Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained

by Meredith, Peter

  Jillybean planned on trading the wounded for slaves, knowing that wounded would spread these lies throughout Hoquiam to weaken the Corsairs’ resolve. It was a fine strategy that had a secondary motive. Because everyone was in on the “Big lie” almost everyone did their best not to let their fear show. In fact, some had to be told to tone down the tall tales. Who would believe they had tanks and artillery?

  The talk of bombs and giant armies unnerved the Corsairs, but it was the talk of “The Queen” that made them scared. There were some among them who had been there when she had thrashed their army as it attempted to take the Marin Headlands. Others had been hunted by her on Treasure Island when she had first started using smoke. A few of them had fought with her against their own people and still others had helped dig the ditch that had undercut the Guardian’s great wall.

  They all agreed that she couldn’t be defeated.

  Had she been there, she would have helped feed their paranoia. Instead, she was on the Dead Fish, sailing the long way around. The journey to Bainbridge had taken its toll on her legs. The hairline fractures had grown and she needed a cast on her left leg. She settled for proper crutches.

  With her were Neil and Gunner as well as a crew of four. They were a nervous crew and for good reason. Neil was no longer the sweet, somewhat shy little man they had known for years. He was now a zombie. Sure, he was a croc-wearing, talking zombie, but, like a great white shark in a sombrero, he was still dangerous. To them Gunner wasn’t much better. He was a growly human/bear combo that filled a spittoon with blood every couple of hours and looked as though he would tear someone’s arm off if he was in a bad mood—and he was always in a bad mood. Jillybean, who they had always known to be a little crazy, had graduated into a full-blown loon. She carried on frequent conversations with herself about how much she would like to kill everyone on board the ship. And, to top it all off, the Dead Fish’s hull was crammed with explosives. A few thousand pounds worth.

  “Enough to vaporize the ship in a blink,” Eve was fond of saying. She would get real enjoyment playing with a detonator and watching them squirm.

  Neil could barely control her. Jillybean’s nerves were frayed to the breaking point. She was going back to the city where she’d been tortured for days on end, and in her heart she feared that no army of any size was going to unseat the Black Captain from his wicked throne.

  Because her army lacked the teeth to make a real assault against Hoquiam, it was little more than an empty threat. This meant that the future of her people depended on her coming up with “something.” She kept telling herself that she needed to see the lay of the land before she came up with a plan. How had the Captain arranged his forces? What sort of weather would she be dealing with? These were just excuses. She knew the city’s layout, and she knew its defenses, and she knew the weather would mean nothing. She knew that fire would not save her this time, and neither would zombies.

  These tricks had been used and were easily countered. She had considered using rockets against the sprawling town but knew it would result in little more than making a mess of the mess.

  In other words, she had no idea how she could prevail this time.

  She had dragged fifteen hundred people across the state hoping that something would come to her. She hoped that one of her corrupted prisoners would whisper his poisonous words in the right ear and start a panic. She hoped that someone would have the guts to shoot the Captain in the back and end the threat forever. She hoped that a miracle awaited her when she got to Hoquiam.

  She also knew that relying on hope in the face of insurmountable obstacles was the mark of a weak mind.

  All of her hopes seemed very distant as she stood at the bow of the Dead Fish on the third day out of Bainbridge. She was back in black leather, her three-quarter length coat flapping in the wind. Except for her bald head, she was beginning to look like herself again. Her bruises had faded to almost nothing and the dark circles beneath her eyes had disappeared after three dreamless nights.

  “What do you think, Myron? Will their fleet be in the harbor?” she asked the ship’s captain. Myron Schwartz was a long time fisherman with a net of wrinkles around his perpetually squinting eyes.

  He almost shrugged; a habit of his that frequently set Jillybean off. She liked answers to her questions, not shrugs. “Can’t say either way. Likely though.”

