Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained

by Meredith, Peter

  Escape was still a possibility. She hurried to the wheel and gently turned the wheel of the Dead Fish to port. Sluggishly, the boat started to turn, and then stopped completely with a strange spongy sensation coming through the hull.

  “We hit something.” But what? It wasn’t the bottom or there would’ve been a crash or a ripping sound. No, the feeling was sort of like being caught by something, like a giant rubber-band. “Or maybe a rope.” A rope made sense and it was a good guess that the Dead Fish had gotten fouled up in the anchor rope of the other boat—the Harbinger. They were so close she could read the gold lettering easily, and there, running from the bow and directly beneath the hull of the Dead Fish was its anchor rope, stretched so taut it looked like it was about to snap on its own.

  There was only one thing to do and she didn’t shy away from the instant decision. Back into the icy water she went, climbing down the swim ladder. After taking a deep breath, she dove, found the rope in the darkness, and sawed at it frantically with Gunner’s long, black hunting knife until it snapped with a weird boint sound.

  She broke the surface as quietly as possible, thinking: Had they heard the sound of the rope parting? Could they feel their boat moving? Would they come swarming on deck, mad as bees and see her? Judging by the complete lack of reaction on the Harbinger, the answer was a firm No to all three questions.

  The Harbinger drifted away, the fog swallowing her up quickly. So quick in fact that it puzzled Emily. The new boat didn’t have any sails up and it certainly didn’t have a motor running, so why had the current sent it on so easily? The boats were roughly the same length, but the Harbinger did seem to be higher in the water by a good two or three feet. She glanced over the side and thought the dark surface was a little closer, which didn’t make any sense unless it was some sort of optical illusion.

  “Maybe the fog is messing with me,” she said, uncertainly. There was only one way to really tell if they were lower and that was to get back into the water and see if she could grab the edge like she had before. It had taken a big kick and a long stretch. “But I’m not getting back in there for nothing.” She was already freezing and considered zipping down to get a new set of dry clothes when she looked back over the stern and saw the swimming platform was now three inches below the water.

  “We are lower. Why would we be low…” Her eyes shot wide. “Oh jeeze, that’s right, we were shot!” With everything going on, she had forgotten that the Dead Fish had been holed. “How many times? Six? Seven?” She couldn’t remember how many times, but one was too many. Afraid that the boat was halfway to sinking and that Gunner was even then drowning, she raced down into the galley and found that nothing had changed. Everything was still perfectly dry. “Yeah right,” she said, speaking to the galley as if it was capable of sinister intentions. “You’re not fooling me. There’s got to be a sub floor or a basement or something.” Spinning around, her sopping wet hair swinging about, she looked left and right for a hatch or a trapdoor. She eventually found a storage locker set into the floor. Yanking it open, she gasped—it was almost filled with water.

  Quickly, she slammed down the hatch again and locked it. “We really are going to sink,” she whispered.

  That frightened kid feeling inside her wanted to come creeping back up again. It latched onto her throat like a clawed hand and squeezed. She swallowed loudly, took a quick, sharp breath and told herself that it was a slow leak. “Or a lot of slow leaks.” She turned in a circle, uncertain of what to do. Plugging the holes seemed like a good plan and yet, she was drifting out of control with another Corsair boat nearby. Shouldn’t those two problems come first?

  In desperation and in need of a real adult, she went to Gunner and gave his shoulder a little shake. He moaned; she thought that was promising and tried again. “Gunner? Hey, Mister Gunner? Are you awake? Hey!” The moan was all she got out of him. “Okay, think, Emily. What do you do?”

  She decided that the holes would have to come first, but only after a quick check to make sure the Corsair boat hadn’t come back. Back on deck, where visibility was maybe forty feet, all she saw was a gray, gray morning. And that was good. “Now, how do I plug a hole?” For a child of eleven, this was something of a stumper. “A cork? Or some gum or something. But how do I get…”

  The soft splash of water quieted her. It was the sound of someone stumbling on a rock hidden beneath the surface of water. She had heard the sound a thousand times and had made it herself whenever she went to Skiff Point with her friends for a swim. It was a natural sound. The silence that followed wasn’t natural at all. The silence was pensive and filled with a breath-holding kind of fear.

