“Load it up,” she said, slipping the padded straps over her shoulders. Jimmy had already strained his stitches to the bleeding point and so Sadie did the work of putting all of their possessions into the cart, which came to almost eighty pounds and then there was the weight of the handcart which, although light, wasn’t feather light.
Jillybean struggled on a southwest course dragging the cart through fields and along ravines and over hills. It took just one long, bramble-covered hill before she was too exhausted to go on. Still that mile and a half was enough to quiet the whispers and the voices.
“Let me,” Sadie said, taking over. The goth girl put the harness on and pressed forward, looking as though she expected the worst. A second later, she smiled.
“That’s not so bad.” The smile remained in place only for the next minute. After that came what seemed to be an endless slog. In the next three hours they left Wyoming, crossed into a little dangle of Montana and then into Idaho, where nothing really looked all that different.
In all that time, no one spoke about Sergeant Steinman. He had become, like so many others, just one of the dead. He’d had no woman and no family. His friends had been soldiers who knew the score—people died. Sometimes they died well and sometimes they died in a way that would haunt the sleep of the survivors. Steinman would haunt Jillybean’s nightmares; she knew it. He would haunt her until she killed someone else. That’s the way it had been and that’s the way it would be.
She trudged on, trying not to think about it.
Jimmy took over working the handcart in the late afternoon and lucked out as the three came upon the first paved road they’d seen in the last eighteen miles. He gazed up and down the road, his eyes flicking back and forth as if half-expecting a caravan of slavers to come barreling down on them at any second.
“This can only be Fish Creek Road,” Jillybean said, pointing at the map where a little squiggle of tan cut through an immense green area. “In a mile and a half, there will be a road west called Chick Creek Road which will run for a few more miles all the way out to Route 20. From there we can go south to Idaho Falls or…we can take our chances with more mountains. It’ll mean less monsters and less people.”
It said something about their state of mind that they were so visibly nervous about approaching a nothing of a town like Idaho Falls, which had a pre-apocalypse population of only 60,000.
“Going through the mountains will also take a lot more time,” Sadie said, reluctantly. “Who knows, maybe weeks and weeks.” According to their schedule, they had all of twenty-two days left to find the perfect place on the west coast and get back to Estes. If they took too long, they could conceivably come back to an empty land. “I think we got to trust our luck with Idaho Falls.”
Jimmy was drenched with sweat from pulling the cart, and pale from his injury. “We could get a car there, right? I know I don’t want to walk the whole way to California and I’d really like to sleep in a bed.”
“Then we’ll need to get moving, I guess,” Jillybean said, squinting up at the sun hanging just above the trees. They had four hours until sunset. She was tired and worn and didn’t want to take another step, however she didn’t want to sleep in the woods for another night, either. Laying on the hard ground, no matter how many leaves she managed to scrape up, didn’t feel like proper sleep.
Sadie went to the harness, strapped in, took a deep breath and began pressing forward. On the pavement, she made such good time that Jillybean, with her short legs, couldn’t keep up and lagged further and further behind. She might not have been able to go much further that afternoon, except Chris came to walk next to her. As always, he was tall and handsome with his hazel eyes and the carefree tumble of dark hair.
He told her jokes and laughed loudly at each as if he was the one hearing them for the first time. When he ran out of jokes, he sang in sweet voice that sounded like her mother’s. And just like Captain Grey, he growled encouragement whenever Jillybean faltered. She was deep in conversation with him when a gunshot nearly stopped her heart.
A zombie had come stumbling out of the woods to their right heading straight for Sadie. It was one of the big ones, looking as huge as a brown bear as it tore aside tree branches as thick as Jillybean’s leg to get at the goth girl. Jimmy shot it at point blank range. “Holy crap! Look at the size of that fucker,” Jimmy said, standing over the beast. “He’s like twice my fucking size.”
“That’s a bad word,” Jillybean said, not understanding the purpose behind casual cursing. It was one thing to exclaim in a moment of stress, but to just sprinkle the words into everyday sentences didn’t add up.
