The Undead World (Book 12): The Body [An Undead World Expansion]

by Meredith, Peter

  Since Eve had come around two years before, Jillybean had become an expert at hiding evidence.

  Hiding a bloody knife was a good start, “But where is the body, Eve?”

  I’m not telling. Eve’s voice was stronger now. This is more fun.

  “Please. You gotta tell me. We could get in trouble. Bad trouble.” Just when she needed Eve to talk, the girl was nothing but static in Jillybean’s suddenly pounding head. She felt sick. Her mouth tasted like pennies and her stomach churned. She looked around and saw that her feet had taken her to the side door of the old school that she had claimed for her own, days after coming to the island. Everything of perceived value had already been stripped from it and no one seemed to care that she had fashioned a working bio-technical lab and a school of practical surgery inside it…not that anyone knew about that second part or the other, more explosive experiments.

  There was blood on the handle of the door.

  “Oh God,” she whispered. She stepped back and her foot splashed down into a brown puddle. Guilt sprang up inside her like a raging fire and she dropped down to scoop water from the puddle and fling it at the door. As fast as she could, she washed away the blood and then stepped inside, expecting to find a body lying in the hall.

  There wasn’t a body, but there were blood drops trailing from the door. In something of a fugue, Jillybean followed them to what had once been the art room, but was now an operating room, of sorts. It was likely the only operating room in the world with a reinforced table and six lengths of heavy chain bolted to the floor.

  She went on tiptoes to look through the little rectangle of glass set in the doorway. There was a man’s body lying on her operating table. It was human, which couldn’t be. She never operated on humans in the school. The school was strictly for the zombies she secretly smuggled onto the island through the north-side culvert.

  Her heart was trip-hammering as she entered the room and cast aside her backpack; the knife and bloody dress seemed like nothing compared to this. She eased up on the body, hoping now that the blood was from a botched surgery, one that had an actual purpose. “It could be acute appendicitis. I found him on the way home from the meeting and this was closer than the clin…”

  Her words seized up in her throat. It was Kevin Dunlap staring up at the ceiling with filmed-over eyes and a dozen holes in his chest. Someone had pounded a knife into him over and over again. Jillybean backed away, tears forming in her eyes. She turned to run, when she heard a ghostly voice.

  No.

  “Eve?” There was no answer and so she tried, “Ipes? Sadie? Chris?” With a grimace, she even poked the corpse. “Mr. Dunlap, sir?” The body remained thankfully inert. “It had to be Eve.”

  There was no reason to ask why Eve had killed the man. Although it had been ages since she had last killed someone, Eve was a murderer. Or, more accurately, a psycho killer. She didn’t need a reason to kill, but most of the time she lashed out because of Jillybean. She hated Jillybean with a fiery passion, or she used to at least. Lately, with the drugs, she was more of an insidious voice in her head trying to get Jillybean to be bad.

  “Are you trying to get me kicked off the island?” If anyone saw the body, she would be. The Founders and the new people both agreed on one thing: Jillybean was “mucho loco,” as Mr. Quiroz always muttered when she was around.

  “And that’s what means many crazies,” Jillybean sighed. She stared at Kevin until she felt just as dead inside as he was, then she wiped the tears from her eyes and addressed the body. Going up on tip-toe, she noted the cause of death in a melancholy voice, “Multiple stab wounds to the torso. All at a downward angle.” She checked his hands and arms. “Old bruising and scars on knuckles, but no defensive wounds.”

  A hundred questions sprang up. Had Eve simply found him lying comatose and proceeded to attack him? Why hadn’t he fought back? Where had all this taken place? And how had she gotten him back here?

  The last question was easiest to answer. Only a few feet away under a sheet was a grungy old wheelbarrow. She went to it and touched the rough, splintery handles. Moving the body couldn’t have been easy and yet she could picture her own face twisted into a gleeful smile by Eve as she heaved the body across the island in the dead of night.

