“Yeah it was,” Jillybean agreed, “and it might get closer, come on.” She crawled past her sister, popping out the other side where the bullets couldn’t get her. “It’s good over here,” she said to Sadie, who was following after, but slower. Behind her was Steinman, going even slower still. For a moment Jillybean forgot that they weren’t all as small and nimble as she was. “Boy, if Chris were here…”
She had to bite that thought right off. She wasn’t allowed to think about Chris, no matter how much it seemed innocent.
When Jillybean ducked back down to look under the Humvee, Sadie was cursing, twisting oddly, straining, caught on a jag of metal. “Move!” Steinman yelled. Beyond Sadie, Sergeant Steinman was dragging Jimmy beneath the Humvee as well. The young private left a trail of blood behind as he was pulled. Worse, in Jillybean’s view, was that he seemed to be choking on air, his chest and throat spasming, his face going red.
With a grunt, Sadie tore the back of her black pants and scrambled up, panting. “Get in,” she ordered, pushing Jillybean into the vehicle. “It’s not safe out here.”
Jillybean didn’t really care about safe at the moment; she wasn’t being targeted by anyone. She was thinking three steps ahead: was there another ambush a hundred yards down the road? Was the Humvee damaged worse than it seemed? And if so where could they escape too? Was Jimmy dying and could they leave him behind with a rifle and a few grenades to cover their retreat? Or would Steinman make an issue of it?
Ipes would have tsked her at the idea of leaving Jimmy behind. He would have told her to behave like a proper lady. Eve would have said: Fuck Jimmy. Use him as a speed bump. Even as the thought came, Jillybean could feel Eve’s smarmy nastiness coating her insides as if she had just drunk a bottle of rancid olive oil. Chris, on the other hand, would have told her to lay down smoke to cover their retreat and at the first opportunity head off into the hills and leave them all behind. These thoughts ran through her, mixing in a great jumble with all the rest of her thinkings.
“First things first,” she whispered, leaping into the Humvee and snatching the iPad from the console and grabbing the control for the M249. She pressed the right-left button and made a disappointed Captain Grey-like growl when the image on the iPad failed to move.
“Oh, for all darn it!” she cranked just as Sadie climbed in. “Something’s wrong with the track or the motor. The gun won’t spin. And the camera’s gotted dark stuff on it. I can’t see very well.” She sat hunched over the iPad and with every smack of a bullet against the tough hide of the Humvee, her shoulders twitched. Thinking three moves ahead didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid of what might happen in the next second.
Sadie checked the monitors, finding hers were clear, all save the thermal gunsight camera, which had not come out of the fire unscathed. She had the same cloudy view as Jillybean—in it they could see vague pale blobs in a dark background. The blobs were humans, that was obvious, but how far off were they? And where in the picture was the vector. How am I supposed to aim without it? Jillybean wondered.
Sergeant Steinman, hoisting Jimmy by his belt, was suddenly at the driver’s door. “Move over!” he ordered, Sadie.
“Get in back,” Sadie answered, jerking a thumb. “You’ll never get him over the console. Jilly, get up here.” Steinman gave a glance towards the wide console that sat between the seats as the eight year old scampered from the back seat. He gave his usual grunt of agreement before manhandling Jimmy up into the backseat and climbing in, himself.
He barely had the door shut before Sadie gunned the engine. The missing wheel sent up a piercing scream and the entire vehicle began to shimmy. “Slow down, please,” Jillybean said. She felt feverish and eager as she watched the screen, seeing the small, far off blobs that bloomed white every other second. “To the left,” she said to Sadie, hoping that centering the screen on her target would mean a hit. “No, the other way. Further…further…good!”
She hit the button that triggered the gun. Above them the M249 began spitting lead and flame. “More lefter!” she cried in excitement as the rounds began bouncing off the walls of the gorge, just missing the blobs.
“I can’t or I’ll hit the canyon wall, sorry. But, hold on.” Sadie stopped the Humvee and backed it up, giving it a little twist. Without the vector, Jillybean could only guess.
