The Undead World (Book 10): The Apocalypse Sacrifice

by Peter Meredith

  Since he seemed safe enough, she went back to peer at the Camry and the little girl. The zombies here were blind, whether temporarily or permanently didn’t really matter. What mattered was getting them away from the Camry now that Jillybean was almost done.

  “They may not be able to see, but they can at least hear. Hey! Yoo-who! There you go, look at me. Well, don’t look at me. Listen to my voice and come on this way.” Like sleepwalkers, the beasts turned slowly toward her voice and she talked them along until they were in the lumber aisle. There, she climbed up on one of the huge, industrial sized shelves that held decking and spoke loud enough for the entire store to hear her. Even the dogman came to gaze up at her, his tongue out and his chest heaving. “You, go back to Jillybean,” she ordered, snapping her fingers. When he left her, she climbed through the open shelf to the next aisle, putting five tons of wood and metal between her and the zombies, and then jogged back, herself.

  Jillybean was just finishing up. “I could have handled them, you know,” she said, tossing aside the gloves and mask. She was red in the face and sweating, her fly away hair sticking nearly straight up in spots. “There was no sensing letting the dog guy get hurt.”

  “Hey, that was all him. He just took off and I thought he was going to get himself killed, which I guess doesn’t make much sense. He’s lived this long without us, I suppose a few zombies wouldn't be so tough for him to deal with. So, are you done here?”

  Jillybean could barely lift her shoulders in a tired shrug. “I should build bomb holders underneath, but that takes a long time and I’m real sleepy. But I can at least get the parts for it and build it over the next few days. Until then we can chuck the bombs out the windows…except we don’t have windows, really. I know, I can cut out part of the back…” A yawn stopped her and she smacked her lips like a drunk before she finished, “…back window, you know, right where the hole in the armor is.”

  Getting the needed items for the bomb dispenser was as simple as Sadie climbing up onto one of the shelves again and addressing the meandering zombies. “Ladies and gentlemen, please direct your dull, empty eyes to the woman in the ugly green top and ‘mom’ jeans, on the main stage.” She pointed at herself which was a wasted gesture; none of the beasts were able to focus their burned out eyes on her. They did, however drift vaguely in her direction.

  She kept up a long, steady stream of yapping which drained the last of her energy. When Jillybean had what she needed, she flashed the Camry’s lights and once more Sadie snuck through the shelves to the next aisle.

  Sadie drove while Jillybean sat in the back seat which was still very cramped. The dogman sat up front, sticking his face at the cutout in the armor, blocking Sadie’s view.

  “He’s not sleeping with us,” Sadie warned as she drove to the Walmart. Jillybean agreed without a fight. If anything, she was more tired than Sadie and yet, she slept for only five hours. Sadie woke to see the bed next to hers empty and instantly panicked. They were in a shabby Holiday Inn that had a view of a parking lot and a coal train. Car after car, all heaped with great mounds of the stuff, stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions.

  Jillybean was in the lot, working on the Camry. She was in the driver’s seat while the dogman laid on his side in the sun next to the open door.

  “Come back to bed!” Sadie hissed through the hotel window. Like the car doors, the window would only cant open so far and not even her entire face could fit in the opening.

  The dogman barked happily until Jillybean shushed him. “I have too much work to do. The cameras need to be mounted and doing it after the armor is on isn’t so easy. Next time, you should prewire the car. I’d use fourteen gauge OFC wiring. OFC is what means…”

  “Tell me tonight,” Sadie grumped and went back to bed.

  Because of the dogman and all the work that they had done earlier, they had gone to sleep close to eleven in the morning and because Jillybean could get hyper-focused on her work, if she deemed it important enough, she didn’t wake Sadie until after six in the evening.

  “I got the cameras going and the iPads and the drones,” Jillybean said, counting her completed tasks on her fingers as she went. “I also gotted the bomb dropper about halfway done. And I named the dog guy. I didn’t think that ‘dog guy’ was very nice, so I named him Spot.”

  Sadie had been just climbing out of bed, but stopped at this. “You named him Spot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You named that guy, Spot? Really?”