  “It doesn’t matter how or why,” she said, falling back into the habit of talking to herself. “What matters is not getting caught. If I getted caught, that’ll be it for me. And for you too, Eve. This was stupid even for you. Stupid and useless.”

  Becoming clinical helped her deal with the pain and she went down a mental checklist. The first thing she had to do was get rid of the evidence. Using the wheelbarrow was out of the question. Moving a body at night was dangerous enough, carting one around in the middle of the morning was simply stupid.

  She went to the end of the table, hooked a wire around Mr. Dunlap’s right foot and then hurried to the head of the table. Next to the wall was a squat wide-mouthed trashcan with a green bag in it. She slid it under the table and then began to work a hand-crank around and around. Slowly the table tipped and as it did, blood ran along the troughs of the table and poured over the lip and down into the bag.

  This wasn’t the first body she had made to disappear from the school. She scheduled surgeries three times a week and if they were not terribly invasive, and she encountered few unexpected complications, she could make a zombie last for up to three weeks. Getting them on the island was easy enough. She had a small skiff and a large tranquilizer gun. It was half a mile from the culvert, where she kept the skiff hidden, to the school. She brought the unconscious zombies in on a gurney with a false bottom, the same sort orderlies used to move dead patients through a hospital.

  To hurry things along with Kevin Dunlap, she slit his throat. His beard was rough as sandpaper on the back of her hand as she cut deep. The razored edge of her scalpel ground on his larynx before finding the thinner cartilage and slicing through. Her stomach lurched again as the blood streamed into the garbage bag.

  Grabbing her stomach with one hand, she reached for a spray bottle of bleach and a cloth. She then made her way back to the front of the building, cleaning up drops of blood as she went.

  Then she went to work on the handle. She had just sprayed it when she heard her name being called. At first, she thought it was another of the voices living in her head.

  “Sadie? Is that you? Do you know what happened?”

  “Jillybean!”

  The little girl jerked her head around. It was Deanna Grey breathlessly calling her. After a last, terrified glance over her shoulder, Jillybean scrubbed the handles as fast as she could and then spun, plastering a fake smile on her lips. Deanna came jogging up in leggings and a downy pink vest. Even sweating and worried she was a beautiful woman.

  With another pang in her stomach Jillybean’s smile went up and down on her lips. “Yes? Hi. Um, I’m just doing a little cleaning. Things should be clean, right? Right?”

  Deanna ignored her frantic bobbing head. “They need your help down at the clinic right away. It’s Jonathan Dunnam. Something’s happened to him.”

  Jillybean’s mouth fell open and for the moment her stomachache was forgotten. “Was he stabbed?”

  “What? No. He’s vomiting blood. Linda thinks he ate something bad. It started around three or four this morning, but it’s gradually gotten bad enough for her to ask for your help. Do you need anything from your lab?”

  Deanna started to reach for the door. Jillybean put her back to it. “No. I-I-I should see him first. It might be nothing. An ulcer! It might be just an ulcer.” She began to urge Deanna away from the school when something struck her. “But if it is an ulcer, I’ll need a secondary antibiotic, and Metronidazole would be best.” She glanced at the door, wondering how suspicious it would be if she asked to go back in alone. Very, she decided and yet there was poor Mr. Dunlap with his throat slit right down the hall.

  “I just need one or two things. You can wait here if you want. I’ll h
urry, I promise.” Deanna was no fool and her brows came down. “Or you can come with me. I-I was just cleaning, and the smell…”

  Jillybean didn’t know how to end the sentence so she went inside, her eyes darting left and right for any blood she might have missed. Then her eyes locked onto the little rectangle of glass on the art room door. She couldn’t stop staring at it as they approached.

  “It’s over there,” she said, putting out a shaking finger and pointing to the right. To the left was the art room and catty-corner from it was the glassed-in school offices. She forced her eyes in its direction and felt immediate relief not to have to look at the art room door.

  The principal’s office was the only locked door in the building. Jillybean kept the key hidden in the remains of a potted plant on the closest desk. Her hands trembled as she unlocked the door. Her imagination was getting the best of her and she was sure she was going to open the door and find another body, splayed out and eviscerated. She even peeked in first before opening the door all the way.

