“It’s just me,” Sadie said, stepping forward so that the dim light fleshed her out. “You gave us a scare, taking a header like that. Lucky for you, Neil thinks you might be dehydrated.” Jillybean was about to ask how that was lucky when Sadie pointed to the nightstand where an unopened can of Pepsi sat on a coaster.
“Maybe he’s right,” Jillybean said, quickly reaching for the can. “I am pretty thirsty!” Sodas were always such a treat that she had it most of the ways gone before she offered the rest to Sadie.
“No, drink up, squirt. There’s a lot going on today and I don’t want you getting woozy again. They’re getting ready to leave.” Despite her fall, which she didn’t remember at all, Jillybean had been feeling extremely relaxed. She was home, it was the one place you were supposed to be able to relax. But now, her stomach began to tighten up.
“To where?”
Sadie started shaking her head, her fiery anger showing in the dark pits of her eyes. “Some crap-tastic place called Beaver Island, Michigan. It’s so far north it’s like practically Canada. And as far as I know, there’s nothing there. No people I mean. It’s got some houses and all that, but does it have a fence around the island? No. And does it have electricity? Hell no. I don’t know what Neil is thinking.”
Jillybean knew. “He doesn’t believe me, does he?”
The goth girl’s anger faded rapidly. She dropped her chin, unwilling to look Jillybean in the face. “I’m sorry, but no. It was that whole Chris Turner business. You made up a person, Jillybean. It sort of, uh eroded your credibility, and we both know how adults are. I tried to talk some sense into him, but he’s busy. Everyone is. They want to leave in two days, but I don’t see it happening.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Jillybean declared, sliding out of bed. She went to her dresser to pick out a clean outfit and paused with her shirt drawer open. Without looking back, she said, “Maybe you should wait here.” She risked a peek back at Sadie, afraid to see something wrong or odd.
After battles and blood and harrowing escapes, Jillybean had been running on fumes for days and it was expected that it would all catch up to her sooner or later. The night before had a hazy feel to it, as if she were coming off a drunk. There were parts that didn’t make sense. She could remember crying and she remembered Neil crying and she remembered telling her story more than once. And she remembered the peanut butter sandwich.
She just couldn’t remember why she had been crying, and she didn’t know why there was an echo of her own screams running like a vine through her memory. Something was wrong, that was obvious enough, and she was afraid that something was wrong with Sadie. But she didn’t want to think about that.
Jillybean began heading for her door, but stopped. “Have you been taking your antibiotics?” she asked her sister.
“Like clockwork. But you missed your own dose last night and this morning, so pills first before talking, got it?”
She hadn’t been taking her pills for the last two weeks or so and hadn’t heard a single whisper in her head…up until last night. A thought came to her: Maybe the lack of pills has finally caught up with me. “You know what? I-I spilled them, but I can get some more.”
She actually planned on going out to the Safeway pharmacy just as soon as she could, but when she stepped out of her room she saw Neil, and he wasn’t busy at all. He was sitting on his bed, next to an open suitcase which held nothing but four pairs of black socks. Black seemed to be the only color of socks he had ever owned and he wore them with everything.
In his hands were a pair of white underwear that had been folded once. He stared past them at a spot on the floor. When he heard Jillybean’s door click closed, he jerked, turning red eyes on the little girl. Foolishly, she asked: “Are you okay, Mister Neil? Have you slept at all?”
He shook his head. She opened her mouth to ask the obvious follow up question: what’s wrong? but stopped with the words pent up in her lungs. She was afraid all of a sudden. Something wasn’t right, something that was being left unspoken, but not unheard. The echo of a scream was back as were the whispers. Strangely, she also had a vision of her staring into a bush.
“I’m not crazy,” she said to Neil. He shrugged as if he didn’t care. She crossed her arms and told him: “We need to go to Washington and not to Beaver Island.”
He took a slow dragging breath. “You heard that?”
“Sadie told me.”
