Generation Z_The Queen of the Dead

by Peter Meredith

  Mike had to tack into the west wind just to induce them to follow along. It was during this long left turn directly in front of the Santa’s fleet that he discovered they were out for blood. Gloom in the lead boat opened fire at a range of about two hundred yards.

  “Coming about!” Mike shouted. “Kasie, the boom, now!” The bullets thudding into the homemade kevlar cured the seasickness of everyone on board the Saber and the ship spun on a dime and raced before the wind, opening a half mile lead before Mike decided that he couldn’t get too far ahead.

  And that was how it went. As Willis Firam breathed his last and James Smith fought to the death on the Marin Headlands with five separate and astonishingly large wounds in his body, Mike played the fool. During the first hour of the “chase” he would tack when there wasn’t any real reason to and when he did, he’d purposely turn too far into the wind so that his boat would stall.

  During the next hour, as the Santas got the hang of working their boats, he kept them close by steering the Saber along the edge of dead zones where the waters were noticeably flatter and the airs weak.

  With all his heart he wanted to race north, afraid that by the time he was able to coax the Santas back to Alcatraz it would be too late. But he couldn’t. Gloom would smell the bluff if he got too good too quickly, and so he spilled air off his sails or let his jib come untied and let the Santas came closer and closer. Every time they got within two hundred yards Gloom would try a ranging shot and Mike would scoot ahead.

  As he passed Hunters Point he let fly a ten foot long white pendant. Doing her best to keep out of sight, Colleen studied the water in front of the piers with their one set of binoculars. “I see them. They look good to go.”

  “Good,” Mike said and edged closer to the wind, adding a knot to his speed. Carefully taking the binoculars from her he looked back at the strung out line of boats. The last was probably a mile distant. “Jeeze,” he grumbled at their ineptitude.

  Next he turned the glasses north. They had seen the smoke earlier but it had run its course and now there was nothing but a thin distant crackling. With the wind carrying the sound of the gunfire to the east, it didn’t seem like much of a battle and yet there were dozens of dark blobs in the water that could only be Corsair ships, and there was the Floating Fortress turned oddly and was closer to the remains of the Bay Bridge than it should’ve been.

  Mike’s heart began to hammer and he had to fight the urge to tighten the main and hit the gas, so to speak. “Ready the green rocket,” he told Christopher. Taking a deep breath, he counted out loud with slow deliberation to a hundred. After fifty the others joined in, their voices growing louder until they reached a hundred in a shout. “Light it, Christopher!”

  With a serpentine hissing, the rocket raced a quarter mile into the sky and detonated with a staggering flash of light and sound.

  They all flinched and Kasie King said in a dead soft voice, “Well that did it. We can’t take that back even if we wanted to.”

  With the echoes still bouncing around the city, Mike put the Saber to rights and raced northeast looking like he was going to run under the larger spans of the Bay Bridge near Oakland. The Santas followed as if they didn’t have a choice in the matter.

  At the sound of the rocket and the sudden appearance of this new fleet, the battle faltered in the northern section of the bay. Everyone stared south, the Corsairs in complete confusion, and the defenders of the Fortress with looks of hope except for Jenn who wore a tearful smile that closely resembled ecstasy.

  The lull lasted half a minute as the Saber seemed to grow in size and majesty then the Black Captain started sending up signals one after another. The boats that had been zipping in circles around the barge turned suddenly away, just as did those moving to reinforce the planned assault on Yerba Buena.

  “They’re breaking off the attack!” Donna cried. This was followed by a tremendous cheer that went on and on as if the Corsairs were turning tail and running for home. They were not. They quickly gathered into two squadrons of thirty ships each and headed south. The remaining boats, another ragged thirty or so headed north toward where the Black Captain’s ship had remained throughout the battle.

  Jillybean watched all of this with a stony expression on her face. She had not cheered. She knew their chances had only marginally improved and it was by a razor slim margin at that. As Mike hauled the Saber around, now shooting southwest under full sail, she turned away, keying the radio.

