Everything went into a green garbage bag which she slung over one shoulder. Out the front door she went, heading further down the road. It didn’t matter where it led; what lay behind her was too frightening to think about.
A cold sun was setting by the time she found the next house on the lonely road. It wasn’t special: a three bedroom ranch with a weed-fouled yard and crooked shutters. Just like the last house, it didn’t have a fireplace and so she had to construct one, complete with a chimney which she made out of flat baking pans glued to two ladders which she wired in place against the wall. It was an ugly affair, though it did its job of directing the smoke up and out of a carefully broken window.
Next, she busied herself, forming her nest for sleep and then she prepared the house for an attack from monsters or bad people. Below windows and before doors, she set noose traps and trip wires and all around the outside she threw crunching glass so no one could sneak up on her.
Just in case, however, she worked out two escape routes and three perfect hiding spots.
Dinner came next in the form of barbecued liver—it didn’t taste good even with the few seasonings she found in the house thrown on haphazardly.
After that, it should have been bedtime, only she was afraid of going to sleep. What would happen if she didn’t wake up? What would happen if the crazy came back? Monsters that could tear her apart was something she could deal with. People with their evil and their greed were harder but still manageable when she could turn the conditions to suit her.
But crazy wasn’t something she could fight against, except by staying busy, busy, busy and putting her mind to work. She stayed up past midnight searching the new house, not just for an atlas, but also for all those useful items she used to carry around. Going systematically room by room, she discovered: screwdrivers, tape, bandages, copper wires, C-batteries, LED flashlights, camping gear, fishing supplies, a 24-pack of bottled water and a small stash of cans in a box labeled: For Church!
“Church food, huh. Do you think God will be mad if I eat it?”
Ipes crawled up onto the box and looked at the cans. Ooh, pineapple! No, I don’t think God’ll be mad at all. In fact, you know what? He wants you to eat it. This box is like a miracle coming in our time of need!
She had to admit she was in all sorts of need, and so she hauled the box, with much grunting and straining on her part and much lip-smacking on Ipes’ part, back to the kitchen where it was comfortably warm.
To stave off sleep, she arranged the cans from least desirable to most. It didn’t help. Her eyes grew heavy and she finally nuzzled into her blanket nest and fell asleep.
When she woke, with light creeping from beneath the kitchen door she asked: “Is this tomorrow morning or this some other morning?”
Who cares, Ipes answered. It’s morning, let’s break out those pineapples! Neither of them could remember eating anything sweet in the last few months, save for the stale marshmallows and those had been disgusting…but not as disgusting as the leftover strips of barbecued liver she had bagged up. With a sigh, she took a dusty plate from a cupboard and laid out the cold liver.
You’re not serious, Ipes said, making a gagging noise in the back of his throat
“I’m saving the pineapple for Sadie and Mister Neil. It’s gonna sorta be like a present on account I killed Eve. I have to get a present for Mister Captain Grey, too cuz I killed General Johnston. I bet he’s still mad about that.”
Probably, but he blames that mean ol’ King Augustus for that, and since you killed him and won the war I bet you’re going to be forgiven by everyone. You might even get a parade. She doubted that. Crazy people never got parades. Oh, stop talking like that. Let’s discuss presents. You can’t go wrong with cookies. Everyone loves them.
“And you would eat them before we got halfway to Colorado. No cookies would be too much of a temptation. I think we should get him a gun. A big one, like a machine gun or a fifty cal. Hmm, but where do you get those in Montana?”
She went to the Atlas she had found the night before and flipped through the glossy pages until she found Montana. Most states had only one page, however Montana was so big that it took up two. “Let’s see. Where in all of this is Viburnum?” It was the strange name of the town in which the little house was supposedly located.
According to the index, there wasn’t a Viburnum in Montana. “That’s weird,” she whispered, looking again at the mail. The name Viburnum, MO was on every piece, so that meant it was a real place. She opened the envelopes one after another hoping to discover answers, but instead found bills and advertisements for credit cards.