A small laugh escaped him. He choked on it and had to wipe away more tears. “I got you both presents,” he said. “I knew you’d make it back and I wanted to surprise you.” He went to his dresser, where there were two matching necklaces, ruby and gold. He picked up the smaller of the two and put it around Jillybean’s neck. As he did, he dripped warm tears onto her face. When he straightened, he took the second necklace and gave it to Jillybean. “Will you give her this for me?”
She was afraid to ask why. She only nodded and walked with leaden feet to her room. She was filled with fear, but it was nothing compared to how Sadie looked. The girl had her back in the furthest, darkest corner. Only the porcelain skin of her face showed with any definition.
“Mister Neil wants me to give you this.”
Like a girl before a guillotine, Sadie knelt and stretched out her neck. Jillybean was slow to place the necklace. She stared at the back of the girl’s neck, mesmerized by the soft wisps of black that were so dainty.
“Don’t draw it out,” Sadie said, in a strangled voice.
Jillybean fumbled the clasp into place, however when Sadie straightened and Jillybean let the necklace dangle, it fell to the floor. “The clasp must be broken. I’ll tell Mister…” Jillybean had bent to pick up the necklace and now saw that the clasp was properly set. The necklace hadn’t fallen off of Sadie, it had fallen through her.
As Jillybean stared at the necklace, the whispers began to kick up again. She shook her head violently to clear her mind, but it wouldn’t clear. There were too many questions. “What? How? How did that just happen? How?” She backed away from her sister, hitting the bed with the back of her legs and plopping down on it. She considered scrambling under the covers and hiding there, but that would have meant turning her back on Sadie and Jillybean was too afraid.
“You know how, Jillybean,” Sadie said, sadly. “You’ve known about me for two weeks. You know they shot me.”
Of course she knew. The picture never left her mind: Sadie lying in the tall grass, blood, nearly as black as her shirt, spreading out, covering her chest. Her eyes had been closed right up until Jillybean stuck the gun to her head. Then they had opened, two slits with what looked like glistening coal orbs behind them.
“But they really didn’t open,” Sadie said. “And the bullet, it didn’t really hit me in my lung.”
“It didn’t?” Jillybean suddenly felt short of breath and was glad she was already seated on her bed. “But I did surgery on you.” Sadie shook her head, but that didn’t make sense. “I did, I swear.” Sadie shook her head again and the memory of that night changed.
Jillybean saw herself standing on a stool in front of an empty hospital gurney. She wore a blue gown that hung down to the floor, on her face was a mask that covered her from ear to ear, and on her hands were gloves that kept slipping as she placed suture after suture in the vinyl cover of the thin mattress. The sutures were neat and exact and, of course utterly bloodless.
“Where were you?”
Sadie lifted one shoulder in a move that Jillybean had seen a thousand times. “I died.”
The little girl was too stunned for tears, and besides, she had known all along. She had just buried the memory deep, deep down where the whisperers and the screamers hid themselves. But now the memory was out. Neil had forced her to confront it. By itself, Jillybean might have been able to handle it, but the memory brought with it everything else, every bad thing she had ever endured, in a tremendous wave that threatened to engulf the girl. It was too much.
She couldn’t handle her reality,
past or present, and now that the mental distortion she had created as a band aid had been ripped away, she couldn’t go back to it. There would be no hiding her pain under what seemed now like a fig leaf. And worse, her journey wasn’t over. She wasn’t safe on Bainbridge or anywhere else. She wasn’t done with the bombs and the explosions and the blood.
In other words, she still needed Sadie or Ipes or Chris, or even Eve. She needed a crutch to carry on until she could find a true home where she could heal properly and be sane and whole. Subconsciously, she knew she desperately needed a way for Sadie to be alive again that was logically consistent. It wasn’t impossible.
I died, Sadie said with another half-shrug. Her voice was like an echo, pulsing from all around Jillybean. And now I’m a ghost. Jillybean’s mouth fell open. Sadie smiled at the look. Yeah, I’m a ghost. Can you believe that?
