The Undead World (Book 10): The Apocalypse Sacrifice

by Peter Meredith

  When she felt she was just about done in, she took them on a long run around the hospital, losing them easily on the other side. There was a fine sheen of sweat on her face when she made it back to Sadie who was sitting in a wheelchair, just inside.

  Jillybean didn’t notice what was just to their right until Sadie gestured to the pharmacy with its overturned shelves. Its floors were covered in what looked like a hailstorm of white pills. “This reminds me,” Sadie said. “Have you been taking the medicine Dr. Danahy gave you? I mean you look great and I haven’t heard you talking to yourself or whispering or anything.”

  The truth was that Jillybean hadn’t taken her medicine for six days. There wasn’t a molecule of it left in her system, but somehow she hadn’t had any ill-effects since the moment a bloody Sadie had cracked an eye in that overgrown yard back in Seattle.

  It was somewhat of a miracle that Jillybean felt as good as she did and there was no reason whatsoever for her to feel guilty about it and yet she did. “Yeah, every day,” she lied.

  Chapter 34

  Jillybean

  For some reason the guilt over lying to Sadie ate at Jillybean’s guts as she drove into the empty, dried-out bowl that was central Washington and the Columbia Basin. In many respects, it was as bleak as any desert and it did nothing to help with her guilty conscience.

  She had never lied to Sadie before and she hated herself for lying now. But she had a reason: what if Sadie made her take her pills again? And what if they messed up whatever beautiful balance her mind had come up with? Jillybean had been wonderfully whisper free for the last few days and she wasn’t about to risk ruining that with some pills.

  They had worked before, that was true, but she told herself that she didn’t need them now. She was better in every way, except for that pesky guilt.

  The only time she had any refuge from the guilt was when Sadie slept and Jillybean was able to leave the Camry and run back and forth along the lonely stretch of road they had been driving on. For hours, I-28 heading east had been nothing but empty blacktop. It had been empty of monsters and cars, that is, but not empty of hazards.

  Every few miles, the road would simply just disappear and in its place would be a gaping hole or a swollen river or a canyon a hundred yards wide. Jillybean found a way around each of these obstacles, only once getting the Camry stuck in the soft, dark dirt that made up the land. It was perfect for growing potatoes in but not so good for trying to drive heavily laden cars through.

  The Camry’s front tires spun and spun, slowly digging themselves twin ruts. She tried rocking the car and reversing it, and putting it in the lowest gear possible but only ended up getting stuck worse. She wasn’t stuck for long. Her mind solved that puzzle in seconds; enacting the solution took much longer.

  It involved a trek across the dirt to a farmhouse that sat crooked on its foundation a half mile away. She went in with her .25 sitting in the pocket of the black jacket that Sadie had given her back in Bainbridge—the house was as empty as the road had been. From a dozen clues, she knew it even before she took one step inside, just as she knew it would have everything she would need to get the Camry free: shovel, wheelbarrow, carpet and a utility knife.

  Twenty minutes later, Jillybean wore an odd smile as she worked. The smile was as crooked as the house had been. Even though this was a perfect opportunity for the goth girl to be sleeping, Sadie sat half in and half out of the car watching her, not saying a word. The force of those dark eyes on Jillybean had the guilt ramping up and she was just sure Sadie was going to ask for the bottle of Zyprexa and she was sure Sadie would count the little pills. Then she would see the truth.

  But Sadie only watched Jillybean work, cutting strips of the ugly burgundy carpets and laying them down on the dark earth. Just when Jillybean thought she was going to get away with the lie, Sadie said, “I need my pills.”

  The dark and the whispered words and the guilt in her twisted the simple meaning of the words. “My pills?” Jillybean asked. “W-why would you need my pills?” The smile on Jillybean’s face was so tight that her cheeks were beginning to hurt.

  “What? I don’t want your pills. I want my pills. My chest, it’s hurting and it’s been long enough, right? I took my last dose at six.”

