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

by Meredith, Peter

  “I can do that for you.” Jillybean hurried to Jonathan’s other arm and had the plastic catheter inserted, secured and flowing in half a minute. “So, you ate something bad?”

  She brought out her penlight as Jonathan groaned out a feeble, “Yes. I think so. Started this morning. It burns. Right in my gut.”

  “Open your mouth, please. Good. Keep it open.” There were red lesions on his gums and soft palate. Jillybean made a worried sound and Jonathan’s eyes went wide. “What did you eat? Was it hot? Not spicy hot, but hot-hot?”

  “No. All I had was a stuffed halibut and a little salad. Why? What’s wrong?”

  She popped her own mouth open to get him to follow suit. When he did, she took another long look, saying, “It almost looks like you were burned, but there’s no blistering. I guess you wouldn’t eat fish if you were allergic to it?” He shook his head and made a garbled noise as the light was still partially in his mouth. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Hmm, I might have to send a tube down your throat. It won’t hurt or nothin’ but it’ll feel…”

  The door came open, and in a rush, Angela Lenna burst in. She was in a state of panic, her narrow face flushed, her long brown hair uncharacteristically in disarray. Normally, Angela was the very model of a woman from the old world. As the chief engineer of the island’s power grid, she felt the need to go about in a pantsuit, wearing an uncompromising hard smile.

  Since she and Kevin Dunlap had been living together for years, it shouldn’t have been a surprise for her to come to the clinic. Still, Jillybean sucked in a long, frightened breath at the sight of her.

  “Has anyone seen Kevin?” Angela seemed to be asking the question of only Jillybean.

  4

  Panic and guilt fought for control of Jillybean. Part of her wanted to spill her guts and confess to the murder. The other part was terrified at the idea and all that came out of her was, “I-I-I…”

  “No,” Deanna answered. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  Angela started pacing around the tiny room. “He never came home last night after the meeting. It’s not like him. I checked the plot he works and talked to his friends. Most of them that I could…” She seemed to just realize that Jonathan was lying on the bed. She gaped at his IV. “What’s wrong?”

  Around a new grimace, he grunted, “Food poisoning. Bad fish I think.”

  “Didn’t you just get that yesterday?” she asked, forgetting Kevin for the moment. “Someone should go down to Hanson’s and see if the rest of their fish is bad. There’s no telling how many people are sick.”

  Deanna put out her hands, palms up. “Hold on, now. We can’t go around starting a panic. We don’t know for sure what’s caused this. And Kevin is probably sleeping off a drunk. We all know he doesn’t shy away from getting loaded. Maybe you should go see the sheriff.”

  Jillybean’s heart jumped into her throat. “The sheriff? W-why?”

  The question seemed to confuse Deanna and she gave Jillybean another piercing look that seemed to go right to Jillybean’s guilty soul. “To see if Kevin’s in the drunk tank.”

  “Oh, right.” Jillybean knew her face was giving away everything and she turned to Jonathan. The penlight shook as she pointed it into his eyes. She needed an excuse not to look Angela in the face.

  Deanna went on, “I’ll head over to Hanson’s and see if there’s anything fishy about the fish.”

  Jillybean nodded vaguely. She had just noticed a tinge of yellow in Jonathan’s eyes. “Yeah, it’s not the fish. When you get sick from fishes it doesn’t effect the liver so quickly. See the yellowing in his eyes? It’s the first indication of jaundice. It’s bilirubin.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about poisons,” Angela accused. “Who can look at someone’s eyes and know what kind of poison is in them?”

  Deanna stepped in front of Angela and glared. “She knows a lot about a lot of things, which is what makes her a good doctor.”

  “Or a good assassin,” Angela countered. “We’ve all heard the rumors about what happened out in Estes. You know, the thing that happened to that general?”

  Jillybean felt her face go flush and the tips of her ears began to go hot in shame. Deanna set her jaw and eased forward into Angela’s space, pushing the woman back with just her presence. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Rumors never give the full story. What happened was not her fault.”