  “Yeah. Spot. It’s like a dot sorta, you know? ‘Cept it’s also a dog’s name. Everyone has gots to have a name. Don’t you think so?”

  It was a ridiculous name for a ridiculous person, and Sadie, who could not understand that level of insanity, only shook her head. To be fair, she couldn’t really understand any insanity. Sometimes she just wanted to shake Jillybean and tell her to stop “acting up.” Sadie never would, of course, but the desire was there.

  “You’re right, Jillybean. Everyone needs a name and I guess Spot is as good as any and he seems to like it.”

  If one could look past the fact that Spot wore pants and a shirt and didn’t have a tail…and was human, he was as fine a dog as Sadie had ever met. He was very well behaved and jumped into the car at a snap of Sadie’s fingers. Because of his longer legs, he sat in the front seat while Jillybean sat in the back, working the controls to the drone.

  It was a relief to Sadie to have cameras once more situated around the vehicle. It made driving far easier and they were able to cruise along, sometimes at speeds of twenty miles an hour. They cruised through the northern stretches of the cascades without incident and it wasn’t quite midnight before they crested their last ridge and paused at a spot that was aptly described as a scenic overlook.

  In the daylight the view must have been spectacular. Almost all of Seattle lay below them and it was dark and mysterious and full of possibilities and yet Sadie barely gave it a glance. Far away, on the other side of the city, across a stretch of water which she mistook for a tremendous river but was really Puget Sound, sat an island.

  In truth, there were many islands, however, there was only one that was ringed with lights. It looked wonderful and inviting. Neither Sadie or Jillybean had to say a word. That was where they were going.

  Chapter 21

  Jillybean

  Spot was excited about the prospect of going to the island as well. He made such a ruckus with his barking that it attracted a hundred monsters that came staggering out of the dark, materializing so suddenly it was almost as if the shadows had birthed them right at that moment.

  The three raced for the overloaded Camry and in seconds were safe inside. As the car was attacked from all sides, Jillybean sent the drone “Agnes” aloft to scout the way down into the city. Sadie pushed the Camry through the mob of undead and followed after the drone, taking instructions from Jillybean as they went down what felt like the longest sledding hill in the world.

  Soon they left the mountains behind and were chugging slowly through the streets of Seattle. There seemed to be obstacles everywhere: military style road blocks, overturned cars, piles of old corpses, and thousands of monsters. Using Agnes, Jillybean did her best to steer them clear of the worst of it, moving them through the northern suburbs before attempting to angle them southwest towards the glowing island.

  The closer they got to it, the more the lights reminded her of fairy lights. The night was misty and each of the lights was encircled in a glowing, magical halo. She began to get her hopes up as she envisioned what sort of people lived there. In her mind, they were good and kind because bad people certainly wouldn’t live among such prettiness.

  She let her mind wander between hope and the image on her iPad. What she wasn’t paying attention to was Spot, who had gone quiet and was no longer sitting with his tongue out. He was staring out the little rectangle of a window and although his face was slack, his eyes were sharp.

  Sadie was just saying, “I don’t
think there’s a bridge to that island,” when out of the blue, Spot opened the passenger door and jumped out. “What the hell!” she shouted stabbing down on the brake and sending Jillybean flying forward to strike the back of Sadie’s seat. The controller went tumbling from her hands, dropping into the footwell.

  Jillybean scrambled for it; there were too many trees around them for Agnes to be safe for very long. She was able to level off the drone, though how close she was to losing it, she had no idea. The picture that Agnes was sending was one of shadows that looked like huge black moths and crossed swords, or so it appeared.

  It meant Agnes was in the trees, perhaps inches from catching a branch in one of her engines. That would have doomed her. With a delicate touch, she brought the drone up and out of danger. “Ha! That was close,” she said, wearing a triumphant grin. “Now to find Spot.”

  Sadie put out a hand, almost touching the controls. “Hey, Jillybean, no. He’s made his choice. He wasn’t chasing anything, he just ran away. I think he wants to be alone.”