Jimmy only rolled his eyes since she had corrected him five times a day for the last week. “Let’s button this up,” he said to her. “You got to stay closer, just in case.”
She wasn’t happy about sticking close since Chris left her, saying I gotta go. They don’t get me. She understood and gave him a hidden wave as he slipped away as quietly as he had arrived, disappearing among the trees. From then on, she talked to Sadie, or at least she hoped she was talking to Sadie. When a person was crazy, there was no telling for sure.
They found another sign that they were nearing civilization not long after: a lone cabin that could barely be seen tucked up a scrubbed-over dirt driveway. Part of the ceiling had fallen in the winter before making it not just uninhabitable but also unsleepable. Jimmy took one look at it and wanted to press on. Jillybean took one look at it and noted the intact windows and the front door still neatly shut. She saw the front curtains that were faded but not tattered and she saw the shed off to the side, weathered but still relatively new.
No one had gotten to this place yet. Was it a hunter’s cabin? A little man-cave where some hen-pecked husband went to get away from the wife?
Jillybean pulled her .38 and her maglite before saying: “Hold on now.” Jimmy whined and Sadie tried to scold her back to the road, but the little girl wouldn’t listen. As expected, the front door was locked. “See?” she said over her shoulder as she went around to the back to where there was a little porch with sliding glass doors.
She cupped her hands and peeked inside at a little den with wood paneling for walls and no-fuss white linoleum floors. “Hmm,” she said, giving the handle on the glass door a yank. It rattled but wouldn’t budge.
“Do you want to pick the lock or should I get this?” Sadie asked. In her hand was a stove cut log she had plucked from the top of a stack of them which ranged along the side of the house.
Jillybean stepped back and even though she guessed it wouldn’t be that loud, she stubbed her fingers into her ears. There was no telling what would set off the whispers.
“Hey, batter, batter,” Sadie said, grinning and swinging the log. The glass came down in a curtain of shards and made enough noise to make Sadie wince and Jimmy look around, afraid that someone might have heard.
The place smelled of wet leaves and mold. Jillybean did a quick inspection of the den with her maglite before moving on to the next room which was a combined kitchen and dining room. After that she discovered a front room and hall to the bedrooms and bathroom.
There was a disease of black speckles eating up the walls in two of the bedrooms where the ceiling had collapsed, but the place was otherwise snug.
“Why are we here?” Jimmy asked. He was in the front room peering out one of the windows.
Sadie had stopped in the kitchen. She came out holding a can of chili in both hands. “It’s not a complete waste of time. There’s like twenty cans of this sort of stuff in the pantry and there’s toilet paper, thank God.” In their rush to get away from the ambush, they had forgotten to grab the toilet paper from the Humvee.
“And did you guys see these on the walls?” Jillybean said, pointing to a light switch.
“Yeah, so?” Jimmy asked.
Did he just say: yeah, so? Ipes asked inside Jillybean’s head. Is he crazy?
“I know,” she whispered before adding in a louder voice:
“This place isn’t connected to a grid and that’s what means it has to have an in-de-pendent source of ‘lectricity, and that’s what means a generator and that’s what means there’s gas around here…probably.” It wasn’t a guarantee, but it was likely.
Sadie shot Jillybean a smile and said: “I’ll check the shed.”
And we’ll check for cookies, Ipes declared. I kinda like this place. It sure is better than sleeping on the ground like common mules or something equally bad like camels or salamanders.
“I agree, but…” She glanced out the back door where the sun wouldn’t set for another hour or two. “But we don’t have time.” Ipes was the soft part of her, the part that didn’t want to have to always work so hard to prove herself. He was the part that wanted to play and be a kid and sleep in and read a book next to a fire.
“It’s not the time we have to worry about,” Jimmy said from the doorway, thinking that he was part of the conversation. “We still have to cart this stuff around. More gas is great, except it’ll just weigh us down even more.”