Jillybean wanted to believe it with all her heart. She nodded and shook her head simultaneously so that her head only wobbled. Her hearing had become warped. She heard Sadie just like she heard the whispers, with her mind and not with her ears. “A ghost? Are those even real?”
They have to be, Sadie answered. Because look at me. Watch what happens when I get too close to the light. She stepped closer to the golden edge of the blackout curtain hung across Jillybean’s window and as she did, she seemed to fade and become both grainy and translucent.
You know what the bad part is? Sadie asked, moving back to the corner where the dark made her whole again. Neil can’t see me or hear me. I can’t tell him that I love him or good bye, or anything.
“I could tell him for you,” Jillybean said.
Sadie shook her head. No. He already thinks you’re crazy. He doesn’t even believe us about Bainbridge and now they’re going to just head on out of here with no idea what’s ahead of them. It’s stupid if you ask me. I mean, why did we do all that work and take all those chances? Why did Sergeant Steinman have to die if this is what they were going to do anyways?
“I’ll prove it to him,” Jillybean said. “I have the map and all my notes. And, and my pill bottle says Colton Family Practice right on it. And the blasting caps have all those tags on them. They’ve got the mining company’s name and address on them. That’ll prove we were way out west. Wait here, I’ll be right back.”
Forgetting that only moments before, she had been on the verge of her second breakdown in the past twenty-four hours, she grinned at Sadie and raced out of the room. Neil didn’t look up as her feet thudded down the hall and out the front door. The Corolla was in the drive, but how it came to be there didn’t cross her mind. She only cared about her “facts” and presenting them to Neil.
The car hadn’t been touched. Not even the bombs had been moved. She grabbed what she needed, including a folded and perfectly clean hospital gown that Jillybean could swear Sadie had been wearing at one point early on in their trip.
“We can’t go to Michigan, Mister Neil,” she said without preamble as she burst into his room. He still had the same half-folded pair of underwear in his hands. She took it away from him and put the map in its place. “We don’t know what’s in Michigan, but we do know what’s in Washington. This is why you sent us, to find out. This is Bainbridge Island. I know it looks little on the map but it’s actually plenty big. Big enough for us and them.”
“Jillybean,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
She didn’t let him go on. “That’s where I got this shirt from Sadie.” She presented the shirt. It was black with glittery words that read: Princess in Training across the front. Before Neil’s eyes could really focus on it, she brought out the blasting cap. “And see this. I got it from a mine place where they were digging for diamonds or something. Look at the address. It’s right here.” Again, she pointed to a spot on the map. It had been circled with a star next to it. “And look at this pill bottle. See? It says Colton right there, and look on the map.”
Neil looked. “Yeah, I see it, sweetheart. But we’re going to Beaver Island. It’s been decided. We…I decided. I love you, Jillybean but…I know you tried.”
“I didn’t just try, I succeeded,” she answered. “We succeeded, me and Sadie. You wanted us to find a safe place and a safe route, and we did that.”
He sighed, shaking his head. “How do you know? How do you know what really happened? How do you know you didn’t make it all up? You have to look at it from our point of view. All we know for any certainty is that you headed west and when you came back, you came back alone and…delusional.” He sighed again this one coming from somewhere very deep.
“But I’m not anymore. I know Sadie d-died.” Her voice cracked on the word ‘died’ and with the whispers growing louder in her head, it took an effort to get going again. “I know I was crazy, but I’m better and the rest of all that is true.”
“I think you’ll like Beaver Island, Jillybean. I think they have real beavers.” He didn’t look up as he said this and Jillybean saw that if anyone was broken, it was Neil. He wasn’t seeing reason. He wasn’t seeing that a blind thrust through the heart of bandit country would only end with more death and misery.
She reached out and took back her things. “Maybe if I show this to Captain Grey…”
“No,” Neil said. “He’s busy and so is Deanna. And anyway, they both agree with me. They agree that this would be best for everyone, and that includes you.”
