Who knew?
Certainly not Sarah, and especially not a minute later when she was sleeping in a comfy chair that sat propped near the window. She had not slept all the night before, and this was on top of the little she had been sleeping for the past month.
Detailed and dreadful nightmares came every time she closed her eyes. They were always the same four horrible events that she was forced to live over and over. In one, she was held down and endless raped by men she could not recognize. She was raped until something ripped open inside her and her guts rushed out in a smell of copper and filth. At the end of that dream, she always came awake in tears, clutching herself.
Then there was the nightmare of fighting Cassie in the dark river where the only thing Sarah could see were sharp white teeth in a grinning mouth and Cassie’s evil eyes glowing. In it, Cassie, with her dreadlocks floating like a squid’s tentacles, seemed like a water creature herself. She pulled Sarah deeper and deeper, laughing without bubbles, as Sarah fought to free herself and fought to hold her breath one second longer. She always came awake gasping for air and clawing at her own throat.
Perhaps the worst was the one where she couldn’t save Sadie. In that nightmare Sarah would pull her daughter to shore to begin CPR, but each time she went to do the chest compressions she would push Sadie deeper into the earth until the girl was lying at the bottom of an open pit that was six feet deep and six long. Whenever that dream struck, she would go to stand over Sadie and stare, reeling in guilt until the sun rose.
The last of her routine nightmares dealt with the ferry boat and the fire. In that one Ram was always alive. He and Neil and Sadie sat chained to the deck waiting for Sarah to come and rescue them. She always tried. She tried to push through an endless throng of men wearing the camouflage of the army, but they weren’t soldiers; they were devils holding her back. She was always weak and slow and couldn’t get away to save her friends. Neil and Sadie would call out Sarah! Sarah! Over and over they would call and the more they called the harder she fought to get to them, but she was always too slow. Then the fire would start and Jillybean would dance on the deck and then when the boat would begin to tip she would walk on its highest edge without fear. Jillybean had no fear because she had started the fire. She was a destroyer. Everything she touched burned and crumbled.
But on that day Sarah slept soundly in the comfortable chair in the empty house. She was exhausted, and for once the dreams didn’t come. She slept without stirring, even when a black Jeep crept down the street.
Chapter 10
Neil Martin
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Neil carried Sarah’s letter everywhere he went. It sat folded in his shirt pocket beneath his ever-present sweater vest, where it felt strangely heavy. At all the wrong times he would take it out and reread the line that counted for everything: …You’re not what I want. I thought I loved you but I was wrong…
All the wrong times to read that line consisted of anytime of the day. He could be smiling at some crazy antic of Jillybean’s and then look at the sentence and feel his heart go numb. Or he could be sitting alone in his room with his heart numb and look at the note and sense a blackness eating away his soul. Or he could be sitting on the edge of the tub resting his head on the shotgun while a blackness ate away the remains of his soul, and if he were to read the letter, who knew what would happen?
He was on the verge of finding out.
At some point, seemingly by itself, the barrel of the gun had slipped up under his chin. It was cool and not particularly uncomfortable. It felt good, actually. The shotgun was something real. It was something that he could understand and trust. It would do its job no matter what. No one could question the loyalty of the…
“Hey, Mister Neil?” Jillybean called through the bathroom door. “Are you in there?”
Neil jumped and the trigger he’d been caressing jerked slightly. He coughed and cleared his throat. “Yeah, I mean yes. I mean you can come in.”
“Ipes said you’d be in here,” Jillybean said walking in. Without asking she pulled the shotgun away from him and set it in the corner. “You don’t need to be afraid of the dark in here, Mister Neil. I have candles you know. In my backpack if you want one.” She slid the pack off and was about to open it up when she paused to look at the image on the front. “Tell me, who is this guy, Belieber? This guy on my bag. He’s got the biggest head I’ve ever seen.”
“He was a singer…sort of.”
“And he made backpacks, too?” Jillybean asked in surprise. “He must’ve been real busy.”