  “No, I-I don’t think so. He didn’t make a choice, because I don’t think he can. He’s like me, Sadie, only worser, and that makes him one of us. He’s weak and needs us, just like I’ve always needed you.”

  “Oh man, you can lay on the guilt,” Sadie said, leaning her head back to stare at the gloomed over ceiling of the Camry. After a moment and a long sigh, she said: “Okay, okay, I guess we can look for him, but if he refuses to get in the car we’re going to have to leave him. He has to have some sort of say in what happens to him.”

  Jillybean nodded, saying, “It would be like kidnapping, and he isn’t even a kid.” She then bent over the iPad, sending the drone higher. “Where are you, Spot? Where are…I got him. Take a left on the next block. He’s running right down the middle of the road.”

  Sadie took the left and began weaving through the mess and the monsters. Suddenly, the engine revved and Jillybean could feel the Camry picking up speed.

  “I see him,” Sadie said. “Dead ahead. Oh crap, he just took a left.” Unfortunately, the left he had taken was into a park that was covered with trees of every size. The drone was useless now and they had to rely on the camera system Jillybean had set up. They were adequate on an open road, however in a heavily treed park where there were only dark trees and the shadows of those dark trees the cameras were only marginally better than going in completely blind.

  Spying a trail heading into the park, Sadie slipped down it until it ended at a parking lot that was surrounded by foliage so overgrown that it had been invisible from the road. “Is there a way through?” Sadie asked, squinting at the front monitor. If there was, the cameras didn’t pick it out. Sadie took one look at Jillybean and groaned.

  “It’s the right thing to do,” Jillybean said and then climbed out of one side of the Camry while Sadie went out the other—she stepped out without her shotgun.

  At Jillybean’s look, the older girl gave her a characteristic shrug. “I’m faster without it. Besides, there are more zombies here than I’ve seen since the war and we only have so many shells. Come on. If we hurry, we can catch him. He’s been running full out for half a mile.”

  He had turned onto a sidewalk that snaked through the park, and there was no reason to believe he would deviate from it. Sadie led them through the park at a fast jog until they found the sidewalk. She took a left on it, slowly pulling away from Jillybean who, after a hundred yards, was beginning to wheeze. In the last month, she had let her physical training lapse and now she was beginning to feel it.

  Sadie paused and started hissing, “I see him, Jilly, hurry.” Jillybean struggled on, going faster until she saw a shadowy creature affecting a weird gallop. It could only be Spot and now that Jillybean saw him, she settled into a slow jog that ate up the distance.

  They caught him on the other side of the park just as he started to cross a street. “Hey, Spot,” Sadie said in a low tone, pulling at his shirt. He acted like he hadn’t heard her and so she got right up close to his ear and whispered: “Stay Spot!” This didn’t work and he kept on going, tugging Sadie along. Jillybean also tried ordering him to stop, but this had even less effect. “We have to let him go, Jillybean,” Sadie whispered.

  Before Jillybean could come up with any argument, Sadie released his shirt. Spot tried to gallop away, only the gallop had become a staggering hop that attracted the attention of the monsters that had been lingering in the dark. Although they seemed confused, they moaned and shuffled towards the strange creature. Right away Jillybean affected a fake limp, while Sadie adopted her usual monster lurch. Spot didn’t seem to care a whit about the monsters. He crossed the street, heading towards a line of the two-story brick homes that stood like sentinels all around the park.

  The two sisters were halfway across the street when the sound of a truck’s engine suddenly rumbled into life halfway down the block. Jillybean was so startled by the sound that she jerked around, looking altogether like a little human girl and had the truck flicked on its headlights, she would have been caught right out in the open.

  Sadie reached out and gave her a sharp tug to get her moving once more. “We can’t stay here,” she said through barely moving lips. With so many monsters behind them, they couldn’t go back, either. The older girl followed after Spot who had entered one of the houses. She didn’t go in, however. A strong, thick hedge bordered the property and they shrunk down behind it. Sadie pried some of the branches back so that they could peer through it and although the view was hampered by the dark, what they saw sent a shiver down Jillybean’s back.

