When Neil found out what the rope was for, he had choked—on air Jillybean supposed and then, ironically, he had said: “I need air.”
Big, man-sized drones would have been nice, she thought, then again, a tank would have been even nicer. All that was wishful thinking and she cast it aside. She had to use what she had on hand, meaning the three remaining drones with their limited speed and payload would only be used as surveillance systems.
When the time came, they would give her vital information, the most important of which was the speed of the trucks and where in line the one with the sex slaves was. Both Captain Grey and Mister Neil said it would likely be in back, but she wasn’t going to risk Sadie’s and their lives on something that was only “likely.”
The drones would also let her know the spacing of the trucks almost to the exact meter. With their bombs being so crude, ten feet could be the difference between a damaged truck and a dead truck, and they had to be dead.
Jillybean was almost overwhelmed with all the possibilities confronting her. Would the traders sense the trap and speed up? Or would they sense it and slow down? Would they sense it at all? When the road narrowed, would they draw closer, which was only natural, or would they fight that tendency and maintain their spacing? She worried over every little detail as she mixed her chemicals.
The idea of being out in the open where everyone could see her was worrisome, however the concept of over-lapping fields of fire scared her to no end. This was why she was making more smoke bombs, mixing in gasoline to speed up the reaction time.
She worried and fretted and time seemed to speed up. It was three in the afternoon when they caught up with the traders, spying them far down the road. For all of two seconds, the three of them were filled with relief that they had found Sadie—then the tension took hold and their smiles faded.
Jillybean’s was the first to go as she discovered that her plan wasn’t going to work. I-71 was four lanes of wide open land which was the worst-case in an ambush attempt. In fact it was straight up terrible.
“Go around them,” she ordered, tersely, biting her lip. “Detour onto one of the smaller roads, we don’t want to be seen.”
Neil had woken and was driving at this point. He stayed well back until they reached an exit and then he sped forward, taking a frontage road that was hidden from the highway by a long run of trees.
It was a winding, bumpy, ill-kept road and at the speed Neil was driving it felt more like a roller-coaster which was not helping her stomach. She was nervous about the plan. Generally, she liked to make plans for other people to follow, while she hung back, only acting the part of heroine out of necessity.
This time she would be right in the thick of it, dodging bullets and probably shooting them as well. The idea made her queasy. And that’s what means you are not crazy, Ipes told her, Only a crazy person wouldn’t be afraid of doing what you’re planning. Did I mention I want to stay in the 4Runner?
“You can’t. We’re not coming back for the 4Runner and you’d be left behind.”
Ipes muttered: I could catch up, later, but Jillybean knew he didn’t mean it. He was just scared. They all were, except for Captain Grey who was trying to finish the bombs as the truck bounced about.
After a few miles at this fearful pace, they took an on-ramp, rejoining the highway and raced ahead as fast as they dared. For miles, the highway remained wide open and all of them worried that the plan would have to be scrapped and a new, much more dangerous one put in its place.
But then they finally got lucky. The road suddenly seemed to end ahead of them. Neil slowed and crept up to where there was a huge chunk of the highway missing.
Long ago, someone had destroyed both spans of the road as it crossed the Little Miami River, turning it into the little Miami swamp. It was completely impassable. “Turn around!” Jillybean shouted at Neil as she ducked her head down at the map and ran her finger along the wobbly line that represented I-71.
She found it and traced it back to a point where two roads diverged away, one running roughly parallel to the north, the other to the south.
“Which way will they take?” she wondered aloud.
Grey leaned over the seat with his head canted so he could see the map. In no time, he said: “Take the south road, Highway 350. We have to assume they know that 71 is blocked here; if they took Route122, they would be backtracking a good ways.”
Jillybean agreed, but on the safe side, she launched one of her three precious drones. “Bye, Bobby,” she called to it as it whirred away. The heli-drone “Bobby” would be flying on a one-way mission since there would be no time to retrieve it.
Neil watched it until it went behind the trees. He then gazed down at the map and instead of turning around as Jillybean had ordered, he went off road, plowing down a fence and cutting straight south through a rutted field, saving them at least ten minutes. When he found Highway 350 he slowed, his eyes wide, his mouth stretched into a grimace as he looked both ways. “Does this look perfect to you guys?” His fear of the coming battle showing on his face.
“There’s no turn off,” Grey noted. “If we ambush them here, they may get trapped in place and that’s a battle we can’t win. We have to keep going.”
Neil seemed relieved by the answer and he headed east on 350, speeding once more, sending leaves and trash skittering in their wake.
Seconds later Jillybean made a noise that was somewhere between a grunt and a yelp. “Oha! The drone has them. They’re coming up on the exit and…they…they’re turning south. They’re coming this way!” She checked the map, measuring with her fingers. “We have a five mile head start. Is that enough time?”
“At thirty miles an hour, that’s a ten minute lead,” Grey said. “That’s cutting it pretty close.”
Neil understood what he had to do. He stamped on the gas and the 4Runner sprang forward, racing along the narrow and, thankfully, empty road. “Do we have everything ready?” he asked, not for a second taking his eyes off the asphalt speeding under his tires.