  Seeing as Jillybean had purposely given General Johnston enough cyanide to kill four men, this was clearly a lie. And yet, she had done it to save the lives of dozens of others.

  Jillybean didn’t look back as she said, “And bilirubin isn’t a poison. Excess amounts suggest that Mr. Dunnam’s liver is failing or is damaged in some manner. We need to find out the cause before it can be treated.” If it can be treated, she thought to herself. “It wouldn’t hurt to check out Hanson’s, Deanna, and you should also run by Mr. Dunnam’s. I’ll need the remains of whatever he ate last. There could be something in that.”

  “I can head over to your school,” Angela said. “I was going that way anyway to look for Kevin. Do you need anything? Some pills or whatever?”

  “No!” Jillybean said, far too loudly. “I mean, I can go. There are books I need and, and, and stuff. Deanna will go to Hanson’s and maybe you-you should go to Mr. Dunnam’s. He lives near you, right? Maybe Kevin came home.”

  Angela shrugged. “Maybe. I hope so. Either way, I’ll go to Jonathan’s for you. What do you need? His trash? Or just whatever scraps he had left over?”

  “I’d bring the whole trash can.” Jillybean then turned to Linda. “Save whatever he’s been puking. I’ll need to run some tests…” Linda shook her head. “You flushed it? Oh. Okay. Did you do a gastric lavage?”

  “He vomited, so I didn’t think it was really needed. Sorry.”

  With people going every which way, Jillybean knew she needed to get to the school as fast as she could, but she also knew there was a better than even chance that Linda would insert the nasogastric tube into Jonathan’s lung instead of his stomach.

  “Excuse me,” she said, dismissing the adults and heading for the supply room in a rush. Although she was gone for not even a minute, Angela and Deanna were gone.

  “This won’t hurt, but it’ll be a little weird feeling,” she told Jonathan. Working on a living human as opposed to a cadaver or a zombie was a piece of cake. Within two minutes, she had a tube snaked up Jonathan’s nose. It curved up through his nasal cavity, down the back of his throat, into his esophagus, and then into his stomach. While humming a song of her own creation, she took a sample of his stomach contents and then “reminded” Linda how to perform the rather simple procedure laymen refer to as “stomach pumping.”

  She left a queasy-looking Linda and a nervous Jonathan Dunnam behind as she took off at a jog for the school, her Keds slapping the cement. As she ran, her mind was in a whirl. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Jonathan had been poisoned at pretty much the same time Kevin Dunlap was being murdered. The two were connected and the only obvious link was Jillybean.

  The two had opposed her the evening before. They had tried to make her look small, inept, out of her league. If Eve had been running the show, this alone would have been enough to warrant a death sentence. But Eve hadn’t been in charge. She hadn’t even been a whisper in Jillybean’s mind—not that she could remember. There was a lot she couldn’t remember, which happened frequently when Eve took over her mind.

  You rang?

  Jillybean stumbled as she spun around, looking for the speaker. “Eve! What did you do?”

  Don’t look at me. This was all you, murderer.

  “It wasn’t me! You killed him. I was…”

  She was suddenly aware that a woman was approaching. It was Deberah Perkins. Sheriff Deberah Perkins. The plain-faced woman was just far enough away for Jillybean to wonder if what she’d said had carried to her.

  “I was, uh, walking in the moonlight,” Jillybean suddenly started singing. It
struck her that if the sheriff had heard her, she might add the words “moonlight” and “kill” to discover that Kevin’s murderer was standing in front of her. “In the sunlight. In the sunlight. Dum de dum…Oh, hi sheriff.”

  “Jillybean. You seem to be in a hurry. Is there a fire I should know about?”

  Perkins was new to her position and frequently looked at Jillybean with thinly veiled suspicion, and just then it wasn’t so thinly veiled. The people of Bainbridge had once had a spotless reputation when it came to crime. Then along came Jillybean, whose entire life was one giant dirty spot. Perkins suspected that Jillybean was always either doing something wrong or preparing to do something wrong. She wasn’t far off the mark, either.

