Jillybean could see the light from the flashlights through the door’s cracks. They were right on top of her and she was so afraid that she was close to peeing herself.
If they catch you, let them do whatever they want, Ipes said. Just close your eyes and don’t say a word. You saw how it was on that bus with the Azael. The more the women fought, the longer it went on.
She remembered everything.
A shudder ran through her entire body, it coursed through her and all she could do to keep from making any noise was to hug herself and grit her teeth to keep from whimpering as the door to the cupboard she was hiding in opened.
It opened four inches when a voice from right above her said: “You know what you should do, Perry? You should go out to the road and look for prints up there. It’s the only thing that makes sense. That’s probably where I would go if I was her.”
The door creaked open an inch wider and Jillybean could see Perry’s dirty fingers and hairy knuckles. She could see the lower part of a man’s pants; they were wet with melting snow. For a moment, a beam of light swept right across her and then it shot upwards.
“If it’s such a good idea, why don’t you go out to the road yourself, Dave? You’re always making these suggestions but you never…”
“I think you both should go,” a third voice said. “Check the tire tracks. If she’s smart, she’ll have walked in them.” This third person was clearly in charge and clearly angry at having not caught Jillybean right away. His frustration was so apparent that the other two didn’t dare backtalk him. They left, grumbling at each other.
This left Jillybean alone with the most villainous of the three and she waited in trembling fear for the door of the cupboard to finish opening and for her to be found. Would he be mad? Would he beat her before doing those horrible things to her?
Just close your eyes and don’t think about it, Ipes suggested. Try to relax.
She closed her eyes and a bloody, violent picture assaulted her: there were bodies around her, dead men without faces. There was blood up to her ankles and a heavy axe in her hands—it was red and slippery. She was covered in the blood, right up to her eyeballs.
She clicked her eyes open, on the verge of screaming, only her breath was caught up in her throat. Where had the image come from? She never thought like that so that meant it had to have come from…
I think you’re safe, Ipes said, and somehow his voice was easy and relaxed.
This was even more confusing to Jillybean until she realized the man was walking away from her partially open cupboard door. He went to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair and groaned his weight down on it.
See? They’ll give up soon and leave and you’ll be okay. Only, she wouldn’t be. She would be stuck without supplies and without gas or a working car. She’d be stuck and yet she wouldn’t be able to stay in the snug house. If the bad guys came back, her luck would run out and she would be caught.
No, she couldn’t stay in the house, or any of houses nearby and so she’d have to move…she’d have to walk in the snow, which was exhausting. How far could she honestly get before sunrise? Two miles? Maybe three? And how far could she get if the snow came down any harder?
Not nearly far enough, she thought. So, what do I do? The bloody image came to her a second time, just a flash, but enough for her to catch her breath. Had she been alone, she would have cried out: Who’s doing that? and, horribly enough, probably would have received an answer.
Now, there was only silence in her head. Not even Ipes spoke. It was just her, alone with a slaver…or worse. There were scarier people in the world than run of the mill slavers.
As the two of them waited, he played with a revolver, spinning the cylinder round and round with a constant clicking sound. It was the sound of death, and yet she found it soothing—anything was better than the nothing going on in her head. She was more afraid to explore that “nothing” than she was of the man with a gun.
Eventually Dave and Perry came back, stamping their feet, leaving splotches of wet mush everywhere. “She’s not out there,” Dave said, going to sit down at the table. Jillybean could see his legs stretching out as if he was relaxing at his own table.
“Trust me, she’s out there,” the leader said. “She’s out there freezing her ass off, but she won’t come back in as long as we’re here.”
“So, we leave and slip back?” Perry asked.
The leader grunted: “Maybe…or two of us leave and the third hides inside. With the snow coming down so hard, I doubt she’s close enough to see who’s in what car.”
“So, who’ll stay?” Dave asked, trying to sound as if it was an innocent question.
“Not you,” the leader snapped. “I’ll stay. Perry take the KIA. Dave take the truck. Drop the car back off at the camp and then come and get me in two hours.”
“Two hours?” Dave asked. “I doubt you need two hours. She’ll be back in fifteen minutes at the longest. We should…” The sound of the hammer on a pistol being drawn back stopped him in mid-sentence.
“You’re going to do what I tell you to do. You don’t know when she’ll be back. She could be hiding in one of the other houses on the road, nice and warm. Hell, she might be there all night for all we know. I know I wouldn’t come back any time soon.”
Dave grumbled something Jillybean couldn’t hear and the leader laughed: “What I do with her is my business. I’ll radio when I’m ready to be picked up, but I wouldn’t expect it to be before ten.”
Jillybean listened with a sinking heart as her KIA was driven off. It had been the key to her future. Without it she was dead, or the next worst thing. Without it she would have to slog through the snow to the next town, which was a place called Lebanon. There were twenty-two miles of forest and iced-over scrub between her and the town. If she didn’t get lost, or killed out in the wilderness by monsters, or abducted by roving bands of slavers, she could look forward to three long days of walking during which she could freeze or starve.
