The Undead World (Book 8): The Apocalypse Executioner

by Peter Meredith

  “No one did,” Neil said. “Fred is only half-right. We are in a tough spot and from a certain point of view it looked as though I wasted supplies unnecessarily, however. The money wasn’t wasted, it was invested.”

  Fred’s mouth fell open. “How?”

  “That’s none of your concern. A real leader takes calculated risks and the return on investment with Jillybean may be as high as five to one. The one stipulation is that I have to seal the bargain, personally. It’s why Deanna Russell will be acting as governor in my stead.”

  Colonel Mires drummed his fingers on the desk for a moment before saying: “You can hardly be accused of abusing your power under these circumstances. Five to one seems like too much to be left unguarded.”

  Since Neil was lying through his teeth, he couldn’t very well have an escort witnessing his perfidy first hand. It would undermine his standing as governor and he’d be out the door at the next election, besides, he hoped to have a guard.

  “I’ll be meeting Captain Grey and his team. They will guard the cargo on its way back to the valley. Now since there are no more questions, I need to get ready.”

  Fred jumped up. “No more questions? I have a hundred questions! What sort of timeframe are we looking at? Who’s going to take Deanna’s place on the council? Where are you go…”

  “I guess, I should have said: since I’m not going to answer any more questions, I need to get ready.” He left Fred fuming and almost certainly plotting. It was in his nature, or so Neil assumed.

  As he marched away, a dreadful thought popped into his head: Why hasn’t Jillybean killed him? Where that thought came from, he had no idea.

  “We’ll just pretend I never thought it,” he whispered, heading down the stairs and out into the night. He really did have a hundred things to do.

  The next morning, Neil rolled his dice. He wasn’t much of a gambler and in dice terms, he didn’t know what was a good roll and what was a bad one. Snake eyes, that is, both dice coming up with ones was about the only thing he knew for certain was bad…and he really wasn’t all that certain about that.

  He’d seen craps played on two occasions and the rules seemed to evolve with every roll of the dice. Once, he’d been in a casino where everyone went mad when a four and a five were rolled. People were jumping up and down, trampling Neil in the process. Five minutes later the same four and five were rolled and the place became as dismally sad as a funeral home.

  He was gambling a lot on a deranged little girl who talked to a stuffed zebra and who had killed over a thousand people. When he thought about it, gambling seemed like too tame of a word.

  “No whammies, how about that,” he whispered as he loaded up a Jeep Wrangler. Jillybean’s KIA wasn’t built for mountain driving, especially when there was four inches of snow to contend with. The Jeep with its huge, heavily treaded tires, would be fine.

  Jillybean didn’t think it was fine at all. She went round and round the vehicle with a look of discontent on her face. “Can we put some armor on this thing? The plains are chock full of bad guys, that’s what means there’s a lot of them and armor will come in handy. I can solder stuff, you know, and I bet I could weld stuff, too if I could get some proper electricity. I could put some metal walls over the windows. I bet.”

  “We don’t have time for all that. We need to zip up to Wyoming, find Grey and Sadie, and then zip out to Missouri to get the gas and then zip back before Fred turns the entire valley against us.”

  “That’s a lot of zipping,” Jillybean noted without much enthusiasm. “I never was able to zip anywheres. There was always monsters and bad guys and people needing rescued and stuff.”

  Neil patted the side of the Jeep. “Well, that’s not going to be us. We’ll stay optimistic and good things will happen.”

  His actions didn’t quite jibe with his words. The quickest way to Wyoming was to first head east to Denver and then north along I-25. In the old days, a trip like that would have taken three hours. In the old days there weren’t bandits lurking in the ruins of the Mile-hi City.

  Instead of trusting to optimism, he chose to follow Grey’s example and he cut north through the mountains, erroneously thinking that direction was safer. The sheer number of zombies changed his mind. They seemed to be everywhere and he faced the same early problems that Grey had.