He was right. They found twenty-three cans of food, twelve bottles of water, two six packs of Pepsi, seven rolls of toilet paper, twenty shotgun shells and four gallons of gas—altogether over a hundred pounds of goods that had to be left behind. Or most of it, that is. The Pepsi was a treat and the toilet paper a necessity. The rest was buried in the woods not far from the house.
Jillybean relished her first can of Pepsi, lagging far behind once more. It was hard to drink, burp the alphabet and walk at the same time. The burping part was Chris’ idea. Why waste a good burp, right? He never wasted an opportunity for fun and not the quiet-time fun that Ipes was fond of, either.
I say you make a statement, like this. He borrowed the can, took a huge swig, put a hand over his heart and burped out: I pleeddge aleeegence to… he ran out of burp before he could get any further.
He reached for the can one more time, but she pulled it back. “You’ve had enough. I’m with Ipes on this one. You should never chug a soda just so you can burp. It goes too fast.”
You’d rather have a tea party with it, I bet, Chris remarked.
The idea was a good one. “At least that way I could savor it for longer than five sec…”
“Jillybean!” Jimmy shouted. “Catch up for fuck’s sake.”
“Fuck’s sake?” she muttered. “What does that even mean? Nothing good, I bet.” Somewhat reluctantly, she caught up and when she did, she noticed that she was alone. Chris and Ipes had left her and now she only had Sadie and Jimmy as companions and then just barely.
Sadie had been in the harness for most of the day and looked done in, and Jimmy was only slightly better off, trudging along, carrying his M4 as if it weighed as much as a tree trunk.
“How ‘bout I pull the cart for a while?” Jillybean offered. She was tired and her feet hurt bad, but she knew she had to pull her weight. A part of her wished that Sadie would say: No, I got this. Captain Grey would have. In fact, he probably would have let Jillybean ride for a while, or so she liked to think.
“Oh, good,” Sadie said, shrugging off the harness.
Jillybean didn’t have it on for a minute before she regretted her decision and it wasn’t another minute before Eve began cackling. The little fiend was up on the cart letting her feet dangle and leaning back. If I only had a whip, I could get you moving right proper.
“Shut it,” Jillybean hissed as she lumbered along. Very soon she was too tired to pay attention to Eve or even their surroundings. She pushed on and on, staring at her feet and it was sometime before she realized that the sun was dipping below the mountains in the west. “Ho-lee mo-lee,” she gasped.
“It could be worse,” Jimmy said with a short: ha-ha, which was all he had the energy for. “It can always get worse. Think about it. It was a pretty day, neither hot or cold. It wasn’t raining or snowing. And there weren’t all that many zombies. If it wasn’t for…”
He faltered. The day had gone on for so long that it seemed like a week or longer that Sergeant Steinman had died, but it had only been that morning. “I mean, all in all it was a nice day for a walk. I remember when we were coming out of Durango with like a million stiffs after us. Let me tell you that was a road march from hell. Picture it: three hundred miles of mountains, in December and it snowed every single day. Man, it was fucked up. When we found Estes, I thought those days were gone. But I guess nothing lasts, right?”
“I guess,” she said, suddenly feeling the weight of the cart as if it had doubled. She didn’t like the idea of nothing lasting. That was more depressing than being crazy which seemed like it was going to be a forever kind of thing for Jillybean.
She was broken out of her brief stint of depression by Sadie, who had strayed ahead and who now came jogging back. Her goth appearance had suffered in the past couple of days. Her black clothes were grey with dust and her hair was no longer spiked. It sort of laid across her head like the flukes of a dead whale.
“I think you’ll like this, Jillybean,” she said, taking a position at the back of the cart and pushing.
Jillybean asked what it was, but Sadie wouldn’t say. They crested the hill they had been suffering up and down below were the fields of what had been a farm. The land was flat and cut into squares by crisscrossing drainage ditches. That wasn’t the interesting part and neither was it the different houses that could be seen dotting the open land.
What was interesting were the buffalo—hundreds of buffalo. They were everywhere, a brown carpet spread over the field.
