The River King shook his head sadly. “None of this is real. Not the zombies or the fires or the explosions. Those are just the trauma of your accident playing on your unconscious mind. You are actually in a hospital. Do you remember my name? It’s Doctor Walcott. I’ve been doing my best to help you heal. Don’t you want to be a normal girl again?”
Her heart leaped in her thin chest. There was nothing in the whole wide world she wanted more than that. “I do. I—I don’t want any of this. But…but…”
“But it feels too real?” he asked with a smile, turning up the edge of his goatee. “And at the same time, it doesn’t feel real, right? That’s part of your…your diagnosis. We’ve been trying to get you to let go of those things that aren’t real, like Ipes. He’s only a stuffed animal. He doesn’t speak and he never has, but you knew that. It’s why no one else can hear him.”
He was right. No one ever had. She glanced down at his black beady eyes and for once they seemed empty of life.
“Let’s start with him,” Doctor Walcott said in a kind voice. “Put him down and you’ll see that he just sits there. He might be able to speak into your mind, but he can’t move because…”
“Because he’s not real,” she said in a whisper. It hurt to say such a thing and it hurt deep inside to let go of him. It hurt too much it seemed, and instead of dropping him, she pulled him close. “But…but he’s my friend.”
Doctor Walcott nodded. “He has always been the hardest thing for you to let go of. Maybe we should build up to that. The road to recovery is made one step at a time. Let’s have you let go of the gun, instead. It represents your anger. You are angry that all of this is happening to you. You need to let go of the anger.”
“The gun’s not real either?”
“No, of course not. How would you get a gun into a hospital? It’s as imaginary as Ipes. Let it go. Put aside the world of make believe and just place it on the ground.”
The gun had been aimed with a steady hand straight at Doctor Walcott during the entire conversation and for an imaginary gun it was getting heavy—which got her thinking: couldn’t she just imagine the gun away? She tried to will it into nothingness, but it remained…and so did the undercurrent of anger in her. She had almost forgotten it.
Was that imaginary as well? “I feel angry. Am I angry because my parents died? Wouldn’t that make me sad, instead?”
“We all deal with grief differently,” he answered. “Now, put the gun down.”
“Don’t worry, Doctor, it won’t hurt you, if it’s imaginary.” The gun might have been a figment of her imagination, but she was sure she saw fear pass across his face and for a moment he was the River King again, conniving and evil.
“It’s for your sake that I want you to put the gun down,” he said, “not mine. You’re the one living in a horrible world where zombies walk the earth.”
Her eyes narrowed and she said, slowly, carefully: “I call them monsters, because that’s what they are. And you know what? That’s twice now you’ve called them zombies. Whose fantasy world is this, yours or mine?”
His wise and caring smile faltered and he said: “Sorry, earlier you were calling them, I mean you were describing them as essentially…” He paused and smiled. Throughout their entire conversation, he had held his own pistol pointed upwards and suddenly in mid-sentence, he tried to turn the gun around, extend his arm, and fire.
Jillybean’s reactions were honed by the constant danger she had been living with; she shot first, her bullet plowing into the right side of his chest where it tore a huge hole in his lungs before lodging in his spinal column.
A half-second later, he fired his own gun, missing wide and then he was falling as his legs gave out. His arms were oddly crimped in and as he was unable to catch himself, he landed hard with a thud. When he hit the road, his gun dropped from his now slack grip.
“I-I can’t f-feel my legs,” he said in a gasping, half-strangled voice as Jillybean came up, her pistol once more cocked. She could never fire it straight when it wasn’t. She stepped on his pistol as one bloody hand groped for it.
She stood on the gun and it felt real enough as did the smell of the spent powder and the ringing in her ears—and yet there were monsters lumbering slowly towards them. How were they possibly real?
“Aren’t we in a hospital?” she asked, still trying to come to grips with reality.