Forgetting the candle, she stepped around Neil and into the empty bathtub, laying down as if there were water in it. “Did you want something in particular?” Neil asked.
“I’m bored,” she griped. “Sadie is taking a nap and Nico is out.”
“And I’m last on your list?” Neil said with a note that was part accusation and part pathetic whine. He immediately shook his head, wishing he hadn’t said anything. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. If you’re so bored, why don’t you and Ipes go exploring.”
It would seem strange to suggest that it was ok for a seven-year-old to go out by herself in an undead world, however, everyone had long since stopped trying to put a limit on Jillybean. She was sort of like a stray cat that had adopted them, but was still mostly wild. She came back to the house for food or companionship, however she was just as much at home in the dangerous zombie-filled streets as she was being tucked in at bedtime.
Neil would have taken a more active role in parenting her, but he had been sick for weeks, while Sarah had been crushed with the loss of Eve, as well as trying to secretly cope with being raped. Jillybean had just sort of been around; always cheerful, but also almost always alone.
Now, strangely, she had barely left the house in the two days since Sarah had disappeared.
At the suggestion of exploring, she sighed and said, “I don’t know.” For a while the bathroom was quiet. Jillybean just looked at him as she walked her fingers, insect-like around the edge of the tub. Neil wasn’t in the mood to play any of the games she liked. He was about to ask her more forcefully to go do something else when she most unexpectedly asked, “Were you going to use the gun?”
“Huh?” Neil blurted.
“You know, for suiciding yourself. I know what is suicide means. My mom did that, you know. I told you, remember? Not with a gun. She stopped eating on purpose and that is what means she killed herself on purpose. I think she was sad, just like you, because my dad left. So? Were you going to do it?”
For a minute Neil didn’t know if he was going to answer her, mainly because he didn’t know the answer, at least not completely. His heart still stung over the loss of Ram, and there was a bitter hole where the love for Eve had once been. Now, on top of all of that, he had been shaken to his foundation by Sarah leaving him.
And Neil was just plain tired of this new world. He was tired of zombies and the bad food. He was tired of fighting for his life and drinking crummy water that tasted too much like dirt. He was tired of being afraid.
“I wasn’t going to do it,” Neil concluded. “I think I was just fantasizing of all the hard parts of life being over. It all seems hard these days. But I still have to hope that what you said about Sarah is true. That she’s just trying to protect us. And there’s Sadie to worry about, and you, Jillybean. I worry about you.”
She looked at him as if that was a surprise to her. “Well, I think that’s all kinds of funny because Ipes is making me hang around because he’s worried about you. He says I have to be extra good so you won’t suicide yourself.”
“Tell Ipes that I’m tougher than I look,” Neil said as a way of reassuring her.
“With that black eye you look pretty tough,” Jillybean said, pointing at his face. “Tougher than normal, which is like librarian tough.”
His shoulders twitched at the mention of his black eye. A single second of carelessness had nearly been enough to mean his death. O
ne moment he was checking under the hood of a fine old Ford truck that had been refurbished to appear as if it had been newly minted, and the next a zombie was on top of him, biting into his shoulder. Neil counted himself lucky that the sixty pound hood had dropped on both of them. He had gotten a few scratches and the shiner, while the zombie had part of its skull caved in.
Jillybean hadn’t noticed the shiver and had gone on, piping in her little girl voice about toughness in general, but when she brought it back to Neil he had to smile.
“Were you tougher as a pirate?” she asked. “Sadie says you used to be a pirate. Ipes says there’s probably no such things, but isn’t sure. Did you have a bird? Pirates have birds and eye patches and peglegs. Peglegs is what means you wear a wood thing down here of your leg.” She pointed at her own shin and then waited expectantly for Neil to answer.
“I wasn’t that kind of pirate,” Neil told her. “I was a…never mind. You don’t want to hear about that kind of thing. It was business stuff, only. There weren’t cannons or treasure or anything cool.”
“I still want to hear about it,” she assured him.
He gave her such a keen look she shifted her eyes down. “Why do you want to hear about it?” he quizzed her.
