The front door came open and a man stood shadowed behind a screen door. She could see his silhouette turn from side to side as he looked from her to the KIA and back again. “You all alone?” he asked in a whispering voice. The smell of tequila carried through the screen and swept over her, making her blink and squinch her nose.
Although Ipes was still in the KIA, she decided to let him remain secret. “Yes, I guess so. What about you?”
“I have friends, but they’re really nice. You’ll like them. Wanna come in and meet them?”
She had smiled and said: “Sure,” and went into the house as the man stood back, holding the door open for her. He was a skinny man with an Adam’s apple that stuck out a good two inches, making it look as though he had swallowed a clamshell that was now stuck longways on in his throat.
The skinny man had a big revolver with a wooden handle and a silver barrel. It made Jillybean’s .38 look like a toy and yet he didn’t have it pointed at her. It just hung in his hand as if it were too heavy for him to lift and aim.
There was a second man in the living room. He was big and beefy and a bit of a slob. He wore a stained white t-shirt that had the short sleeves cut off. His face was dark with stubble and there was something yellow at the corner of his mouth that might have been egg yolk.
“You all alone?” he asked. “You got no daddy around?”
She thought of Neil. Ever since Ram had been turned into a monster, she thought of Neil as the only thing she would consider a father figure. “He’s in Colorado,” she said, going to sit down on a high-backed chair of dusty mauve. “So, where’s your other friends?”
“Some are downstairs,” the skinny man said as he shut and locked the door. He looked past Jillybean and to the man on the couch. “I saw her first, you know,” he said.
“Man, you’re a moron, Jimmy,” the bigger man said. “First, who cares if you saw her first. There is a certain pecking order to these things and you are dead last on that order. And second, if she’s a virgin, she’s worth a freaking mint and no one’s gonna have her. Hey, honey, any guys get to you yet?”
“You mean in a prostitute sort of way?” Jillybean asked. When the man chuckled and nodded, she said, “No, sir. I’m too small for that stuff, don’t you think?”
“I think so but there are some men who don’t.”
“And you two would sell me to one of those men?” she asked, holding out her left hand palm upwards. Their eyes tracked on the left hand as her right disappeared into the shredded coat she wore.
The skinny man with the poking-out neck tried to look as though the idea was preposterous while the heavy man on the couch only smiled a cat’s smile and shrugged.
It was all the answer she needed. These were bad men. She turned to the skinny man; he was closer and he was armed. There was no need for her to pull the .38 out of her pocket to kill him. The bullet exploded out from the shreds of her monster coat and struck him at an upward angle just north of his belly button.
He appeared shocked at the sound of the gun and then he glanced down at his shirt, which was already showing blood. The big revolver fell from his hands and he toppled backward. As he did, Jillybean calmly turned to the big man on the couch whose eyes were ping-ponging back and forth from Jimmy to Jillybean and back again.
“Anyone else here?” Jillybean asked, her coat shoved out in front of her, a small wisp of smoke drifting up from a black-ringed hole.
“Just some girls. I didn’t touch them, I swear. You heard me before, right? I’m not like the others.”
“Anyone else touch them?” Before he answered, he swallowed, the noise disgustingly loud to Jillybean. Although her ears rang from the gunshot, her hearing seemed to have become superhuman. She could hear Jimmy as he fought for breath with a blasted-out diaphragm, and she could hear the women in the basement whispering in fear. And she could almost hear this fat, evil man trying to come up with a way out of his situation.
“Some of the other guys, I guess, but I didn’t. I swear.”
“You stink of bad sex,” she said, producing the .38. Hers was a sad life that she could smell the difference between a woman taken in fear and force and one who went happily to the bed. She fired three times. Two of the shots because he was a big male in the prime of his life, and the third, simply because of her anger.
If there was anything she would like to forget, it was the cold fury that had radiated out of her. When she pulled the trigger, she felt dead inside save for the anger. This feeling stayed with her like a hangover.
