Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained

by Meredith, Peter

  “Neil?” Zophie was looking at him in alarm.

  “Hmm?” He had been leaning over her. “Oh, um, I was just…here comes Troy. Good.”

  The Guardian came jogging up, hefting an extra rifle, his pockets stuffed with magazines, food, a map and a radio. He pulled the magazine from the extra rifle and tossed the M16 into the ditch. “How is she?” She whined fearfully in answer, and then whined worse when he checked for an exit wound. There wasn’t one, and he didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. He looked over the top of her head at Neil, who could only shrug.

  Troy looked into her face and came as close to lying as he could. “Bainbridge isn’t far. The Queen was from Bainbridge. She has all the tools and drugs for this sort of thing, right Neil?”

  “Yes. She has an entire operating room.” He held back that she was the only one on the island who knew the first thing about surgery. She had begun teaching Emily, though that had been in the beginner stage of medicine. And yet, that wasn’t Zophie’s biggest problem. They had to get her there first.

  A quick check of the map showed that they were much further north than Troy had anticipated. He worried that it would be a long, dangerous trip curving back around to Olympia. Then he turned on the radio and discovered things were even worse than he imagined. Corsairs and Mountain Bandits had flooded the area and had staked out every street, highway and dirt road from Little Skookum Inlet to Olympia itself. Going south was impossible.

  Had Zophie not been shot, Troy would’ve suggested slipping back west and hiding out for a few days until the pursuit was lifted. She didn’t have that sort of time. If she didn’t bleed out, the stomach infection would get her. He had seen it happen twice, where relatively minor belly wounds went ripe and as nasty-smelling as old cheese and had killed men much tougher than her.

  “We’ll go north. Neil, let me have your backpack. And I don’t think we need both guns. But keep the straps.” A confused rattle of gunfire from the south had them all staring until it bled away. “We have to hurry,” said Troy, only Zophie couldn’t be hurried. She couldn’t even stand. The only way to move her was to drag her using the straps of their rifles and the backpack. She moaned pitifully as she was dragged along. It became so bad that Troy asked her if she wanted to consider her other “options,” a gentle way of asking her if she wanted to be put out of her misery.

  It took two minutes for her to finally shake her head. With the Corsairs pelting north, all of their options were diminishing quickly. More gunshots echoed behind them, closer now.

  The three came up out of the dell and were hidden by the fog once again. Two miles later, Troy had to rest. His arms were burning and his legs were trembling. Along with everything else, he was carrying around thirty pounds of armor and a fifteen-pound spear. As well, he had been going for too long without food and couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything to drink. All these were fine excuses and yet, he had never been out-marched or out-worked in his life, yet Neil was easily doing both. To cover his embarrassment, he took out the map.

  “What do you think?” Neil asked. He had glanced at the map and only saw a mesmerizing glow of colors.

  “We’re a mile south of Shelton, so we should start seeing some houses soon. We can’t hide in them, though. Hiding won’t do us any good whatsoever.” He sighed, not knowing what to do besides pressing on. This they did. Right to the outskirts of Shelton, where they found a grocery store and transferred Zophie to a cart with four squeaky wheels. Their ears were assaulted for two blocks until they came across a gas station.

  Although it had been cleaned out, there was a big semi-truck parked right in front. Its oil pan was easily accessible and was so rusted that it was as fragile as an eggshell. Troy punctured it with his knife and rich black goo dribbled out. Like so many towns, there was trash strewn everywhere, and Troy found a cracked bowl which he filled with oil and in no time, they had the wheels greased and were plowing on. They left the north end of the town just as the first of the Corsairs came abreast of the supermarket, and gazed down at the bloody backpack that they had left behind.

  The radio crackled, “We tracked them to Shelton. One of them is hurt. I think we got ‘em trapped.” A quick look at the map showed that the speaker was correct. To the west were the foothills of the Olympic mountain range, to the north their way was blocked by an arm of Puget Sound and to the east the land bottlenecked to a point less than half a mile wide.