  “No. Just an emergency down at the uh, uh clinic.” The answer felt like a mistake, too. Jillybean didn’t need the sheriff poking around an obvious poisoning with the likely suspect hanging around. “Mr. Dunnam got sick. I just need to get some pills.”

  He didn’t just get sick.

  “Oh yeah? That’s too bad.” The woman just stood there, rocking up and down on her heels, staring at Jillybean.

  Kill her, Jillybean. She knows. Kill her like you did the others.

  Sweat from the run ran into Jillybean’s large eyes. It was a good enough excuse to break eye contact. She rubbed her eyes and told the sheriff, “I have to go because the pills.” Perkins nodded and watched her run off. Jillybean wasn’t jogging anymore. She tore away, knowing that the middle-aged sheriff wouldn’t be able to keep up.

  She ran until her lungs were burning and even then, she didn’t slow. She staggered into the school and to the art room. The site of Kevin’s butchered body set off a raucous screech of laughter inside her head.

  “Shut up!” Jillybean snarled as she worked the crank to lower the end of the table. “This is your fault, not mine. Oh jeeze. We got to get him bagged up, quick.”

  There was a bone saw close at hand, but she ignored it. Her arms were too skinny to manually dismember an entire body. She threw on a gown, mask and face shield, grabbed a couple of tarps and a 12-amp corded reciprocating saw. It could cut down a four-inch tree limb in a minute.

  What it did to a human body was disgusting.

  Normally, Jillybean was able to see past the ground meat and the spinning blood because she was usually cutting up the corpses of zombies. Kevin was different. His flesh was still white. He was still at least somewhat a person and there was a chance his soul was still lingering, judging the little girl.

  As the saw did its terrible work, and the guilt built up, Eve cackled in Jillybean’s mind. The laughter grew louder and louder until she couldn’t take it anymore and fled from the room to stand in the hall, gasping.

  “Stop it, Eve!” she cried. Her voice echoed along the dusty lockers and through the empty halls. “This is your fault. This is…” Her eyes went wide as she saw the side door of the school begin to open.

  In a terrified blink, Jillybean fled back into the art room as Neil Martin stepped inside. His neon-green crocs seemed to glow in the gloom as he squinted around. “Hello?” he called out. “Jillybean?”

  With her heart hammering in her thin chest, the girl frantically tore off her garments, tossed them to the side and frantically attempted to cover Kevin with the tarps. When she turned around Neil was looking through the rectangle of glass.

  5

  He saw you, Eve whispered in her ear. He knows what you did.

  Jillybean couldn’t move as she and Neil stared at each other through the glass. She was so caught up in her guilt that she couldn’t read the fact that his expression was one of concern, not of horror. When the door started to open, she jumped in surprise and tried to hold it closed. Had Neil wanted to, he could’ve pushed her aside with ease, but he was also surprised.

  “You okay?”

  “Um, yeah. I just dropped some uh, stuff in here. You know, chemicals.” Neil leaned back from the door and Jillybean took that moment to slip out of the room. There was a water fountain a few feet away; she went to it and washed her hands. She wasn’t just pretending. In her haste, she’d gotten blood on the back of her hand and more on the sleeve of her pink warm-up suit.

  Neil stood back, his scarred face warped into an even greater degree of ugliness by his nervousness. “What sort of chemicals? It’s not anything like that VX is it?”

  “No. It’s just ammonia. Concentrated ammonia. Very potent.” She hurried across the hall to the office area before Neil noticed the lack of odor.

  He’s going to find out and when he does, he’ll kick you out. They’ll banish you and you’ll be alone. All alone and…

  “I was going to do research,” she said, speaking loudly over Eve. “You heard about Mr. Dunlap?”

  “Mr. Dunlap? Kevin? No, what happened?”

  “Dunnam. I meant Mr. Dunnam. Ha-ha. Just a slip of the tongue. He’s sick.”

  Neil nodded and as he did, he looked down. Jillybean did as well and saw a large drop of blood on the white edge of her Converse. For some reason, Neil bent down to it. Jillybean went stiff with fright, but Neil only came back up holding a super-ball. “I used to love these things.” He gave it a bounce and it recoiled to the ceiling. The ball came down too quickly for him and he fumbled the catch.