  The truck was big and filthy black with such heavily tinted windows that it was a wonder anything could be seen from inside. Like a colossal panther on the prowl, it slunk up the road towards them. It, or rather the people inside it, were searching…perhaps even hunting for someone. The sensation was unmistakable and Jillybean felt suddenly like Jilly-mouse, small and vulnerable, caught out in the open.

  She wanted to run and slowly she began to lift up, ready to sprint out of there. Calm and seeming unafraid, Sadie put a hand on her skinny shoulder. There was an instant connection between the two and the calm sensation flowed from one to the other. Without using any force, Sadie pressed Jillybean back down.

  “If they see us, I’ll run across the road and get them to chase me,” Sadie whispered. “You get Spot and head back to the car. If he won’t come with you, you’re going to have to leave him.”

  “But…” Sadie cut her off, putting a finger to her lips as gravel and glass and dried bone crunched beneath the big wheels of the truck. It was close now, its engine rumbling placidly, once more giving Jillybean the impression of a cat. Sadie tensed, ready to spring. Her breathing picked up, not in fear, but as a precursor to the possibility of a sprint.

  The truck was mostly past the driveway, gently plowing through the monsters when there came a soft clunk from inside the house. Jillybean had the instant fear that Spot was on the verge of racing out of the house, barking his insane head off. If that happened, whoever was in the truck would shoot him for sure and there would be nothing anyone could do.

  Perhaps because of their rolled up windows, the people in the truck must not have heard the sound. It went on in the same manner as it had until the rumbling engine couldn’t be heard by the two. Sadie stood, saying, “Let’s get that stupid dog and get out of here.”

  She marched up to the front door with Jillybean tagging after taking two steps for every one of Sadie’s. “Maybe you shouldn’t be mad. If he hadn’t run off, we would never had knowed what sorts of people live around here. That truck creeped me out.” Sadie grunted in answer, though what she meant by it Jillybean didn’t know.

  The two went into the house. Sadie slowed, now stepping lightly, her dark eyes like shadowed pits, her head tilted slightly, honing in on the sound of Spot’s breathing. They could hear him. He was deeper in the house and it sounded like… “Is he crying?” Sadie asked.

  “I think so,” Jillyb
ean answered, looking up at her sister. “What do we do? I don’t want to make him be embarrassed. That’s what means some people don’t like to be looked at when they cry.”

  “Yeah, maybe we should wait here.” It was a fine plan, except neither of the two were all that good at waiting. Sadie lacked the patience and Jillybean couldn’t restrain her mind. Why this house? she wondered. What made it different from the thousands of others they had passed?

  There was nothing all that special about it in her opinion. To her left was an office with a fancy desk that, judging by its impressive size, had to have taken a dozen trees to create. In front of them the house opened up into a great room that was white walled and white carpeted. It was strangely “bright” even in the dark as if the moon’s light had seeped through the walls.

  Jillybean ignored the great room. It was there simply to impress anyone stepping into the house. It was cold and hadn’t been used much even before the monsters had come. She went into the office on a hunch. There were messes here. Drawers had been pulled back and the contents rifled through, but there were other messes, older ones from before.

  This room had been used. It wasn’t a set from a play like the great room. On the floor was one of the newer messes: a framed picture that had been carelessly knocked over. Jillybean picked it up and, taking the maglite from her belt, lit the picture. It took her a moment to imagine the young man in the picture with wild hair and a bushed-out beard.

  “This is Spot’s house. His real house from before.”

  She showed Sadie the picture. “Yeah, okay. That’s great, now turn off the light.” It took a moment before their eyes readjusted to the dark. During that short time, Sadie was only a vague outline. She looked like a ghost and Jillybean had a queer feeling that maybe she was one. Hadn’t she thought Chris was real? She had crossed half the country with a person who wasn’t real.

  Jillybean stuck out a quivering hand, afraid that it would hit nothing but air. Sadie’s eye must have adjusted quicker because she reached out and took Jillybean’s hand in hers. “You know he may want to stay here. I want you to prepare yourself, just in case. Insanity is tough. It doesn’t care who it…you know what? Never mind. Maybe we should find out his name.”