Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained

by Meredith, Peter

  It was then that someone finally noticed the falling anchors. A storm of bullets started flying up at Mike and Rebecca, while at the same time, more guns were fired across the maze-like structure by the Corsairs on the towers. If any of the Corsairs had an actual target that person would have been dead in a blink. Thankfully, it was midnight dark beneath the structure and the Islanders were in more danger from the blazing hot lead ricocheting back and forth than a direct hit. Still, it felt like forever that they were trapped, unable to do anything but cringe behind twelve-inch wide girders as bullets bounced all around them.

  The odds were that eventually one of them would have been hit if the woman in the oversized parka hadn’t finally started shooting. At forty yards, she had a good view of the north tower and she laid into the Corsairs like a marksman. Pop, pop, pop, pop! In the span of three seconds, two men died, a third was hit and the rest fled back into the tower.

  With the focus of the shooting partially shifted in her direction, Mike chanced a quick move. He hopped up on his girder and ran across it with short, light steps, his arms out to catch the next beam in a bear hug. It had only been fifteen feet—fifteen feet over a two-hundred foot drop with gusts pushing him back and forth, and nothing but empty air on either side. He sagged against the beam, trembling and breathing in great gulps.

  Running like that had made him a target, and as he bent to cut away another anchor a bullet whined off the metal, nearly cutting the rope for him. This time, he didn’t even flinch. A slash of the rope sent the anchor plummeting down where it smashed through the deck of a forty-five footer with such force that it nearly sheared its bow completely off. It made a huge jagged hole through which water surged. In seconds, what was left of its bow was ten-feet below the waterline and its ass was heaved up out of the water.

  Now more anchors were falling. Not every one was a direct hit. But they didn’t need to be. When sails caught the anchors, booms would snap in two and masts would bend like taffy, making steering impossible.

  Before long, all three holes in the barrier beneath the bridge were plugged with dead or dying ships, while all along the front edge of the bridge, the Corsairs were fighting to get away. In some cases, they were killing each other to get away. Quick, brutal gunfights erupted among crews as they tried to fight both wind and tide. Ships began to ram each other, and in a dozen cases, sails and booms became interlocked.

  Even though most of the ships edged just out of reach of the falling anchors, they weren’t out of reach of the rifles of the Islanders. Mike straddled a girder like it a horse and went through five magazines; he didn’t think he missed with a single shot. Rebecca emptied four and managed to set two boats on fire.

  There was no telling how many boats were sunk or forced to be abandoned by the deadly fire from the little team.

  The Corsairs hit back savagely, sending dozens of men up into the towers where they burst out onto the platforms, firing in all directions. The woman in the parka was the first of the defenders to die. She fought to the last, making her shots count until her lifeless body dropped like a stone.

  The next one of them to fall did not do so with quite so much dignity. His or her scream, Mike couldn’t tell the sex of the individual, was a high terrified shriek that went on and on, only to end with a sickening crash among the boats below.

  Mike and Rebecca shared a look of dread.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Mike said. When Rebecca hesitated, he whispered, “I think it’s fair to say we’ve done all we could. Now come on!”

  “It’s so far,” she answered in a timid voice.

  The far southern end of the bridge was still wide open and was their only option. It was a half mile away, a half mile of inching along the frozen girders, hoping not to fall or be seen.

  “We can make. We’ll just take it in sections. I’ll start with moving to your girder. Then we’ll go together. Can you do that?” Her mouth moved but nothing came out. “Okay good,” Mike said. “Get rid of your gun. There you go.”

  She tossed aside her weapons, laid almost on the horizontal beam so that she was hugging it, and slowly, slid forward. Mike cheered her on as the wind kept whipping and the bullets never stopped tinging off the metal around them. In the deep shadows beneath the bridge they became all but invisible, but that didn’t stop the Corsairs from shooting in their direction. Some bullets struck so close it made Mike’s testicles shoot up into his body. Others missed by half a football field.

  Most of the time, the wind was their biggest enemy and they clutched desperately at the metal with wooden fingers. They had travelled only forty or fifty yards when a sudden burst of fire from another of the defenders drew every eye, and every gun.