“Stop!” she cried and started shooting the machine gun in little spurts until it went strangely silent.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, pressing and repressing the fire button on the controller. “We can’t be out of ammo so soon. It must have been the fire. Sadie, it’s broken. We gotta get out of here. Sadie…” The appearance of a much bigger heat source caused her to falter. “Oh my goodness, Sadie they’re coming!”
Sadie’s eyes shot to the rear monitor. Despite the clouded over camera lens, the thermal sight picked up the heat of a huge truck heading their way. “Holy crap!” She stabbed down on the pedal even harder than before and at first the Humvee slewed right until she corrected the steering.
Gripping the back of both seats, Steinman leaned forward onto the console, squinting at the screen. “That’s the truck? It’s prolly just a deuce and a half. If they got a fifty-cal then we could be in trouble, but if not you two are getting your panties in a bunch for nothing. We got a crap load of bombs and I bet the SAW is just jammed. I can fix that no problem.”
While Sadie was still driving, Steinman opened his door, reached up to the roof rack and climbed out of sight. Jillybean opened her door as well, but didn’t climb out. Over the scream of the wheel, she yelled, “Mister Sergeant Steinman, sir? Can you wipe off the camera lens while you’re out there? Oh, and see if you can find out why the turny gizmo isn’t turning, thanks.”
“He said balls,” Jillybean mentioned when she shut her door. “What do you think that means?”
Sadie only had time to shrug before Steinman climbed back inside. “The gun is good to go,” he explained, “It was just jammed, but there is a lot of melted rubber and burned stuff under it. I don’t think it’s gonna turn.”
“That’s k. At least I can see all the stuff there is to see,” Jillybean said, watching the screen; her blue eyes, intense as diamonds. “I think you’re right about them not having a fifty-cal. They would have shotted it at us by now. Sadie, can you stop after we come around this bend…keep going…keep…there, that should be good.” They all waited in tense silence. They were two hundred yards away from the curve in the road and perfectly lined up.
A few seconds later, Jillybean rattled off sixty rounds, hitting the truck dead center, thumping rounds straight into the engine block and blasting apart the windshield.
The truck turned sharply and ran straight into the side of the rock wall of the gorge, its hind end lifting three feet clear off the ground, sending men in the back flying. To be on the safe side, the little girl gave them a few more rounds and then shrugged, saying, “I guess that should be good.” Sadie got the Humvee screaming along the road again at an ear-splitting ten miles an hour as Jillybean glanced back at Jimmy. “You okay, Mister Jimmy?”
The soldier, somewhat pasty-faced and bleeding from what looked like a wound to his armpit, nodded. He was no longer in any respiratory distress, which Jillybean wondered at.
“I caught one in the arm,” he muttered, seeming to be embarrassed. He tried to lift his affected arm, but could only get it so far up despite his groans and grimacing.
“You want me to look at it?” the eight-year-old asked. It seemed like a no-brainer to her. Now that Dr. Hester and Margaret Yuan were dead, she had more medical knowledge than pretty much anyone and yet, Jimmy hesitated.
With shrewd eyes, Steinman watched the little exchange and said to Jimmy: “Let me see.”
A new look of embarrassment swept Jimmy’s boyish features. “No, that’s okay. Sh-she knows what to do. I trust her. I don’t believe the rumors.” No one had to ask: What rumors? There were a thousand running through the remaining survivors, and a few of the
m were actually false. Though with Jillybean, it was just hard to tell the truth from fiction.
One thing was known for certain: she had saved Neil Martin when no one had thought it was possible. He had been a wreck of a person, shot up, through and through and bleeding as though his flesh held all the integrity of a sieve.
“Let’s switch,” Steinman said to Jillybean.
The little girl climbed through to the back seat without a problem, while Steinman grunted and groaned like a middle-aged man needing two tries to get off the couch. When he finally got in the seat, he held out a hand to Jillybean and said: “I’ll need the drone controller.”
“This is the gun controller,” Jillybean replied, holding it up.