“Fuck you,” he hissed, breathing out bubbles of blood. This was her reality. There had been no car crash and no hospital. There were only lies, liars and monsters, and he was all three.
With two hands, she leveled the gun and fired. From three feet, she didn’t miss. His body jumped as the bullet went into his face, just to the right of his nose, but he didn’t die right away. He choked on blood and his feet drummed and he was still squirming when she left him, heading straight out the way she came.
You did the right thing, Ipes said in what he supposed was a comforting voice. He was a bad man who…
“Not now, Ipes,” she whispered, shutting him off. She needed to think, but she didn’t want to. She needed to think about how easily she had been fooled by the River King. He had told her the baldest of lies and she had jumped at it.
Above her buzzed the last drone she had aloft, sending out signals to the iPad, but she didn’t really need it. Monsters were now roaming freely across the base and all the king’s men were hiding or shooting at each other. Jillybean left the base with weight on her shoulders, wishing with all her heart that the River King really had been Doctor Walcott.
Chapter 42
Neil Martin
“Something is definitely broken,” Neil mumbled after caressing the left side of his face for the tenth time since they entered the pipe. It was either his cheek or his jaw or him temple. It was hard to tell which since the area in question was swollen to an alarming degree.
He cast a look at Grey for his opinion, but it looked as though the captain had passed out. His battered body was bleeding stripes through his stolen BDUs from the lashes he had endured before Neil and Jillybean had been able to get their plan moving.
Neil decided to let him rest for another minute before he got them moving again. There was an unspoken agreement between them: if Jillybean didn’t call, they would go back for her. It would likely mean their deaths, but neither cared just then. Neil was exhausted and Grey was at a point well beyond the quaint notion of exhaustion.
Tired or not, Neil was just about to shake Grey awake when Jillybean spoke over the radio: “Cat, this is Mouse. I am inbound. ETA is three minutes, over.”
Before he could answer, Grey cracked an eye and said: “Warn her that the smoke is lifting. It’ll be a hot extraction.”
“What does that…”
“Just tell her,” Grey said in a gravelly voice, the closest thing he could come to his usual cranky growl.
“Fine, fine. Mouse be advised that our, uh, cover is not what it used to be. It’s a bit thin which will make your approach somewhat warm.”
There was a moment of silence from the radio and then her little voice piped: “Roger that. I will have two ropes ready. Out.”
Grey grinned a smile that was only on his face long enough for him to say: “That’s my girl.” Neil opened his mouth to ask, but Grey waved him not to bother. “It means she won’t be slowing down, so be prepared to grab on.”
“She won’t slow down?” Neil pictured being dragged in the wake for a mile before the rope slipped through his hands and he was left behind to fend for himself.
“Jillybean knows you, Neil. She knows what you’re capable of, don’t worry.”
That was easy for Captain Grey to say. Even halfway to death, he was three times the man Neil was. He was already pushing out into the smoke-covered river and man the smoke was more than just thin, Neil thought as he flippered out. Closer in to shore, the smoke was iffy. Thirty yards further out it was little more than wisps drifting a few feet above the dark water.
There were zombies
everywhere, splashing and moaning in great excitement. The battle had stirred them up but stuck in the river as they were, they could do nothing but splash about.
Neil, who was immune to a zombie’s bite or scratch, swam ahead to clear the way. Zombies could float and flail, however, in general they were terrible swimmers and Neil was able to push a few out of the way so Grey could swim without interference.
“How far do we go?” Neil whispered. “What if she is way out…” Just then they heard a hum. It was close. Grey started swimming further out just as the pontoon slid out of the low smoke seeming huge and oddly majestic for such a normally unappealing boat.
Jillybean was in back, holding the steering handle of a fisherman’s electric motor. When she saw Grey waving, she canted the handle and the ship gently turned in their direction. It was purring along slowly, maybe four miles an hour, and as it came abreast of them, the little girl threw coils of rope.
