“I didn’t pick it out,” she answered through teeth that barely parted to spit out the words. To Grey, she didn’t look spitting mad, she looked biting mad.
“Just take it off and get this over with.”
Sadie glanced around. There were no real walls between the cells, only bars, which meant every one could see her. Although it wouldn’t be the first time the men had seen her naked during the humiliating trip, she seemed uneasy and so Grey ordered: “Eyes right!”
No one but Rodriguez looked as Sadie dropped her dress. “So skinny. Why do all the girls have to be so skinny? Turn around. Oh, well that’s better. Nice tush. Okay, put your clothes on. I can use you if the price is right.”
They spent the night wondering if the price would be right. It turned out it wasn’t. They were fed at the break of dawn, given coats, hats and gloves, and were reshackled, this time, not just in handcuffs, but with leg-irons as well. They made getting on another boat a bit of an adventure.
This one was larger, but not any better from a comfort standpoint. It was wide and flat with a small pilot house in the rear. It was loaded with goods of all sorts, all stacked on towering pallets that were roped and chained in place, making any walk along the boat a dangerous obstacle course.
The little group of seven prisoners were the only human cargo. They were given a small square of deck directly beneath a pallet that was stacked twelve feet high with bundles of cord wood cut in eighteen inch lengths. They huddled against the wood which kept the worst of the wind off of them.
Fifteen men accompanied the boat, each of them armed with an M4 and each looked very capable. At all times, two of them were stationed fore and aft, two more were on either side and one stood vigil over the slaves.
“Where’s the Colonel?” Grey asked the young man who watched over them first. He was covered from his lower eyelids on down in layers of green camo. “He’s not going to see us off?”
“I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
“Fair enough. Can you at least tell me where we’re going?”
The young man was silent for so long that Grey didn’t think he was going to answer, but then he spat out: “Cape Girardeau. It turns out that you’re worth quite a bit of money.”
Grey wasn’t surprised. He knew his fate and had already accepted it. “What about my friends? What’s going to happen to them?”
The soldier turned to watch as the boat began to push down the river. Again, he was quiet for a long stretch. After miles of empty river bank swept by, he simply said: “They’ll be sold at auction, probably destined for the arena. They like their blood.”
Chapter 29
Jillybean
Two days later, Neil and Jillybean, looking like a pair of small and somewhat timid monsters, moaned their way down a road which ran parallel to Highway 74. It was as direct a route to Rock Island Arsenal and to the Colonel as Neil would allow.
He was nervous and wanted to make a complete circle of Davenport before angling in toward the base. Jillybean, who trusted her acting skills and her monster makeup, saw it as a waste of time, while Ipes thought that making two circles of the base was the safest course.
Maybe even three, he said. Heck, I might even do four just to be on the safe side. Why take chances with safety?
“You’re going to get wet one way or the other. You might as well get it over with.” It was an island after all and both Neil and Jillybean felt that they couldn’t exactly just walk up and ask for a ride across the river without incurring disaster. Neil had used that word: incurring. Jillybean had inferred its meaning and didn’t want an incurring though she fully expected one.
She had heard from Neil, Sadie, Deanna and all the ex-prostitutes what sort of man the Colonel was—he was a bad man, a very bad man. And she knew what she was supposed to do with bad men.
“I execute them for their badness,” she said in a whisper. She had to whisper. The words were taboo. They were utterly and completely true, but they were also taboo. Neil wouldn’t understand and neither would Ipes. And the monsters would certainly not understand how one of their own was suddenly talking.
Oh yes, there were other monsters about, but not many, not enough in Jillybean’s opinion. In a crowd, the two of them would have been basically invisible. Now, they stood out because of their size. The corn-fed monsters were big ones. They had thought the mountain monsters subsisting on pinecones, stiff grasses, roots and the occasional columbine were big, but these ones were giants.
It wasn’t just the boy-monsters. The girl-monsters thundered along, almost as loud and almost as scary.