  Like horrid logs, zombies rolled down the side of hills at them, and they jumped off cliffs and they stood like a diseased barricade right in the middle of the road. “Is your seat belt on?” he asked Jillybean every time they came to a particularly large grouping of them.

  “Yes, sir,” she always answered and then pulled her sleeping bag up to her chin. She kept the sleeping bag near for “extra protection for when the monsters break the windows,” was how she put it.

  “They’re not going to break,” he had said. Forty-two minutes later the window right behind Neil was smashed with one punch by a fearsome zombie of great size. He was a huge thing with a bloated stomach and a mouth full of weeds that he growled through.

  The growl was drowned out by a scream and a gunshot. “Sorry about screaming like that,” Neil said. They had been skirting a boulder when the beast had come from out of the woods to slam into the slow moving vehicle. Now it was half in the Jeep and half out, bleeding down the interior of the back door. “It just surprised me how fast it was.” Neil jerked the Jeep right and left until it fell out.

  “It was fast,” Jillybean agreed as she picked out the empty brass casing from her .38. She gave it an interested sniff before chucking it out the broken window. “And big, too. Have you noticed that the monsters are getting bigger?”

  Just then, dodging in and out among a herd of them, they did indeed seem larger than usual, but he was sure that it was his imagination. “No, I haven’t noticed, but it’s unlikely that they’ve grown. Most of these things were adults before they became monsters. They’ve grown all that they’er going to.”

  “Maybe, I guess. Though, then again maybe not, on account that they’re not people no more—any more, jeeze Ipes, I’m not in school.” She seemed to lose her train of thought as she slid a shiny new bullet into the gun and hid it away somewhere in the rags she always wore.

  They passed another beast of monstrous size and Jillybean nodded at it. “When I woke up, I thought they looked different, scarier, you know? At first, I thought they had just been getting all fattened up, you know, because of winter and all, but they are definitely bigger.”

  Neil took his eyes off the road and stared at two of the creatures who still had the tattered remains of clothes on them. Both wore pants that were hitched high up on their ankles. “Great,” he said. “Zombies that can heal themselves and who continue to grow. That’s just what we need, giant zombies.”

  “I don’t think we need giant zombie-monsters. Oh, careful, Mister Neil, sir.” Up ahead was the same boulder where Grey’s team had been ambushed. Jillybean had a nervous twitch to her eye as she looked at it. This more than the boulder caused Neil to stop a hundred yards down the road from it.

  “Are you worried about an ambush?” he asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “A little, I guess. It’s the perfect spot. You could roll big rocks from up on that hill and squish anyone. Or you could wait around the corner with guns and spiky things in the road. I should go up that hill and check it out.”

  Even though it made sense for her to go since she was far stealthier, a better climber and a far worse driver, Neil felt embarrassed to send a seven-year-old out to do what he considered a man’s job. But he didn’t argue. He watched her slowly mount the snow covered hill until he saw a number of stumbling, slipping and sliding zombies advancing on the Jeep. Grumbling, Neil was forced to abandon the warmth of the Jeep time and again to deal with them. He left the M4 behind and grabbed his trusty axe, and after caving in a few skulls, he would glance up to make sure Jillybean was doing well and then duck back into the Jeep.

  Coming back down for Jillybean was a piece of
cake compared to going up. After a few minutes of walking along the ridge line and gazing down the other side of the hill, she produced a small blanket and a black garbage bag from her backpack. She fashioned a sled of sorts and was back down on the road in under a minute, her cheeks rosy and her smile going from ear to ear.

  “I wish I had a real sled,” she said to Neil, as she took the blanket from the bag, gave it a few shakes, and stuck it back into her pack. “Just think how fast I coulda gone if I had one.”

  Too fast, Neil wanted to say. His heart had been in his throat watching her fly down the steep hill. “If we only had time, but we don’t, darn it. I take it you didn’t see anything from up there.”

  “Nothing scary, but the angle wasn’t the best. It’s like a cliff or something on the other side. You wouldn’t have liked it. I know how you don’t like heights. And it was all slippery. One false step and then splat! Ipes was freaking out, too. You know, sometimes you and him are a lot alike.”

