Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned

by Meredith, Peter

  Joslyn Reynolds was just bringing a teacup up. It stopped just before her painted red lips. “Are you talking nukes?” She had been one of the Colonel’s whores who had escaped at the same time Deanna had and just like her, the years had been kind. She had almost feline features that men found irresistible.

  The very notion of nuclear weapons was preposterous, but that didn’t stop the six members of the Governor’s cabinet from beginning to babble with undertones of hysteria. If Neil hadn’t been feeling as though his death was not far off, perhaps just outside the door with its bony knuckles raised and about to knock, he might have laughed. His head hurt too much for that. “No not nukes. Jillybean knows better. But…” He let the word hang in the air, not out of theatrical reasons but because he was reaching his limit and it just took too much energy to run so many words together. After a big breath, he went on, “It doesn’t mean there aren’t toxins that might be released. We all know her advancements in battery technology have come with a certain level of environmental concern.”

  “All the more reason to shut that place down,” Norris said. He was usually an agreeable man who had the look of an aging lumberjack about him. His paunch had turned to a gut years before and no amount of plaid could camouflage it. “Now may be the perfect time. She’s gone and when she comes back, Neil won’t be around to control her anymore.”

  The council members looked sideways at each other as Deanna stared into the fire, knowing Norris was right, but not wanting to admit it. She loved Neil, like a brother and couldn’t imagine a world in which he wasn’t bumbling about in his sweater vests and ghastly Crocs.

  “I could do it, maybe,” Joslyn said. “You know, look after Jillybean. I know we don’t see eye-to-eye on very much…”

  “Very much?” Norris cried. “Is that a joke? Sorry to break the bad news to you, Jos, but she hates you. Don’t feel bad, she pretty much hates all of us, and she’s going to doubly hate whoever we choose to watch over her.”

  Deanna balled a fist and looked as though she wanted to leap up and punch Norris. This wasn’t something Neil had to deal with as he was dying. Norris was right, of course, but the timing was wrong.

  “We could let her pick her own watcher,” Emily suggested. Although she was not quite twelve, she had been to cabinet meetings since Deanna had been chosen as the first Chief of Housing and Infrastructure nine years before. Deanna had then moved on to the governor’s position partially on her ability to harness Jillybean’s genius.

  “I don’t think so, darling,” Deanna said. “Whoever Jillybean picks will be someone she can dominate and then it would be better if there were no watcher at all. We would never know the truth from a lie.”

  It was strange for Neil to hear them discuss his replacement. Strange but not altogether unpleasant. No matter what people thought of him and his ugly face, he had been needed more than they really knew. He had made Bainbridge what it is and he had protected it; all behind the scenes. And now I’m dying, and no one will know or care, he thought, bitterly.

  This wasn’t true, and he knew it, and yet his head was pounding so miserably that it was hard not to wallow in at least some self-pity. He tried to force a smile onto his face as he asked, “Emily, can you be a lamb and fetch me more medicine?”

  “I have some here.” She had changed into a white sweater and jeans that were high on the ankle. Her jeans always seemed to be high on the ankle since she never seemed to stop growing. She pulled out a bottle of pills and held them out. Before he could ask, she had a glass of water for him as well.

  “Thanks, but could I trouble you for ice? I’m hotter than the sun.” The moment she was gone he dry swallowed five of the pills, wondering if it would be bad manners to pour all the pills down his gullet right there. The thought of over-dosing on Jillybean’s opiate-based pain meds sounded kind of nice just then. It would have to wait, however. He had sent Emily from the room for a reason. “There is only one person who can take my place.”

  He was looking steadily at Deanna with his fevered eyes. She mistook the look. “Me? I don’t think so, Neil. Jillybean respects me. I know that much, however she still has that teen mindset. It’ll only be a matter of time before she begins to resent me.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of you, I was thinking of Emily.” Deanna demonstrated how good of a leader she was by not reacting as everyone around her did.

  “She’s just a kid!” Norris blurted out.

  Joslyn was less circumspect than even that. “Who’s going to be more dominated than her? Jillybean will be her puppet master.”