As the girl was so small the rope was little more than cord and couldn’t have been more than a quarter inch in diameter. Grey grabbed one end and entwined it around his hand. Neil started pulling himself along the length of the cord, going hand over hand, hoping to get on deck before he froze to death or a zombie plowed into him and he accidentally let go of the rope.
He should have been worried about the gentle wind, which took that moment to shift slightly. There was a shout from shore followed by a clear voice asking: “Where?” In seconds only guns and the sudden roar of the pontoon’s engine could be heard.
Through the remaining smoke, stabs of orange could be seen from the western bank of the river. Not everyone knew what they were shooting at, otherwise the pontoon would have been sunk in thirty seconds. Still enough bullets swept over and around Neil to cause him to duck down under the water where the sound of the shooting was muffled compared to the much closer and much more ominous noise of the engine’s propellers digging through the water at full power, sounding as if it were headed right for him.
All Neil could think was: Jillybean is going to run me over! He popped out of the water only to get side-swiped by the long metal end of the shore-side pontoon runner. The props had been turned toward the bank and when Jillybean had started the engine it had gunned in that direction, right at Neil.
Jillybean realized her mistake and turned hard to port, sending a wall of foaming water over Neil, who began to choke on it. Drowning was a real fear, but it was distant third in his current fear rankings. The bullets skimming and skipping across the water were easily in the lead. Every gun on base seemed to be pointed at them and where the water wasn’t white from the engine, it was white from the flying lead. He was going to die, turned to human mulch by a thousand bullets.
His second place fear of being left behind was coming true as the cord slithered through his wet hands with remarkable speed. Desperately, he tried to clamp down on it only to feel the rope burn through the flesh of his palms.
In four seconds, the pontoon was racing away and the end of the rope was yanked from his hands. He thought: Now the smoke will clear completely and that’ll be it. They’ll gun me down…
Before he could finish the thought, he was spun around and dragged backwards through the water by the collar of his coat. Grey had him, which was the good news. The bad was that he was being choked by his own coat. He fought his fingers between the skin of his neck and the cutting edge of his zipper and prayed he wouldn’t black out.
Dragged along, he had a horrifying view of a hundred guns ripping up the water all around them. “Jeeze!” he screamed in a strangled voice. The bullets were hitting so close they were kicking water into his eyes!
Thankfully, the misery of this lasted only a minute before they were at the first bend in the river and Jillybean immediately put the engine in neutral. Neil felt himself being pulled toward the boat and he started kicking with his flippered feet to help.
“You’re alive,” Grey said. It wasn’t a question, it was more of a statement of surprise.
“Barely,” Neil answered.
The pontoon was barely alive, as well. It listed heavily to the right where thirty bullet holes leaked water into the once airtight metal cylinder. The engine had also been struck and dark smoke wafted up from it.
Grey and Jillybean looked it over before shrugging at each other. The little girl then glanced at the holes in the side of the boat. “You two should try to move all the heavy stuff to this side of the boat or we’ll sink. Well, I guess we’re gonna sink no matter what, but I guess it’ll be slower this way.”
She didn’t seem to care one way or the other and Neil thought she had a queer blank look on her face, making him wonder where she had been and what she’d been doing.
“Jillybean, are you okay? You don’t look yourself.”
“Does it matter what I look like? You’re not a doctor and this isn’t a hospital.” Neil was at a loss to reply to this but she shrugged her remark away. “I’m fine, just a little tired of being me. It’s usually not fun.”
“You should try being a grown-up,” Neil said and tried to give her his best possible smile, which had zero effect. “Probably because I look worse than a zombie, I bet,” he mumbled.
Grey, who was also very zombie-ish in appearance, didn’t comment. In fact, he didn’t seem to have heard it. As Jillybean increased the throttle of the smoking engine, he picked up a few heavy crates of C4 and moved them to the high side of the boat.
After four such crates, he fell against the back of Jillybean’s captain chair and passed out. Neil rushed over, but Jillybean stopped him. “No, you gotta right the boat first. I’ll look at him, I guess.”