  He was being compared to a neurotic, chicken of a stuffed zebra that wasn’t even real. It could be worse.

  Instead of throwing away the garbage bag, she held it up for a quick inspection. There were a few minor tears in it and so she dug in her pack once more, pulling out a role of grey duct tape that she had smushed flat so it took up less room.

  “In my experience, once a trash bag is ripped, tape isn’t going to save it,” Neil told her. “Besides we can get more. The world is filled with bags and we don’t really have that much in the way of garbage.”

  She laughed at him as if he had told her a joke. At first he thought it was a symptom of her insanity. After all, people laughing at nothing was usually a stereotypical action of the mentally ill. She folded the black bag once and put it up to the broken window. “You wanna do the holding or the taping?”

  Finally, he caught on that she wanted to cover the broken window so they wouldn’t freeze on the drive. “I’ll tape, I guess.”

  Jillybean watched him with a raised eyebrow, her look indicating that he was doing a less than a genius-level job at using tape. “It’ll hold for now, I guess,” she said, “but you’ll need to stop at the first hardware store we see so we can put a real fix on it.”

  He wasn’t about to argue, the tape job was sloppy at best. To be on the safe side, he ran more tape across the bag going in four different directions. It was noticeably warmer as they climbed into the Jeep.

  “Let’s see if we can get around that boulder,” Neil said, growling the vehicle forward. It was nerve-wracking to skirt the huge rock since they had to go into the partially frozen-over river. Safe on the other side, their nerves were further tested when they saw the great mound of bodies piled at the base of the cliff.

  Neil parked next to it with a screwed up expression on his face. The dead were stiff and oddly contorted as if they had frozen in the middle of rigor mortis. The snow only partially covered them and made it seem as if the bodies had been there for months, if not years. It was like something seen on the approaches to the summit of Everest.

  “I hope they’re alright.” Jillybean couldn’t seem to take her eyes off the mound of bodies.

  “I’m sure they are,” Neil assured. “I bet those bodies have been there for weeks.”

  She shook her head and finally turned away. “No. They’ve been there for five days. Miss Deanna said it snowed five days ago. These monsters fell just before it snowed or they woulda been eated by the birds. And they didn’t just fall, neither. There’s only one reason the monsters woulda been up there.”

  A lump gathered in Neil’s throat as he stared up at the cliff face. He knew the one reason—they had been chasing someone. “We should hurry.”

  He pushed the Jeep through the twisting mountain roads as fast as he dared. It was a good vehicle, well balanced and sure footed. Despite the snowy roads, they made good time and it was an hour before sunset when they found the truck that Captain Grey had taken on his expedition. “Oh, God,” he whispered, coming up on the vehicle slowly. “That’s their truck.”

  For only a moment was Jillybean’s face stricken by anguish. Then her lips drew into a line and her eyes narrowed into slits. Before he could stop her, she had slid out of the Jeep and was trudging through the ankle deep snow, slinging her pack and putting Ipes into an inner pocket.

  “Their packs are still in the back, all except Sadie’s, which is in the front seat. The truck is out of gas, but the gas cap is still on. There’s no sign of a struggle, no bullet holes, no blood. Strange.”

  She stared around the truck and then looked back the way they had come and was silent for so long that Neil finally asked: “So what happened? They didn’t just disappear.”

  A nasty look of contempt crossed her features before she gave her head a quick shake. “No, they didn’t disappear. People don’t just disappear. They were taken, but they weren’t taken here. This is no sort of ambush site unless the bad guys were dressed as monsters and were mixed in with them, but…but that would be too risky for pirate types.”

  “Maybe it was dark when they ran out of gas and the bad guys snuck up on them as they were about to put more gas in the truck.”

  She shook her head. “Would Captain Grey let his truck run out of gas on a mountain road filled with zombies? I don’t think so and neither does Ipes. But Sadie would.” Jillybean walked once around the truck, touching the scratches that marred the sides. “These are new. There’s no rust in them and no paint either. Sadie was driving last and she was in a hurry.”

