Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned

by Meredith, Peter

  I’m alive, but paralyzed from the top of my head on down. Great. Thanks for nothing, Jillybean. This was her doing. It was simply another of her tortures to endure. Jenn was just wondering how long she would live like this, cast adrift and paralyzed, when the first wave splashed over the gunwale. The boat rocked and her head on its limp string of a neck cocked over to see the waves washing over the railing.

  Fear grew to panic. The boat wasn’t just abandoned, it was sinking! I’m going to drown, she thought, the words filling her mind with ghostly echoes. Her vision began to grey until she realized that she was going to faint. The idea was so absurd that just thinking how ridiculous it was staved it off.

  Another wave thudded into the boat. Its cold waters rushed across the deck, picked Jenn up and dragged her towards the gunwale.

  She thought she was going over the side and she screamed: No!!! The sound of the scream never left her head. I have to do something, but what? I’m paralyzed and that means…

  Just at that moment she realized that if she really were paralyzed she wouldn’t be able to feel the water. It’s temporary. Good. I just need to get better before I drown. But how? She decided to take inventory of her body. She tried to wiggle her toes, bend her knees, flex her thighs, and move her hands.

  Her left calf twitched at her command, lifting her heel slightly. That was it. Relief flooded her and with good reason; she was not paralyzed and already she was far advanced in her ability to move than just a second before. She tried again to move her different parts, this time straining with all her might.

  The leg moved again, which was good, and her left arm unkinked slightly at the elbow. This would have been great if it had not come with a grating pain as if there was a build-up of rust in the joint. There was no time to worry over that, however. Another wave washed over the floundering boat and slid her right to the edge of the deck.

  One foot hooked a post of the gunwale and her shoulder hit another, keeping her from flowing overboard like some sort of long dead squid. Another try! she demanded of herself and made to move all of her muscles at once. Her back spasmed, her elbow bent and her left foot pointed…all of which was accompanied by a new and torturous pain in her joints.

  The pain was so great that it almost made drowning preferable. Almost. A wave brought her to the brink and she saw she was on the edge of the ocean. It stretched away forever. If she went in, she would never be found. A horrible thought. With her entire will she forced her muscles to move. The pain was as immense as the ocean and she heard a cry.

  It had come from her own lips.

  Another wave and she would have gone over the side and out to sea, but she willed her left arm to crook around a post. The move saved her, for the moment. Her legs were now dangling in the water, dragging her down. Her fear blotted out the pain and she focused everything on her right arm now. The fingers at the end could only bend part-way, however she could crook her elbow almost halfway and with a new cry she hooked it around the same post.

  Even with this, she sank lower. The water pulled at her and her lower body was all but useless. She flailed spastically with barely functioning legs; her still limp feet sliding uselessly along the fiberglass hull. Her muscles were weak from the poison and she could feel herself begin to slip. “No,” she whispered as a new wave smashed into her back and her right arm fell away.

  The boat spun in a slow circle and for Jenn it was like the second hand on a clock and when it reached the twelve o’clock position, the waves would hit her square again and she would slip away forever. Hope left her completely only to be revived a moment later as Mike Guntner suddenly appeared at the rail. The poison had changed him. His face was a wild pink color and seemed to have swollen up; his lips were covered in white foam that bubbled greater with each of his ragged breaths; worst of all were his eyes. There was blood where the whites should have been.

  He looked like he was dying.

  “Hold…on,” he whispered and reached out a knobby, clawed hand. The fingers of the hand were weak as a child’s and as stiff and unbending as the branches of a dead tree. Still, he tried to grab her. The pain was immense. It ran from his fingertips, up his arm through his shoulder and radiated down his back.

  Mike whimpered as he whispered, “Help me. Kick…or…pull.”

  With her body still kinked and broken, Jenn could do neither. Mike’s hand fell away and now the weight of the water was tremendous. It was like she was trying to haul the entire ocean back onto the boat.