Her toes would get frostbitten and maybe her face as well. And once she got to Lebanon she would have to search the ruins of the town, dodging monsters and hiding from slavers to scrape together anything close to the treasure trove that was being driven away.
It was annoying to think about and irritating and…maddening. For the first time since she could remember, Jillybean was angry right down to her wet Keds. In fact, she was furious.
But what can you do? Ipes asked. They are grown-ups and they have guns. You…you don’t have anything and you’re small and tiny and weak.
He was right. She was all of that, and worse, she was just a girl. She pictured what she would do if she were a boy with muscles. The images were unpleasant.
“No,” she whispered. “I’d rather be a girl. I’d rather do things my way.” Now, she imagined what that would look like. It would start with patience. It would start with her settling in and outlasting the grown-up. He would break first. He would either fall asleep or have to use the bathroom, or just grow agitated and pace. When he did, she would pounce. She would slip out of the cupboard, grab the revolver and then she would be in charge.
Oh, how things would change. Strangely, the very idea of making someone afraid was comforting to her. If they were afraid, it only made sense that she wouldn’t be.
“I’m tired of being afraid,” she said under her breath. She had lived most of the past summer in a pleasant haze where fear was forgotten—and she missed it. She closed her eyes, thinking about those warm days and at some point must have fallen asleep, because when she blinked it was light out, brilliantly white.
It was too white, shockingly so.
There was no way such brightness should have penetrated the cupboard walls. Sharp fear and confusion swept her, and without moving a muscle she spun her eyes around and found herself in a bedroom…a girl’s room…a messy girl’s room. There was a pile of maybe clean clothes just off the side of the bed, and the pillow had drool stains and the quarter of a des
k in sight was piled with books and make-up and loose change.
It was all very normal and in a way, pleasant. The panic in her receded as she discovered that she was actually quite comfortable in a nest of blankets. She wasn’t in pain or even hungry.
Where am I? Jillybean wondered. This was followed up by a second quick question: When am I? Had she blacked out and missed months like she had before or just hours? Or something in between? She waited for Ipes to answer, but he remained mute.
Slowly, she sat up and saw the girl’s room completely. The cluttered desk and the pile of clothes and the strewn shoes didn’t stir a single memory. The house was utterly silent and the air was still; she was sure that she was the only one in it. In fact, Ipes wasn’t even in the house. She knew that even though she didn’t know how she knew it.
Out the window she saw snow-covered trees. That it was still winter didn’t answer any of her “when” questions and as the trees were pine, it didn’t help the “where” question, either.
On the desk, pushed to the back by the mess was a picture of a preteen girl standing with a soldier. This helped. Likely she was still near Fort Leonard Wood. “I guess that’s something,” Jillybean murmured, feeling a little disappointed. In her mind, she thought that if she were going to have a blackout it would’ve been better to get the entire winter out of the way.
Wake up fresh in spring. Going to the window, she saw it wasn’t anywhere near spring. The blood in the snow was too red for spring.
Chapter 12
Jillybean
A trail of blood led away from the house to disappear from view among the trees that lined the property. The blood reminded her of acid. It had eaten its way through the snow and in a couple of places she could see down to the maroon stained grass.
There was a lot of blood and it had to have been hot and fresh to cut through the snow. The thought was disquieting, and the very fact there was blood at all was unnerving, and yet, she felt nothing but an inner calm.
She stared at it for a long time trying to come to grips with it in an emotional way, but the blood didn’t seem to have any hold on her whatsoever. It was just blood and the world seemed full of it these days.
With a lift of a single shoulder, she moved to the door, as always creeping quietly along, just in case. The door led to an upstairs hall that sprouted three other doors. They were all open: two bedrooms and a bathroom. None were special in anyway. The people who had lived here in the before had been messy. Other than that, they were just rooms.
Jillybean made her way down a central set of stairs to the main floor where, despite the open front door, the house smelled cloyingly of fried food as if something had been burnt. She walked toward the open door in something of a daze. Nothing looked familiar. It was as if she had been “beamed” into the upstairs bed through some sort of science fiction gizmo.
“Are those real?” she asked aloud. She didn’t think so. Nothing in any of the old sci-fi movies were ever real: there weren’t any light sabers or flying cars in the world. There was only blood. She could see it just fine from the front stoop. The blood could only end in pain and yet she felt she had to follow it to where it led. Right in front of the stoop were footprints in the snow.
One set was tiny, so small they could just fit Jillybean’s Keds. The other were man-sized, but they weren’t boot prints. Someone wearing only socks had run out the front door. “They must’ve been ascared to do that,” she said.
After a deep breath, she put one of her Keds in the closest of the grown-up prints and as she did, a ghost of an image came to her: she saw herself stepping into a print very similar to it, but in the memory it had been dark and her body was quivering in fear.
Now she only had a bit of a quiver going as she stepped into the dead man’s print. Trying to match a man’s stride, she took three giant steps before she came to the first splotch of blood. It sat, shaped somewhat like an uneven maple leaf, where the snow had been smushed down by a falling body.