  “Hmm,” she murmured, loud enough to be heard. The answer had been the equivalent of a verbal shrug. Their lives depended on keeping out of reach of the Corsair fleet. She set the binoculars up to her magnificent eyes and scanned ahead. Even with the field glasses she could just make out white waves crashing along the jetty that marked the mouth of Grays Harbor. Between her and the jetty, the deep emerald sea was empty.

  To the west the sunset was a fiery furnace and to the east night was coming on strong, the sky already a darkening cobalt.

  “I’d say, very likely they’re in the harbor,” Myron said, amending his answer. “Just in case, Maxine, you be ready to come about in one hell of a hurry, okay?” He had his own binoculars out now and he scanned ahead, picking out every shadow and worrying over it.

  Minutes ticked slowly by and as they did, Gunner stumped on deck, helped by Neil. The grizzled veteran was pale and felt as though he was still only a sneeze away from death. But he was stronger than he had been and he was sure he could still outshoot everyone on board. He glanced up at the mast where the black banner of the Corsairs whipped in the wind. He growled at the sight of it before settling himself in at the rail, an M4 next to his good hand.

  “We’re going to zip by the entrance to the harbor and take a peek,” Myron told Jillybean, giving her a quick once over out of the corner of his eye; she had begun to twitch. He had known her for the last nine years, but had never seen her quite like this. She nodded without moving the binoculars. Closer they came until they were framed in the mouth of the harbor. All eyes were staring in.

  “I see ‘em,” Myron said in a whisper that made no sense. The forty or so ships were moored near the mouth of the Hoquiam River, five miles away. “I thought there’d be more of them.” They all stared as the Dead Fish eased slowly along, when they neared the far end of the entrance, Myron turned them up into the wind so that the setting sun was right in their faces.

  It was why they didn’t see the black ships bearing down on them until it was too late. There were a dozen of them spread over half a mile, their course all converging on the Dead Fish.

  “Christ on a cracker!” Myron bawled. “Maxine, turn us about. Jed, come on, damn it. Get the jib over t’ the other side.” There was a world of difference between a fisherman who puttered around Puget Sound in an eighteen-footer, and a proper captain of a fighting ship. Maxine turned the wheel too early and too far, and instead of spinning on a dime and shooting back north, they fell off the wind and lay dead in the water for a full minute.

  By the time they were able to pick up the wind again, even Neil, who knew next to nothing about boats, saw that they were going to be pinned to the shore.

  “Turn us back, you moron,” Jillybean/Eve ordered. Her hands were hooked on the rail; one under the control of Eve and the other was Jillybean’s. She felt like she was splitting down the middle. “Into the harbor. What are you doing?”

  Maxine, her round, pink face stricken in terror, had turned the wheel prematurely again, and once more the ship seemed to plow into an invisible hand. The sail was shifted and they began to pick up speed, but it was too late. From the left and right ships were crossing in front.

  “What do we do?” Myron cried. “They’re going to…” His eyes shot wide as he saw Jillybean feeding a pair of batteries into the detonator. “Neil!” he screamed and pointed.

  “Huh?” Neil seemed only mildly interested in the boats racing around. He couldn’t understand the significance of the little black device. “Yes?”

  “She’s going to blow us up!” Myron looked stricken.

  Neil suddenly remembered the
explosive. “Oh right. Yeah, I suppose that would be bad. Jillybean? Is this your way of getting me to part my hair down the middle? Ha-ha.”

  Her eyes were mismatched; one dark and angry, the other bright and frightened. “It’s Eve. She wants to do it. She wants to feel it. The fire. She wants to feel the fire. She’s only waiting until they get closer.”

  Gunner had been sighting his rifle on one of the ships, getting a feel for the rhythm of the sea. Something bright caught his eye and he found himself looking at a spear. “The Corsairs don’t use spears, Jillybean. Tell Eve to look up at their flags.”

  The ships weren’t flying the black flag, they were flying a white flag with a golden crown. The Queen’s fleet had arrived.

  Chapter 42

  Grays Harbor, Washington

  The Queen’s Revenge had led the fleet to Grays Harbor. With her three masts, her immense, snowy white sails, and her sixty-four feet above the waterline, she was an impressive vessel. She was not the Queen’s flagship, however.

