Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned

by Meredith, Peter

  She wasn’t listening. Her once pink Keds were a blur as she hurried up the aisle, past the glassy-eyed stares of the stuffed animals. The sound of the cheering was drawing her on, pulling her faster and faster until she slammed through the double doors of the auditorium and found herself on the wide, flat roof of a building.

  All around her were strange, wild men in stained black clothes. Most of the men were tinged blue-green from face tattoos, however those that weren’t had shaggy beards and long hair. They were Corsairs…no, they used to be Corsairs. Now they were her men.

  Although her heart began to jackhammer and her stomach started to ache, Jillybean did not react outwardly to this sudden change of perspective except to glance down at herself. Gone were the knobby, scabbed knees, and the Keds and the sundress. In their place, she wore thigh-high black leather boots, soft black yoga pants, a button-up black shirt and a three-quarter length black leather coat that she had belted tight against the cold.

  Just about the only things about her that resembled her tiny, six-year-old self, were her dead-white skin, her lamp-like blue eyes, and her fly-away hair.

  Her hair was being whipped by a fiercely cold wind, but the wind wasn’t the reason why she shivered. In front of her, three men were being tortured to death. They were spies and it was necessary.

  She was queen and yet she hadn’t dared to give any other order than for the most hideous torture, followed by a gruesome butchering of the prisoners. For a dozen years, these men knew only the worst debauchery and deprivation known to humanity. They did terrible things, horrific things and they told themselves that it had been necessary to survive. In their black hearts they knew for a fact that evil was a more powerful force than goodness and kindness.

  But they were not completely without laws. The straight-up murder of fellow Corsairs was illegal, stealing was frowned upon, and the usual petty differences between people were almost always settled through savage fights. The Black Captain had allowed no unnecessary killing of women and children, though both could be raped almost at will by their owners.

  Non-Corsair males were usually tortured and killed in the most heinous fashion imaginable, though this too was subject to strange whims and sometimes they were impressed into the Corsair ranks and made to murder and rape to earn their chance to live.

  All of this was abhorrent to Jillybean, despite her reputation for both unbridled insanity and cold ferocity when dealing with her enemies. She hated everything about the scene playing out in front of her. It made her sick and frightened. The mental anguish of having to witness such brutality had sent her away to a happier time when she and Ipes had played and danced and sung songs. She had come back to reality and was hit once again by the horror of her world. With all her might, she wished she could flee back into herself, but that was not something she could control. By definition, if she could control her crazy she wouldn’t be crazy.

  Not that the spies didn’t deserve torture and death. According to all the rules of warfare dating back many thousands of years, it was all they deserved. The three men had information that could conceivably imperil the lives of her people. It was all the reason she needed.

  Jillybean remembered giving the order and remembered making the painful decision to watch, knowing that if she hid from the barbarity of it, she would lose face. The next thing she knew, she was back in that elementary school, putting on a play. That first performance had been a bit of a fiasco, but by the third show, she and Ipes had worked out the kinks.

  That had been a good time in her life. Sadie was still alive and Estes Park was safe. Deanna was still with Captain Grey and little Emily was growing inside of her. And the biggest threat to all of them was a thousand miles away playing the lead role in Romeo and Juliet.

  She couldn’t exactly say this was a good time, not with the screams of the tortured spies ringing in her ears and the smell of their burning flesh in her nostrils. The picture playing out in front of her eyes was horrible and she tried to watch and not watch at the same time. She let her eyes lose focus so that everything was a blur. The other buildings around them became grey and indistinct, while her cavorting soldiers took on a ghostly appearance.

  The screams and the acrid stench were still there, but she let them wash over her as if they were part of an old memory. Sadly, she had many memories in which such things dominated and she fully expected her mind to send her back to one of them. It would not have been a relief if it had. In so many of them, she was the cause of the pain.

  At least here and now she couldn’t blame herself. Spies knew what they were getting themselves into. They knew the risks well ahead of…

  It must be nice to absolve yourself so easily.