  “What do we do?” Neil asked.

  Troy’s eyes shifted to Zophie before he could stop himself. As long as she was with them they would have to stick to paved roads. It meant that getting caught was only a matter of time. “We keep going.”

  This sounded like a poor plan, even to Neil’s befuddled brain. But he understood. “How ‘bout this. What is the last thing they would expect us to do?”

  Troy stared at the map again. “They’re trying to drive us against the Sound, so I guess they don’t think we’d attempt to swim it.”

  Neil shrugged. He didn’t know if he could swim as a zombie so he should have been afraid, only he wasn’t at all. “Then that’s what we do. We’ll find something that Zophie can float on and we’ll cross where the waterway is the most narrow.” He made a half-mile swim in forty-degree water while hauling a raft, sound like it would be nothing. Without other options, Troy agreed.

  Together they began pushing the cart once more. Zophie sat in it, her knees drawn up, holding her stomach, whispering to herself that they were all going to die. “Maybe you should pray,” Troy suggested. She cast a harsh look at him and was about to ridicule him and his beliefs when they hit a crack in the street. The cart thudded heavily over it, and her look turned to pain. “Try the Our Father. It’ll make you feel better.”

  He walked her through it until she was able to repeat it without fault. Fifty-two repetitions of it got them to a branching, tree-lined road. With the fog coming on thick again, all they could see was an endless line of tree trunks on either side of them. They were spaced so perfectly apart that they felt like the bars of an immense cell. Zophie started praying again, quicker now, but also quieter. They could hear the dead moving on either side of the road.

  So far, they’d been lucky. The zombies were stirred up by the sound of the guns and were on the move, yet the three of them had been missed, on the other hand, the much more numerous, and much louder Corsairs couldn’t go a mile without having to blast away at them.

  Their good luck held as they finally made it to Puget Sound. The water was grey and calm, barely lapping against the shore. Troy dipped a finger in the water; it was frigid and he knew it would quickly suck the life out of all of them if they went in. Maybe Neil can make it, Troy thought. He would be the only one and that was if he didn’t get turned around in the fog.

  Of course he’ll get turned around in the fog. Troy stifled a groan. “Okay…let’s find a raft or something,” he said, trying to sound confident.

  “Jillybean used a bounce house once to cross the Mississippi,” Neil remarked. It was just a faded memory to him and it came blurting out. It had a strange effect on the other two. Both looked away into the fog, both thinking about the bounce houses they’d been in. The very concept struck the hardness from Zophie’s face and it brought out the little boy in eighteen-year-old Troy.

  “I was in a bounce house once,” he said. “It was so long ago.” His memory was even more vague than Neil’s, and yet it brought with it a surge of hidden joy.

  Zophie had been fifteen at the time of the Apocalypse and had a much clearer memory: kids bouncing like rubber balls off the inflated walls, whacking into each other, giggling and laughing like mad. Someone always got hurt, but they’d be back three minutes later, smiling through the tracks of their dried tears.

  The two wore the same look, one that Neil didn’t think he could even fake now. He was losing his humanity by degrees and it was sad that he didn’t feel all that worried over it.

  They pressed on, the two rem
iniscing about their childhood, and Neil doing most of the pushing. It was fine with him since he wasn’t tired, although there was an emptiness inside of him, especially in the area of his stomach. He was hungry, but what he was hungry for couldn’t be spoken of. He didn’t even want to think about it and yet, the idea of sucking on Zophie’s bandage wouldn’t leave his head.

  His stomach had just let out an enormous growl when Troy abruptly stopped the cart. Zophie jerked with a groan and was about to lash out.

  “Shhhhh,” Troy whispered, and pointed his chin out at the fog. Something was drifting in from the Sound. At first it was hard to tell exactly what it was, as incongruent parts solidified one at a time. What looked like a giant spear broke through first, then a dangling rope, and then the wide edge of something long and black.