  Neil did not have the strength or really the desire for any of this. He only stared at Deanna as she came to her own conclusion. The Governor thought it through just as she would have with any suggestion from Neil. “Emily is smarter and stronger than her age would suggest. And Jillybean is already teaching her a great deal. It’s an interesting idea. My problem is the danger posed to her. I never worried about you, Neil because you have proven to be tougher than anyone gives you credit for.”

  “That is a sweet lie, Deanna.”

  “What’s a sweet lie?” Emily asked, as she came back into the room with a pitcher of ice water and nine glasses.

  Neil sucked down an entire glass greedily before answering, “Your mom said that I was safe from all of Jillybean’s strange concoctions and contraptions and weird experiments because I’m tough. The truth is that I’m prudent to the point of cowardice.”

  “Don’t be like that,” Emily chided. “A chicken could never have broken into the River King’s prison. And a chicken would never have led the assault on the Believer’s bunker…”

  “That was your father. I was just along for the ride.”

  She was so tall that she could look down her nose at Neil. She looked almost exactly like her mother as she said, “No, that was both of you. And it was you who led the final assault that drove the Azael out of Estes. Don’t try to fool me, Uncle Neil. I know better.”

  “Trust me, the final assault was the easiest thing anyone did that day.” It was far easier than seven-year-old Jillybean and fifteen-year-old Sadie battling the King of the Azael and his entire family by themselves, or Deanna attacking two armored personnel carriers and singlehandedly turning the tide of the battle. “Still, you are right, you aren’t a fool. It’s why I think you should take over my job watching over Jillybean.”

  He knew that by saying this before it was agreed to, he had crossed the line, stepping over the boundary between mother and daughter. He had also stepped all over the toes of Deanna in her role of Governor. She glared daggers, which he ignored. Emily did not. She saw the look her mother wore and understood the problem.

  “I’ll have to think on that and get my mom’s permission,” she said, honoring her mother as a proper daughter should. “But I do think I may be the only one suited for the job. Aunt Jillybean would never hurt me or put me in a position to get hurt. I think it’s really sad, but I might be the only person she really trusts, besides you, Uncle Neil.”

  Deanna drummed her fingers in silence as she sat thinking of all the terrible situations Jillybean could get her daughter into. On the flip side, Jillybean was a genius and, through her teaching, could propel Emily forward. As Jillybean had put it once: “She is my Alexander and I am her Aristotle.”

  Deanna was torn and, as always when she couldn’t make up her mind, she didn’t make up her mind. Neil thought this ability to put decisions on hold was one of her better qualities as governor. “This is really a moot point at the moment,” she said. “Jillybean has been gone far longer than any of us expected. It could be she has found a new home. Or she has managed to find trouble that even she can’t get out of. I think this attack on Neil may be a result of what we all feared. She’s gotten on the wrong side of the Corsairs and this is their revenge.”

  From the moment that Jillybean had disappeared with the three people from San Francisco, it had been obvious that she was going to Grays Harbor to steal a boat from the Cor
sairs. They weren’t going to walk the five hundred miles back south, after all.

  “If it’s revenge, let’s hope they’re done,” Joslyn said. “The Corsairs are the last people we want to mess with.” Everyone but Neil and Deanna nodded along with this assessment. The reputation of the Black Captain was enough to chill the blood of the hardest of men and the council was made up of two men who were past their prime and five women who hadn’t fired a gun in ten years.

  “Do you think she set this up on purpose?” Deanna asked. “I don’t mean the attack on you, Neil. That was pretty much out of the blue and no one could have seen that coming. I’m talking about stirring up the Corsairs. She knows better than anyone that you don’t mess with them and not expect some sort of reprisal.”

  Jillybean had been warning the Governor and Neil for years about the growing threat that lay just to their south. They had taken the threat seriously, however the people of Bainbridge thought they were unreachable behind their high walls and the mood had been against making trouble. Jillybean had taken a dim view of this.