Steinman started looking around the seat. “Then, where is the…? Is it back there with you guys?” With their gear and all the necessary equipment, it was a tight fit for the four of them and after the explosion, everything was pretty jumbled, but there was no controller and the screen only showed something that might have been a tree branch.
“You lost Betty,” Jillybean accused Jimmy. “Now we only have one drone left, for all darn it. And where do you think we’ll find another, out here?” The next closest town was Idaho Falls, eighty miles away, and it was a dinky place out in the middle of nowhere.
Everyone was glaring at Jimmy, even Sadie, who should have been watching her monitors. “Let’s pull over,” Jillybean said. They were at least a mile from where she had shot up the truck and just then, the drone really was the least of their problems. She was afraid that driving on the Humvee’s rim any more than they had to would damage the hub to the point where they wouldn’t be able to get the spare on it. Then there was their fuel reserves to worry about, and she had to fret over the Humvee itself. It had taken a beating in the explosion.
Finally, there was Jimmy’s arm to consider. He was a bloody mess and if his brachial artery had been severed he would bleed out in the next few minutes. As Sadie brought the vehicle to a halt square in the middle of the road, Jillybean took out her maglite and shears from her belt kit.
In seconds, she had cut away the sleeve of his BDU shirt and saw that he had a hole right through his triceps muscle. “Okay, that’s not all that bad. Gonna need a few stitches, though.” Using his own sleeve as a temporary bandage, she tied it around his arm and then went to cut away the rest of his shirt, which was a tacky mess.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said. “It’s just the one wound.”
“I should look. Sometimes with their adrenalines going, people don’t know they gots more wounds.” In the back of her head, she heard a zebra-ish voice correct: They don’t have more wounds. “Right, they don’t know they have more wounds and you were having some issues with your lung breathings.”
He still hesitated, holding out his left hand to stop her. “But I’m okay. I just sort of wigged out is all. I never been shot before. You know?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said, pulling back, trying to keep her face neutral. A soldier having a panic attack wasn’t something she had ever seen before. In fact, she could see the panic still in him. Like an old case of jaundice, it yellowed him, making him look sick and weak, at least in her eyes.
With role models like Captain Grey, Sadie and Neil Martin, it was hard for her to understand the fear other people felt. But it wasn’t hard to empathize with someone feeling embarrassment. As a murderer of women and children, she knew all about shame.
“You look like you lost a lot of blood,” she told him, giving him a pat on the hand. “Maybe you should just relax a bit. I want to check out Hank. I’ll be back in a bit. You’ll be fine.”
A smile twerked his lips for a moment and then he dropped his chin. She left him with a heckling laugh cascading down in some deep part of her. It was Eve. “Shut it,” Jillybean warned. Eve was the last person she needed to hear from just then.
It was common knowledge that Jillybean had made an imaginary friend named Chris on her trip cross country. That was something her friends and family could understand. They’d never understand if they knew Eve was back, poisoning the water. No one would ever like Jillybean then.
Faking a smile, she came around the Humvee to inspect the damage. It was both good and bad. The mine they had hit had been designed to knock out the tires without killing everyone on board. It had done its job, taking out one tire and piercing two others. Thankfully, the self-sealing tires had saved the two, and they still had the spare strapped to the hood.
The bad news was that there was fluid leaking onto the pavement from two different sources. Steinman had his own flashlight pointed at the front leak. “That’s brake fluid. I can’t see where the line is ruptured, though.” He then turned the light to the back and there was no need to explain what was dripping onto the road. The gas tank had also been holed.
“Can you fix it?” Sadie asked, kneeling down next to Jillybean’s left leg. The older girl had been preparing their last drone. Their first, and most important rule, was to always keep a drone in the air when traveling or when danger was near.
“I could if it was just us two,” the little girl said, with a heavy sigh. It was matched by Sadie’s. The two of them had been perfectly happy to go on this scouting mission by themselves. They were, after all, brave, intelligent, resourceful and tested in battle. Jillybean had spent a week preparing Hank the Humvee with every item they would need for a cross-country journey.