Jillybean made sure not to look at them except out of the corner of her eye. To look directly at them would cause her to shudder and her shoulders to twitch. These weren’t exactly the moves a monster would make.
Tell me why we have to get wet at all? Ipes asked.
“Because of the water. Now hush.” He knew why, he was just being a pain in the rear, Jillybean thought. After all, he had been there when they had hashed out the choices before them which had boiled down to just two: ransom or rescue.
All three of them wished that ransom was the better of the two options. It would have been neat and simple to march up, negotiate a price for Sadie, Grey and his team, and then get back to the valley before any more damage was done.
There were two main problems with the ransom scenario, namely Neil and Jillybean. “I’m the governor of Estes Valley, for goodness sake’s,” Neil had said, once more drumming his fingers on the Jeep’s steering wheel. “I’ve got enemies from Denver to New York, and if the Colonel is willing to throw away diplomatic protocol by buying Captain Grey, the head of our military, he wouldn’t hesitate nabbing me as well. And you are likely the most wanted person on the planet.”
She didn’t think she was the most wanted person. The people of the valley didn’t want anything to do with her and everyone else only wanted to do bad things to her. All except for Sadie. Her big sister had always been there for her. From the first second Jillybean had met her deep underground in the evil church of New Eden, Sadie had tried to protect her.
To Jillybean, Sadie was the most wanted and loved person on the planet and she would do anything and everything to free her from the evil, bad colonel.
With ransoming out the window, they turned to rescue and that meant Neil turned to Jillybean. “You’re the expert, what sort of plan do you have cooking?”
“Cooking? I don’t have a plan cooking or food or nothing. I don’t do plans from this far away. I have to get close and see stuff.” And that was why they were moving in, dressed as monsters, their weapons and bombs hidden under their ragged clothes.
It had taken two hard days to get where they were. The obstacles in their path hadn’t been easy: monsters by the millions, land pirates that almost had them in Nebraska, and a sleet storm that swept down on them out of the blue in Des Moines.
It was after three in the afternoon when they got to Davenport and both of them were so eaten up with fear that neither would wait even a minute. They had changed into their monster clothes in the car and within minutes were on their way, hoping that this would be the last mile of their long chase.
For Neil, it was almost the last hundred yards of the chase. It had been months since he had last pretended to be a monster and it showed. He walked, stiff with fear and he wouldn’t stop making eye-contact with a monster that was strangely colored: from the waist up, he was green, but from the waist down, he was yellow. It looked as if the monster had been dipped in dye like an Easter Egg.
Jillybean couldn’t understand how it came to look like that, but, regardless of its coloration, she knew enough not to look at it. She tried to warn Neil to stop looking, but since he wouldn’t stop looking he didn’t see her furtive attempts to tell him to stop looking.
The monsters began staring right back, which turned Neil’s moan into a high-pitched whine. Neil’s going to get eaten! Ipes cried. Don’t look it’s going to be messy, and make sure
I don’t get any blood on me. You know the sight of blood gets me si…sick. I think it’s happening already…
“Oh hush. You’re fine,” she mumbled under her breath. Ipes was right about one thing: Neil was about to get eaten. She reached into one of her deeper pockets and pulled out an oddly shaped and bumpy ball. It was one of her MSDs—monster distraction devices. It was a small, battery powered Bumble Ball.
Flicking it on, she dropped it. Immediately, it began to bounce around going in completely random directions, its led lights blinking away like crazy. The two-toned monster turned and stared at it in amazement. All the monsters did. They came and stood around the bouncing ball in a perfect circle.
“Thanks,” Neil said. “That was clo…” Jillybean grabbed him and hauled him into the closest building: an IHOP. It appeared to have been searched by someone with anger issues or had been the sight of a one-restaurant riot. With all the broken glass and the trash strewn everywhere, it was the perfect spot to re-teach Neil how to be a monster.
