Jimmy was afraid for himself, while Jillybean was afraid for Sadie. That fear had been with her since Hank the Humvee had crashed; it had been at a simmer before, but now it came to roil within her. It made her want to do things, bad things.
“You couldn’t have stopped her,” Jillybean said. A harsh thought followed this up: And you won’t be able to stop me, either if I have to go get her. “And we don’t know if they got her. Sadie is awful fast. And you know what? That was a pretty low flare. She probably just triggered a warning flare. It showed her up and she booked it out of there. That’s what happened.”
She turned on her heel, walking back to the house. “We need to be prepared to go,” she said. “Sadie will be here pretty soon and she won’t want to wait.”
“Thank God,” Jimmy said, catching up to her in three strides. “For a moment there, I thought you were going to get all weird on me. I say we put some miles between us. Just a couple of hours should be enough. Besides it’ll get us that much closer to Idaho Falls.”
Jillybean cast a dubious eye up at him. “I doubt we’re leaving the area just yet. A flare doesn’t tell us if they’re bad guys or good guys. It only tells us that they know something about defending their land. I would have went with a sound trap and that’s what means they don’t use up supplies.”
Jimmy pulled her up short. “Wait. We can’t fuck around here. They know we’re here. They’ll be coming for us.”
He sometimes didn’t make sense to the girl. “They don’t know where we are, Jimmy, or who we are, or how many of us there are. But I think they will come to protect their buffalos. That’s why we got to move. I think we should get up into those hills behind them. If there’s no roads back there, they probably won’t expect it, you know?”
“Yeah,” he said, calming slightly. “I guess.”
“Okay, then let’s get ready to go.” She had him smother the fire with dirt from the yard. While he was rushing back and forth with a little pail, she loaded up their few possessions onto the handcart and brought up some of the choice items from the basement. Despite her firm belief that Sadie had gotten away, she had plans turning in her mind for the worst case scenario.
It wasn’t long before they were ready to go. They waited for Sadie, sitting across from the house near the edge of the field where they could either greet her or slip away unnoticed if someone else happened to come by.
As they waited, Jillybean picked green branches from a bush, transforming her monster outfit into a ghillie suit. At the same time, she did some basic calculations. “Two miles at night would be a thirty minute walk, unless she ran,” she murmured not quite under her breath. “If she ran, then it would be twenty…and she’d be here by now. Hmm, but if she was running to lose people following her, it would take her more like forty or forty-five minutes.” She checked the watch on her wrist and declared: “I’ll worry at sixty.”
It was a bald-faced lie. She worried for every one of those sixty minutes and as she did, she felt the whispers crawling up from the depths of her mind like a bunch of black ants. And she heard from Ipes telling her that it was time to run, and she heard Chris laughing and telling her not to sweat it, and she felt Eve in the background hoping to come out to play. Hoping to take over once more.
“I won’t let you,” Jillybean hissed, making Jimmy look at her all queer. She pretended not to notice, something she had become very good at. It was easier than facing the truth of what everyone thought of her and what she thought of herself. She didn’t like to think about herself too deeply, especially ever since Chris came around, or rather, ever since she had discovered that she had invented Chris, an entire person with thoughts and feelings and a history and everything.
In the last few months, Jillybean had not been herself. She felt shook up like a snow globe with the different parts of her floating around waiting to find out where they would settle down.
When they did, would she be a doctor? Or would she be an assassin? How about an engineer or a dancer? Was it possible that she could be just a little girl?And would she be crazy for always? Or would she get better? Or would her crazy be situational, coming and going depending on the weather or the stress? Would she keep inventing new people or would she reinvent the old…like Ipes? Were those whispers ever going to form a body to take their revenge on her like she deserved?
She didn’t know any of it. The one thing she did know was that Eve was never going to take over again, or if she did it would be in the two seconds before Jillybean splatted on the ground after a leap from a tall building. That was fact. It was such a cold fact that a shiver took hold of her from the inside and she shuddered uncontrollably for a good thirty seconds and in that time, Jimmy only stared.
After a long breath, Jillybean got a hold of herself and pushed aside the snow falling inside of herself and decided that what was also fact was that Sadie had been captured. She checked her watch and saw that it had been almost eighty minutes since the light had flared in the hills.
A cold anger swept her. “We have to go get her.”
Judging by his reaction, Jimmy thought this was the craziest thing yet. “Hey, hold on. Like you said, we don’t know anything just yet. Think about it, if those are good guys, they might just be talking to Sadie. You know, finding out that we’re harmless and shit like that.”
“And if they’re bad guys, they could be peeling her fingernails back right this second.” It’s what I would be doing, she thought. Almost too late, she added: If I were bad that is.
Jimmy looked shocked at the description. “And if they’re good guys and we go in fucking shooting? What do you think will happen to Sadie? Look, I’m not saying that we don’t do anything, I’m just saying give it time.”
He could be right, Ipes said from inside her backpack. His words came to her muffled and a little mumbly, as if he were in the very depths beneath the bombs she had hidden away when Jimmy had been inside worrying over the fire.