  Jillybean did not flinch, did not stiffen, did not react in any way. Her eyes remained unfocused and everything was still a blur, except one man: Ernest Smith. The bounty hunter’s vanilla, overly average face shone clearly through the crowd.

  You could stop this if you wished. Even if she wanted to respond, which she didn’t, she couldn’t, while she was surrounded by her men. Her madness could only be allowed to go so far. Speaking of being crazy, Ernest said, some of us are getting a little cooped up in here. It’s always Sadie and Ipes who get to come out and play. When’s it going to be my turn, or Eve’s?

  Hopefully never, was her first thought, then she realized that he was out now.

  This isn’t out. This isn’t real. I want to be in charge, Jillybean. I deserve it. I created your empire for you. Without me, where would you be? Huh?

  “I would be exactly right here, right now. You forget you used my mind. You couldn’t have done anything without…”

  Just then, her chief lieutenant, Mark Leney glanced back, his smile dying on his lips. “Did you say something, your Highness?” This was his way of reminding her that she was talking to herself. Leney sometimes found himself in a difficult and dangerous position. He knew that Jillybean would be appreciative of the reminders, but there were other “people” inside of her that hated to be reminded of the fact, one of whom had pulled a long-bladed knife from out of nowhere and threatened to open him up on the spot if he mentioned anything like that to her ever again.

  “Just thinking out loud,” Jillybean answered. “Thank you, however.”

  Thank you? Ernest began chortling. Jillybean, he’s a pet. You don’t thank a pet unless he brings you your slippers.

  She let her mind wander past his words, and she did not ignore Ernest as much as she endured him. Just like with the screams, she let the words coming from his nasty mouth wash over her. The screams and the words mingled together to form meaningless static and once more she let her eyes blur until the carnage in front of her reformed into a curtain of perishable grey.

  Time lost meaning as did the static-filled world of grey she had built. A frightened hand touched her. “Your Highness?” It was Leney again, worried who he was going to wake.

  She broke from her trance and very slowly cracked her eyes, not certain where or even when she would find herself. The sun was barely up and they were still in the dinky town of Petaluma, where the thirty-seven mile chase had ended. The three spies had fled on foot up the sluggish, mud-slogged Petaluma River, hounded by two platoons of her soldiers. The spies route had been obvious from the beginning since everything to the west of the river was barren ash from the fire Eve had started weeks before, and everything to the east was overrun by zombies.

  With their route a near certainty, Jillybean had taken the Hell Quake and cut them off after making a landing on the coast west of Petaluma and racing inland. The chase had been exhilarating; the capture less so. Now, she was sitting on a high-backed chair that looked as though it belonged in someone’s dining room and not on top of a four-story office building.

  “I think we got everything we’re gonna get out of them,” Leney said. He was down on one knee; the way she had taught him.

  “And that is?”

  Because of his scars and the many tattoos covering his
face, expressions were hard to come by with Leney. For the most part, he looked either angry or very angry, with shades of one or the other thrown in for good measure. Jillybean read this particular shade to mean he was nervous.

  “I won’t shoot the messenger,” she said, trying to calm him.

  “Well, it’s just the Captain knows you and he knew you were down here before we all got here.”

  Jillybean remembered the way Phillip Gaida hadn’t reacted to her name when she had come aboard the Sea King. He had not been surprised by her presence. “So, there’s a spy among us.”

  “Not among us,” Leney replied, with the indignation of one bearing the mantle of moral superiority. “It’s one of your people. Your other people, I mean. The Hill People or the Islanders or whatever…your Highness.” She said nothing to his little faux pas, she only raised an eyebrow and waited for him to go on. They had tortured the three for well over an hour and she hoped for their sakes they had gotten more information than just that.

  “Okay, yeah. They also said that we’re losing men. They’ve seen four little groups heading north. One guy says it was twelve men total, the other two said fourteen. The first group has a full day head start. They know everything. Those groups, I mean. The torpedoes, the smoke bombs, how many people we got, everything.”