“Like this,” she said and then went through her routine, showing just how easy it was. When he tried to imitate her, she groaned and stuck her hand on her forehead. “You’re missing something.”
Yeah, like a brain.
“Not now, Ipes. I think it’s your hands, Mister Neil. You don’t seem to know what to do with them. You can’t just hold them out like that. You’re not a praying mantis. That’s what means a weird bug. They hold their arms like that, but the monsters don’t. You should try being natural.”
“That’s not easy since I’m not naturally a monster and besides, it was a little freaky this time. I don’t know why.” Despite the chilly day, Neil was sweating, especially around the eyes, which Jillybean found odd.
“Just remember, they won’t hurt you as long as you seem to belong. Come on, try it some more.”
She carved away the bad parts of an apple and then munched on it as he stumbled around the restaurant. When she had chewed down to the core and there were little brown seeds showing, she declared Neil much improved, even though he was only sort-of improved and they moved out once more.
In order to keep an eye on him, she let him lead the rest of the way. Thankfully monsters aren’t all that bright, Ipes remarked, after watching Neil for a time. He looks more like a robot. Sort of like a really scared robot.
The zebra wasn’t wrong, Jillybean thought as they made their way down to the waterfront. She couldn’t understand being afraid of the monsters, especially when they weren’t being attacked. It was sort of like being afraid of sharp knives sitting on a counter.
Neil was still sweating his way through his routine when they reached the river. As they traveled, Jillybean had been picturing the island in her mind. She had imagined that a place called Rock Island would be well, more rocky. It was a bit of a surprise to see that almost the entire east half of the island was taken up by an eighteen-hole golf course and a cemetery; it was flat and faded, but still green. The western half of the island was crammed with buildings, and barracks, and warehouses of all sorts.
And there were people, a lot of them. Some walking around the golf course pulling golf-bags on wheels, some marching in formations and some seeming to just wander. A number were at the river wall holding long poles. These were much longer than spears and at first, she couldn’t tell why they had them.
Although the monsters that had marched down the road with them were now staring intently at the river floating by and wouldn’t have noticed if the men at the wire emplacements had done cartwheels, she stayed perfectly in character as she went to a pub on the bank of the river called the Driftwood.
It was nautically themed as she knew it would be and was as horrendously trashed as the IHOP had been. Ship steering wheels had been ripped from the walls where, in her opinion, they didn’t belong in the first place, and stiff plastic looking fish that had been mounted about the place were now strewn among the shattered crockery. Tables and chairs were more often than not flat side down with their legs pointing at the ceiling.
All of this mayhem was just fine with her. It made for good cover as she pulled out a heavy set of binoculars and set them to her small face so that her nose was just a tiny bump set in a black V of plastic.
The soldiers with the long poles sprang into her vision. She watched one of them point further along the river and she swiveled the binoculars to see a monster attempting to climb out of the river. The men sauntered over and began poking at the thing until it fell back in the water.
They were extremely casual about it, and for good reason. In order to be any threat, the monster had to climb six feet straight up and then would have to overcome a tangle of concertina wire. It wasn’t likely that too many would make it onto the island.
“Wire cutters,” Jillybean muttered. “Don’t let me forget them, Ipes.” She went back to scanning, her eyes sometimes focusing with the intensity of a laser and sometimes drifting as her imagination took over her mind.
She could see a host of possibilities and problems. The first being the river itself. Yes, there were many, many monsters in it, but they didn’t frighten her so much. She had been in the Mississippi before and it had been far from a pleasant experience, but she had learned from it. She knew the river’s dangers and she knew how to combat them.
In fact, she considered the river to be an asset. The soldiers would never expect anyone would be crazy enough to use a river full of monsters as an access point. If they watched at all, it would be for stray monsters who had somehow climbed the wall and were hung up in the wire.