  Jenn Lockhart had chosen the fifty-five foot catamaran that had dealt so much death and destruction to her people. It was none other than The Courageous, the same ship that the Black Captain had used weeks before when Jillybean had trashed his army north of the Marin Headlands.

  The Courageous, with her twin hulls, was the smoothest riding ship in the fleet and Mike Gunter was desperately in need of a stable platform. Day by day he had grown weaker and more listless, until it was all he could do to keep his eyes open for a minute at a time. Jenn became so alarmed that she threw caution right out the window and charged north, racing right for Grays Harbor and Hoquiam without bothering to send advance ships to scout the way.

  Although she stayed busy tending to him, he was not her only patient. Thirty men and women had decided to chance an ocean journey north to seek out the “Girl Doctor.” They figured that even if Jillybean was crazy, she was their only hope. So far, eighteen had died.

  Prayers were spoken, tears were shed and their lifeless bodies were allowed to slip away off the back rail of the last ship in line. They had brought nothing extraneous to weigh the bodies down and no extra sails to wrap them in. The ocean took them, while the living kept their eyes on the northern horizon. Blundering into a Corsair fleet was their biggest worry, but other than pods of whales, the ocean was clear right up until they caught sight of the Dead Fish, and came charging down on her, thinking they were snapping up a Corsair ship. What they caught was even better.

  The Guardians were amazed, and a little unsettled, at seeing the “Old” Queen, come aboard. Even bald, she had a presence about her and when she flashed her blue eyes at any given man, he inevitably turned away.

  Bishop Wojdan greeted her with a reserved nod and opened his mouth to ask the first of a hundred questions that were bubbling up inside of him. He never got the chance as Jenn came rushing up with tears streaming down her face, and crushed Jillybean in an embrace that blasted the air from her lungs. Before she could recover, Jenn was pulling her towards the galley.

  “It’s Mike. He was shot. I did what I could, but it got his liver and his kidney. He won’t stop bleeding and everyday it gets worse.” Jenn was so focused on Mike that she didn’t think to explain how she and forty ships ended up at Grays Harbor. “You have tools and all that? Of course, you do. I’ll send someone to fetch them.”

  She was gone in a blur, leaving Jillybean alone with Mike. He opened cracked swollen, and jaundiced eyes. His eyes were as yellow as a cat’s. “It’s you,” he whispered.

  “I think so.” Jillybean was so turned around by how quickly everything was happening that she wasn’t quite sure who or what she was. But it didn’t matter just then. She knew pain when she saw it…and she knew death. Mike was closer to death than he was to life. She moved to his bedside, inspecting what she could see of him. He didn’t look good. His jaundice was advanced, his limbs were swollen, his racing pulse could be seen through the thin skin of his neck. The sweat on his brow indicated fever. The blankets suggested chills.

  “Can you take a deep breath for me?”

  If he breathed any deeper, it wasn’t noticeable beyond a soft crackling as his lungs inflated. “Did we win?” he rasped out. “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t really know. We won a battle back in Bainbridge, but he got away. I suppose you had a battle as well?”

  “Jenn won. Magic.” Speaking the three words took all the energy he had and his eyes dulled over.

  The Queen was back in seconds and with her were Donna Polston and Shaina Hale. Both stared at Jillybean as if they were seeing someone raised from the dead. Wait until they see Neil. The voice in her head might have been her own or it might have been Sadie’s.

  “The injured kidney is still in him?” she asked Jenn.

  “I didn’t know how to take it out without killing him. Your books…they aren’t meant for normal people. I couldn’t follow along, so I came here to find you.”

  There was much left out of the brief explanation. So much so that Jillybean’s head was abuzz with questions. “First things first,” she told herself. “We need to find a safe place to anchor. We have to hook up with Deanna and the army out of Bainbridge. Then I need to reconnoiter the bay and Ho…”

  “No!” Jenn said, raising her voice. “You need to fix him. That is why we came. So, get working.” She had gotten almost no sleep during the last three days and could hear the hysteria in her own voice. She knew what she was saying was wrong, however her heart was tearing itself to pieces. “Please. I mean please help him. I’ll take care of everything else.”