  Quickly, Jillybean wiped one shoe with the other, smearing the blood and making it look like a stain.

  When Neil had finally corralled the ball, he held it up as if it were a prize. “Yes, right. It’s too bad about Jonathan, but what about you? Deanna was worried about you. She said Eve had come back?”

  “Yeah, right. I forgot my meds. I’ll get them now.” After a quick glance at the door to the art room she hurried into her little pharmacy and dry-swallowed a Zyprexa. After a moment’s hesitation, she took a second. “All better.” Her smile was plastic, however Neil was chasing the super-ball again and didn’t see.

  The ball took an especially long time to expend its energy. Neil was sweating after the chase. “Good. You’ll keep me posted if she persists?” She nodded to keep from outright lying. He accepted it and asked, “So, what do you think got Mr. Dunnam? Deanna said it was maybe fish but you had other ideas?”

  For the moment, her concern for her live patient overshadowed the murdered man across the hall. She turned to her shelves of medical books and blew air out from puffed cheeks. “Yes. Fishes can get you two ways. One is if the fish sits out and gets spoiled, and two, is if another fish eats enough bad fishes it carries the microbes around inside it. Either way, the symptoms are different from what he has.”

  “Deanna mentioned that Angela thinks he might have actually been poisoned. You know, by someone trying to off him. That’s crazy, right?”

  You know what else is crazy? Your sweet, lovable sick-in-the-head Jillybean.

  A twitch started beneath Jillybean’s right eye. “I don’t know. He might have swallowed something by accident or touched something that he shouldn’t have. There are toxins that leach into the skin. That could’ve been it.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be able to figure it out,” Neil said, putting his fatherly hand on her shoulder. “How tough could it be? All you have to do is match symptoms to the right poison and there you go.”

  “There you go,” she whispered, still staring at the books. “I wish it was that easy, but there are thousands of poisons and thousands of toxins. Sometimes it seems as if everything can kill a person. Which is true, I guess. Everything is a poison. It’s like the world doesn’t want us here and is constantly trying to kill us off. Did you know that even oxygen will kill you?”

  He frowned. “Are you sure about that? That doesn’t seem right. We breathe oxygen.” He paused for a moment and then added, “Right?”

  “Yes, but it’s diluted. Most of what we breathe is nitrogen.” She turned back to her adopted father. Her eyes swung past him and landed fleetingly on the art room door. “I’m going to need some alone time to figure this out. I’ll see you at home later?”

  “How about I
bring you some lunch at the clinic? Salmon surprise? Huh? Sounds good, right?”

  She didn’t think she’d be able to eat anything after carving up Mr. Dunlap. “Yeah, sounds great.” She walked him out, making sure to be especially flamboyant with her gestures while they passed the art room so that he would focus on her. After that, her shoulders drooped.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said, before leaving.

  “How,” she muttered to herself as she closed the door and put her back to it.

  The hallway leading to the art room seemed darker than normal. Mr. Dunlap is waiting, Jillybean. He’s waiting with that big smile you made for him. It goes ear to ear. Literally. I know you hate that word, but I think it’s right. You took your knife and gave him the happiest…

  “Shut up!” Jillybean raged, her voice carrying all through the school. She stomped down the hall and was about to enter the art room when she looked back. “I was lucky,” she said, around a sneer. Jillybean didn’t like to be lucky. She liked to be smart.

  She hurried into the office and searched through the “lost and found” box and in the desks. A bike chain and a spare lock were easy to find. She sped to the side door, glanced around and then locked it. Next, she ran around to the front of the school, slid inside and locked the door behind her. Then she ran for the art room. Time was racing by and there was no knowing how long Mr. Dunnam could hold out.

  It depends on what you slipped him, Eve whispered. What was it? Huh? DDT? Creosote? Thallium? I bet it was Thallium. It’s the poisoner’s poison of choice. Isn’t that what they say?

  “Yes,” she answered as she gloved up. “But how would I have gotten any? I know it’s used in electronics; especially in switches, but reducing metals to their initial components is long and time-consuming.”