She left the top floor with the couch acting as a sponge for the big man’s blood and with Jimmy dying slowly, taking tiny sips of air, his eyes rolling in his head. She went down to find the captives.
The women and the one girl were shackled in a row. They didn’t know what to make of Jillybean and she didn’t know what to make of them right back. She stared at them for a time, not understanding their looks or the locks that were still locked or why the one girl started talking: “I’m Aria Murphy, have you seen my mother?”
“No,” Jillybean replied. Aria was a twig of a girl with a twig of a neck supporting a strangely large head. She was a pretty blonde thing, but with her big eyes and her big head and yellow hair, she looked to Jillybean like a sunflower and she hadn’t seen a mom that looked like a sunflower.
“Her name is Kat. Kat Murphy but everyone calls her Kat.”
Nor had Jillybean ever met a person that looked like a cat. Sadie with her black clothes and her black hair and her sleek, muscular body had been the closest.
“I said, no.”
The women stared some more, their fear giving way to puzzlement as Jillybean stared right back—Why hadn’t they fought back against the men? Why hadn’t they picked their locks? Why couldn’t they see their own power? What was wrong with them? The little girl tried and failed to comprehend such weakness.
They may not have your smarts, Ipes said, once she had fetched him from the KIA and, once he had gotten over his queasiness at the sight of the dead bodies in the living room; Jimmy was no longer taking those tiny sips of air. He was still, his eyes fallen back in his head. Ipes gave him a wide birth as he went on: Bravery is easier when you’re big or strong or well-armed. Or smart. You took on those two men because you knew what would happen, didn’t you?
She had known exactly what would happen. She knew that there would be only one or two of the pirates in the house. One to guard the captives and maybe one to guard the guard. As well, she knew they wouldn’t be afraid of such a little girl as she was. They would let her walk right through the front door and they would never suspect her deadly nature.
“I guess you’re right,” she said, going to the dead man on the couch. He smelled of sausage and garlic and sweat…and bad sex and blood. Touching him was the last thing she wanted to do, but she had to find out if he had the keys to the shackles the women wore.
With a sigh, she pushed her tiny hand into his pocket and fished them out and then headed back down to where the women cowered. “It’s okay,” she told them. “The pirates are dead. Do you guys want to come to Colorado with me? Oh, wait, we’re in Colorado. I guess I should ask: do you want to go to Estes Park with me? It’s very nice and the people are good and not mean at all.”
That had been two days before and now she was suddenly not so sure the people of Estes were nice. Fred wasn’t the only one who had given her angry looks. Some of the men at the gate had recognized her. They had whispered and pointed. And a secretary in the front room of the Stanley had gasped when Jillybean had led the group of ex-slaves in.
“They don’t want me here, do they?” she asked Neil right off the bat after he had emerged from his chat with Fred Trigg. It was to his credit that he didn’t lie. The doors were old and the gaps wide, she had heard everything Fred had said.
He looked down at her, but in spite of the difference in height and in age and in spite of the fact that he was the governor of five thousand people and she was only a sev
en-year-old girl, he looked at her as if she were an equal. She liked that.
“I want you here,” he answered with that awful smile of his. She liked that, too.
Jillybean had hoped to find Sadie, who would have accepted her without any reservation, whatsoever. Instead she got Neil and his scarred face and his tired blue eyes—it was the next best thing and, in truth, wasn’t bad at all.
He had always wanted to love her and to protect her, but in the past he had always been so busy trying to save everyone else that Jillybean had fallen by the wayside time and again.
But at least he tried.
“I have presents for you and the others,” she told him. She had scrounged quite a bit from the pirates: nearly a thousand rounds of ammo, a hundred gallons of fuel, and two hundred pounds of food. When it had been all piled together, she had looked the slave-women dead in the face and told them: “This is all mine by right of conquest.”