  Hundreds of Corsair bullets ended the battle and another body took the long, long fall.

  When the Corsairs went back to shooting at Mike and Rebecca, they were firing at the segment of girder right behind the one they were on. This gave the pair a full seven minutes of hope—then they saw lights begin to splash about the far end of the bridge. The Corsairs had cut off their one line of retreat.

  “What do we do?” Rebecca whispered. Her eyes kept darting down to the dark water. From directly above the chop and small waves disappeared, and the mouth of the bay looked like a sheet of black steel. It would feel like that as well if they were to jump from where they were. As though she were reading his mind, she asked, “We don’t have a choice, do we?”

  Dying of exposure was another option. Or they could just sit there and wait for sunrise and get picked off by the Corsairs.

  “If one of their boats come this way, I’ll do the world’s greatest cannonball,” Mike said. But one wouldn’t come. The ships were tacking relentlessly back out into the Pacific, and besides, the open lanes were well behind them. He’d have to use one of the ropes and hope that he could launch himself that far on a few swings.

  He was picturing the heroic swing when his mind clicked on an idea. “We can climb down the ropes!”

  Rebecca was far less excited. “That’ll leave us with what? A hundred and thirty foot fall? That’s like twelve stories. It’ll still kill us.”

  “What if we tie two of the ropes together? Or three?”

  “And what if the Corsairs see us? Tying ropes takes time that we don’t have. Look.” Some of the braver Corsairs were venturing out onto the girders. “We’d be sitting ducks out there.”

  Mike considered this. “Okay maybe not three ropes, but we can do two. Instead of a knot we’ll hook two of the anchors together. It’ll take seconds. Then we’ll slide down the rope and when we get to the bottom,” he paused to swallow, “we just drop.”

  It would be seventy or eighty feet. He didn’t know if a person could live after a fall from that height, but it was their only alternative. Rebecca nodded, agreeing despite the horrible fear curdling up into her stomach.

  The two closest anchors were chosen and Mike hauled up the first. It was nearly sixty pounds of awkward metal. He tied the end of the rope around his waist and let the anchor dangle far below his feet. Then he edged to the next rope, which was awkward as well with the anchor swinging back and forth, trying to tip him first one way, then the other.

  He pretended he wasn’t about to crap himself and his fear only escalated once he reached the second rope. Looking down it was the worst thing he could do it, but he had to. “Okay, okay, okay. Don’t come down until you hear me hit the water. Then count to three and come on down. Wrap your legs around the rope to control your descent. Got it?”

  She nodded, her lips pressed together so tightly not even a whisper could’ve slipped between them. Mike left her, wondering if she would follow. She didn’t have someone drawing her on like Mike did. He had Jenn and he kept her firmly in mind as he slid down the rope. Perhaps because of the anchor weighing him down, he went down the first rope like a bat out of hell and when he fetched up against the first anchor, the rope actually bounced, nearly sending him flying off. He clung desperately as the rope shivere
d and shook, and swayed alarmingly. The sane thing to do would be to wait until things calmed down before he tried to hook the second anchor to the first.

  Sanity had flown out the window the moment he had crawled beneath the bridge.

  With his feet perched on the flukes of the first anchor, he muscled up the second, hooked the two together Barrel of Monkeys style, pulled the tail of the slip knot and watched as the sixty feet of rope played out. The end of it still seemed impossibly far from the water.

  “Just don’t look down,” he told himself as he wrapped his legs around the rope and started to slide. He looked anyway. It was impossible not to, especially as the free end of the rope was coming faster and faster. His hands burned as he tried desperately to slow down. He came to a halt a foot above the end.

  “Please God,” he said, and let go.

  This time he didn’t look down. He stared straight up, looking through his outstretched hand as the bridge seemed to fly away from him. The wind whistled in his ears, growing louder until it was a shriek. Then he hit the water with an explosion of sound and pain. It felt as though the bottom of his feet had been hit with a bat. It was agony. Still, he was alive and whole enough to kick to the surface.