  The silence was made worse by the fog and Emily was sure that there was something just there, a few feet into the grey. She wasn’t wrong. Within seconds, the Harbinger began to slowly form, seeming to materialize from the fog itself.

  Its bow had slid gently onto the slime-covered bed of the Sound as it rose up to meet the land and it was now within thirty feet of shore. Inside the Harbinger, two of the four remaining crew members cracked bleary eyes and instinctively knew something had changed. The boat wasn’t rocking as it should have been, and the soft lip of the water against the shore was loud to them; loud as well as unnerving. Had they lost their anchorage? How close were they to the shore and was it rocky? Had the wind picked up? And what was that other sound?

  The “other” sound was Neil Martin struggling to remain upright. The ground beneath him was a perfect combination of ooze and ooze-covered rocks. Even Troy was having trouble; a rock turned under his boot and he pin-wheeled his one free hand to keep from falling.

  They were both in odd positions when one of the Corsairs came peeping up from the companionway. In that one second, he had all of his questions answered, though now he had new ones. “Who the hell are you guys?” he demanded in his rough way. The two men weren’t Corsairs; he knew that for certain. No Corsair in their right mind would try to sneak up on another man’s boat. You’d get shot that way and the Corsair was a flinch away from unloading a magazine on the two.

  “I’m Neil Martin,” Neil answered, forthrightly. It never occurred to him to lie. Lying took a certain amount of imagination and just then he was happy just to get his own name right. “And this is Troy…Troy something. I forget what exactly. And you are?”

  “I’m the man that’s gonna kill you, if you don’t get them hands up higher.”

  Neil looked perplexed for a moment, and then asked, “What do they call you for short?”

  As the Corsair began to throw curses at Emily’s uncle, she went to the wheel of the Dead Fish, her small hands clamping down on two of the extended spokes. She had little steerage but with the weather conditions, she didn’t need much. A quick turn to the left and she would disappear into the fog; a quick turn to the right and she would disappear into a battle…probably forever.

  Chapter 10

  Hoquiam, The Lair of the Corsairs

  Boiling men alive was a time-consuming process and during some of the more prolonged executions, the Black Captain wasn’t in the church at all, which was the only relief that Jillybean had during the ordeal. When he was gone, things took on a workman-like atmosphere. The guards fed the fire and added more and more water to the vat. They trussed up the prisoners, and prepared the ropes, and they did all this in a haze of sweat. The church was like a steam room.

  The guards leaned on walls and Colleen sat on the second step of the dais with her head in her hands, possibly trying to drown out the screams. The audience relaxed as well, which actually made them even louder, something Jillybean didn’t think possible.

  When the Captain disappeared for the third time, Jillybean’s gruff, bear-like guard told her, “Ya cain’t ‘spect him to hang around all day. He gots plans to unravel.” His name was Ben Jagar and he liked to let on that he had a vast knowledge of the comings and goings of the Captain. “As his personal guard, he trust me, ya know. Sometime he even axe me fer advice.”

>   “Is that so? L-Like w-what sort of advice?” she asked, desperately needing to take her mind from the screams. They had been drilling into her head for what seemed like hours now and were enough to drive a woman to madness—and she had already been mad to begin with.

  “Ya know. This an’ that. I cain’t give specifics ona account that would be kin to spyin’ an’ all.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said as what seemed like the hundredth man was being slowly lowered into the hissing boiling water. Like all of them, he began the awful writhing and bucking, shrieking in a way that wasn’t human; she wished to God she could stab her fingers into her ears to stop the sound. This was not allowed and her hands were tied to the armrests so she could only writhe along in companion-like misery, begging Eve to take over. “Take me into the darkness, please!”

  The Corsairs fell over themselves in laughter at this. They made faces at her and cried out, “No, take me!”

