"What?" the man asked. "What stairs? What are you talking about?"
She waved him to be quiet as Ipes answered her: We have to build a crude set of steps, because he can't magically hop four feet straight up while tied to a pole. And the stairs will have to go around the pole, like a spiral staircase. Now hurry and get all the books you can find. And those crates, and those little bin things.
As the man continued to sputter out questions, she dashed off, going from pile to pile, picking up books and plastic bins and sticking them in one of the plastic containers. When she got back she was short of breath and sweating up a storm.
"Can you get up, Mister?" she asked.
"What?"
"Stand up," Jillybean said. "We gotta build stairs so you can get up off that pole." She didn't wait and began stacking books next to him, however Ipes stopped her.
No, the crate first, Ipes ordered. He's going to go up sort of to the side and back. It won't be easy so the first step should be sturdy. Now push the chair over here. Turn it around so the back is to the pole. Great. We'll need the books in order to...
He stopped as their came a series of metallic bangs coming from the school. It was the sound of a door being knocked against a wall repeatedly. It was the sound of the monsters escaping from the school in a manic rush.
"Hurry," the man whispered, afraid. He had stood and watched her construct the rude stairs with a touch of hope, but now his brown eyes were big in his face as he stared over the playground and to the school. "You can hear them coming!" It was true. They were coming around the school, thankfully they were taking the long way, which would give them maybe thirty seconds.
Thirty seconds was not much time. Still it was enough time for one attempt and so the man tried to step up onto the crate; instead his foot upended it.
Guide his feet. Ipes commanded in a rush. He can't see where he's going.
Jillybean returned the crate to its position. "Lift your foots. I'll put them on the crate." Half their time was spent getting him from the ground to the crate to the chair.
Now the books! Ipes cried, waving his stubby hooves in the air. Make four stacks that are as even as you can get them. Then we'll put the next chair on top of those.
She dropped to her knees and stacked all the books she had into four piles.
It's not enough, Ipes said. And you don't have time to go get more. We should go. Tell him sorry and let's go! The moans and the running, slapping feet were louder now. The monsters would be around the corner in seconds.
"What about the bins?" she asked.
The man tore his eyes from the sound of his coming doom and took in the situation. "They'll crack under the weight of the chair. They're too flimsy." He sighed in resignation and she was sure he would remind her of her promise again, however Ipes interrupted.
Not if they are stacked as well! Ipes cried. See how they fit one into the other? Jillybean grabbed one and saw that he was right. Hurry! Ipes practically screamed. Just do four. And now make sure the stacks are even.
Obediently she did as she was told: stacking the bins, lining up the books, and then struggling the chair up onto them. And all the while she could picture the monsters coming closer to the corner of the building and she could image that she could hear a clock ticking.
"They're here," the man whispered and strangely where before his face held a growing fear, now his voice was rough and he sounded more angry than anything else. "You have to go, now!"
"There's only one more step," Jillybean said, after a glance at the little kid monsters. Between them was forty yards of trashed playground. Forty yards wasn't much and had she been alone she would she would've ran screaming away, however this man was a grode up. Compared to the little kid monsters he was really big—yes, he was beaten up, and yes he had his hands tied behind his back, but still he was a grode up and that meant he would protect her...somehow. But first he had to get off the pole.
"Let me have your foots," she commanded, tugging at the hem of his jeans.
The monsters charged and, guided by Jillybean, the man put one foot on the chair and stepped up with a grunt. Under him the chair began to slide on the slick surface of the plastic bins. Jillybean tried to hold the chair in place, however it shot at her violently as the man made a desperate and graceless hop to clear his hands from the top of the pole.
He came crashing down, landing on one foot, before falling to the asphalt face first. At least he was free—somewhat. With his hands still tied behind his back getting up was a struggle. Jillybean ran to help him.
"Hurry! Hurry!" she cried over and over as she hauled on his arm. Finally he got to his knees and then his feet and then they started running directly away from the monsters.
Don't leave me! wailed Ipes at the top of his lungs. Without regard to her own safety, Jillybean dashed back. Ipes was more important to her than a leg or an arm. She grabbed the little zebra and paused to stare at the onrushing monsters. The big one had joined in the chase, and now in the light its nudity was more apparent and more obscene in her mind. Along with horrific lesions and running sores that leaked yellow puss onto its grey hide, its man parts had been partially eaten away, while what remained were blacken shreds that swung in rhythm with its stomping gate.
Run away, Jillybean, Ipes said in her daddy's calm voice. She didn't hesitate. Spinning on her heel, she raced after the man she had freed and saw he was already in need of her help again. He had run the short distance to a chain link fence which separated the school yard from a little alley that smelled of pee, and he had managed to get stuck in a hole in the wiring.
He was grunting and twisting himself to no avail. As she came up to him, with the monsters not twenty feet behind, she saw the problem: his coat was hooked at the collar.
He needs to take one step back and then hunch lower, Ipes said. With so little time for explanations, Jillybean grabbed him by his bound wrists and pulled him back with all the force of her forty-seven pounds and cried, "Duck down lower!"