  Groaning, he rolled over on his back and watched as Rebecca came down. She stopped for a good twenty seconds at the point where the anchors joined and if one of the Corsairs hadn’t seen her and started shooting, she might have frozen to death up there. The gunshot got her moving and she came down the rope like it had been greased.

  “Too fast. Too fast. Oh God, she’s going too fast.” Right at the last second she squealed in pain as her body jerked almost to a stop and then she was falling, her arms pinwheeling, her body at an angle. “No,” Mike whispered just before she hit the surface with a great geyser of water.

  Mike took a deep breath and dove under the water, knowing she was in trouble. He had gone in perfectly straight and the pain had been terrible. He couldn’t imagine what she had felt. Her dark clothes blended with the black water, but her dead-white face had an ethereal glow to it. He found her fifteen feet down. She was alive and struggling weakly for the surface, using only one arm. Grabbing her, he kicked mightily upward. She was like an anchor herself and it took everything he had to get her to the surface.

  “Are…are you…okay?” he gasped.

  She was on her on her back, floating listlessly, staring up at the bridge. “My arm. I can’t move it. It hurts. It hurts down into my chest. Everything hurts.”

  “Just hold on.” He took hold of the collar of her coat and kicked for the chain and rope barricade below the bridge. It wasn’t far and yet he was close to drowning himself by the time he made it. Thankfully, she was able to hold on to the rope with her one good hand.

  Despite their pain, they both looked back at their handiwork. Twenty ships had sunk or were in the process of sinking; three hundred men were killed and the remains of the Corsair fleet was fleeing west.

  “They’ll be back,” Mike guessed. The Corsairs had paid a terrific price to open the way into the bay and they weren’t going to give that up now. They had the bridge. They had the numbers, and they had the will to fight. Mike had done little except put off the day of reckoning for another twenty hours.

  “I’ll get you set up somewhere safe and dry,” he told her. “Then I need to get to the Guardians before it’s too late.”

  “You can’t swim all the way to Angel Island. Not in this water. It’s too cold.” They were both shivering uncontrollably.

  Mike was under no illusions on that account. “Not those Guardians. I mean the ones in that little cove. They’re going to fight one way or another. If they don’t fight for me, I’ll make sure the Corsairs know exactly where they are, and then they’ll have no choice.”

  The one lesson Mike had learned from Jillybean: All was fair in war.

  Chapter 28

  Bainbridge Island, Washington

  In her slow, “Aw, shucks” way, Deberha Perkins had been running rings around Deanna, Neil and the rest of the people of Bainbridge Island for so long that when she received her new orders to kill the governor, she hadn’t felt the slightest fear. And, although she had known Deanna for nearly ten years, she knew she wouldn’t feel even a hint of remorse after she put two shots in her face.

  Murder was nothing new for Deberha. Since the beginning of the apocalypse, she had killed many times. The old pre-apocalyptic Deberha would have wept and crawled into bed for a week if she had hit a dog with her car. Of course, that was before when she had lived in heaven. Compared to what the world had become, pre-apocalypse America had been heaven, and she and everyone else had been too blind to see it.

  She could remember becoming upset at the stupidest things: the price of gas going up a dime, the shoes she was eyeing not being available in her size, the milk going bad because she would always buy a gallon instead of a quart. Unbelievably, she used to whine to her husband about having to drive a Toyota and would have killed for a BMW.

  But now she had to wonder why? The Toyota had been a perfectly reliable car that got her from A to B. It had lights and a stereo. Hell, it even had air conditioning. What more did a person need?

  And, she was embarrassed to recall, just how terribly green with envy she used to be that her friends could afford to go to Cabo when all she could afford was Corpus Christi. Wasn’t it the same sun up above? Wasn’t sand just sand? Both places even had Mexicans by the ton, so why hadn’t she been satisfied?

  A certain amount of clarity had come when she’d been cast out of heaven and forced to live like an animal. Survival had become her entire focus and not just in the short term. Deberha had begun working for the Black Captain because she had seen the writing on the wall years before. The people of Bainbridge had built themselves a tiny version of heaven and then promptly forgot that they were surrounded by hell.