Sadie held out her M4 for Jillybean to take and for just a moment Chris was inside her, hungering not to kill, exactly, but to hunt. Having lived with Eve’s evil, she knew the difference. One was a primal need: man versus nature in an eternal struggle for survival. The other couldn’t be explained by Jillybean simply because she didn’t understand murder. She had committed it, but she never truly understood.
“Look, babies,” Sadie said.
This only confused Jillybean even more. “Do you want me to kill one of them? I don’t think I could.”
“No silly. Use the scope to see them.” That made much more sense. She put the scope to her eye, eased back an inch to bring everything into focus—and there were the baby buffalos. They were humped and tiny and precious as they gamboled about.
The desire to hunt faded almost to nothing as she scanned the field, watching them, however she saw something that stoked the desire to kill.
“Are those wolves?” Jimmy asked. He had his own M4 up, but because of his wounded arm, he was having trouble holding the rifle steady enough to focus.
“No,” Jillybean said, not realizing that her finger had slid into the trigger guard. There were things down on the plain that were dressed as wolves, but they weren’t wolves. They were men arrayed in fur and they were hunting, going for one of the babies.
“Jillybean,” Sadie said, “What are you doing? Take your finger off the trigger, okay? Please?”
“They’re going after the babies,” Jillybean replied. There were at least a dozen of the “wolves” stalking closer, moving inward. Yes, they’re going after the babies, Eve whispered. You don’t want that, do you? You can stop it. Just pull the trigger.
Sadie eased around next to Jillybean, kneeling down, her hands out. “Hey, hey, slow down. You don’t know if they’re going after the babies, Jilly. Please.”
“Oh, we know. We know,” Jillybean said.
Chapter 6
Sadie Martin
“Hold on, Jillybean,” Sadie whispered, approaching the little girl as if she were a bomb that could be triggered with the slightest touch and in a way, she was. Jillybean had settled in behind the rifle, her eyes twitching, her lips moving in odd sporadic jitters, forming parts of a smile and then puckering and then going up and down.
“Th-they need t-to die, can’t you see that?” Jillybean asked.
“But do we need to die?” Sadie gently put her hand across the front of the scope. “If
you kill one of them, they’ll come after us and I’m too tired to run, just now. My feet hurt. What about you? Do your feet hurt?”
She blinked and said: “Yeah, they really do and so does my shoulders and my ba…huh?” She paused, her head cocked, listening to the voices.
Sadie interrupted: “Jillybean. Hey, look at me. Forget what you’re hearing and pay attention to me. Okay? Good…good. Now think. We don’t know if they’re good guys or bad guys or just normal guys. They might be just hungry and you know what? I’m hungry. What about you?”
Jillybean’s eyes had lost their twitch and her lips were soft and pink, once more the lips of a little girl. “I am hungry, I guess. But I don’t want to eat a baby. That doesn’t seem right.”
“Maybe there’s just a few of them,” Jimmy suggested, using a voice that he must have thought was soothing, but was so condescending that Jillybean’s eyes went to squints at the sound of it. “They probably don’t want to waste food. One of those big ones would feed, like a hundred people. A little one might be just right.”
Sadie gave Jimmy a look that suggested he should be quiet and be quick about it. The danger had passed, at least for the moment, but there was no telling when it would come screaming back. Jillybean had not been her usual, “just a little crazy” self ever since the ambush. She had been talking to herself with greater frequency, but so far, she had been trying to hide it. This suggested to Sadie that she was still in control.
“Let’s just see what happens,” Sadie said. “Here, can I have the gun?” She took the gun back and eased down next to Jillybean, putting an arm around her scrawny shoulders, fully prepared to grab the girl’s arms if needed. Sadie knew all about the .38 in her right front pocket and the knife on her belt and the hidden razor blade.
“Maybe she shouldn’t watch,” Jimmy said. “You know, in case something bad happens.”
The Undead World (Book 10): The Apocalypse Sacrifice Page 6