  “It’s a boat,” Neil said, but only when a stray breeze revealed the entire thing at once. More specifically, it was a fifty-foot Corsair boat drifting lifelessly with the current. Its black deck was completely empty. “Let’s get it!”

  Troy was way ahead of him and was already laying down his spear and pulling his rifle from his back. All Neil cared about were his beloved Crocs and he set them neatly aside before wading in.

  Chapter 9

  Puget Sound, Washington

  True to its name, the Dead Fish floated lifelessly in the gray murk. The big boat was helpless, pushed and pulled by the tides, its head spinning slowly around the compass as stray gusts kept Emily confused as to which direction up was.

  The fog seemed to have no end and was so thick that it defied the sun. Gunner’s heavy black watch told her that it was past noon, yet there wasn’t a hint of warmth or radiance when she stared up into the sky. There was only cold, wet, grey air. Even though she had lived most of her life on the Sound, she had never seen anything like it.

  At one point, she actually had to wonder if she was dead and if the boat was actually floating between worlds. Then Gavin died without so much as a groan. Emily figured one couldn’t die if they were already in the afterlife. This hardly cheered her up. The truth was, Gavin didn’t simply die; she had shot him—no, she had killed him. She had killed other people before, always in self-defense, of course; the difference was that they hadn’t lingered long enough for her to see them as real people, with real pain and real fear.

  Gavin had seemed like a normal guy. “After I shot him,” she had to remind herself. “Before that, he was as bad as the rest.” During the last several hours, she had taken to talking to herself to ward off loneliness as well as her growing fear. Before Gavin died, he would mumble in her direction, and sometimes Gunner would crack an eye, but that was all she had to reassure herself that she wasn’t really alone.

  Now she didn’t even have that. Gunner had faded into such a deep sleep that she was afraid he wouldn’t wake up.

  She was staring down at Gavin’s corpse when a zombie sent up a mournful howl. A shiver went up the entire length of her spine. “Maybe I’m in a ghost world,” she whispered. When Emily had been small, her mom had told her that there was no such thing as ghosts. She had been very firm on the subject. Her Uncle Neil had been less so. When she had asked him, he had agreed with her mom, but he had done so with an odd look on his face, as if he were only saying it because he didn’t want to run afoul of Deanna. She had a strict “everyone on the same page” style of parenting.

  Emily had pressed him closer and he had stuck with the company line, adding, “Maybe don’t bring up the question around your Aunt.” He meant Jillybean, and to a seven-year-old that was basically a gold-plated invitation to ask her.

  “Ghosts?” Jillybean had snuck a look past her at a blank wall and then grinned. “Of course, I believe in them. I see them every single day. Then again, I’m crazy, so what do I know?”

  That had thrown Emily for a loop and the question had never really been resolved in her immature mind. “And now is not the time to open that can of worms.” The one way to avoid it was to get rid of the body. That was another thing Jillybean had taught her: “Always get rid of the evidence.” Emily figured it would go worse for her if she ran up on more Corsairs and they found out that she had killed four of them and stolen their ship. It would also get rid of a potential ghost, if one was still hung up inside the body.

  Getting Gavin up the stairs was a hundred times harder than it had been letting him bounce down. He was twice her weight, and it was literal dead weight. In death, he had become somewhat unbound, though that wasn’t the term she would have used. She regarded him as “floppy.” His arms and legs were apt to go in any direction, and his neck seemed grotesquely longer than it had been, and was now as supple and pliant as hot rubber.

  This was all very disgusting, but what was worse was when his underwear got caught on the first step going up to the deck and tore right off of him. He was now completely exposed—she thought she was going to throw up.

  Through a great dint of work she got him on deck and slid him over the side, leaning away from the splash even though her shirt and arms were slick with blood. She expected him to sink and when he didn’t, she thought he would float off and lose himself in the fog. Instead, Gavin came up and thumped his head against the side of the boat.