  Deberha knew that one day, sooner rather than later, it would all come crashing down.

  And the reason? It was because they had become soft and weak. Slowly, with each passing year they were growing fat and lazy. Deberha despised them. She looked down her nose at them in her own secretive way. She even looked down her nose at Deanna. With all of her natural gifts, she had gone from being a whore to the one thing that was even worse: a politician, which was simply whoring on a grand scale.

  For the most part, her contempt was deserved; however, there was one person Deberha should not have discounted. Despite his mild manners and his diminutive size, Neil Martin was the one person who had proven to be unkillable even by the rather extreme standards of the day.

  Neil was generally dismissed by everyone, and just then, ragged, torn-up, and glass-eyed, Deberha barely acknowledged him, thinking he was as useless and harmless as a child’s old teddy bear that was falling apart, losing a button here, an eye there, fluff coming out in the seat of his pants.

  Sadly, he had just a touch more mental capacity than a teddy bear. He saw the gun in Deberha’s hands; he noted the intense look on Deanna’s face; he heard the words. It all became a mush in his muddled, mixed-up mind. Despite that, his instincts did not failed him, and he rushed between the two women just as Deberha fired her gun.

  Both shots smashed into the right side of his chest, shredding his lung and throwing him off his feet. He stumbled into Deanna as she clawed furiously for the pistol she’d been carrying for exactly this moment. Just as she cleared the gun, a foot came down on her ankle.

  “As always, you’re just a bit too slow. Always one step behind, that’s you.” Deanna glared past the gun and was about to spit, when she sucked in her breath. Deberha laughed. “What? You got something to say? Last words perhaps?”

  “Yeah, I do. Emily, you can shoot anytime. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Emily? What the hell does she have to do with…” It was then she felt the deadly cold gun barrel against her neck. Very little ever frightened Deberha, however feeling the cold against her flesh and seeing the eleven-year-old out of the
corner of her eye sent a shiver down her back. Emily didn’t have the eyes of a child. Hers were like ice.

  What Deberha was seeing was impossible. Emily had left the island. Deberha had watched her board the Dead Fish, personally. She had made sure of it so there would be no surprises when the time came to take out dear old mom, and yet here she was, sopping wet and dripping from her half-mile swim across the west channel of Puget Sound.

  It shouldn’t have been her standing there, it should have been Wayne French. Hours before, when the Corsair’s had come screaming out of the woods above Route 16, it was clear to both Gunner and Emily that the spy was still on Bainbridge and could only be someone close to Deanna, someone she trusted. In his usual gruff manner, Gunner volunteered Wayne French to: “Swim the channel, find Deanna, warn her and then guard her with your life.”

  Wayne seemed the likely choice. After all, he had been a naval officer and could swim as well as anyone on the island.

  Emily had fretted for her mom all through the terrifying battle. Bullets hadn’t scared her, but afterward, seeing a perfectly dry Wayne French chatting with Paul Daniels, had nearly given her a heart attack.

  “Why are you still here?” she had screamed. “You’re supposed to be on Bainbridge protecting my mom!”

  “Huh?” Wayne tried to appear shocked and confused. “Gunner wanted me to go before the battle? Sorry, I didn’t know. Let me see if I can find a wetsuit. There’s probably one in that marina south of Tracyton.”

  “Tracyton?” Emily couldn’t believe her ears. Tracyton was seven miles out of the way. “You coward!” Wayne had bristled and made indignant remarks that Emily hadn’t heard. She was already running northeast, heading for the Sound, afraid that she would be too late. That growing fear drove her on so that three miles passed under her feet almost unnoticed.

  At the Sound, she threw off her coat and dove into the icy waters. The shock of the water gave her a burst of energy that carried her for a few hundred yards. From then on it was a long dreadful slog as her clothes weighed her down and clung to her, hampering her arms as they wheeled round and round. It was only a half mile swim and yet, after a while she could barely keep her head out of the water.