  It was blessedly empty. She made a noise that was half wearied relief and half groan from her stomach issue. Deanna brought her hand down on Jillybean’s shoulder and turned her around. “It’ll be okay. No one’s expecting you to perform miracles. Just do your best for him.”

  The image of Kevin Dunlap, his throat slit open in gaping red smile, came to her. Was that the best she could’ve done for him?

  “Okay,” Jillybean answered, her lips going herky-jerky once more. They were giving away her guilt and so she turned quickly and went to one of the many white cabinets she’d hauled across the island weeks before.

  Inside were questionable antibiotics. Some were three years out of date. But they would have to do, because so far, Jillybean’s forays into the creation of home brewed antibiotics had produced miserable results.

  “Hopefully this will help,” she said and shook the pills at Deanna.

  “I’m sure they will,” Deanna answered and headed for the door. Jillybean rushed to follow as it looked to her that Deanna was heading right for the art-room.

  3

  “It’s this way,” she squeaked, grabbing Deanna’s arm.

  The woman turned and gave her a long look, her blue eyes searching Jillybean’s face. “What’s going on with you? You seem all over the board this morning.”

  The rectangle of glass was right behind her and through it, Jillybean could see Mr. Dunlap’s canted body. Perfectly red blood was dripping from the lobe of his right ear.

  Deanna dropped down to one knee so they were face to face. “Neil said you snuck out the back when I came to your place. Is there something you want to say to me?”

  Jillybean’s giant blue eyes were so wide, they felt as though they might pop out of her head. She had the fantastic urge to vomit a confession all over Deanna and if she could actually remember what she was confessing to, she might have.

  “I-I no. I was just, you know, cleaning. And, and the fumes were giving me a headache.”

  For just a moment, Deanna looked unconvinced, then anxiety over Dunnam clouded her face. “Okay, good.” She started marching again and Jillybean had to half-jog to keep up. Deanna glanced down at her. “I was worried you had an issue with last night.”

  “Last night?” They were coming to the exit and she was eager to free herself of the dark school with its ghastly secret. “What about last night?”

  “You know, how some of them were getting testy with you. I knew you could handle it. Well, I hoped you could handle it since we hadn’t heard a peep out of Eve in a while.” They had just stepped out of the school but instead of feeling relief, Jillybean’s shoulders stiffened at Eve’s name. Deanna didn’t miss the sign. “Did she come back?”

  Jillybean’s eyes flashed to the door. “Just a little bit.” She couldn’t look up at the tall blonde.

  Deanna sighed and looked out at the island. It was beautiful, and as far as anyone else knew, peaceful. “I’m sure it’ll be okay. You take your pills today? Want me to run back in and get them for you?”

  She had her hand on the handle when Jillybean practically begged, “No, no, no. I have some at the clinic and, either way, we shouldn’t leave Mr. Dunnam for too long. He’s sort of a meek kinda guy and that’s what means he’s probably ascared a bit.”

  “He is that,” Deanna answered, sneaking peeks at the little girl. She had changed overnight. At the meeting, she had been vibrant in her flower dress, and although her hair was still a wild tangle, her mind had been razor-sharp. The idea of a wall…a great wall had electrified her.

  To her, the wall meant complete safety, if it was done correctly. The opposition had argued that the current barrier was already proof against the zombies and so far, had kept the Corsairs and the other bandits at bay. But Jillybean was far-seeing. She had already authored a paper on zombie growth over the first two years of the apocalypse. At first, the idea of giant, near-unstoppable zombies was laughed off as a child’s over-active imagination. She had expected exactly that response and knew that a picture was worth a thousand words, and she had taken dozens of pictures.

  Seeing seven-foot-long grey corpses laid out and measured could not be refuted.

  The argument that the Corsairs would become more of an issue over time was based less on hard science, and yet was more effective at changing minds about the wall than the idea of giant zombies.