  Neil also touched the gouges. They hadn’t been there when the truck had left the valley. “Do you think they were ambushed back at the boulder?”

  “Someone had allowed the monsters to chase them up the hill and over the cliff. My guess it was Sadie. She was always fast and relied on her legs. And while she was gone Grey and the others probably tried to hurry past the boulder only to fall into a trap. That boulder was the perfect spot for an ambush. They might have got them before they had a chance to react.”

  “But why leave a truck full of gas. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  She shrugged, listlessly. “Maybe not all the monsters went after Sadie and they didn’t have time to siphon the last of the gas from the truck. They took what they needed and left.”

  “So Sadie might still be free,” Neil said jumping at the slim hope. “Get in. We’ll find her and then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  Jillybean didn’t get in. She was no longer so grim and focused; she looked sad and worn. “Will it ever be over?” she asked, looking down at Ipes. There was a moment of silence and then she nodded. “Until then, we keep going.”

  She sighed, climbed up into the Jeep and began digging into her backpack, producing a map of Colorado folded so that the section of mountains they were in was facing out. “If they left in the morning, they were likely aiming to get to Poudre Park by nightfall. If Sadie was on foot, I think it would be her only option.”

  “Then we’ll go there. Get that bomb shooter of yours ready.”

  Chapter 27

  Neil Martin

  Twenty minutes later they struck Route 14. To the east was Poudre Park to the west were a number of rinky-dink mountain towns that were so small and stuck so far out in the middle of the wilderness that it made little sense wasting gas heading to any of them, and yet that was the direction in which they found tire tracks in the snow.

  Again, Jillybean was out of the Jeep before Neil could get out, in fact even before he stopped she was down on the ground like a bloodhound going back and forth, gently touching the tracks with her tiny fingers. “There were two trucks and they were the sorta big ones, but not the really big ones. Bigger than Captain Grey’s truck, you know what I mean? And they were pulling trailers. Those smaller tracks were made by trailers.”

  All Neil saw was mash of tire prints. He stepped closer, standing over them—it was like looking at an alien language and he couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. But since he had Jillybean with hi
m, he didn’t see the point of poking around in the snow further. He trusted her in these sorts of things. “Can you tell anything else from them? You know, like how many people they could have with them or what kind of weapons they had?”

  Jillybean looked at him for a long moment as if she were looking at a bug she had never seen before. She then glanced down at the tracks, her brow crinkling. “They don’t have artillery guns like the Azael had, if that’s what you mean. Other than that, I can’t tell what type of guns they had. All I know is that some of the tires are mismatched, which isn’t, um, out of the normal? Is that how you say it? Is that what means that’s how it is nowadays?” Neil nodded and she shrugged. “So, I don’t know if that means anything.”

  Neil looked back and forth down the highway, seeing nothing but snow, tire tracks and mountains rising up like shark teeth. There wasn’t much else to see other than the deepening shadows that stretched long across the road.

  “Five day old tracks going deeper into the mountains?” It wasn’t much to go on, but they had nothing else. “Maybe these bandits have some sort of hideout that they sneak out of to take people as slaves.”

  “Maybe,” Jillybean said with a shrug that couldn’t have been more of a platitude if it had been spoken by a politician. Neil correctly read it not as a maybe, but as a: definitely not.

  They decided to spend the night in Poudre Park since it was the closest shelter available and, hoping to find Sadie safe and sound they drove through the not-so empty streets looking for any sign of her, however the zombies spilling out of the houses along the main drag made it difficult for them to do anything more than survive.

  They dashed here and there, turning u-turns every time the road ended in a gulch, which seemed more often than not.

  There were zombies everywhere and Neil ran many of them down as they frequently slipped and fell in front of the Jeep. He roared along in four-wheel low, smushing zombies into the snow. It was strange to see them pick themselves up again, leaving behind a body print…and usually some flesh and grey blood. It was like a horrible version of a snow-angel.