  Furious, she screamed that she would kill them all, that she would set fire to their world. They only laughed harder. The laughter was nearly as bad as the screams, sending her mind spinning so that the next man who was hoisted above the boiling grey muck wore her father’s face, and when he screamed in high terror, he screamed in her father’s voice, “This is your fault! This is your fault!”

  She begged his forgiveness in a wailing cry that she kept pitching louder and louder so she could be heard over the waves of laughter.

  In the midst of this, the Black Captain was back, appearing in front of her like a dark apparition. “You could end this, you know. Tell me about the operation.” Her brilliant blue eyes had been as round and blank as pearls, but at this they focused into hard diamonds. He shrugged. “Have it your way. It’ll only get worse.” And it had. With each death, her mind warped and twisted. Reality and insanity mixed until she couldn’t tell what was true and what wasn’t.

  Ipes deserted her sometime later when Sadie was dipped, inch by inch, into the roiling water. Don’t tell! Don’t tell! she screamed.

  “I won’t,” Jillybean screamed back right before she fainted, losing her crown, which rolled down the three steps and into the fire. It was snatched out of the flames as cold water was dashed into her face.

  “Just keep yer head still, fer goodness sakes,” Ben muttered, sticking the charred crown on her once again. Blearily, she apologized, and this simple act opened him up to her. He began talking to her under his breath; he seemed bored by the executions and had no problem talking about what sort of diabolical plans the Captain had for their enemies. She learned that until the Bay People were dealt with, Bainbridge was to be “sat on like a hen on her brood,” which didn’t sit well with Ben. He was tired of Hoquiam and wanted the Captain to do something more dramatic than simply “sit” on Bainbridge.

  “What’s it really like there?” he asked, as he practiced with his whip, flicking it at the altar, trying to extinguish a candle without knocking it over. “Ever-one say you gots ‘lectricity, and water in the walls. Is it true?”

  “Yeah,” she answered, somewhat breathlessly. The stench in the church was hellish and beyond description. The smell of boiled human flesh literally hung in the air in the form of a sticky mist that coated her skin and seeped into her pores. Jillybean could practically feel the stench emanating from her naked flesh and from her glistening bald head. “It’s just like the old world.”

  With the crack of the whip snapping like stray firecrackers over the screams, she let her mind latch onto the memory of her home. The image of the island filled her: the high walls, the clean, well-lit streets, the bucolic people, slipping so easily back into the soft, peaceful ways of the time before the Apocalypse. She pictured the Fall Festival in its orange and gold glory, the Christmas pageant with its many lights, the Easter egg hunts, the picnics, the barbecues, the long summer evenings where the laughter of children could be heard from one end of the island to the other as they played kick the can or capture the flag until twilight gave way to real night.

  As Jillybean sat on her throne above the vat with its screaming man, her mind built an entire world from her memory. But in that world, the wall went for miles into the air and was so thick that it could never be breached or destroyed. The children never aged, the trees were never without fruit, and the rain only fell at night and the soft, gentle patter would ease her into her dreams. She built a perfect world in her mind, and she wanted to stay in that world; she wanted to hide there forever if she could.

  But Eve would not let her.

  Eve filled her mental image of Bainbridge with rampaging zombies and raping, pillaging Corsairs. The streets became rivers that ran with blood, and the buildings…

  “Stop it!”

  No, you stop it. You can’t hide from our fate. Eve appeared in the crowd of Corsairs, a bottle of brown liquor in one hand; there was just a slosh left in the bottom. Remember what you said?

  “I say a lot of things. Perhaps if you…”

  A soft, childish voice cut her off. The wall won’t hold. It was her own voice spoken nearly nine years before as she surveyed her creation. It had been Jillybean who had drawn up the plans for the Great Wall of Bainbridge, and it was she who had managed every inch of its construction. It was a monumental work that had propelled Deanna into the Governor’s office, while at the same time had nearly broken Jillybean’s carefully pieced-together mind. She had lived and breathed the wall into existence at the expense of her mental health.