To keep the boat headed in the right direction, she tied off the steering wheel with a piece of string, and then knelt down next to Grey. “Mister, Captain Grey, sir? Can you hear me?” He didn’t budge, not even when she shook him and patted his cheek.
She put her delicate ear to his broad and bloody chest. When she sat back up, there was a frown on her face. Neil asked: “What is it?”
“His heart has tachi-cardia and that’s what means it’s going real fast, but it’s not all that strong as it should be. Accordion to my books, he might be poisoned or gots a disease or he was shot and lost a lot of blood.”
She looked him over, making a face as she touched the whip-marks that striped him. “Hmm, he looks bad, but he’s not been shot and I don’t think he bleeded enough to have tachi-cardia.”
“So, what do you do?” Neil asked as he hefted another box. He could tell he was wasting his time. The boat was going to sink and probably within the next twenty minutes.
Jillybean was quiet for a while as she alternated between looking at the captain and the river ahead of them. Eventually, she said: “We treat the symptom I guess. That’s what the book said. Mister Neil, can you get me the box of med stuff. It was in the front of the boat with a plus sign on it.”
He fetched the box and offered to help, but she shooed him away, telling him: “I got this. You keep the boat on track and keep it from sinking.”
He did what he could with the boxes, moving everything to the high side of the boat and steering on a river that was nearly half a mile wide in spots was not difficult. It afforded him plenty of time to watch Jillybean prepare an IV, something he had seen a number of times, but had never attempted.
Of course, neither had she, as far as he knew, and yet that didn’t stop her from cracking the bag, running the lines and preparing the catheter. Grey normally had veins like rope, but now they were thin blue lines and were mostly hidden beneath the surface of his bloody flesh.
Jillybean tied off his arm above the elbow and let it hang lower than the rest of him. It took almost a minute before a vein began to plump up to the size of an earthworm. When it did, she slid the catheter in until there was a flash of blood at the top of it. She took out the needle portion, hooked up the tube and then ran the fluids into his arm, gently at first and then when she saw that the vein was holding, she went full bore.
In no time, the bag was empty and she put in a second. Midway through it, when the boat was riding very low in the water and the engine was spluttering badly, Captain Grey woke up. He took one look at the IV and said: “Good job, Jillybean. We’ll make a doctor out of you yet.”
“How do you know I didn’t put it in you?” Neil demanded in faux but quiet outrage.
“The taping is her handiwork. It’s exactly how I showed her in the past. Hey, do we have any Tylenol or morphine. I feel like three-day old crap.”
Jillybean raised an eyebrow at the crudeness, although she didn’t say anything. They had both medicines. Grey took morphine, which was an indication of the pain he was in and Neil took five fat white pills of Tylenol. He was also in a lot of pain, but he wanted to be as clear-headed as he could be.
The motor conked out a minute later and they had to rely on the current and the little electric motor which wasn’t very effective now that the weight of the pontoon was almost double with the water taken on.
“We don’t need to go too much further,” Jillybean said. “Do you remember Cairo? Oh wait, neither of you were with us for that part of the adventure. There’s a town up ahead. It’s got lots of cars we can get one and…you know.”
She fell silent, biting her lip.
Neil understood. They had succeeded in rescuing Captain Grey, but they weren’t done yet. There was still more danger ahead and more killing. The thought was depressing, especially since they wouldn’t be able to take a break.
The traders had a fourteen hour head start, which meant Neil would be driving again as soon as they found a car. He had been up already for the last fifty hours and was on the verge of falling asleep right there on deck as the river water began creeping over it.
“We better dock this thing, quick,” he said. “Hey, do we have to take all this stuff with us?” He dreaded the idea of having to move it all once again. He would have to do it alone. Jillybean was too small to help and Grey was still listless—his last few days had to have been ten times worse than what Neil had been through.
The Undead World (Book 8): The Apocalypse Executioner Page 43