Grey stared around. “Thirty feet of knotted rope, two remote controlled mines, six smoke bombs each the size of an artillery round, a sledge hammer. All our weapons locked and loaded, oh, and one AT4 anti-tank weapon.”
He forgot about me, Ipes said, crossly. Jillybean hushed him. Her mind was going over every single detail of the plan. It would come down to timing, the speed of the vehicles and their spacing—in other words, things she couldn’t control. Her stomach started to hurt.
“If everything is ready…” Neil paused and swallowed before finishing: “then ten minutes might be good enough. We just need to find the right spot.”
Three miles went by and still they didn’t find what they were looking for: a spot where the two-lane road was hemmed in by forest, basically they needed the forest to overhang the road. And they also needed a turn off very close to said overhang.
Time and again, they got one but not the other. Eventually, they had to settle on a spot just before the land opened up on fields of stunted and browned plants.
Jillybean, her heart going quick, said: “Right here. Stop the truck.”
Grey was the first out. He jogged back down the road, staring up at the trees overhanging the road. “Right here. This is the only place where we can ambush them.”
The little girl looked down at her iPad, which showed empty road; the trucks had out distanced her drone and so she sent up another. While she did that, Grey and Neil unloaded the 4Runner and then, as Grey mounted a tree with a length of rope rolled over one shoulder, Neil went to hide the truck in the forest.
“Well?” Neil asked when he got back. “Where do we put the first bomb?”
“I don’t know, they’re not in range yet. I don’t have them on screen and it all depends where the slave truck is in relation to the rest.” Every few seconds, Jillybean checked the screen, whispering: “Come on, come on.” Finally, the drone’s camera picked up the trucks chugging their way. “Which is the slave o
ne?”
Neil squinted at the screen. “I can’t tell from the front. The slave one usually has three Xs on it or some sort of picture of a woman…usually a naked woman.”
Jillybean angled the heli-drone until she saw the Xs emblazoned in huge letters: “It’s the third one. For all darn it.” The middle truck would be the hardest to cut out. If it followed the others too closely it could accidentally trap itself and attacking it like that would likely get them all killed.
She was suddenly frozen by indecision: should she abort the mission? Should she order them back into the 4Runner and hope there was an absolutely perfect spot up ahead? Or should she go through with it and pray?
“Where do I put the first bomb?” Neil asked, his voice straining at a higher than normal octave. He kept looking back and forth from Jillybean to the road west of them.
“And I need the first load,” Grey called from above them. Climbing up into the tree where the branches were thin couldn’t have been easy for the two hundred pound man and his sweating face hung down.
“I-I just need a second,” she said. They didn’t have seconds to spare and every moment she dithered was a moment they would never get back, for good or for evil.
Ipes centered her. So, it’s third in line. So what? Nothing has really changed. You knew you weren’t going to get them all and you knew it was going to be dangerous, so just roll with it. Unlike Neil’s voice, Ipes’ was deeper, far more manly than his usual nasal tone.
“Okay…I will.” She looked again at the screen showing the trucks chugging down the road. They were doing maybe twenty-five miles an hour and their intervals had shrunk. They weren’t bumper to bumper. Jillybean thanked God for that, but there was maybe only thirty feet separating each.
It would mean trouble. “But that’s okay, we have Captain Grey with us,” she said. “And I’ll have you, Mister Neil, sir. I need you to put the first mine across from that white trash bag and the next one will have to go across from the oak tree. Do you know which is the oak tree?”
She knew that when it came to woodland knowledge, he didn’t know many facts and usually mixed up the ones he did have at his disposal. He surprised her. “I know what an oak looks like…the one with the reddish leaves, right?”
“Yes, now go.” She spun on the spot and spied the rope Captain Grey was dangling from the overhead canopy. He had earlier knotted it to make it easier to climb, but she wasn’t climbing. She snaked the loose end through the strap of the AT4 and then through the trigger guards of Grey’s and Neil’s M4s. She even hooked her own backpack and M79 on there as well.
It seemed like a heavy load to her. Grey whisked it up as if it was nothing. A minute later the rope came down landing on her head as she was bent over the screen of her iPad. The trucks were leaving the drone far behind and were now small in the picture.
She could hear their rumbly engines as she looped the heavy sledge hammer into place and the satchel of tools and the plastic bag filled with the remotes for the detonators. Time was flying, not like sand in an hourglass but as leaves rushing by. A wind was sweeping across the highway blowing yellow and red leaves along with it. It reminded her of a time long ago. She had read a Winnie the Pooh book that was all about a blustery day and this day was similar to that—except without the danger that was churning her guts and making her want to pee.
A pee had not been factored into her plans and now she wished it had been.
“You better hurry,” Grey barked. “I can see the exhaust whenever they change gears.”
“That can’t be right,” Jillybean said, but it was right. She could just see a puff of black at the tops of the trees getting carried away by the wind. The traders were early or traveling faster than she had reckoned…and the smoke bombs weren’t even in place. Neil was still setting up the second bomb, so she ran to the smoke bombs—they were ultra smoke bombs. With the gasoline soaked in, they’d go right up. Yes, they would burn out quicker, but they weren’t going to be needed for more than a minute.