  He hissed all of this out, not because it was a secret he was keeping from the other guys, but because he was scared, and he was afraid people would hear it in his voice. The Black Captain was a holy terror. His very name invoked such a feeling of dread that even his captains would piss themselves if it was whispered they were under his scrutiny.

  The Queen looked at him blandly. “I don’t see why you are so worked up. So far you haven’t told me anything that I didn’t already know or suspect.” She gazed over the top of his head at the others, standing in little knots around the tortured spies. They all looked scared, except the one man who didn’t belong. He didn’t belong among the living because he was really burning in hell.

  You know why I’m not scared? Ernest asked. Because the Black Captain can’t kill me. Like you said, I’m already dead. Ha-ha! But the rest of these guys are crapping themselves because they can see how you’ve shrunk. When I was running things, I had it all under control. I didn’t go off into some fantasy world and leave Sadie in charge. Jeeze, Sadie! She’s useless. No, she’s worse than…

  Jillybean forced both her mind and gaze away from him. Ernest was right about one thing: her ex-Corsairs were suddenly all nervous. They watched her uncertainly as she strutted forward into their midst. She walked through them until she came to the three tortured spies. There was blood and bits of them everywhere and yet they were still alive, staring at her in frightened misery. Militarily sound or not, the sight of them was sickening and sad in equal measures. The doctor in her saw they had no chance; the burns, the loss of blood, the many, many lacerations would all lead to septicemia which would kill them in three to five days.

  “If I actually thought they would live, I would let these fellows go.” As expected, her men looked shocked at the idea. A few were comically over the top in their astonishment and a new picture of them formed in her mind: dirty, bearded men wearing brightly colored Easter hats and with large strings of pearls around their necks. Oh my! they cried in high falsetto voices as they fanned themselves.

  She snorted laughter and said under her breath, “Not now, Ipes.” The zebra’s chuckles echoed in her mind as if her head was not just vast, but empty as well.

  “Yes, I’d let them go. Not out of the goodness of my heart, but because I want them to crawl to the Black Captain and let him know exactly what he’s dealing with. Why? Because I want him to fear us. I want him to be afraid of our torpedoes and explosives. I want him to lie awake at night dreading the coming black smoke and I want him afraid of the death he will find in it. I want him afraid of us!”

  The men began nodding, their fear dissipated. They were weak men, governed not by principal, properly adjudicated laws, or a higher morality, but by the extremes of the moment. If everyone around them seemed angry, they were angry. If everyone was nervous, then they were nervous. They were followers, perfectly willing to rape, torture and kill as long as they weren’t expected to possess and express true independent thought.

  She turned back to the chair that had been brought to the rooftop for her. “Tell me, Leney, did you get any useful information from them?” she asked, sitting primly before the half-dead men and her barbarous crew. Leney gave her a look that she read to mean: Huh? “Did you ascertain the exact size of the Black Captain’s remaining fleet? The strength of his army? His intentions? The names of the spies on Alcatraz? How do they communicate with their handlers? Did you get any of that?”

  “No, sorry,” Leney said, hanging his head. “We tried, okay? But the Captain doesn’t really work that way. He keeps everything in its own separate box. That’s how he says it. And only the people who are supposed to know what’s going on with each box are allowed to look in. Those guys know more about you than they know about the Black Captain. The only thing we really know is that they were supposed to be heading north to Bodega Bay to check in.”

  “What do you know of him, Leney?” she asked, catching him off guard. “You were one of his captains, you must know more than the average sailor.”

  He shrugged. “Well, sure. I know some things. His army is still a lot bigger than your…ours. And his fleet is larger, but they don’t have better boats than us. He sent all his best boats to destroy you.” Leney saw the Queen’s blue eyes turn frosty and he quickly added, “He could’ve sent them all and you still would have beaten him.”