It was only after she had tossed aside the mail, grimaced her way through her breakfast of liver and decided a change of clothes was in order that she discovered where she was.
The only clothing that came close to fitting her was found in a boy’s closet where half the shirts were red and emblazoned with a most unmanly red bird. “A cardinal? Ah, the St. Louis Cardinals,” she said, not realizing that she had left Ipes in the kitchen and was now talking to herself. “I get it, he likes baseball. So, that means the MO stands for Missouri? Why wouldn’t they use MI? Wouldn’t that make more sense…oh right, there’s Mississippi and Minnesota.”
Relieved to know where she was, Jillybean went to the atlas and began plotting a route to Colorado. On paper, the safest way was to head directly southwest and quickly. It was a bit shocking how close she was to Cape Girardeau and the River King. He would love to get his hands on her and do…things.
A knot in her throat caused her to swallow hard and a strange “being watched” feeling crept up on her from behind. Abruptly, she spun trying to catch whoever it was in the act.
What? Ipes asked, looking, perhaps for the first time in his life, actually innocent. I didn’t do it. Whatever happened, it wasn’t me.
“No, it’s me,” she said. “Sorry.” She turned back to the map and the first word she saw was “Fort,” as in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri seventy miles west. A brief flare of excitement was followed by a sudden let-down.
There was no way that a military base so close to the River King had gone unplundered for so long. “But…” she said, her mind working, seeing things, not as she wished and not as others saw them, but as they were.
According to the atlas, the land in and around the base was hilly and deeply forested. There would be monsters there, drawn to the people coming to search. They would be hard to spot and very dangerous, even for grown-ups. They would make extensive searches difficult and perhaps not worth the risk.
Jillybean could imagine little homes hidden from sight, tucked up in the little vales and down dirt roads leading to weed-choked hollers. Many of these homes would belong to soldiers or ex-soldiers and likely, there would be guns and bullets in them. She needed both and not just as gifts to Captain Grey. If she was going to venture out among people, she would need a gun of her own.
“Then that’s the plan. We go to this army-man base and we find some guns and some food and stuff.”
Smelling like that? Ipes asked, with one hoof covering his face. She glanced down at herself and her nose wrinkled. On the spot, she stripped down and saw that not only was she too skinny, her flesh was scabbed and bruised and utterly filthy.
Naked, she started the fire going before padding down to the bathroom. For the second time in two days, her reflection startled her. Her head looked huge on her skinny body and her fly-away hair was no longer so flighty. It stuck up, here and there, stiff with dried mud.
The image in the mirror bothered her and she turned quickly away to start the water running. “Come on water,” she whispered, hoping that the town water tower still had something in reserve. Sometimes they did and this was one of those times.
“Ew,” she said, leaning back from the faucet. The water chugging out was the color of mud and there were flecks of rust spitting out with it. Gradually, it began to clear until after a few minutes, it looked like normal tap water from “before.”
Although it looked good, she didn’t trust it enough to drink it. It would have to be boiled first.
The next hour was spent heating the water to the perfect temperature, finding the little girl she used to be beneath the grime, and hunting for Ipes, who needed a bath as much as she did. Another hour was spent gathering her supplies and preparing clothes.
She ignored all the Cardinals jerseys in the boy’s closet and went for the more neutral greys and browns. As she was so small, nothing actually fit her. A pair of kitchen shears and a cinched belt fixed the problem though she was sure she looked ridiculous. The shears also transformed a winter coat into a monster costume that hung from her in tatters.
A red and blue Spiderman backpack, filled with what she considered essential knickknacks and two day’s worth of food went under the coat. The remaining food and water went back into the church box, which she pushed beneath the front porch and covered with damp leaves.