  “Yes, right, those pills. Yeah, it’s time. I’ll get them for you.” She rushed back into the car and got to the medbag before Sadie could. She opened it with her back to her sister, but Sadie was in too much pain to notice the odd behavior. “Here you go,” Jillybean held out two pills, the bag behind her back in a childish attempt to hide it.

  “Thanks,” Sadie said and laid back in her seat, which was at full recline.

  Jillybean went back to work on the carpet, cutting it slowly, being overly precise when little precision was needed. Every few minutes she would sneak to the side of the car and peek her head around to see if the pills had knocked Sadie out as they usually did.

  Her pain must have been great since it took thirty-five minutes for her to finally fall asleep. To be safe, Jillybean waited another five minutes before she grabbed the Zyprexa and the bottle of aspirin from her medbag and slipped out into the night. Under a moon that had been slowly draining away night after night, she dumped the Zyprexa onto the earth and counted out sixteen aspirin to take their place.

  She kicked dirt over the fallen pills, put away the medbag, and then went limp with relief. “I’m not crazy no more,” she declared. So why the guilt, she wondered. “Am I supposed to be crazy? Am I only me if I am crazy? Maybe the others won’t recognize me without it. That would be stra…”

  She stopped suddenly, realizing that she was talking to herself. That was the very definition of crazy. “But at least no one talked back.”

  “Did you say something, Jillybean?”

  It was Sadie speaking in a slurred whisper, but that didn’t stop Jillybean’s heart from seizing momentarily as she jumped in shock. “No…no, I was just, uh doing math. You know to figure out coefficients concerning the parameters of the, uh of the car’s weight versus the friction caused by the earth and the…”

  “That’s good,” Sadie interrupted. “Just try to keep it down.”

  Jillybean clamped her lips shut and finished her work in a dogged silence. She was determined not to be crazy in any way.

  The car was free and back on the road minutes later. Sadie slept through it. She was so pale and still that Jillybean tried to take her pulse, but Sadie thought she was trying to hold her hand and grabbed Jillybean’s hand in hers and went back to sleep.

  Slowly, the girl extricated her hand and then pulled the drone’s controller from beneath Sadie’s bottom. It was tricky running the drone five hundred feet above their heads while at the same time as driving the windowless Camry. It kept her eyes moving and her hands busy—she forgot all about being crazy, while Sadie faded into the shadows of her periphery.

  She drove for five hours like this, stopping only to change out the batteries in the drone and to run sprints up and down the road which was still empty. In fact the land around them was so desolate that it felt to Jillybean as though she was traveling on a foreign planet.

  It got so bad that when she saw the first monster of the night, a ragged, naked beast that, with its great shaggy-haired head, seemed half as large as the Camry, she actually grinned at the monitor. If she hadn’t long before disconnected the car’s horn, she would have tooted it as if to say “hello.”

  “What is it?” Sadie asked, coming alive from the shadows next to her. “Where are we?”

  “Two miles outside Sprague.”

  A soft, weak yawn escaped her. “Sprague? I never heard of it.” She took up the map which Jillybean kept near at hand. It was neatly folded and carefully annotated in Jillybean’s childish scrawl. Sadie squinted down at the tiny dot that represented Sprague. “It looks like no one else has ever heard of it either.”

  It had a pre-apocalypse population of just over four hundred people. Now, the only living things in Sprag
ue beyond the rats, the cats that fed on the rats and a family of badgers, were twenty-two monsters of the hanger-on types. They were brain dead like all the rest and yet they hung around their old neighborhoods, haunting them like living ghosts.

  With the windows covered in metal, most monsters tended to ignore the Camry, but the Sprague creatures came toddling out into the road. Even for monsters they seemed bored, and Jillybean let them congregate as she coasted along looking for a good place to stay for the day. It would be sunrise soon and she wanted to be undercover.

  “What about that place?” Sadie asked. On the corner of the main strip was a rambling two-story brick home with a wraparound porch and two extensions that had been built on to the main structure at different times in its history. It was the type of home that Jillybean loved to explore. It was practically a guarantee that it wouldn’t have the usual living room, sitting room, dining room configuration. There would be odd staircases that creaked and turned on themselves. And there would be rooms beyond rooms, little cubbies, a hidden sewing room, and perhaps a secret door or two.