So getting on the island wouldn’t be an issue, however staying on the island would be. Neither she nor Neil looked anything like a soldier and no amount of makeup or costuming would change that.
The next problem would be in finding the prisoners and freeing them. They could be anywhere on the island. Once they did find them, Neil and Jillybean would have to somehow free them and escape without alerting the entire island. There were so many problems wrapped up in doing so, that it was mind-boggling even to Jillybean.
“One issue at a time,” she said as she ran the binoculars back and forth. Neil waited patiently until he couldn’t take it anymore.
“How the hell are we going to do this? Two people taking on thousands?”
Jillybean looked at him with a queer light in her eyes and a cold feeling deep in her soul. It was the—someone’s about to die and it’s not going to be me—feeling she got when she started to plan an attack. “We aren’t going to take on thousands, silly. That would be the same as suiciding ourselves.”
“We aren’t?”
“No, of course not.”
Ipes made a dismissive noise in his throat. Sheesh! Neil can be such an idiot sometimes. Take on thousands of soldiers? What a maroon. Am I right, or what? Ha-ha…say, Jillybean, he is right about one thing, there are thousands of bad guys. How are we going to take them on?
“By shopping and being quick about it.”
Chapter 30
Neil Martin
The smell of burning wood drifting from the island brought with it a touch of nostalgia for Neil. It reminded him of deep autumn in New Jersey, when the trees were red and gold, the days cool and the nights pleasantly chilly. Neil missed those simple times with an ache of longing that would never be cured, because those times were dead and buried.
Neil took in one more breath of the smoke on the night air and turned his mind back to Rock Island, where not a single beam of light was visible. From where they stood on the river’s edge, the island was darker than the night and darker even than the shimmering river that flowed by. The stars danced on its surface…except of course where a zombie floated along, and there were many zombies.
The river wasn’t nearly as clogged with them as it was down south in Cape Girardeau, but there were too many for Neil’s tastes. They moaned, quietly, and gently splashed the water, not yet in a feeding frenzy, which Neil was secretly afraid would happen the second he got in. The idea of
stepping down into that dark water made his balls shrivel.
And the shriveling has only just begun, he thought. The water was not only infested with zombies, it was also sharply, deeply cold. Perhaps even deadly cold. Neil had no idea where the waters of the Mississippi originated. He had never bothered to look it up. As far as he knew, it flowed down from Canada, where it was always stupidly cold.
It wasn’t a good sign that there was already ice on the edges of the bank. Yes, the planes were thin, unable to hold even Jillybean’s weight, but it was still ice and was the reason that Jillybean’s first stop had been to a marina that sat a quarter of a mile away from the Driftwood Pub.
They picked up neoprene wetsuits to insulate them from the cold, thin life jackets, a square of heavy netting ten feet on the side and a number of floatation devices. Despite this, the pair didn’t look like divers at all. Over the wetsuits and the life jackets, she had draped them in the shredded camo they had picked up at their next stop.
An army surplus store had given them the camo as well as other interesting items that the little girl had snatched up. Then they were off to three different pawn shops, a Radio Shack, two police stations, a library and the Davenport Historical Society.
For the most part, Neil had tagged along acting as a human shopping cart and not asking questions. When he asked questions, it seemed to set Jillybean on edge. “We don’t have a lot of time for questions,” she would say and then follow it up with: “Here, hold these.”
Time seemed to be her enemy. Along with the running around, batteries had to be charged, explosives had to be prepared, everything had to be bagged and double bagged, the Jeep had to be emptied of their belongings, the gas drained, the battery pulled, and the jerrycans of fuel had to be sealed with wax.
All of their belongings went onto the net which barely floated, despite the buoys tied every two feet. “It’ll be fine,” Jillybean had said when the car battery had caused it to sag, but where she got her assurance, he didn’t know. He was scared to death at the prospect of invading the Colonel’s island fortress, and his fear only ramped up when she started prying open one of the claymore mines.
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