Once Ipes, still slightly damp in his round bottom, was set in the front pocket of the coat with just his bulbous nose and two beady eyes sticking out, Jillybean was ready to go. There was no hesitation on her part or looking back. Behind her was a past filled with sadness, in front of her were her friends and all around her was death, destruction and danger.
Chapter 4
Sadie Walcott
Eight hundred miles west of where a lonely girl walked along a lonely road, Sadie Walcott eased her M16A4 to her shoulder and sighted down the P4Xi 4x24 scope at the lead battlewagon. At three hundred yards, she had a perfect shot, her crosshairs on a long-bearded man in a knee length coat standing in front of the lead vehicle. She could see his lips move as he spoke into the radio.
She recognized the man. He had been one of the Azael—all of the men clambering around the machine had been as well. But that was before, they all said. And: We didn’t want to be a part of the war. They made us.
Supposedly, the people of the plains had changed their ways. The empire of the Azael had fractured and now there were seven warlords ruling the wide-open lands which cut the country in half. They claimed to be peaceful traders.
These particular traders called themselves Rangers. They came from a wide belt of grassland that took up most of Oklahoma and northern Texas. Sadie didn’t trust them or their fake smiles. Like the rest of the former Azael, they still bought and sold slaves, and they still forced people to pay “protection” fees to cross their lands and yet, in spite of this, people still disappeared in the long crossing.
Sadie swept her scope across the battlewagons that were parked just down the hill from the new and improved Red Gate 1. There were four of these immense and ugly machines. Essentially, they were 18-wheelers that had been modified to such an extent that only with a scope such as Sadie’s could someone guess at what they had started out as.
Teams of expert welders had turned the trucks and their trailers into fortified warehouses on wheels. The trailers had been widened, so they took up most of the two-lane road. Rising up from this sturdy base were metal walls, thick enough to withstand small arms fire. They rose straight up twenty feet, and atop this structure was an armored turret from which a fifty-caliber machine gun jutted.
Along with the machine gun, each of the walls had firing ports from which people inside could shoot their weapons without exposing themselves. The cab was as fortified as the rest of the machine, including a retractable armored slag of metal to protect the driver. To protect the tires, two overlapping curtains of chain hung like a metal skirt from the bed.
Although the Rangers claimed that the battlewagons were designed with zombies in mind, the amount of armor and firepower suggested otherwise—not that Sadie was worried. The wall of Red Gate 1 stood sixty feet above the road. It was a tremendous structure of cement and rebar that could take direct hits from the largest of howitzers.
“I count twenty-eight,” Grey said after glassing the vehicles with heavy binoculars. He was pale and still sweating from the climb to the top of the Red Gate 1. His recovery had been slow and extremely painful, and he was just a shadow of his former rugged self.
Next to him, resting her elbows on the wall and letting her round belly sway, was Deanna Russell in her ninth month of pregnancy, though to look at her, one would have thought she was not even seven months along. Her belly was only slightly larger than a volleyball and instead of being a griping, sweaty mess, she had the proverbial glow.
“Twenty-eight’s not a lot,” she said.
“You’re not going,” Grey growled at her. Sadie’s eyebrows went up, but other than that, she made sure to keep her face as neutral as possible, not wanting to get involved in their little feud. The larger her belly got, the more over-protective Grey became. Just climbing the ladder had instigated a near-silent fight as the two glared. He ended up climbing up behind her with the ludicrous idea that he would catch her if she fell.
“Sorry, Grey, but she’s coming,” Neil said, ending the argument. “You know me, I’m too pessimistic. I need a counterbalance, someone who will keep her head.”
That wouldn’t be Sadie as everyone knew. For some reason, she got excited whenever the traders came by. For the most part their stock consisted of the basics: guns, bullets and fuel, each of the five tons towed a 3000-gallon fuel tank. These were also armored and looked strangely boxy.
It was the more “exotic” items that had made her eagerly hurry to the wall…her stomach rumbling. The traders frequently carried hard to get items: cookies, strawberries, brown sugar, Hostess Twinkies—all of these were now so rare that they commanded ridiculous prices.