  Once more Mike tried to save her. This time he stuck his useless hand under her coat and shirt and up along her arm as far as he could push it. Then he pulled—and screamed. The pain was outrageous and yet he pulled back with all the strength left in his body.

  Thankfully, Jenn was small and slim. Even soaking wet, she was light, and had he been at his full capacity, he could have picked her up with ease. Now, it was a struggle. It was one of the hardest things he had ever done in his life and when he finally got her on board, he was shaking and crying unabashedly. No one knew his pain, no one could understand, except Jenn, who was also weeping.

  She was trying to curl into a ball. Her body hurt less that way.

  “No!” Mike hissed. “Get up. We have…to keep…moving. Or we’ll…die.”

  “It feels like I already died.” She hadn’t budged from her fetal position and Mike was forced to straighten her by hand…or by claw since his fingers were still hooked. He started with one of her arms, bending it at the elbow. He groaned and she screamed. It hurt them both, equally. It felt like glass had been crushed up and injected into their joints.

  Instinctively, Mike knew they had to keep moving and not just because of the poison. They were also on the verge of freezing to death. As he worked her arms and shoulders and legs, he stared about at the Captain Jack. She wasn’t going to make it. The new fiberglass patches hadn’t been given enough time to dry. She was leaking like a sieve and with the storm coming on, she wouldn’t last another hour.

  “Where the hell is Stu?” he wondered. His first attempt at “looking around” had been an abbreviated twist of his upper body along a very short arc. With the possibility that Stu might be going overboard as well—or already drowning—Mike turned even further. Nothing hurt worse to move than his back and neck, so his resemblance to an old, rusting cyborg was uncanny.

  Stu was lying near the bow, his dark eyes open but unmoving. “Get up, Jenn! Stu needs us.”

  In abject misery, she rolled onto her front and crawled after Mike who had stumped over to Stu and was kneeling next to him, shaking his shoulder. “He’s cold,” Mike said.

  Jenn had touched far too many corpses over the last couple of months and now she was touching another one. Stu wasn’t just cold and stiff, his flesh was disagreeably hard. As she was numb, save for the grinding pain, the shock of his death was less than she would have thought. She turned to Mike and laid her head on his lap and found that he was just as cold.

  She touched his arm and it too was hard. Maybe we’re all dead, she thought. Or all alive. “Stu!” she screamed as loudly as her feeble lungs would allow. When he didn’t budge, she put her ear to her chest and listened. At first it was like listening to the side of a brick wall, but then there came a faint lub…dub.

  “Stu!” she yelled again. “Mike, he’s alive. We gotta move him like you were moving me.”

  “No, you have to do it. I have to keep us from sinking.” Although both Stu and the Captain Jack were about to go under, he knew her job was going to be infinitely easier.

  The pain in Mike’s joints doubled, then tripled as he stood and went to the mast. Slowly, hand over hand, he raised the sail that he had replaced three days before. Tying it off, he went to the wheel and put the sailboat before the wind. Their only chance was to keep the storm on their stern and run before it.

  A laugh scraped up out of his throat at the word “run.” The Captain Jack wallowed in the surf like someone had stabbed a mast into the carcass of a forty-foot
whale and he was being asked to pilot it. Still, he had no choice. The sinking boat swung around until it was pointing at the sunrise. A groan escaped the mast as the sail filled.

  With luck, Mike thought they had an hour before she went under—unless he could find some way to bail out the water. “I need a bucket,” he whispered. A bucket was a laughable idea. Even if he wasn’t feeling weaker than he had ever felt in his life, and even if he wasn’t shaking with hypothermia and barely able to stand on his own feet, trying to bail out a boat with gaping wounds in its hull in the middle of a storm using only a bucket was preposterous.

  Besides, he didn’t have a bucket. He had been in charge of towing the Captain Jack ashore and getting her hoisted, which had only been possible by emptying it out completely. The cabins and all the cubbies had been emptied.

  “Breathe harder, Stu!” Jenn yelled.