  “Oh, jeeze,” she mumbled, feeling her stomach heave. She hurried to fetch the boat hook, which she used to shove him away. Instead of slipping out into the fog and becoming lost in the mists, he spun like a leaf just out of reach of the boat hook. And there he floated, keeping station with the Dead Fish, neither gaining nor falling off. After a few minutes of hoping he would sink or that a shark would eat him, she slunk back down into the galley to check on Gunner.

  Nothing had changed. His lungs were still filled with blood, his pulse was still thready and weak, and he barely stirred when she bound his smaller wounds with strips of sheets. Next, she inspected and prodded the hole that ran into his strange hump. She felt she had to do something even if it turned out to be the wrong thing. The worst that could happen was that he would die a little faster.

  “Or a lot faster,” she muttered. She tried sitting him up, but he only kept slumping over and if anything, he struggled even harder to draw a breath. Next, she laid him on his injured side because she was worried that the blood from his injured left lung was somehow spilling over into his right. Although her reasoning was off, shifting him as she had done was actually the right thing to do, and his breathing grew progressively easier.

  But he still didn’t wake up.

  She had a vague notion of what a coma was and guessed that he was in one, and decided that maybe it was a good thing. He seemed more at peace and if he was in pain, it didn’t show on his horrible features.

  Having done all she could for him, she inspected the boat and found all sorts of necessary items: guns, bullets, food, fresh water, torpedoes.

  “Well, I’ll be dipped in tea!” she whispered, gazing down at the odd devices. The controls were simple, the arming device obvious. “So easy a kid could use it,” she giggled, as she picked one up and hauled it bodily on deck, where she tied it to the outside of the railing with a couple of simple knots. It could be in the water in seconds. Going for balance, she brought up another and tied it on the other side of the boat. Seeing them there made her feel safe for the first time since being kidnapped.

  Now she went for more guns and ammo, storing them in the cockpit, and for a moment, she felt more than just safe, she felt like a badass. The Dead Fish, a name she was certainly going to change the moment she got to safety, could now fight another boat with a real chance at winning.

  The feeling couldn’t last. In minutes, it was swallowed up by exhaustion and her worry that Gunner was going to die. She went down and sat with him, alternating between feeding the fire and herself. To keep awake, she chatted with the comatose man, telling him stories of her life, which up until a few weeks before had been uneventful. Blessedly so, she now realized.

  She was in the middle of telling Gunner about her last birthday—Jillybean
had allowed her to help build a recoilless rifle and fire it right after the sun went down—when he shifted suddenly and his blanket fell from his back, exposing his scarred flesh. She had never seen anyone look half as tortured, or even a quarter so. In truth, she had never even heard a rumor of someone so abused and still alive. The scars were everywhere, crisscrossing his body.

  They reminded her of something. Peering in closer, she saw that some of the scars were thinner than expected. Many of them were little more than etched white lines, almost as if the stitching had been done by a real surgeon, and there was only one real sur…

  A soft thud against the hull made her jump and cry out.

  “It’s that gal-durned Gavin again,” she told Gunner. “I’ll be right back.” This time she was going to give him a push in the center of his naked body and not on the leg as she had before. “And I don’t care if I do see his thing. But what if there’s like, something eating him?” She pictured his body covered in crabs; their snipping claws pinching off little bite-sized chunks.

  The mental picture slowed her steps and she crept from the galley to peer over the side of the boat. It was Gavin alright, thankfully without the crabs. Using the boat hook like a shuffleboard master, she shoved the corpse away, giving her wrist a little flick at the end to counter any spin. Gavin drifted away, entering the edge of the fog and had almost wholly disappeared when he hit something, giving off a light hollow thump—it was the exact same sound as when he had knocked into the hull of the Dead Fish.

  Emily froze as a boat materialized out of the gloom. It was big and black and terrifying. Gone was her feeling of safety. She shrunk back, wanting to dash down into the galley and probably would have given in to her childish fears, except she observed that the deck of the other boat was empty. No one had seen her yet!