  And when it was completed and the people slept safely for the first time in years, secure in the knowledge that no army could ever defeat it, little Jillybean, only ten at the time and already a towering intellect, had sighed and said, The wall won’t hold, not forever. She had known this even before she had started on the plans and it was why she had taken precautions. Impressive as it was, she knew that if she wanted to, she could easily destroy it, and didn’t that suggest that a future attacker, if they were smart or determined enough, could as well?

  She knew they would start by taking out the searchlights on the walls. These would be shot out by distant black boats, and then, in the dark, divers in wet suits would come up out of the Sound to set explosive charges against the walls. Holes would be opened in a dozen different places, and into these breaches a flood of zombies would pour in, just enough to get the attention of the defenders. While they were dealing with the undead, a hundred black ships would land the next wave of attackers. And the next, and the next, and the next. They would fan out, overwhelming the last of the defense and kick off a week-long orgy of rape, blood sacrifices, horrific tortures, and screams like the ones blaring in her ears.

  “No,” Jillybean whispered, grimacing, picturing it all once again.

  “It’s true,” Ben said. “More’n half the fleet is gonna be goin’ south. I was there an’ I heard it with my own eyes, didn’t I?”

  Jillybean blinked up at him in confusion, realizing that he’d been talking for a while and that she had missed most of it. She tried a smile; it was a brief, twitchy thing, more of a tic than an expression. “Well, if you heard it with your own eyes, then I suppose it must be true.”

  “I ain’t lyin’,” he agreed. “An’ I ain’t lyin’ that I don’t wanna go. We ain’t never been lucky south of Eureka and that’s the truth. They says that even that other queen got witchy powers. That true?”

  Witchy powers? Other Queen? What did I miss? It took a moment for her mind to reset itself and to remember where she was. The first thing she saw was a pale, rubbery thing that had once been a man, being slithered into a green garbage bag. His hair had been boiled off and his flesh hung like hot cheese from his bones.

  Jillybean’s stomach rolled over and she turned quickly to Ben. “No, she doesn’t have any supernatural powers,” she answered honestly. “In fact, she doesn’t have any supra-natural powers, either. The one meaning to have talents relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe…” She paused to take a gulping breath. “Especially one attr
ibutable to God or a god, demi-god, spirit or demon.” She was being pedantic and didn’t care. She had to take her mind off the torture and she clung to her over-sized vocabulary like a drowning man might cling to a passing branch.

  “Huh?” Ben said. His lips twisted, giving his beard a Muppet-like grimace of befuddlement.

  “I-I wasn’t done.” Far from it. There were ten more weeping, praying men yet to die. “Supra-natural, in the strictest definition would suggest an increase in the higher end functions of a person’s natural abilities. Supra meaning above in most…”

  “What the hell are you talkin’ about? I just asked if that kid queen had any witchy powers. Like ESP, or mental telepathy, or voodoo crap, stuff like that.”

  The way the tide had turned so rapidly, Jillybean was afraid that Jenn Lockhart would in fact need some sort of supernatural powers to defeat the Corsairs, especially if she didn’t have the help of the Guardians. And even with their help, the young queen would be hard-pressed. As stout of fighters as the Guardians were, and none were braver in Jillybean’s opinion, they were not forward-thinking when it came to warfare. They saw battle as two-dimensional: us versus them, good versus evil. One army lines up here and the other army lines up there; the two sides clash, and whichever side has God on their side will win. It was a fifteenth century philosophy with little use in the real world.

  Unfortunately, without a strong military leader among the Bay People, and Jenn had not yet demonstrated anything along those lines, the order of battle would be determined by Knights Commander Walker—and that was if Jenn had managed to weld the disparate groups together, a feat that few could accomplish even in the face of a common enemy.

  Jillybean had been able to do it by harnessing fear, superstition and the power of her mind. She had also been lucky when it counted and she had used her unique genius to capitalize on that luck.