  “This is the Queen. Team leaders check in. I need an accurate ammo count and a head count as soon as humanly possible.”

  “I dropped my radio,” Donna said, a smile still on her lined face. She swayed slightly, her injured arm hanging limp and useless clearly in need of immediate medical attention.

  There was no time for anything but the basics. “Jenn, I need you to wrap…” Jillybean stopped when she saw Jenn wouldn’t be of any use while Mike was in danger—the ecstasy she had exhibited had turned to stark terror. She stared down the length of the barge to the south with her mouth open and twisted at the Saber which no longer appeared so magnificent. It now looked small and very alone racing between two converging fleets and when gunfire erupted Jenn sucked in a sharp ragged breath.

  “Stu,” Jillybean said. He too was watching the flight of the Saber and didn’t stir at his name. She noticed that he had aged in the last few hours of endless battle. “Stu! Wrap that arm good and tight.” She didn’t have time to check to see if her order was being carried out. The Floating Fortress had endured a thirty minute attack from half the Corsair fleet and was now a floating mess. They had been on the eastern side of the barge and now she moved in towards the center and at first saw no one.

  They’re all dead! Eve shouted and then laughed. The sound of that creepy laugh echoed along the narrow alleys between the huge metal boxes. The echo made it seem like the barge was deserted.

  Jillybean took one step toward a ladder and her foot came down in a narrow river, running through the gap. The water was red—not tinted red, but deep red.

  I don’t think that’s water. Do you? Do you really think that’s water?

  Jillybean refused to answer her. During the battle her mind had been racing faster than few humans dead or alive could have kept up with, but now there was a lull in both the fighting and the whirring gyro of a brain and into this respite the shadows moved in.

  Her only choice was to ignore Eve as best as she could. She sloshed to the ladder, a grimace on her face and her heart constricted so badly she could barely breathe. Climbing out of the blood river helped, however at the top of the ladder she gazed around the open expanse and counted only six people and five of them were bleeding.

  “Where’s everyone else?” she whispered. She distinctly remembered hearing a cheer when Mike had fired his first rocket. It had been loud and strong.

  Don’t pretend you don’t know. The voice had come from below her among the shadowy, bloody lanes. Eve was out of her head. Sometime during the battle she had escaped and was now roaming the ship.

  The death ship, Eve corrected, calling from within the maze. Come and see what you did.

  “No, I don’t have to. I’m the Queen.” Jillybean wanted to run away. She wanted to find some dark container and hide. “I’ll just get Stu to get a head count.” Eve snorted laughter at this and sent an image into Jillybean’s head. The image was of Stu how he looked only a minute before: dried blood caked down the side of his face, shiny fresh blood leaking down his back, his entire body sagging in complete exhaustion against the wall of a container. He had carried the fight from the first shot on the Marin Headlands to this point.

  Good plan. Run him ragged until he dies. Wasn’t that your plan all along? Weren’t they all supposed to die? Isn’t that right, miss three-steps-ahead?

  “We’re not done yet,” Jillybean snapped and then began struggling down the narrow alleys between the metal boxes, pretending that the ankle deep blood wasn’t utterly horrific. It helped if s
he kept her chin up and her eyes on the next container, even if it was riddled with holes and there were splashes of…her foot came down on someone’s face and she let out a little cry.

  The face, with the distinctive swirl of her boot imprinted in the tacky blood was unrecognizable. It was too mangled, too disfigured…”

  “Queen, this is Gerry.”

  Jillybean gratefully answered; anything was better than that face. “This is the Queen. I’m glad you’re alive. How many fighters do you have?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  She couldn’t answer for a few seconds as that numb feeling swept her and it was all she could do to hold the radio. “Thirty-one? Is that what you said?” Her mind could not comprehend the number. It made no sense. There had been three hundred and fifty people on the island.

  “Yes. Thirty-one. Three, one. We aren’t with the others. We’re in a building on the east side of the island. We only have seventy-four rounds left.”