If they were there after a minute, they would all be dead. The thought sent a shiver through her, but as it mixed with all the other shivers, she barely noticed.
The smoke bombs were not much to look at: a triple-layered ball of aluminum foil sitting in a brown bag. She grabbed two and bracketed the road just below where Captain Grey was trying to set the weapons in the tree branches to keep them from falling.
At first, she was glad for the wind as it swept leaves right on her and the bombs, burying them easily. However, when she ran to get the next two smoke bombs she saw that the wind had blown the leaves off again.
Leave them! Ipes ordered, again with that deep voice that was maddeningly familiar. Concentrate on getting them in place. Worry about hiding them later.
“There is no later!” she hissed, rushing to the next pair of brown bags and hurrying them across the road to set them in the tall grass at twenty foot intervals. As she armed the thermal detonators, she watched Neil struggling with the same issue she was having. He looked like a child trying to save his sandcastle from the ocean, clutching the leaves with both arms while a terrified look played on his face.
Jillybean had placed the “mines,” a word she didn’t quite understand, in garbage bags so they wouldn’t look exactly like what they were: bombs. In her world, mines were things that people dug into the ground to find gems and jewels and gold; mines weren’t bombs.
Whichever word they were called didn’t matter as much as the fact that they seemed blatantly obvious lying in the middle of road. They had to be camouflaged but at the same time she wanted to scream at Neil to forget the bombs and get up into the tree. She didn’t trust that Neil would be able to climb the tree in the time they had left. He had trouble with ladders and sometimes even stairs.
Again, she was struck with a decision that could get them killed if she chose wrong.
Trust your instincts, a voice in her head said. This wasn’t Ipes. She just realized that the zebra was in a pocket of her backpack high up in the tree. This was a new voice, which meant, a new crazy.
I’m not new, Silly-Jilly. It’s Daddy and I would never do anything to hurt you. Now, go with your gut. Listen to what’s inside you.
The roar of engines from up the road—she didn’t have a second to marvel or argue or question the new voice. She cried to Neil: “Leave them! Get up in the tree, please.” He hesitated and she made a noise in her throat that sounded like a cat whining. It got him scrabbling at the tree, bark raining down into his face as he struggled against gravity.
A hard sound: blatt! had her turning west. Certain that she would see the trucks at the end of the road, aiming right for her, she froze, her legs straddling the yellow line, like a deer caught on the way to the watering hole.
The road was blessedly empty…for the moment. She ran for the last two smoke bombs. She should have been following Neil up into the tree, but her plan was gossamer thin, relying on luck as much as it did her native genius. She knew that anything including the last two smoke bombs could make the difference.
She put them in place on either side of where she hoped the fourth truck in line would stop and was just clicking the “go” button on the first bomb, when she heard her name being screamed. Her head didn’t orient on the scream, which came from above her, what filled her with fear was being caught in the middle of the road without any camouflage or pretense. Her plans would be laid bare, pretty much naked to the world as the day she was born.
But the road was empty.
“They’re right there!” Grey hollered. She ignored the scream and bent back toward the smoke bomb. It was needed. The fact was, just at that moment, the bomb was needed more than Jillybean was. She had made her plans and that would be pretty much her entire contribution. She wouldn’t be much good in the coming fight. Likely, she would be only a detriment to the team. A fine example of which was getting caught out in the middle of the road like a silly fawn.
She scraped a handful of leaves over t
he bag that held the smoke bomb and did her best to bury it in the three seconds she had left, or the three seconds she thought she had left. The next blatt of the engines was so close it turned her stomach to ice. She was about to race for the tree that Neil was struggling to climb when she saw the first of the trucks pull around the bend in the road, two hundred yards distant.
Just like the fawn, she feared she looked like, she froze, her Keds seemingly glued to the pavement. She froze and could easily imagine herself still standing there when that first massive truck plowed her into nothing but goo.
Run! her daddy screamed into her head.
She ran, angling for the tree, but then she saw the rope drop, its last knot touching the pavement, the rest going straight up. She didn’t need Captain Grey’s instructions. She ran and jumped on the rope, entwining her legs and gripping with all her might as she was hauled up as if she were a spider on a web.
Grey pulled her up until she dangled in front of his face. “Were you seen?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Wait…” She pulled back a branch so she could see as the trucks came closer. “No. They woulda stopped if they saw me. They’re still coming Mister Neil, sir, they’re still coming. You gotta hurry.”
His tree climbing skills were even worse than Jillybean feared. He was inching along the branch that snaked out over the road as if he were crawling across a tightrope a hundred feet over a river of lava. She turned from him and gave Captain Grey an arched eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “Hold this rope and this rifle, will you?” Very carefully, he slung the AT4 across his back. He then took the rifle from her and slung that as well. The satchel of tools went over one shoulder and he laid the sledgehammer across his knees.
Jillybean took up her backpack, hung her M79 grenade launcher across the top, cinched it down and put the pack on her back. When she looked up, she found Grey smiling at her.
The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8 Page 45