There was a third reason that she rushed to the wall. Although slavery was illegal in Estes, everyone eventually made their way to the slave truck, looking for loved ones. There was only one person beyond the gates that Sadie cared for: Jillybean.
If the little girl was ever captured and her identity found out, her price would be outrageous, perhaps more than Neil would be able to pay. Estes, the land where honor meant as much as life was a poor land, mired in poverty.
The east coast city-states had their fisheries. The midwest had their horses and their cattle and their crops that flourished without the hand of man helping. The Texas states had their oil, and the “Over the Mountain” lands had their stockpiles of goods from the hundreds of cargo ships that had been left to rot at the docks in places like Long Beach and Seattle.
The River King had his pontoon bridge and the tolls from it generated a fortune. Much wealthier was Yuri Petrovich, who had his much-needed vaccine that he sold without bias to anyone with cash.
Even the Colonel was doing well. Taking a cue from the River King, he had moved his base of operations to Davenport, Iowa. It sat astride a northern stretch of the Mississippi where a large island lay smack dab in the middle of the river. As all the bridges had been demolished, he sent parties north into Canada to find ferry boats. He had three operating at very competitive rates, allowing him to control the trade across the upper part of the country.
Estes, on the other hand, had no natural resources. It sat on a direct route across the mountain passes, however there were other mountain passes that could be used, and so nothing was gained from their position. It had been discussed that perhaps these other roads should be destroyed at key points forcing trade through the valley, but the honor-bound Neil Martin wouldn’t hear of it.
Most of the population farmed the rich soil along the Big Thompson River, but there were some who hunted almost exclusively, and others who scoured the high plains for cattle and already there were two-hundred head grazing in valley pastures. Because of the cattle, there was a growing population who made forages out into the plains to gather the wheat that grew abundantly. Flour was ground for bread and the leftover stalks were stored for the cattle.
The people of the Estes Valley were undoubtedly some of the hardest working people in the world. Despite this, they had little left over to trade and what they did have wasn’t in great demand, at least compared to bullets and fuel. An
d they were in desperate need of both. The war with the Azael had left them with dangerously low reserves.
Their fuel situation was so bad that no one drove any more. Everyone rode bikes or walked, pulling handcarts. The lack of ammo was even worse. It was so bad that Neil kept the truth hidden from everyone except for the six members of the commission and Sadie. Neil feared what would happen if word got out.
If his enemies found out that they were down to four thousand rounds and that the munitions bunker was mostly filled with empty boxes, it was a good bet that they would attack immediately. If his people found out, they would leave in droves, tar and feathering Neil on their way out of town.
“Well, let’s see what they have for us this month,” he said with a sigh, heading for the ladder.
“Don’t be so glum,” Captain Grey chided. He was technically, either General Grey or Commissioner Grey, but since he refused to use his power as Commissioner of Defense to give himself a promotion, he still wore the black bars of a captain.
“Food is important and we’re well stocked. You never know what the current demand is,” Grey added as he went down the ladder wincing and slow. Neil went down even slower, his hands white-knuckled and sweaty. Above them, Sadie groaned at the delay.
Deanna heard her and raised an eyebrow. “You’re always too eager. If you want good prices, you have to act like you don’t care. You have to be all: Is this it? Is this all you have? Meh.”
“I know, I know, but it’s hard.” She was tired of being poor and she was tired of doing without.
Finally, the men were down. Sadie slipped ahead of Deanna and, nimble as a monkey, the girl in black zipped down the ladder receiving glares from both Neil and Grey. “I’m cool,” she insisted. “Don’t worry about me.”
When Deanna made it down—awkwardly with her butt pushed out to keep from hitting her protruding belly on the rungs, Neil led them to the gate where they set aside their weapons and emptied their pockets. Unfounded accusations of stealing had occurred in the past and this was the simplest way to keep that from happening.
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