It didn’t matter to Jillybean that they agreed with Neil. What mattered was that she didn’t agree and that she could do something about it, crazy or no crazy.
Chapter 40
Captain Grey
Deanna knew better than to ask about what happened in California. They weren’t married and yet she had somehow adopted the time-honored code of the soldier’s wife. She would give him time to come to grips with his survivor’s guilt. There would be no “getting over it” there would only be eventual acceptance and that was if he were lucky.
Some men never could. Grey knew that he would be able to, not because he didn’t care about the men he had lost, or that he was a cold hearted bastard, but because he had before. He had been doing it for coming on two years, just like he had been surviving against incredible odds for two years.
And this last fight, a running six day battle between two different groups that he and his men had stumbled into, had been the worst yet. Giving up had never been an option, however letting the last of his blood leak out of him was. He had twice been in a position to simply allow himself to die.
In the past, he had sometimes fought to live through sheer stubbornness, now he had a real reason—two reasons, in fact. One was breezing around the house in a long, button-up shirt of his and nothing else. And the shirt wasn’t all that long. The other reason lay in his arms, staring up at him with huge blue eyes. Emily had a bottle perfectly corked in her mouth.
“She is really going to town,” Grey said. He assumed that her draining the bottle in one long pull was a good thing. Even after four months of having Emily in his life, he still felt a little like an imposter. Deanna was absolutely certain about everything when it came to the baby, but he felt like he was just winging it half the time. What he needed was an instruction manual, and not a touchy-feely-nausea-inducing book with a pink cover showing two already happy parents gazing down at their newborn.
What he needed was a proper operator’s manual based on a US Army field guide: Infant, Human, Pink, One Each. That way everything would be set in stone and nothing left to guess work.
“Just burp her when she’s done,” Deanna said. She was standing in front of her closet, looking in at her clothes. She had to pick out a total of three outfits and she was acting as though the fate of the world could hinge on the decision. According to the time frame of the “shift,” as they were calling their cross-country migration, she had another twenty-four hours to be packed, but at the rate she was going, Grey was glad she had gotten off to an early start.
After a brief lunch-time meeting with Neil, who had looked like shit in Gre
y’s eyes, the shift had been moved up by twelve hours. They were to leave the following day at sunset. “According to Jillybean, the thermal cameras are far more effective at night,” he had said.
“And people and monsters act a whole lot different in the night time,” Jillybean added. “That’s half the way you can tell which is which.”
As usual, Grey thought they were relying too much on the little girl. Although she had given only this minor advice concerning drones and cameras, he thought that even that was too much. Her journey, although not as physically torturous as his, had been an ordeal that she was still coming to terms with. During the lunch, her eyes had constantly strayed to a dark corner of the room which just happened to be directly behind Grey. It was unsettling to think she was staring at “Sadie.” More than once, Neil had looked back there as well.
Emily, leaking formula out of the side of her mouth, brought Grey around to the present. He wiped her cheek, set her to his shoulder and tapped her lightly—too lightly, as always—on the back until Deanna groaned. She took the baby gave her two heavy thumps and brought up a burp worthy of a pro bowler.
“Okay, I guess you got this,” Grey said, meaning the baby. “I’ve got to get down to the high school. They’re bringing in the cars.”
“No more than fourteen,” Deanna warned. “Neil and I worked out the math and we don’t need or want any more than fourteen, so don’t let anyone give you guff. And they all need to be five seaters at a minimum. And go fetch Jillybean from Neil’s. I think it’ll do her some good to get out. She needs some fresh air. At least Neil is busy doing something, but other than having lunch, she hasn’t done anything but sleep.”
Although Grey thought sleep wouldn’t hurt the little girl, he said he would let her tag along.
The afternoon was a fine one and she wore pink shorts with a matching tank top. She had been traveling at night for so long that she looked ghostly white. As he walked, she skipped, though when she came to a crack in the sidewalk, of which there were many, she would make a conscious decision to hop over them.
The Apocalypse Sacrifice: The Undead World (The Undead World Series Book 10) Page 42