The effect was immediate and the man came loose and was free on the right side of the fence in a wink. This was not true for Jillybean. The monsters were within arm's reach when she threw herself through the opening, landing on the cement floor of the alley with pebbles digging into her palms. She tried to climb to her feet but something had a hold of her. Grey scabby hands had her by the loose jeans, and unbelievably one of the monsters had her sneakered foot in its mouth. A scream ripped from her lungs, but then the man was there, stomping on the little monsters who had found the hole in the fence even less manageable than he had.
There was a lip at the bottom of the opening which the first of them had tripped over. The second tripped over the first and so on until four were lying one atop the other, half in the alley and half out, each trying to get at poor Jillybean.
"Get up," the man ordered while continuing his mad stomps. A second later he stepped back, aghast. The giant had come. The monster threw its weight at the fence which sagged and bent inwards. A second blow by the beast snapped a steel ring holding a part of the fence to the support pole.
"We have to get out of here," the man said in a horrified whisper.
Jillybean hopped up quick and asked, "To where?" as she backed away from the monsters scrambling to get through the fence at them.
The building that made up one side of the alley had been an apartment complex and now every door hung askew and every window was smashed in. The man shrugged, a move barely discernible from a twitch. "In there somewhere, I guess."
Neither she nor Ipes had a better idea so they hurried into the complex, only to stop short after the first building. All the ruckus had stirred things up on this side of the fence as well. There were a pair of monsters lurching their way toward them.
"I'll draw them to me," the man said between clenched teeth. "You run. Go find your parents."
He started to move away from the side of the building in which they had ducked, however Jillybean grabbed him. "There are places her
e to hide for both of us. We just have to find them."
We don't have time, Ipes warned.
The man shook his head at her and said the same thing, "There's no time and look, not a door around here is sturdy enough to keep out that giant."
"What about that one?" Jillybean asked, pointing at an iron door around the side of the buildings. The sign on it was beyond her ability to read, all save for the top word: Danger.
The man's eyes went wide. "Maybe it'll work. If it's not locked."
It wasn't, however it was so heavy that the little girl barely had the strength to pull it back. "You can do it! Pull!" the man urged. His head went back and forth from cheering on Jillybean to gaping at the monsters who had seen them and were now rushing to feast. It was a race that Jillybean won with two seconds to spare.
Once she had the door opened enough, the pair, and Ipes, dashed into the room and slammed the door shut behind them and then sat against it breathing in gasps and trying to ignore the sound of the monsters smashing into it.
The room itself was fairly well lit by a small rectangular window set high in one wall. "What is all this stuff? Do you know?" Jillybean asked. There were six large cylinders set in two rows. From them sprouted a multitude of pipes.
"It's a boiler room," the man said. "Or it was. See if you can find anything that'll cut these laces. Something sharp, or even jagged will work." She was so tired and not at all feeling well, despite this Jillybean took a deep breath and stood on wobbling legs. The man saw this and asked in concern, "Are you all right?"
"My tummy hurts and my head does too."
At her answer a long weary breath escaped him. "Have you been bit or scratched by one of them? Let me see your arms."
"I don't think so," she answered, hiking up the Eagles sweatshirt. The evidence suggested otherwise. Her arms were covered in scratches and bruises, but where they all came from she didn't know. "Oh, maybe I was scratched a little. Is that bad?"
"Yes, very bad." He didn't explain further and now he refused to look into her eyes.
Ask him why it's bad, Ipes asked nervously.
She didn't want to, because she was suddenly very afraid of the answer. Regardless, she whispered: "Why is it bad?"
"It means you'll turn into one of them."
Shock widened her blue eyes and she whispered, "I don't want to be one of them. I want to be a girl still." She felt like crying. She could feel her eyes well up and his did also.
"But that's not going to happen," he said. His words and his voice seemed empty or blank as if he didn't care about her, or anything really. "You won't stay a girl and I won't stay a man. I was scratched also, and now I'm sick and in a few hours I'll turn into one of them."
"You're going to be a monster too?"
He started to nod and then stopped and said, "Unless you turn first." This struck him as funny and he laughed crazily in hard misery and turned a little to his side so that his ugly purpled hands were visible to Jillybean.
He laughed and he cried at once, which scared her.
"What are you laughing at?" she asked at last.
The man turned to her and his face, sweaty and pale, was as crazy as his laughter had been. "I just don't want to get eaten," he said. "And I don't want to eat anyone. Just thinking about it is making me want to puke."
She had the same feeling. It made her head light and her breathing heavy. "If we stay in here we should be fine," she said hoping to cheer them both up. Outside the monsters moaned and the door shimmied beneath the blows of the giant, but it seemed solid enough to resist his power. "We'll be monsters but we won't be eating anyone. So there’s that."
"I'm sorry, but you're wrong. One of us will eat and one of us will get eaten," he told her in a whisper. She started to shake her head, but he cut her off, "Yeah it's going to happen. Whichever one of us turns first will eat the other; that's the way it works."
