one of the caravans wouldn’t be a life at all.

  “And for you soldiers, well.” He shrugged, a move that was half-apologetic. “You’re all too old for one of them sadistic queers and too dangerous to keep around for field duty. It’ll be the arena for you guys. So, if you don’t want that to happen, do exactly what I tell you to do…and maybe pray.”

  Chapter 25

  Jillybean

  “I think I made a mistake coming back here,” Jillybean said out of the corner of her mouth to Neil as the four women stared and whispered to each other. One made a joke and the other three laughed, cruelly.

  “Don’t be silly,” Neil said, scowling at the women. When he scowled, it wasn’t a pretty sight and the women quickly looked away. “Of course you belong here. People can be mean. I’m sure they’ll, uh, stop, you know…” Neil struggled to come up with something positive to say, but then he brightened. “Deanna! How are the new people?”

  Deanna had just come up and at the question her eyes slid over to Jillybean before she answered: “Troubled. You know, the usual sad story: capture, enslavement, endless rape. But thanks to Jillybean, they’re safe now.”

  Neil beamed and put an arm around Jillybean’s shoulders. “Well, that’s good, right?”

  With another glance at Jillybean, Deanna shook her head. “It’s not all good. They say she killed eleven armed men.”

  The smile on Neil’s face faltered. “Eleven?” He rubbed his head as if the number had caused him to spring a headache. “Oh boy. Eleven? You killed eleven men?” Jillybean nodded reluctantly and Neil rubbed his head some more. “Any chance we can keep the ladies from talking about what happened?”

  Ipes and Jillybean shared a confused look before the girl said: “But they were bad men who did very bad things. Why can’t they talk about it?”

  Neil dropped down to one knee so that he was eye to eye with her. “It’s because people are easily frightened. You already have a reputation, Jilly and the fact that you killed eleven armed men…”

  “They weren’t normal, they were slavers and pirates. They were eleven very bad men and I didn’t do nothing wrong. Not even Ipes thinks so and he’s always telling me not to kill so many…” She stopped speaking abruptly and cast guilty looks up at the adults. “There…there were a few others, too, but they were all also bad. I promise they were.”

  Deanna looked down on Jillybean and sighed, a long sad sigh. “I bet they were bad. I wish…” She gasped suddenly and her face spasmed. One hand went to her round belly and tapped it lightly but urgently as her eyes bugged and she showed her gritted teeth. “It’s Emily! She’s got…ow…she’s got a grip of my insides and is pulling on something that shouldn’t be pulled on.”

  Since this was an internal battle, Neil and Jillybean couldn’t do anything but wait on the outcome in a nervous state. After a few moments of pained grunting, Deanna’s breathing returned to normal and her smile returned. “She’s a real fighter. She kicks so much I bet she’ll be born knowing kung fu.”

  “Can I touch your baby-belly Miss Deanna, ma’am?” Jillybean asked, suddenly filled with a desperate longing to touch another baby. To her, babies were the ultimate in innocence and it still stung like acid on her mind to think about baby Eve.

  It must have stung Deanna as well because she drew in another sharp breath and stepped back. “Um,” she said, a tilted smile on her full lips. She glanced at Neil and there seemed to pass a season’s worth of time until he nodded.

  Deanna put a false smile on her lips and said: “Sure.” As Jillybean stepped close, Deanna’s fingers curled, looking like giant pale spiders dead on a windowsill. She kept them held just above the swell of her belly. They were at the ready—just in case.

  Just in case I do something evil, Jillybean thought. Just in case I suddenly pull out an eight-inch hunting knife and plunge it up to its hilt into that fat balloon of a belly.

  Jillybean wanted to cry out: But I never would! only she knew she wouldn’t be believed. She had done too much evil in her past to be believed about anything.

  Resigned to the presuppositions all criminals lived under, she bore the burden she deserved and only put out a delicate hand. Deanna’s belly was warm…no, it was hot. The furnace of the Lord was creating a baby in that belly and it was hot!

  She longed to keep her hand there for minutes, hours, days if needed until the baby was born. But she pulled her hand away after the first movement of the infant. “She moved,” Jillybean said, affecting a lying grin.

  “Yes,” Deanna agreed, relieved that the hand…the same hand that had killed dozens? Hundreds? Perhaps even thousands, was removed. “I have, uh things, to take care of,” she said and then left, her feet moving with indecorous speed away from the hotel.

  Jillybean watched her go and did her best not to cry. Still her eyes watered and she had trouble catching her breath. It started a light hitching in her chest. “I shouldn’t have come back,” she said, again, unable to look up at Neil.

  “That’s nonsense!” Neil cried with forced cheer. “This is where you belong, Jillybean.”

  He’s sweet, Ipes said, the sadness in his voice matching the overwhelming feeling bubbling from her soul. He’s always been sweet, but he doesn’t see it yet.

  “Not yet,” she agreed, in a whisper. Louder, she said: “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. She’ll come around. They all will. We just need to give it a little time. In a week or two, they’ll see that you’re doing much better.”

  But they didn’t have a week or two. They didn’t even have a full day. Like a lone wind, a whisper began to float through the valley. It coursed through the eaves of every house and along door jams and under stands of aspens, and it even spun out to the tremendous
walls of stone that guarded the entrances to the Valley.

  The rumor that Jillybean had come back to the Valley reached every ear and then that lone wind became a gale of gossip. Every Jillybean story, true or not, was retold and rehashed, and it was the true stories that were the most damaging:

  I heard she poisoned the general and stood over him laughing as blood poured out of his eyes.

  That’s nothing. I heard she set two ferry boats on fire and that they were crammed with people. Women and children and everything.

  Oh, yeah? Well, I was on the River King’s bridge when she blew it up. She didn’t care that there were like, three hundred of us packed in trucks crossing it when she blew it up.

  That’s not how it happened. She rescued us, Fred.

  And what about New Eden, Kay? How many people did she kill there, just trying to save a baby? I heard she killed a thousand without blinking, so don’t tell me she blew up that bridge to rescue us. She blew it up because she likes fires and blood and death. That’s who and what she is.

  They’d all heard the same thing and more rumors besides. With a lack of television and theater, Jillybean’s exploits had become a form of entertainment in themselves. Two themes ran through them—she was absolutely crazy and she was dangerous to everyone around her. Everyone except for Sadie and Neil, both of whom supposedly had some sway over the girl.

  The danger she posed was why a delegation came to the Stanley just as Neil and Jillybean, who had on a new dress of yellow and white, found for her by Deanna, sat down for dinner that evening. They were blowing on soup that had just come from the kitchen under a miasma of tomato-smelling steam when a soldier came bustling into the first floor dining room and leaned into Neil to whisper in his ear.

  “A delegation? Really? Now?” Neil asked. “Is it Trigg behind it? If so, tell him I’ll talk to him in the morning.” The soldier leaned in again, his eyes on Jillybean as he made hissing noises into Neil’s ear. After a few seconds, Neil frowned and said: “Oh, I guess that’s different. Jillybean, honey, wait here, I have to talk to some people.”