She sighed again and said, “Ok, I don’t. Ipes says suicider people should talk a lot. He says I should keep you talking and then you’ll get all better. My mom never said anything and she died. That’s what it’s all about. I don’t want you to die, Mister Neil. I like you a lots. So that’s why I wanted to hear about you being a fake pirate and all. You can still tell me, but can we also play a game at the same time?”
Neil had come in to take a break from his seemingly endless scrounging and, since they were scheduled to leave in the morning, he should’ve gone back at it, however he agreed to her request. They played Go-Fish, though Jillybean called it “Gold-Fish,” a mistake he allowed because it was innocent. Neil needed a hefty dose of innocent just then.
As he had expected, she did almost all of the talking. That was ok with him. He wasn’t in the mood to talk. Still it helped a little. The game kept his mind off the letter, and the little girl filled the numb void in his heart which had once belonged to baby Eve.
Neil had long ago given up on ever getting Eve back. At first, when they had fled from New York and settled in Philadelphia, Sarah had pushed for them to do something, to come up with a plan to invade New Eden, to make preparations to take on Abraham. However no one had. Neil and Sadie had been sick, Nico didn’t have the brains to be a strategist and Jillybean had been playing herself a game of Jenga during the talk since no one would play with her.
“We don’t need a plan to storm the underground fortress, and battle Abraham’s fanatical followers,” Neil had said at the time. “What we need is a way to grieve and cope and try to go on with our lives.”
“That’s our child you’re talking about giving up on,” Sarah had replied. She hadn’t been angry. She was rarely angry after New York; she was always just there, more or less living in bland, neutrality.
“I’m not talking about giving up on anyone. I’m talking about trading lives. You know we won’t be able to just walk in there and walk out again with Eve. People are going to die. Some of us are going to die. As much as I love her, I couldn’t trade any one of you for Eve.”
It was still true. Other than Nico, they weren’t warriors. They were just people: a mom, who on her best day was only an average shot, a Goth girl who was fresh off being dead, a Wall Street guy who knew his way around a wine list better than he knew any weapon, and a little girl whose sanity was daily fretted over.
To take on New Eden was clearly suicide, making Sarah clearly suicidal.
Neil blew out in a noisy sigh, not happy about how dark his thoughts had become. “Do you have any eights?” he asked.
Jillybean gave him a look before picking out the eight of Clubs from her hand. “Can you see my cards?” Before he could answer, she glared at Ipes, who sat propped up in the corner of the bathtub. “I’m not being a sore loser. I just asked a question.”
“Don’t worry, I can’t see your cards,” Neil told her. In order to throw the match, Neil then asked for a jack, a card he had only just asked for the round before. Jillybean’s lips went white.
“I just pulled that one,” she said and handed over her jack reluctantly. “Can you read minds or something? What am I thinking now?”
He was about to blurt out cookies, only for some reason he stopped and actually thought about it. What was she thinking? If there was ever a girl of two minds this was it.
“My guess is that you’re thinking about all sorts of stuff. You were worried about me, and I know you are worried about Sadie. And I think you’re afraid. You’re probably afraid to leave this house, and probably afraid to go on another crazy trip. I’d bet you’re definitely afraid that the bounty hunter is out there tracking us. And maybe you’re afraid of what we will find if we have to go to New Eden. Am I close to what you were thinking?”
She shook her head, arrayed her cards better in her hand and said, “No. I was thinking about cookies. Ipes started going on about Oreos, which are his favorite and it got my stomach rumbling. But you were right about all the rest, even though I wasn’t really thinking about those things just then. You were right about everything ‘cept being ascared of leaving this house. This really isn’t a good house at all. The only thing it’s good for is fooling the bounty hunter man.”
“I almost said cookies,” Neil told her. “Ipes had that look in his eye. It’s the look a lion get when it sees a gazelle.”
“Yeah,” agreed Jillybean. “He’s worse than the monsters if you put a plate of cookies in front of him. He’ll go crazy!”