Chapter 10
Cassie
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
In sleep Cassandra Mason possessed an elemental beauty few could match. Her dark features, stylized and large, were a sculptor's dream. They bespoke of a regal nature that, once hidden, had now come into fruition. Though not in name, Cassie ruled with all the power and severity of a queen, and by many she was loved, and by all she was feared.
It was in consciousness that her beauty faded. Her face, always hard and frequently angry, was quick to sneer when she was displeased, but it was in her eyes, those large doe eyes, where a person's true fear originated. They held such a surety of power, such a presence of personality that few, even the toughest of men, could hold her gaze for long.
Standing in her room, the largest in the brick fortress-like warehouse, those eyes took in her personal map of Philadelphia and what they saw brought a smile to her full lips. The fact of her power was illustrated on that map. It showed, in shaded grey, where the Blacks controlled. From a little square in the south of the city, the shade had bloomed to take over so much.
"But not everything," she purred. There were still the dregs of the Spics hiding and running for their lives in Camden, just across the Delaware, and the Whites who were holed up in their odd bastion in the suburbs. "It'll happen," she assured herself. It was just a matter of time.
Time had matured her, and despite that, time had come easy for her. Everything had come easy. So easy that some whispered she had made a deal with the devil. This wasn't idle chat either. The devil had gained quite a world-wide following during the apocalypse and Cassie wore the mantle of Devil's Disciple without a qualm. She rather enjoyed it if the truth were known.
She despised the Christian God and always had. Was he not everything she hated? A white man; a patriarchal figure, with his white beard and his white robes, sitting up in his heavenly plantation making all the rules?
And was not the devil depicted as a dark being, cloaked in black? And was he not forced by the white man’s God to dwell in the ghetto of hell? And was he not after power without excuse, just as she?
Cassie was just fine with the devil as her patron; what's more she was happy making sacrifices to him. Anytime someone got in her way and died as a result, she would think on the devil and smirk. It had started with the killing of Julia. Far from sending her into a weepy depression, Cassie had exalted at finally striking back at her enemy. It was something she couldn't exactly thank God for, so instead she had pictured the devil and smirked, knowing he would have appreciated the way the axe had sunk, cachuck, right into that stupid red head of hers.
Her enemy...that was how she viewed all white people, and to a lesser extent the other races as well. This would not be considered much of a surprise if one knew her background.
Her mother, Dee Mason, was not simply a racist who saw only good within the black community, she was also a conspiracy buff...though conspiracy nut would be far closer to the truth. Dee had one criteria for belief in a conspiracy: it had to further her view that every problem in the black community was the white man's fault.
This view held firm despite any evidence to the contrary. If there was a crime in which a black person was convicted it simply meant that evidence had been planted. Not even a taped confession meant a thing to her. As she stated on many occasions: "If they can fake going to the moon, they can fake this."
It was into this world that Cassie was born and raised, though to be sure Cassie was far more sane than her mother.
Cassie allowed that a number of the conspiracies weren't true; obviously not true, and yet she did not once refute them. To the contrary she championed each and every one, because to her, hate overrode logic.
Not much had changed since coming to Philadelphia. In fact just one thing had: she had discovered that hate—a real, true passionate hate equaled power. When she had come to the city after two months of enduring a hard cold beginning to the winter alone, she had discovered, much to her annoyance, that the blacks didn't hate their neighbors.
After surviving the horrors of the "Grey Plague" the blac
k people of the city had no stomach for strife, even though it was clear to Cassie they had been jailed once again by the whites. They had been allotted the portion of the city between the Schuylkill and the Delaware Rivers, while to the north and east they were hemmed in by the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.
The White's on the other hand claimed everything west of the Schuylkill River—basically the entirety of America! Pointing this out had done nothing. The blacks were eagerly neutral, a state that Cassie despised and vowed to rectify. It took a subtle and conniving hand to steer them into "asserting their dominance" in other words, into open warfare.
She started with propaganda, spreading rumors among the disenfranchised about the Whites. Since it was a time of fear and strife these seeds of hate took on a life of their own with whispers of racism and white “superiority” and a return of the KKK.
To nurse the hate, Cassie then began to deface the city: hangman’s nooses were found dangling from light poles; scrawled graffiti: Die Niggers! was discovered spray painted on store fronts across the south part of the city; even manikins were stumbled upon dressed in white sheets. Without proper KKK robes and hoods they looked ridiculous and childish in Cassie’s eyes, and yet the people shook with fear regardless.
And still the so called Black Leadership did nothing!
There were six of them, all men, most with grey in their beards and all with heavy feet which they dragged toward any difficult decision. Each was burdened with the same pacifist mindset. They thought they could trade their way to peace and prosperity.
They literally sickened her. It was this feeling that drove her to attain power. When she first came to Philadelphia she thought she was the least qualified person to take on a leadership role among her people. After all she was very young, an outsider, and a nobody who lacked even a high-school diploma.
But there was no one else with the guts and the vision. Alone, she saw the dangers of being hemmed in by enemies. Yes, the warehouse was strong in fortification and at the moment well stocked, but what of next year? What if survivors kept straggling in? Would the food hold out? Would there be room in the brick building? Already it felt crowded and closed in—it felt much like a prison.
The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors Page 9