He could also be wrong, Chris chimed in. If I hadn’t acted quickly that time with the slavers, they would have sold you off. You need to act now before they recover from their initial shock. You got to get in close.
“Knife distance,” she said.
Jimmy crossed his arms and glared down on her. “You need to stop. This is how you got Sergeant Steinman killed. You went running off doing your own thing and he died because of you.”
Jillybean was too stressed to deal with Sadie being captured and the accusation, especially not as tired as she was. The black whispers flared, forming a black cloud over her black mind and out of it came a familiar voice hissing: “I didn’t do nothing! He was stupid. He was too stupid to deal with one monster and stupid people deserve the death they get. Everyone knows that.”
The savageness coming from Jillybean’s lips shocked Jimmy, who slowly reached out for his M4, keeping his eyes steadily on the little girl who was just as stunned and was only just realizing that the cold lump in her right hand was her .38 police special. She lifted it, not to aim at Jimmy but to see if what she was feeling was correct.
“Hey, it’s cool, Jillybean,” Jimmy said. He was frozen in an odd stooped contortion, his hand inches from the tip of the barrel. “It’s cool, okay? Don’t do anything…bad.”
“I won’t,” she said, attempting to push the pistol back into her pocket where it belonged. She pushed against resistance; an invisible hand perhaps. But it was weaker than she was and the gun disappeared from sight. When her hand came out empty, Jimmy snatched up his rifle. As he did, Jillybean felt her lips twist into a sneer.
Did he not feel the difference in the weight? How could he not notice the missing scope? Or the magazine? She had taken them ten minutes before when he had walked away to tinkle. She had nothing to fear from that gun, at least not until he dug around in his pack for more bullets.
He was just beginning to realize something was wrong when she said: “Wait here, Mister Jimmy. If Sadie shows up, fire twice with a three second interval.
&n
bsp; “Until then, keep quiet. I…I won’t be bad, okay? But there might be some explosions.”
Jimmy had been staring at the open port of the rifle, looking as if Jillybean had performed some sort of magic trick. Now, he jerked. “No, please. We…we have a mission, remember?”
“Yeah, of course I amember.”
“And do you remember what happened to Bobby Hernandez and Ray Trainor?” For a moment, Jillybean was at a loss. The names weren’t immediately familiar. Ipes had to remind her: Bobby’s girl was taken by slavers while on a scouting mission. The two went after them and were never heard from again. That could be you.
“You can only get lucky so many times,” Jimmy said. “And when your luck runs out, we all lose, Jillybean. Your family is counting on you.”
“Sadie is my family,” she said, defiantly. “And I don’t need luck.” She knew exactly what she needed: an equal combination of genius and unbridled violence—but only if they forced her hand. A part of her wanted that violence to bloom out of her in fiery glory, but she wouldn’t let it. Unless they forced her hand. Unless they did something to Sadie, and then…a queer shiver of anticipation racked her again.
Chapter 8
Sadie Martin
A half dozen flashlights sent beams crisscrossing her prone body so that everything around her was strangely black or white with no middle ground. Because she seemed to blend in with the earth and with the heavy knee crushing down on her back, the blending was somewhat literal.
“Lights off,” a man ordered and immediately the forest went dark. “Get him up.” Hands grabbed her, hoisting her to her feet. The gun across her back was pulled off, the strap scraping right up the side of her face. Rough hands worked their way into her pockets, taking her knife and lighter. They swept up her slim frame, stopping at her breasts, where they went back and forth between the two for a moment.
“Holy crap! It’s a girl.”
Sadie was blinded for the third time that night as a flashlight, with what felt like laser intensity, was shot into her face. “Yeah, I’m a girl, so what?” Brazenly, she swung her head back so that her black hair lifted away from her face. “If any of you try anything, I will guarantee you will live to regret it.” For emphasis she snapped her teeth.
“Right,” was all the leader said before turning from her. “Broadway, you and Two Forks keep an eye out until we get another flare set up. The rest with me.” Eight men moved off after the leader, hauling Sadie along with them. With iron hands gripping her arms, she had no opportunity to run.
They went along the deer trail for another sixty yards before they came to another trip wire. Sadie was lifted over it. If she could have seen the filament, she would have given it a kick out of spite, only it was such a thin line that she was already past it before her eyes could pick up on it.
All along the length of the top of the hill was a bristling hedge made up of thousands of stakes made from sharpened tree branches. At the head of the path, there was a gate of sorts made up of these stakes. They had been banded together on a frame that could be swung forward like a door.
Another group of men, fewer in number than the one that had captured her, waited in the gloom beyond the stakes. “How many?” someone asked.
“Just one as far as we know,” the leader said. “And it’s a girl.”
“Strange.”
“Very.”
Sadie was frisked a second time and then passed off to the smaller group. In silence, they followed a path down into what she had hoped would be a spacious valley utopia. It was disappointingly small. The box canyon was shaped somewhat like a football: three hundred yards long and two hundred wide, tapering towards the giant wall.
A further disappointment were the accommodations. There was one two-story house that looked, even in the dark, to be at least a hundred years old, and somewhere around fifty mobile homes set up on concrete blocks, giving the valley an abused and sullied appearance which she suspected would be ten times worse in the daylight.