  Every man and woman at the meeting had seen how people react when the shit hits the fan. The end may begin with a riot at the Walmart over toilet paper, but it never ends there. The survival instinct built into humanity is too great to be denied and the weak look to the strong, even when that leader is harsh and brutal. Maybe even especially when the leader is harsh and brutal.

  In the short run, morality is a handicap to survival. In bad times, it’s far better to be on the side of the nasty, raping, murderous man than to be waiting anxiously for him to descend out of the night.

  It is the universal practice for dictators to use fear to draw great numbers to them and it’s always just a matter of time before they unleash their growing hordes on their neighbors. Jillybean did not need to look to the historical examples of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane or Attila the Hun. She had the recently defeated Azael to point to, and closer to Bainbridge were the bandits who had pillaged half of Washington state under Hatchet-Joe’s ferocious leadership.

  The little girl had laid out the obvious need for a wall before fielding dozens of questions concerning the materials needed for the immense project, the labor involved, and the timetable she envisioned.

  That girl had been at her peak, mentally. The girl walking beside Deanna was disheveled and frightened. She kept looking back at the school as if expecting something to burst from its doors and chase her down.

  “It’ll be okay,” Deanna said again. To get Jillybean’s mind back on track she asked, “Do you really think Jonathan has an ulcer? I never heard of someone vomiting blood from an ulcer before.”

  Jillybean snapped her head around guiltily as if she’d been caught looking at something she wasn’t supposed to. “Yeah. It happens. Generally, after it’s gone untreated for a few weeks. I think he likes spicy food too much.” She frowned suddenly. “Come to think of it, he ate Mr. Quiroz’s salsa at the potluck on Sunday.”

  “You think that made it worse?”

  “No, but it should have. It was so spicy that it made Neil cry. Just a little bit, not a lot,” she added quickly, not wanting anyone to think anything bad about her adopted father. “Something that spicy would’ve caused an ulcer to flare up immediately but Mr. Dunnam showed no sign of discomfort. This would suggest that we’re dealing with an acute issue. That’s what means it just happened.”

  “I know the meaning of some words, Jillybean,” Deanna said. “You don’t have to explain everything.”

  “Sorry.”

  The two trod along in silence, Jillybean skipping every other step to keep up with Deanna. Ever since her captain had died to save Jillybean,
Deanna was not one to dawdle. She had an urgent, long-legged gait that suggested there were never enough hours in the day for everything that needed to be done. Deanna had one basic need in life and that was to keep her daughter Emily safe. Almost everything she did was towards that end.

  Even tracking down Jillybean to save Jonathan was for Emily. Deanna did not fully trust Governor Rowe. She was too much the politician and not enough of an actual leader. Deanna was already planning to run against her and needed to be seen among the people caring for them.

  There were two would-be patients waiting to be seen when they got to the clinic. One was puffy-faced Ann Newman with her puffy-faced, colicky baby, and the other was Chris Truman with his arm in a sling he had fashioned from a dirty towel. Both were chronic patients. Chris was a lazy man who wanted to remain that way through continuous injury. Every week was a new excuse, a new pain, a new fall, a new ailment.

  Ann was simply a mother who still expected things to work like they used to. She wanted Linda Diaz to simply give her a pill that would fix her baby. Unfortunately, the only cure for colic was patience and Ann had little of that.

  “Hi,” Jillybean said, brightly as she swept in. “Miss Linda will be with you shortly.” Before either could jump her with a request, the little girl scooted into the patient screening area where she donned her doctor’s coat. Although the sleeves had been shortened by Veronica Hennesy, it was still too large on her small frame and made her look like a kid playing at being a doctor. And yet, without it, she just looked like a kid and that was even worse.

  She and Deanna followed the sound of groaning and found Linda Diaz digging an IV needle about in the crook of Jonathan’s left arm. Although Linda had been a nurse by trade, she’d never had a good hand when it came to needles, tubes, forceps or sutures. Nursing school had been thirty years previous and those thirty years had been spent in the same small-town doctor’s office where she had done little more than take temperatures and answer the phone.