  At first, Jillybean’s hackles had gone straight up at being told: No! in such a forceful way. No one ever talked to her like that. At the same time, no one had ever said they would “take care of everything else.” Hearing those words, and seeing the fleet, and being close to Jenn once more was a bigger relief than she could ever have expected.

  Jillybean jumped at the chance. “Sure. Sounds like a fair trade.” She was even given a competent assistant in Denise Woodruff. Leaving everything in Jenn’s hands, Jillybean went to work, first on Mike and then on the others. It was a grim task. Many of the wounds had been improperly cleaned or the tools hadn’t been completely sterilized. Infection was rampant, as was sepsis and the smell of the seeping wounds was enough to make her head spin. Two men died within minutes of Jillybean opening them up. Three others lost limbs to the beginning stages of gangrene. One man had lost his pancreas and should never have made the trip.

  Mike should have been one of those who had died along the way. He was so bad off that Jillybean couldn’t take the chance of sedating him properly. Thankfully, he passed out quickly. She didn’t like his chances; he needed an immediate transfusion, dialysis, and the strongest antibiotics possible—and this was after Jillybean removed his kidney and sewed up his liver properly. The best she could manage was to give him her homemade antibiotics and some normal saline in an IV drip.

  After Mike, the patients became something of a blur. To her they became a list of afflictions and damaged body parts. She remembered a few bellies, a number of chests, an arm that she took off just above the elbow, a femur that needed to be set and cast, and a brain that was swelling alarmingly.

  It was because of that brain that she wandered onto the deck blinking furiously against the blazing sunlight. “It’s day,” she muttered.

  Yeah, but what day is it? Ipes asked. The little zebra had been coming in and out of the little operating room for the last few hours, always munching on a new kind of cookie. Currently, he clutched a peanut butter cookie between his hooves.

  “I don’t think it matters what day it is. Where’d you get that cookie? It looks freaking-A good.”

  “Cookie?” Faith Checkamian asked. The dour, stern-faced woman had been standing by the rail. She wasn’t sure, but it seemed as though Jillybean had looked right through her. “I don’t think we have any cookies. We do have some fresh-caught halibut if you’re hungry. I can fry that up for y
ou in a second.”

  Ipes disappeared with his cookie and Jillybean found herself staring into Faith’s washed-out eyes. “Fish? Sure, that sounds good. Wait, no. I didn’t come up here for food. I need a flat piece of metal and some surgical screws. Herbert screws if you have them. If not then something exceedingly small. There’s a fellow down there with a brain bleed and increasing inter-cranial pressure.”

  “You can fix that?”

  The question was an odd one, almost as if Faith was joking with her. “Sure. I just have to rouse out his brains, plug the hole with a wad of cork, and fit the whole thing back inside his head without getting them turned around. We don’t want him waking up thinking he’s Mary Poppins, right?”

  Faith wasn’t sure what to think, except that having a man prance about like Mary Poppins would indeed be a bad thing, perhaps even a sinful thing.

  Jillybean couldn’t answer to what was a sin and what wasn’t as the thought of cookies was still very prevalent in her mind. She decided on breakfast and ate fish on deck while a metal plate and screws were scrounged for. While she ate, spitting the tiny bones demurely over the side of the ship when no one was looking, she gazed about Grays Harbor. The Queen’s fleet was moored along the remains of a dock on the southern side of the harbor, while three miles north-northeast was all that remained of the once great and terrible Corsair fleet.

  It seemed so small now, though in truth it was still slightly greater in number than Jenn’s fleet. It could have been twice as large and the Black Captain wouldn’t have risked it. He had been stung time and again, and now he was holed up in Hoquiam, layering his defenses. Or at least that was what Jillybean would be doing in his shoes. And he was no fool. He would make sure any attack would be far too costly to even attempt.