  So bad news/terrible news. “Seventy-four?” she mumbled, mostly to herself. It was only enough for them to commit suicide with. The thought made Eve’s presence grow. Jillybean shook her head savagely. “Do what you can defensively. I’ll…I’ll think of something.”

  Yeah, you can kill yourself, too! The high cackle rang and rang. Jillybean tried to escape it, hurrying away but she could only go so fast as she ran into more corpses in shabby little piles or completely carpeting the runs between the containers.

  No one was alive it seemed. She found dead body after body until she came to the front end of the barge where the ramp sloped upward. There was only one body here, surrounded by a litter of spent shell casings that rolled back and forth in time with the gently pitching deck.

  Jillybean was just turning away when there was a distant explosion. Mike had set off his second rocket—the signal for the three-person team he had left behind to light the crates on fire. Each of the fifteen crates was filled with more of the potassium chlorate, barley, and baking soda mixture used to make great clouds of smoke which filled the southern part of the bay. The smoke was Mike’s only chance to escape.

  “They said we would lose,” the corpse at the front of the ramp said in a slurring mumble. It rolled over and Jillybean saw it was Dango Ferem. Most of him that is. Half his face was gone, replaced by a shock of gore and shards of bone. He coughed and half a tooth plinked down among the brass.

  “I’m sorry.” Jillybean couldn’t look at him.

  “They said we would lose,” he mumbled again. “But we didn’t.” He turned his one bulging eye out to the bay where a dozen boats were burning, belching out greasy smoke. Around them were the dead bodies of Corsairs floating in an undulating tide. There were so many of them, she could have hopped, one to the next, all the way back to Alcatraz. The sight was sickening and yet Jillybean stared.

  Dango coughed and then grunted out, “We won, but I’m going to die, aren’t I? That’s why you’re not saving me.”

  “Huh?” she blurted. She hurried to his side, touched his wrist and yanked her hand back when he felt his pulse. “You’re still alive!” Tentatively she checked his pulse again. He wouldn’t be alive for much longer.

  Let me help, Eve whispered into her ear. Let me make it quick. She was so eager that she had Jillybean’s knife out and had it poised in front of Dango’s eye before Jillybean could even blink.

  “No…no thanks,” Dango said, giving the eye a single glance. “I’m not afraid to die. I just want to take one more of them with me. You should go save someone worth saving.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that.” She paused, looking down at him. “Good luck, Dango.” She left him but not without casting a last glance north toward the Corsairs. The small flotilla of ship had broken up and were now going to the many stricken ships, saving men and trying to keep some of the boats from sinking.

  The Corsairs weren’t done and that meant Jillybean couldn’t be either. Eve would have to wait. “Who’s in charge at Yerba Buena?” she barked into the radio as she mounted a different ladder. Trying to navigate the bloody lanes between the containers was insane and would only add to Jillybean’s own madness. She couldn’t afford it.

  “Hello?” a scared voice asked over the radio. “Is this the Queen?”

  “Yes. Who is this? Are you in charge?”

  There was a pause before she answered, “R-Rebecca Haigh, ma’am. And I guess so. Everyone’s awful scared. I was doing a count and we got only a hundred and eleven, ma’am and some of them are kids.”

  “Kids?” The idea that children had survived so far wasn’t a good thing in her mind. The Corsairs were so beastly that it would be better that someone killed those kids now before it was too late. It was a sickening thought, but it didn’t make it any less right.

  “Yeah. Eight of them. And we only have a few hundred bullets or so and a hundred bolts for crossbows. Are you going to be able to come save us?”

  “Yes, probably,” Jillybean lied. “Until then I need you to stay strong and fight until I tell you to stop, is that understood?”

  The answer of “probably” had taken Rebecca’s breath away and it took her a moment to reply, “Yes, my Queen.”

  The self-proclaimed Queen of the Bay Area rocked on her heels as a light breeze struck her. Death surrounded her on every side except to the south where there were only clouds of smoke and the occasional tip of a sail to be seen.