  As much as she wanted to explore it, she sighed and shook her head. “Nah. It doesn’t have a chimney and you need a bath. I’m a little too tired to build an improvised fireplace. Asides, places without chimneys don’t have any firewood all cut up and ready, not usually, anyway.”

  Sadie gave her left armpit a sniff. “Maybe you’re right. It has been a few days since I’ve seen soap. It’ll be okay with my stitches?”

  Jillybean didn’t know if regular bathwater would hurt them at all. She guessed that as long as the chest tube didn’t get water down it, that a bath wouldn’t hurt her. “Sure, I guess.”

  “You guess? Well, that’s certainly reassuring.”

  “You’re on antibiotics. What could happen? Hey, look at that place. It’s got its own whatchamacallit? A rain catcher? A Cistern? Is that a word? Or…whoa, look at him.”

  The home had a wraparound porch and standing beneath it was another of the beasts, but this one was so peculiar that Jillybean had to see it with her own eyes instead of viewing it through the monitor. She cracked the door and stared.

  It had been an old man in the before but now it wasn’t. Certainly it was still old, but where before he’d had withered arms and a sunken chest and a back that had been bent by the weight of eighty winters, now he was tall again and barrel-chested. His flesh was as grey as a wasps nest, but his hair was a fantastic explosion of pure silver. It rippled from his head in waves and was as long as any girl’s.

  Sadie leaned across the console to get a look. “Maybe we should find another place. He looks like the kind of guy who used to yell at kids for walking on his grass. I bet he eats them now.” Jillybean agreed that they should go and yet she didn’t shut the door and neither of them moved.

  “Look at him,” Jillybean said as if there was anything else of interest. “He’s so strong-looking even though he’s so old. Do you think the monsters will live forever?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the genius. I should be asking you.” The monster came to the edge of the porch and toppled right off, landing on its face. Sadie snorted soft laughter saying: “I guess that answers the question.”

  It didn’t as far as Jillybean was concerned. She started visualizing more experiments. How tough would it be for her to find out this silver-haired beast’s name and age? Not very. From there she could set up a proper laboratory condition in which she could sustain…a yawn, complete with dripping eyes, ended the train of thought. She was suddenly too tired to do anything but find a place and fall into bed.

  They found a home that wasn’t far away that was perfect for what they needed. Perfect except for the old bloodstains splattered on the kitchen walls and the jumble of bones in the master bedroom closet. Jillybean shut the door on that ugly scene and settled Sadie into the big bed, tucking her in.

  “Did you take your pill?” she asked, Jillybean.

  “I got it right here,” Jillybean answered, taking an aspirin and swallowing it. She drew the curtains against the building morning light and went to the other side of the bed. It was the “dad” side, but she didn’t care. Sleep took her quickly. In her dream, she went to the closet where there was a rasping noise. It sounded like one of the beasts, but the little girl went to the door regardless.

  “Hello?”

  “Help.” That wasn’t a monster. It was a human with a soft voice, one that she recognized.

  “Sadie? What are you doing in…” She stopped with her hand on the knob as a thought suddenly struck her: if this was Sadie, who was in her bed? When she looked back, the bed was far away and cast in shadows. It was empty except for those shadows. Quickly, she pulled her hand away from the knob. She didn’t want to know what was on the other side of the door.

  Fear struck her like a knife to the guts, and in slow motion she turned to run. The carpet turned to a beige colored bog sucking her feet down until she was fighting each step. When she looked back, the closet door was opening and in the dark was…

  Jillybean sat up, her heart ripping in her chest, her face covered in sweat. Next to her Sadie was sleeping, her breath the same soft rasp she had heard in her dream. “Just a dream. That’s all it was.” She looked at her watch. Hello Kitty had both paws merged above her head. It was noon. Jillybean tried to calculate how much sleep she had gotten and couldn’t come up with a number. She only knew that she hadn’t had enough.