  Mike gazed dully at them for a moment, noting that Stu wore work boots. Mike pictured himself trying to bail using one of them. It was a terrible idea. A part of him wished Jillybean was there. He knew she could turn the boot into some sort of hydro-magnetic water lifter. She was the genius, not him…so why had she labeled the cubby next to the wheel EMPTY? It was her meticulous handwriting. No one alive had handwriting as neat as hers.

  And why weren’t any of the other cubbies marked in any way? Instead of dissuading him from opening it, the sign prompted him to fling open the door. It wasn’t empty. Sitting on top were two tightly coiled garden hoses. Crammed beneath them was a small black plastic drum with two stubby knobs for attaching hoses to and a handle that cranked round and round.

  At first Mike thought the drum was for coiling the hoses around, then he saw the label: Hand-Powered Water Pump. Excitedly, he read the small print: “Blah, blah, blah. Inlet and outlet can be reduced using standard ABS…blah, blah. Oh, holy crap. Ninety gallons a minute? How is that possible?”

  It was possible using an electric drill, which Jillybean hadn’t included. “Still, this is something.”

  What that something was, turned out to be pure torture. Just getting the hoses attached was pain like he couldn’t imagine. His hands were brittle from the cold and the poison. He cried out as he threaded the hoses to their couplers.

  “Are you okay?” Jenn asked.

  “Yes,” he said through his tears; he made sure to face away from her. “How’s Stu? Is he alive?”

  Jenn looked down at Stu and wanted to cry as well. Stu wasn’t responding no matter how much she called his name or how diligently she worked his limbs. She guessed that he had been poisoned much more than she or Mike. As the vial of poison had been very small and Jillybean had said that only a few drops were needed, she had made sure to take the smallest sip so that there would be some left for the others. Mike had done the same thing.

  Stu had probably finished it off and now he was neither alive or dead. “He hasn’t changed,” Jenn said.

  “Keep going,” Mike told her. “We don’t have a choice.” For the foreseeable future, death was going to be their only available option in pretty much every circumstance. If the boat sank—they would die. If they couldn’t get to shore by nightfall—they would die. If they couldn’t figure a way to get warm in the next hour, they would die. And so on.

  Because of this, Mike gritted his teeth and worked through the pain, getting the hoses connected and turning the wheel. Water came rushing out of the export hose and seeing it, spurred him on. Twenty-two gallons came out in that first minute.

  Another two-thousand to go, he thought to himself, just as a wave broke over the stern. At least twenty gallons rushed down into the hold. He cursed with the strength of a hundred-year-old man. It came out in a grumbling, under the breath mutter as he kept the pump handle turning.

  On and on he went without looking up, without feeling anything but the pain of each rotation. The shards of broken glass bit into the ball of his shoulder and the joint of his elbow; it ground along his back and his neck. He pumped hundreds of gallons of water over the side of the boat and hundreds poured back in. The storm was picking up and heaving them along. It was hard to tell exactly in what direction. The wind had become chaotic, sometimes hitting them from both front and back simultaneously. As well, the sun was hidden by such heavy clouds that he might have been traveling in circles.

  Direction didn’t really matter, however. The ocean had become violent, with the waves rising to greater and greater heights. If one of the waves hit them side-on, they would capsize—and if they capsized, they would die. Mike was in the terrible position of having to do two separate things at once. He had to bail or they would die and he had to man the wheel, or they would die.

  “Jenn! Is he alive?” A disgusting thought hit him: If Stu is dead, then Jenn can pump, and we might live. Ashamed, he cranked the pump harder, groaning as he did. With the storm, he didn’t hear her come panting up, dragging Stu behind her.

  “I’m alive,” Stu said, in a slurred voice. “Unfortunately.”

  Mike looked up to see the sturdy Hillman, looking like a cast off rag-doll. His eyes were as red as Jenn’s, but he was white as snow otherwise and his limbs were limp.

  “Toss me over,” he whispered. “You know you have to.”