They hadn’t argued. They were a whipped lot, all save Aria, who had told Jillybean on the first night they’d been together: “I wish you had left Kevin alive. He was the fat one. I wanted to cut his dick off and stuff it down his mouth while he screamed.”
“Oh…sorry, I guess.” Jillybean found the idea strangely hateful. It was understandable, of course, only she didn’t like the thought of revenge on such an unnatural level. That was how Eve had been and Jillybean was repulsed by the image Aria had produced. It was one thing to execute a man, to kill in cold blood out of necessity, it was quite another to give in to such hate.
Jillybean took Neil’s hand and led him out to the KIA and the windowless van that were parked beside the hotel. She told him about her travels, leaving out the very worst bad parts and there seemed to be so many worst bad parts that the story was somewhat disjointed.
Neil didn’t seem to care. He gazed in at the contents of the van and said: “It was awful nice of you to bring all this stuff, thanks Jillybean.”
“I also got cookies from this other lady who was all alone and she had a hump, which was weird. Ipes ate some of the cookies and a few got smushed, but you can have some if you want. The rest are for Sadie. Where is she, anyways? Deanna wouldn’t tell me and gave me a weird look when I asked.”
“Well, you know Deanna, she can be, uh full of weird looks,” Neil said, pulling Jillybean away from the van and walking her to the front of the hotel where the views were magnificent and where they could have a bit more privacy.
Neil gave the hotel a quick glance before saying: “About Sadie, she’s on a scouting mission, or I guess I should say a scrounging mission. We’re getting desperate around here for supplies but since that has to remain a secret, the official word is that she and Captain Grey and a few soldiers are out looking for you.”
“But I’m right here,” Jillybean said, pointing down at her feet. Neil laughed softly at this. There was little joy in the sound, and she gave him a keen look. “What’s wrong?”
He cast a glance back at the old hotel and whispered: “Sorry, I’m just distracted. There’s a lot going on, and, if I know Fred, he is going to be trouble. You know how I said we were getting desperate for supplies? It’s partially my fault. I spent…wasted is more like it, half the supplies we had left in the valley trying to get information concerning you, Jillybean. And now people are starting to talk. If they find out how low our supplies are, it won’t be long before I’m run out of town on a rail.”
“Like a railroad kind of rail? I seen one on the way up here and it got me thinking about how to get it working again. Getting a train working, I mean. For, you know, like moving people and goods up and down the mountains. It’ll be a little complicated but…oh you weren’t talking about trains, were you?”
“No, I’m talking about the survival of the valley.” He told her about the poor state in which the war with the Azael had left them and he told her about the traders and the sad woman he had purchased. Jillybean remembered Gayle’s name and all the others she had rescued from the witch and she was more than a little disappointed that they had gone and got themselves captured again.
Neil went on: “And now I have Fred Trigg breathing down my neck about everything, you included, Jillybean. He’s going to use you to try to undermine me and if that happens and he takes over as governor, I really do fear for the valley. We are in a precarious position.”
Jillybean didn’t know what to say to this because for once she hadn’t done anything wrong or not a lot wrong—killing pirates and bad guys couldn’t be all wrong. Ipes whispered in her ear: I wouldn’t worry about it. I bet they’re always in a precarious position. The truth is, we all are in a precarious position and we probably always will be, at least until the monsters are all killed.
That was probably true, she decided and she was about to agree with Ipes when a quartet of women came out of the Stanley just then. Jillybean recognized two of them as having been in the meeting in which Fred Trigg had made his onerous remarks. They stared hard at her monster rags and her wild hair and the M79 grenade launcher slung over her shoulder.
And it wasn’t just the two she recognized. The other two, complete strangers to Jillybean, also stared with malice and hatred in their eyes.
“I think I made a mistake coming back here,” Jillybean said out of the corner of her mouth to Neil.