The blood and the two sets of prints went on and so did Jillybean until she saw a man’s leg sticking out from beneath a bush. Although she was thirty feet away and she could only see the leg from the knee down, she recognized it immediately. “That’s Dave. Ipes, that’s the guy from…” She paused as she realized she was talking to herself. Ipes wasn’t anywhere near her. “He has to be around here someplace. If only I could remember.”
She tried to picture where she had last seen Ipes, only instead, she saw herself standing in a darkened kitchen, standing next to the cupboard she’d been hiding in. She had one hand on the counter and the other over her mouth. Her breath was hot and coming quick with excitement, now that she had made her decision.
“Huh? What decision?” Jillybean asked, looking around at the trees. She actually expected an answer to come to her, perhaps from the trees or maybe from her own head. No answer came and the only sound was that of snow, falling in clumps from over-weighted tree branches.
Nervous now, she moved on through the brush, stepping in Dave’s big people footprints. She wasn’t exactly nervous about what she would see when she got closer. After all, she had seen plenty of dead bodies in her day, quite a number of her own making. And she had the sinking feeling she had killed Dave—who else would have? Who else could have made the tiny set of prints?
What scared her was what she might have done to Dave. It was one thing to kill a slaver to protect yourself, it was another to do evil things to him first. She didn’t want to be evil, but sometimes it happened, which made her sad.
Dave had died unpleasantly, Jillybean saw as she followed the smaller second set of prints around the bush. Dave had died in agony, sitting with his legs splayed and both hands clutching his belly, which was stained a dark maroon. More of the maroon had poured out from beneath his shirt and was now a congealed black pool between his legs. Jillybean guessed he had been shot at least once through the stomach.
His face, contorted in misery, was hoary with frost and looked waxen from the frigid temperatures which had frozen it in a mask of pain. His eyes were still open—that bothered Jillybean. They looked like painted grapes and they bothered her, but at least they weren’t staring at her. They stared at something just to her left, but what Jillybean didn’t know.
She glanced around and saw nothing except the tiny prints in the snow. With morbid curiosity, she placed one foot after another in the prints and found them an exact match. When she looked up, she saw the painted grapes staring at her and, in silence she stared right back.
“Why don’t you say sumptin?” Dave asked, his voice came out slurry as if he were drunk.
“Ah, jeepers!” Jillybean cried, so startled that she fell down, snow sliding up the back of her shirt. She was all set to race out of there, only Dave was still again, or rather, he was still frozen like the world’s most horrible statue.
Unnerved, Jillybean got to her feet, her eyes never leaving Dave’s face, noting that the hoary ice crystals hadn’t cracked or fallen away. “That’s what means he didn’t really talk.” Only she would have been disappointed that a corpse hadn’t begun talking out of the blue. “It’s what means I’m crazy,” she whispered, her chin hanging down, her long brown hair falling in front of her face.
She didn’t want to look up. She didn’t want to be crazy anymore, but Dave had something to say and if she didn’t hear it now, he would haunt her, maybe in her dreams, maybe when she was walking along, minding her own business.
If Ipes were there, he would have told her to face her fears and get it over with. She sighed and asked: “What do you want?”
He wouldn’t answer until she looked up again—as expected, Dave was staring right at her. “Why don’t you say sumptin?” Dave asked, again.
Confused, Jillybean replied: “Like what?”
“You’re going to shoot me and then just watch me die and not say a fuckin’ word? Well, fuck you.”
Jillybean had no idea what to say to this and so stood there in silence wa
iting for something to happen or for the strange vision to end. Dave wasn’t finished and a moment later he went on: “You could at least kill me, you dumb bitch, instead of just watching me die. Come on, do it! You got the…” A spasm of pain crossed his face as he released one of his hands from his belly long enough to point at something at Jillybean’s side.
She looked down and saw she had a gun in her hand. It was a warm and heavy and very familiar gun. She had seen it through the crack of the cupboard door as the leader of the slavers spun the cylinder round and round with a hypnotic zzziihh noise. And later when the house had been quiet for an hour, she had seen him spinning the gun itself. He had been sitting at the kitchen table, twirling the gun on the table as though he were a middle-schooler at his first boy-girl party playing spin the bottle.
And she had seen the gun an hour later when he finally got up. The leader of the slavers only took three steps away, but the gun was right there, lying on the table. Although now there was a blueish tint to the metal, in the dark it had looked like a twisted hunk of black shadow.
She was little more than a shadow herself when she slid out of the cupboard, her decision made. She would kill them. They were evil and deserved to die. That was justice and it would be a mercy to the world. She would shoot them in the…
“Oh,” Jillybean said stepping back and looking down at her right hand, where a moment before a .357 Magnum had sat in her sweaty grip. Now her hand was empty, though it still vibrated as though she had recently fired the gun—and she had. The memories were coming back to her like pieces of a puzzle.
“Maybe I shouldn’t try to put them together,” she mumbled, glancing a last time towards Dave’s frozen corpse. It didn’t move and it hadn’t moved. It had all been in her head and that was okay with her. “Maybe I should just be happy that they’re dead and I’m alive. Really, ha-ha, what’s the use of being mental if you throw away the only good thing about it?”
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