And that included a portable welding machine. It had been one of the first things jettisoned as unnecessary by Sergeant Steinman. Neil had decided that their mission was too important to leave in the hands of only two “people.”
“People?” Sadie had growled when she was told that they would have to make room for the soldiers. “You mean two girls, right?”
Neil had been unfazed by his daughter’s anger. “I mean, we have eighty people depending on one of these three teams making it through to the coast, finding a community for us to join and getting back here as fast as possible. We both know what will happen once the main group leaves for Cheyenne. We’ll be vulnerable.”
Jillybean kicked the memory out of her head and wiggled under the Humvee, following the dripping brake fluid. Luckily, she didn’t have to go far to see there the line was cut. It was just a nick, but she knew that with the hydraulics it wouldn’t take much more to cause trouble. With every press of the pedal, they would be shooting out the pink fluid like it was a squirt gun.
Five minutes of that and the only way to stop the Humvee would be to crash it into something sturdy. “Hmmm,” she considered. “I might be able to solder it, but it won’t last. I’ll need to replace it or put a weld on it to make it permanent.” Another sigh escaped her and then she began squiggling her way to the back, keeping out of the growing puddle of diesel, the smell of which always made her want to gag.
There was a hole in the side of the fuel tank that she could fit her pinky in. Although this was the bigger hole, it was a smaller problem. The fuel in the tank wasn’t under the same sort of pressure that the brake fluid was. It would be a simple patch job that she could do in five minutes.
“The brake is gonna be a headache. Hey, Mister Sergeant Steinman, sir? I’m gonna need two containers to catch all this. One can be small, like a cup or so.”
Steinman, who spent three long minutes searching for an appropriate container, clearly felt the loss of the diesel to be more important than the slow dripping brake fluid and in this he was wrong.
Even with losing most of the contents of two jerry cans, they had enough fuel to get them into Idaho Falls, while the loss of the brake fluid out in the boonies wasn’t something they would be able to replace. The last of it dripped away before Wood slid a plastic water bottle to her.
“Thanks, I guess,” she said, as she crawled out from beneath the Humvee and gazed around into the night. Other than the stars, there wasn’t a light visible for as far as the eye could see. They were still in the mountains and had a great view of the flat expa
nse of Yellowstone National Park, which was beautiful to camp in, but not good to break down in.
“Anyone know a proper replacement for brake fluid?” she asked, without much hope. The other four-person teams heading to the coast had been carefully chosen with designated people: someone with a bit of mechanical knowledge, someone else with medical knowledge, a team leader, and an all-purpose fighter. In their team, the eight year old, arguably held three out of four of the positions.
So, it was a surprise when Steinman said: “I hear power steering fluid would work. Or you can try tranny fluid. It’s all used for hydraulics.”
“Oh, I didn’t know, thanks.” She felt a moment of relief, which was turned on its head when a snide voice crept up out of the dark part of her mind.
You’re going to trust that moron?
“Shut it, Eve,” Jillybean mumbled as she hurried to the rear of the vehicle where her small satchel of tools was kept. “We don’t have a choice.” That bit of truth shut the dark girl up and Jillybean went about fixing the Humvee.
Under her direction, the team worked efficiently to get the Humvee going again. Jimmy was well enough to pilot the drone while Sadie and Sergeant Steinman replaced the destroyed tire. Jillybean fixed the hole in the gas tank first. She used Super Glue to build three layers of latex across the hole before soldering a sturdy piece of plastic over everything. The fact that the plastic melted at the edges only made the seal tighter.
The hole in the brake line was far more difficult to fix and she worried over it, endlessly. She knew the pressures involved in stopping a six-thousand pound vehicle traveling at seventy miles an hour would be tremendous and that any weak spot in the system would lead to a rupture.
Once more, she built up layers, but she wasn’t fool enough to think that plastic would work this time. Using her battery operated mini-rotary saw, she cut away tiny strips of metal from an aluminum can and built a lattice over the hole and the surrounding line, soldering everything in place as she went. It was an ugly fix, but a sturdy one.
The Undead World (Book 10): The Apocalypse Sacrifice Page 2