  “We won’t!” Jenn said. She knelt next to him and was already trying to pump his arms at the elbow once more. It made a crunching noise as if there really was glass in them.

  With his head back, he grunted. “She would have.”

  Jenn deflated, remembering the slave girl that Jillybean had stabbed through the heart and dumped over the side of the Saber. And then there were the children she had murdered in Sacramento, and who knows how many people she had purposely killed on her operating table in Bainbridge. These had all been mercy killings, something Stu looked more than ready for, just then.

  “She probably would,” Jenn said, agreeing reluctantly. Just then their little group needed every able hand and Stu could barely move, and there was no evidence to suggest he would be able to in the next hour. They were, more than likely, going to be at the bottom of the ocean in an hour unless she could give Mike a hand.

  Stu saw all of this as well. “I won’t blame you guys,” he whispered. “Just slide me over the side. It’s that or we all die.”

  Chapter 6

  Mike was suddenly furious. The pain was terrible, their situation was worse and yet it was the ungrateful bellyaching that put him over the top. “You’re both being…I don’t know what the word is. Petty or something like that. I’m the only one here who never loved Jillybean but I’m starting too. She saved us, okay? Do you guys get that? Those Corsairs were going to throw us off a building, or did you forget?”

  “It feels like I was thrown off a building,” Stu grumbled, without looking up.

  “No. You’d be dead,” Mike snapped. “We all would. If you ask me, this is better than being dead.” He didn’t add the proper modifier before the word better, which was slightly. Mike could not remember ever being so miserable. “We should be thanking Jillybean. Not only did she save us, she helped us escape.”

  Jenn nodded and then winced in pain. “He’s right. And it was our fault. We forced her away instead of trying to help her.”

  “Do you mean help her to become Queen of the Corsairs?” Stu demanded. “I would never help her to become that. And if I had known that was what her end game was, I would never have helped her in the first place.”

  “I don’t think that was what she had envisioned at all,” Jenn said. “And she was the one who helped you in the first place.” She frowned and winced again; everything hurt so badly she wanted to curl back up in her ball. “I think we’re making her out to be smarter than she really is. I don’t think she came here meaning to be queen at all. We forced her hand.”

  Mike tried to laugh, but it came out as a whimpering cough. “I say speak for yourself, Jenn. Maybe she did want to become Queen of the Corsairs. We know she wanted to destroy them and what better way? She took over half of them and is going
to use them to fight the other half. We all know the Black Captain isn’t going to let her get away with this. There’s going to be another fight.”

  “And our people are going to be stuck in the middle,” Stu said.

  “It was going to happen anyway,” Mike said. “I’m like the least smart of all of us and even I can see that.”

  Stu wouldn’t answer that. He only looked out to sea where the storm had turned green-black and was spinning the ugly clouds around alarmingly. “Jenn, help Mike,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “No,” Mike said. “Don’t listen to him. When we’re on a boat, I’m in charge, not Stu. Come take over with the pump. Keep it going as long as you can.” Moving like an old woman, Jenn went to the pump and began spinning it. Mike grabbed Stu and heaved him into a sitting position.

  “I told you not to worry about me,” he said.

  “And I told you I’m in charge.” Mike lashed him to the mast using the second knot every four-year-old learns: the double-knotted shoelace knot. “When you can get out of that, you can either help us survive or drown yourself, it’ll be up to you.”

  Had his fingers not been hooked like someone crippled by palsy, Stu could have gotten out of the knot in ten seconds. Instead, he pawed feebly at the knot, barely able to hold himself upright. Giving up and just laying down was a seductive choice. It was the easiest, least painful thing he could do. And yet, there was Mike hobbling around doing everything he could to keep the wind and the waves on their stern. And Jenn was cranking the hand pump in circles, tears in her bloodshot eyes.

  Their grit shamed Stu. He wasn’t ready to forgive Jillybean; she had used his love as a tool and no matter what anyone said, that was just about the nastiest thing a person could do—but that didn’t mean he had to give up and die.