“Then I guess it’s good we don’t have any cookies,” Neil said. He had meant it to be a joke, but Jillybean’s smile disappeared. Clearly, in her mind, there was never a good time to be out of cookies.
Neil was about to apologize, but just then there came a tap at the door. Sadie peeked in, showing surprise on her pale face. “Cards in a darkened room? Is this a high-stakes game?”
“We aren’t playing for steak,” Jillybean said. “It’s free. You can play if you want. It’s gold-fish. But be careful, Neil is hard to beat.”
“I’d like to play, but I was just coming to tell Neil that I’m ready to travel. Those pills have done wonders. We should leave as soon as Nico gets back. I’ll start getting my stuff together.”
She started to go, but Neil took her soft hand and held her back. “I told you, tomorrow. And that’s if you pass the breathing test. You can try it now, but I still hear the rattle in your lungs. Go ahead and prove it to yourself. Put your arms over your head and now, take a deep, deep breath.”
“I’ll be fine,” Sadie insisted. “The new medicine is working great and all I’m gonna be doing is sitting in a car. That’s not exactly a strenuous activity.”
“You don’t know what will happen out there,” Neil said. “No one does. What happens if we run into one of the giant hordes? Can you sit in a truck all night without heat? What happens if the bounty hunter finds us? Can you run away? What happens…”
“None of that matters!” Sadie interrupted. “Sarah could be practically at New Eden right now and you’re just sitting here worrying about me. You shouldn’t be. You should be worrying about her.”
“I am,” Neil told her. “I’m worried sick. I’m worried that we won’t find her in time, but I’m more worried that we will, and that she’ll refuse to come back home with us. What do we do then? Do we go on with her and try to attack a city of over three hundred people?”
Sadie began to cough. It was a wet sound, but still infinitely better than it had been. “Maybe,” she managed to reply after a minute.
“With two guns shared by the four of us? How far do you think we’ll get before they shoot us like dogs, or heaven forbid, burn us at the stake?”
“I don’t want to be burned like a steak,” Jillybean st
ated, trying to be helpful. “Do they eat you when you’re done, do you think? Is that what steak is? People? That’s gross…oh. Ipes just told me it’s cow meat. That’s better because my dad used to like steak a lot and I didn’t like the idea of him being a cannonball.”
“It’s pronounced cannibal, and it’s really not a good subject to discuss,” Neil told her. He stood and stretched, kneading his knuckles into the small of his back. To Sadie he said in his strictest, I’m the Dad around here so no back-talking, tone, “We’re leaving tomorrow and that’s if you can draw a proper breath.” Inwardly he added: And if we find more gas.
So far, in two very long and challenging days, he and Nico had only managed to scrounge up four gallons of gas. It would barely get them out of the suburbs of Philly if they took the Ford Expedition that Neil had found intact and drivable. There were smaller cars available that would get them further, but these offered nothing in the way of protection from the zombies, nor did they have off-road capability, a feature that was becoming a must.
“I have to go,” he told them. “Jillybean, take care of Sadie. And Sadie, get back on the couch.
Chapter 11
Sarah Rivers
South of Philadelphia
A run of delays kept Sarah pinned in place for longer than she could have believed. First there had been the catnap. She had wanted to get in a quick snooze to energize herself, but somehow the nap had turned into an all-day slumber. By the time she cracked a bleary eye and ran a dry tongue around the inside of an even drier mouth, the sun was dipping down below the horizon. Much to her annoyance, she was forced to spend the night in the lonely house.
The next day’s delay was due to an influx of zombies on a terrific scale. They came marching out of the morning mist just as she was rolling up her sleeping bag. Strangely they appeared to be moving in formation, schlepping down the suburban street in a vile imitation of a parade. Sarah waited patiently, watching from her chair on the second floor, but abruptly, something stopped the lead contingent and so row upon row of dead people stood waiting as if for a command from an undead drill sergeant which never came. Eventually most of them began to graze in the front yards of the neighborhood houses; eating flowers and wild grasses. Unfortunately, there were still too many left in the street for Sarah to try to get away in the little Honda.
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