  This was a false bit of flattery which she didn’t correct, instead she waited for him to go on, but he only shrugged a second time. She tried not to look disappointed; it would have set a bad tone. “Alright. Let’s dispose of them and head to Bodega Bay. If we swing around from the north, we’ll look like any other Corsair boat.”

  She was halfway to the stairs leading down when Leney asked, “How do you want it done?” He had a knife out and used it to point at the spies. Humanely was the first thought that occurred to her. She knew it wouldn’t go over well.

  Before she could come up with a response that would satisfy, one of her soldiers said, “Sticky Jim has a good i-dear. Well, ack-sually it was both our i-dears since I brought up the whole apple bid-ness in the first place.”

  “Apple business?” she asked, her stomach beginning to flutter.

  “Oh yeah. You ever seen one of them apple peeling gizmos? You put the apple on it and spin it round and round, and the knife part skins the apple.” He grinned showing off a smile that had as many teeth as the average jack-o’-lantern.

  What he was suggesting was horrible and yet she had a duty to destroy the Corsairs. They were such a threat that the ends justified the means. A week before, her soldiers and sailors had been Corsairs. They would have gladly killed innocent people to save these very same spies. Jillybean had to find ways to divide her people from the Black Captain’s. There had to be “Us” and “Them.” Horrible as it was, the sickening deaths would help in the long run.

  “Go ahead,” she told the man as something inside of her laughed and something else cried. She turned around and headed back to her chair.

  She never actually made it. Her vision blurred, only this time the world did not go grey, but instead went a dull brown. When she blinked, the brown solidified into a real physical mass. Confused, Jillybean reached out to touch it. The mass was ridged and formed of thin lines, millions of lines.

  “What is it?” she heard her own piping voice ask.

  It’s crazy is what it is, Ipes replied. He had his bulbous nose pointed way up so he could see as much of the thing as he could.

  Jillybean had to agree. It was crazy. She looked at the faded plaque once more. World's Largest Twine Ball! it read.

  Beneath the headline were the facts—Francis A. Johnson spent four hours a day for twenty-nine year
s wrapping twine into an immense ball that was, according to the sign, forty-feet in circumference.

  “Huh.” It was pretty much all that could be said. Although words could easily describe the ball, the idea of it was immense. A man literally walked in circles for hours every single day for decades with nothing to show for his efforts except the ball and the plaque.

  It was the epitome of a wasted life in Jillybean’s opinion and right on the spot she vowed that she would do something great with her life. Had she known the terrible things she would have to do to become great, she would have begun rolling her own ball on the spot.

  Chapter 5

  Sea water as grey and cold as the morning light washed over the decks of the slowly sinking Captain Jack. It wouldn’t be much longer before she went down. Pockets of air trapped in the cabins were the only things keeping her afloat, but now the wind was picking up and with it came growing waves.

  In the east, the sunrise was a baleful red. In the west, it looked as though night would endure far longer than scientifically possible. A storm had built up overnight and now looked ready to fling itself on the stricken boat.

  Jenn Lockhart could see the gunwale, the cresting, white-capped waves and the storm, and nothing else. This was a great improvement of what little she had been capable of seeing all through the night: circling stars in an ink-black background. That was when she had been certain she was dead. She had drunk poison, after all and, logically speaking, death generally followed closely on such an action.

  All night her soul had been trapped in an unmoving body—her own body she supposed, though she had no way of knowing. She hadn’t been able to feel the body and only guessed she was in one by the heart that beat seven or eight times a minute. It had been soft at first, barely noticeable. Now, it was faster, maybe going as fast as thirty times a minute, though to be honest, minutes meant nothing to a dead person.

  Then the sun had risen and her perspective had changed. Maybe I am still alive. That brought both hope and fear. Dead people had no need of either. When the waves came a few minutes later, she realized, with her fear gaining momentum, that she was on a boat. An abandoned boat she figured, given the fact she hadn’t felt a single vibration coming up through the hull that couldn’t be attributed to the waves.