  For your sake, you better hope for a miracle, Eve said from behind her. Jillybean didn’t turn. She could see the girl’s shadow parallel with her own. If Mike fails it will be my turn to lead.

  “He has no chance and never did. But I do.”

  You don’t, because once I tell the truth they’ll all turn on you. You’ll have nothing and no one, except little old me, which is pretty damned lucky since I can save us. Only me.

  “Maybe I don’t want to be saved.” Jillybean didn’t wait for Eve’s answer. She ran for the next container and leapt across the chasm and called down into the open door, “Anyone alive in there?”

  “J-Just me.”

  “Yeah? Who’s that?”

  “It’s me, Shaina. I tried laughing like you said, but it didn’t work. I’m sorry.” She began blubbering like a child which made Eve grow and grow until her shadow had thrown itself over Jillybean.

  Jillybean didn’t dare look back at her. Instead, she went down on her stomach and leaned over the edge of the container to see the woman sitting in a ball, again so childlike it hurt Jillybean’s heart to see her suffer. “Come out of there.”

  Shaina wiped a sleeve across her nose and climbed up to the top of the container, trying her best not to look at all the blood and the dead bodies. Jillybean told her to look up at the sky. They went to the back of the barge with the Queen yelling down into each container and collecting a few more people.

  They gathered at the rear of the barge to watch the smoke swirl and eddy, and to hear the chatter of guns. All of them had the same insane hope that Mike and the Santas would somehow prevail and then turn north to route the last of the Corsairs. They all knew it was insane and yet they clung to it right up until they saw the white pendant the Saber had been flying break free of the smoke—partially break free that is.

  The Saber was on fire, billowing black clouds of smoke. The boat slipped out of the maelstrom, turned in a long curve before heading back in to the fight at shocking speed. They could see the pendant flying along. Then it stopped as if it the boat had struck a wall. Slowly the pendant leaned further and further over until even Shaina knew that the Saber was sinking.

  Chapter 45

  From the very beginning, Mike knew he had no chance. The Santas were not allies. They were as intent as the Corsairs were on killing him, in fact more so since they had been tricked into a battle they wanted no part of.

  More than one of the Santa “Captains” broke free from the smoke only to realize their danger was even greater outside of it as three or four boats converged.

  There was one point that
Mike realized he might have broken free with so much momentum that no one could have caught him before he made it to the other side of the bay, but he too turned back. He did not equate “getting away” with winning, not after what he had seen to the north.

  Even just surviving wasn’t good enough. It’s why he raced back into the smoke even though the Saber was marked for destruction by both sides. It would have been at the bottom of the bay had it not been for its kevlar siding which had withstood hundreds of bullets.

  Still it was a matter of time before he lost his beloved Saber. “Just light the damned fire and trust me!” he had yelled at Kasie, five minutes before. She and Colleen had obediently set alight the piled blankets, sheets, sleeping bags and everything else that would burn, thinking that Mike had clearly spent too much time around the Mad Queen.

  Real captains feared fire far more than bullets and as Mike raced back into the scrum with a fire raging on board, those few who saw him coming threw their ships out of the way. Most did not see him and had no idea what was going on. They were lost in the smoke—the Santas trying to hide in it and the Corsairs trying to drive them out. Mike had a great advantage over both. He had the second ATN thermal scope and even through the smoke he was able to pick out, not one, but two victims.

  A pair of Corsair boats had nearly crashed into each other and both had lost their headway. Mike shot his beautiful Saber right between them, swinging his boom around so that it jutted out, acting very much like a lance. There was a crash on the right and a squeal of protesting wood on the left.

  With the fire onboard the Saber swirling out of control and belching even darker smoke, none of the Corsairs had any idea what was going on. They were blinded by the heat and the smoke and fell easy prey, as Mike blasted away with his scoped M4, sweeping the deck of the left-side boat clear of men. “Board her now!” he cried. There were curses coming from the boat on the right, and screams coming from his own, but he ignored them as he leapt across the three foot gap.