  She laid back down and tried to force sleep to come. All she accomplished was wasting an hour. Deciding that a bath would help, she went out to the backyard where, off in the distance was a pond. It, along with the jutting finger of a chimney, was why she had chosen the place, and she was just setting her mind turning trying to come up with a way to get a bathtub’s worth of water up the hill, when she tripped over something in the grass.

  Like an endless snake, a yellow garden hose sat among the overgrown weeds. She followed it all the way to a hand pump embedded in the earth. “Perfect!”

  After poking around, she found enough hose to circle the house if she had wanted. She also discovered a cord of wood stacked against a shed. Along with the wood she found about a zillion spiders including what she suspected was a black widow, though it might have been just a really big and ugly normal spider.

  She didn’t take any chances and chose logs from the opposite end of the run. It wasn’t long before she had a good fire going, and washed-off rocks sizzling in pans above it and was pumping water into a second floor bathroom. The hose had holes all up and down its length that made little fountains as she pumped. She didn’t care.

  The end result, a long, hot bath was all that what mattered. Only when she was pruney to what she felt like was a dangerous degree did she get out and dry herself with stale smelling towels. Next, she prepared Sadie’s bath, though she suspected the water wouldn’t be used for an hour or two.

  She was wrong. Sadie was waiting for her in the living room, sitting next to the fire in a rocker. “Are we having boiled rocks for dinner?” She raised a weak hand towards the flame where she was heating up more rocks. “How do you know when they’re done?”

  “They’re not for dinner, silly. I picked up some potatoes last night and I was going to roast them. And we still have some soup. But first you gotta have a bath. I’ll get everything ready.”

  “Hold on. The fire is a little smokey, don’t you think? Aren’t you worried about bad guys?”

  She really wasn’t. This was her second time through the badlands of Washington State. It seemed as if humanity had ceased to exist in this part of the country. “Not really. If you had seen the bunch of nothingness we drove through last night, you wouldn’t be too worried either.” She gave Sadie a smile suggesting everything would be fine, however when she went outside to work the pump, she cast a nervous glance up at the chimney where a feather of black smoke rose to a height of about eighty feet before it simply disappeared.

  A growl crept out of her throat. Eighty feet wasn’
t very high, still in a barren land such as this it caught the eye. “It should be fine for a few more minutes,” she told herself and began working the pump up and down until she saw the water coming up in tiny fountains along the hose’s length.

  Sadie was sitting on the toilet, breathing heavily from her exertion, when Jillybean came up with the fire-heated rocks. The older girl had climbed a dozen steps and had taken off her pants; it was a lot for her to do on her own.

  Jillybean inspected the incision site, thinking that the wound wasn’t healing at quite the pace she had hoped for. “There’s not much progress and that’s what means we need to see Doctor April.”

  “I said we would go,” Sadie groused. “I’m just not staying, so don’t bother asking or trying to guilt me. You need me, Jillybean.”

  “I need you alive.”

  Sadie found the energy to lift her right shoulder in a half-shrug. “Alive or dead, you still need me. And I need you, too. Mostly because I can’t reach down far enough to take off my own pants. Maybe it’s too early for jeans.”

  “Are you saying you want a dress?” Jillybean asked, not hiding her look of shock. “You must be worser off than I thought.”

  “I’m fine, but yeah, I think a dress would be smart. The jeans were sweet of you. I just can’t breathe in them.” Jillybean started heading for the door however Sadie stopped her. “Nothing pink, you got it?”

  Three doors down, Jillybean found a yellow sundress in a size eight; Sadie wore a zero, so the dress floated on her. Sadie couldn’t summon the energy to complain. She only lifted a dark eyebrow. “It’ll do. Who’s going to see me but you, right?” Jillybean thought that a lot of people would. She had their drive for the night already planned out and she figured they would make it to Colton by daybreak.

  It certainly seemed like they would as the first part of their trip went by quickly. Sadie was awake and though she wasn’t all that energetic, she was able to work the controls for Agnes. Her camera showed nothing but dull empty land, allowing Jillybean to pick up speed. They crossed to the other side of the basin in record time.