“Jillybean was right,” she murmured under her breath. It was a rinky-dink operation and not one worth getting caught over. “Too late for that.”
It was early enough that there were lights on in most of the trailers as well as in the big house. There were also little campfires here and there with empty chairs parked in circles around them, but there weren’t any people in sight. Sadie guessed that they were manning their perimeter, called away from their cigarettes and their hooch.
On the porch of the big house was a big shadowy figure standing on the top stair gazing down. Behind him were two women, both armed with M16s and both filled with glares, which they offered to Sadie right up until it was announced that she was a girl.
“I prefer the term woman if you don’t mind,” Sadie said. The only people who seemed to mind were the two women, who glared with an even greater ferocity as Sadie was once more transfixed with flashlights. The teen was svelte and beautiful and stood in stark contrast to the two women, who were thin from sideways on, but broad and flat from the front.
“We don’t care,” said the man on the porch. He gave her a long look before turning to the men who had brought Sadie. “Keep everyone in place, except Baggy Pants. Find him and tell him to bring his bat.”
Sadie rolled her eyes, but when she saw that it hadn’t been noticed in the dark, she made a production of sighing before saying, “A bat, oh please. You would have been more scary if you had said…” She paused, cleared her throat and when she spoke again it was rough and gravelly like the man’s on the porch: “Tell him to bring the drill.”
She laughed at the man, though it was all show. The bat threat had seemed a little unconvincing, but there was no way to be certain and she was suddenly nervous that she had given him an awful idea by mentioning a drill. “Y-you guys do a lot of t-torture out here?”
“As much as needed,” the man answered. “Let’s get you inside. No need to stir up the local stiffs. They like a good scream.”
Sadie wanted to laugh this off, however the man’s face was shrouded with the night and as dark as a demon’s; he had a way about him that suggested he was not to be taken lightly.
She was at a loss at what to do. Jimmy and Jillybean were more than likely oblivious to her predicament and probably would be for another couple of hours. She could be beaten to a pulp by then…or raped a dozen times over. “Fuck,” she whispered, climbing the stairs. Up close the leader of the little valley was surprisingly tall; her eyes were nipple level to the man who caught her by the back of the coat just below the collar in a fierce grip.
“Is that how you treat a lady?” she asked.
“It’s how I treat a spy,” he answered.
She spat out another laugh. “A spy? What on earth is there to spy on, here? I don’t care about your stuff. I came to find out what sort of people you are. You know slaver or free. Or whether or not you’d be interested in trading.”
One of the woman hissed: “Don’t listen to her, Baloo. Who goes about asking for trade deals in the dead of night? Huh? No one, that’s who. I say you use a drill on her like she asked. She’ll be talking in no time.”
“I got this La-La,” Baloo grumbled. “Go fetch me some rope. Try the garage.” La-La, plain as a fence post with dull brown hair, pushed past, heading into the house. Sadie was marched in after her.
Just as she suspected, it was a very old house, but sturdily built. The floors were varnished pine that creaked with every step, making a sneaky getaway highly unlikely. The walls were also wood and with the candles burning, there was a rustic charm to the place.
The basement was a different story altogether. Dusty and dark, it smelled old. The walls were made of crumbling concrete as was the buckled floor. There was a rift running through the first room—there were many rooms. The place was a rabbit’s warren of shadows, old junk, cobwebs and rat droppings. Baloo’s flashlight swept back and forth; he seemed to be looking for something.
“Is this where they filmed Silence of t
he Lambs?” Sadie joked, trying to laugh away the jittery feeling eating up her stomach.
“Don’t know about that,” he said, dragging a chair with broken back slats out from one of the cubby-like rooms as above, they could hear La-La crossing the floors.
She was not light-footed and the thuds approaching the stairs were like a countdown clock to Sadie who began to feel a soft dread turn her bones to jelly. She was almost thankful when Baloo set her down in the chair.
“I got twine. Is that good?” La-La called from the doorway.
“Yeah. Get your ass down here.” The twine was coarse, seeming as old as the house. It bit Sadie raw as Baloo cinched it down tight. He gave each knot a hard tug before he ordered: “I want you and Mad Jenny to watch over her until Baggy pants get here. Don’t let him do anything until I get back.”
Sadie had a desperate fear radiating out of her and she hurriedly said: “But I didn’t do anything wrong. This is not how you treat people.”
He paused, one foot on the stairs. Without looking back, he said: “This isn’t how I used to treat people, but it’s a hard world now. You never know who to trust, right?” He left them and when he crossed the floor above, his steps were thunder.
The moment he was gone an uncomfortable silence filled the dark basement. It stretched on and on. “I like your jacket,” Sadie said to Mad Jenny when she finally couldn’t take it anymore. The woman had on a Vietnam era OD green army jacket. Back in her old life as a rebellious teenager, Sadie would have killed for a jacket like that.
Mad Jenny’s lips poked up for all of a second and then she resumed her silent glare. Sadie tried hard to keep her eyes from rolling upwards. More minutes of silence passed. “So, what do you guys do for fun around here?”
The Undead World (Book 10): The Apocalypse Sacrifice Page 8