Chapter 24
Captain Grey
The snow came down in a quiet manner like a rain of sifted flour easing at least one of Grey’s many fears. Winter in the Rockies wasn’t something to ever take lightly. At any moment, a blizzard could howl down on you cutting you off from the rest of the world, leaving you stranded for days, if not weeks.
For two days, Grey watched the clouds and listened to the wind as the white drifts built up outside the little cabin. Smitty had finally kept them from moving on. He was afraid the storm would suddenly pick up while they were trying to make it over some mountain pass or down in some sharp valley.
When his men complained, he told them the story of the infamous Donner Party who had been snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas back in the 1840s. Poor planning and rampant stupidity had left the party unprepared and trapped by a blizzard. Without food, they had resorted to cannibalism to survive.
Grey saw some of the same stupidity around him. The bandits, other than Smitty, were an ignorant bunch who ate too much, wasted too much wood and barely watched over their prisoners.
Escape seemed tantalizingly close, but unfortunately, the prisoners’ ability to pick locks had been terribly haphazard. Sadie, brave and nimble fingered, had managed to snag a fancy pen from the desk in the main room and in the dead of night she had broken it down. She had hoped for a sturdier piece than the little clip that held the pen to a pocket, but there just wasn’t much to the pen and she had to settle on the one inch long piece of metal.
Grey held out his hands and she went right to work on his cuffs with the tip of her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. It was slow going with a thousand failures before, finally, after two in the morning they finally heard the muffled click of the lock turning.
“Oh, thank God,” Sadie whispered, sitting back, shaking out her fingers beneath the blanket that was stretched over her, Grey and Wilson.
The seven prisoners huddled on the cold floor beneath three blankets that did little to keep out an icy draft coursing down from the window. They had been given a single bedroom to sleep in, one that had been emptied of all of its furniture.
They were watched over every minute of the day by a single, rotating guard who sat on a folding chair in the doorway. Sometimes the guards would read, sometimes they did crossword puzzles. One man actually slept, but that was before Grey got his cuffs off.
With Grey’s hands free, he went to work on Wilson’s handcuffs. The more of them who were free, the better the chance they had at an escape. But try as he might, he couldn’t unlock the cuffs. He blamed the hard angle and his over-sized hands that were perfect for crushing a man’s windpipe but not as dexterous as he could h
ave wished in this regard.
He was forced to wake Sadie to let her try, but her fingers were throbbing from her earlier work and she soon tired. She gave up the piece of metal to Lieutenant Wilson, who scooted down so that his legs stuck out of the blanket.
Before he could get the lock picked, the guard noticed his odd position and kicked him. “What are you doing?”
“Huh? What? I’m just trying to stay warm,” Wilson answered, feigning grogginess as he deftly passed the sliver of metal to Sadie.
“Well you can get warm on one of the guys, but stay off the girl. Those are the orders, dip-shit.”
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said as he moved back up. He stuck his shackled hands under his head, closed his eyes and pretended to fall asleep.
Grey watched the guard out of cracked lids, hoping that his attention would wander or that fatigue would cause him to nod off, but the man must have sniffed something wrong because he remained extra vigilant until the sun came up and the others started to wake.
They grumbled over the cold as they went to each window to stare out as if the view from one would be tropical.
“Stop your bitching,” Smitty snapped. “Let’s get the prisoners up. Bill and Pecos, take them out to piss.”
If there was a chance for Grey to overpower the guards it would have to occur in the next few seconds while the bandits were still groggy and unsuspecting. They moved around the cabin, poking into packs or simply yawning. In spite of this, Grey knew he’d have to be fast, blazing fast, if he was to stand a chance. He’d go for Pecos first. Not only was he the closest to Grey, he held his M16 in a loose grip with one hand while the other was busy scratching his ass in such a determined manner that Sadie watched him with a curled lip.
Grey’s muscles bunched, ready to fly at Pecos, only just then the bandit noticed the look of disgust on Sadie’s face. “What are you staring at, you dumb bitch?”
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