  But would she have stirred the pot on purpose? Neil wondered. “Maybe. Maybe. She would’ve had a plan of some sort which wouldn’t have involved me getting poisoned.”

  “That brings up a point we haven’t discussed,” Norris said, absently scratching his belly through its plaid coating. “Why was Neil attacked? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to go after you, Deanna?”

  Deanna had to fight to hide the shiver that wriggled her back muscles. “Maybe it was a warning.”

  “They could’ve sent a letter,” Neil grumbled. It was bad enough getting killed, but to be killed like a second-rate character was rubbing salt in his wound. Of all the ways to go out he had never expected to die by cutting himself on a razor. It was officially the least heroic way to die imaginable. “Look, I’m getting tired. I just want to go take a look at the school. I doubt an assassin made it in. It’s the most inaccessible building on the island. And if he did get in, there’s a good chance he’s already dead.”

  “I don’t think you should go,” Deanna said, putting a hand on his arm and forcing it to remain, despite the waves of heat coming from it—although he was her closest friend, she couldn’t help imagining the waves of disease coming from it as well. “We could draw you a hot bath and I can get some of that chocolate ice cream from…”

  Stifling a groan, Neil shook off the arm and stood up. “No. This may be the last thing I do. Killing an assassin would be a good way to go out.” Neil was adamant and he strode out into the cold night wrapped in Emily’s pink comforter. Shamed by this display of courage, the entire council went with him. A weeping Emily and a stoic Deanna propped him up.

  The fifteen-minute walk was an ordeal for him. In the dark, he stumbled and veered left and right. Still, he made it to the last building left to be searched. It had been surrounded by a hundred people, most of whom hung back, smoking cigarettes and whispering to each other.

  “Let’s check all the windows and doors first.” Neil said. With the chill, his voice had grown phlegmy and was not his own. “Maybe no one got in at all.”

  The Fast Response Team was tasked with the job. In a clump, they went in a circle around the building pointing twenty guns at every window and door. Only Eddie Sanders wasn’t afraid of the building. He had his own fear, making him sweat despite the cold—what would everyone do when they realized that there wasn’t an actual assassin on the island? He thought he knew. They would begin to look at one another. They would start to ask questions. They would find out that he had gone out alone that morning and they would want to know why.

  He stumbled around the building with the others, desperately trying to come up with an adequate excuse.

  As Eddie knew it would be, the school was locked up tight. When this was announced, Neil picked himself up from where he’d been sitting on a log, fished out his keys and opened the front door. “Lights,” he said with a weak gesture to the bank of switches just to his right. It was all the energy he had left.

  Joslyn turned on the lights and then immediately leapt back as the building shook with a fantastic roar. More followed the first until Neil thought his head would split. While Norris, Deanna, Emily and Joslyn were cowering, Neil swallowed four more of the pills. They were the only things keeping him going.

  “Give me those,” Emily said as the last one got stuck sideways in his throat and he began to gag. He was so weak that he was helpless against even her strength.

  “How big are they?” Joslyn asked in a whisper.

  At first Neil thought she was talking about the pills—The size of a horse’s balls, he was about to say before he realized she was referring to the zombies. His answer was only shrugged. He needed to lie down. He needed to close his eyes and let the pain pills wash away his troubles. The next thing he knew Emily was shaking his shoulders and when he cracked his throbbing eyes, she was looking directly into his face. “Hey,” she said, softly. “Tell me what you need. Is it time?”

  Was it his time to die or was it his time to turn into one of them? The beasts were still thundering, the sound reverberating in his chest, in his head, going to those cancerous lesions eating up his mind and soothing them, lulling Neil into a new stupor.

  “I’ll do it,” he heard Joslyn saying. “Norris, if you’ll help him outside. I’ll make it quick, Deanna, I promise.”

  They were going to shoot him! That didn’t seem like a good thing…in a vague sort of way. “Not yet,” he slurred. He was losing it, or had lost it already, but it didn’t matter. He remembered there was an assassin and since he was going to die anyway, he wanted to go out a hero. Even if it killed him.

  He stood, wobbled and started walking quickly, afraid that if he didn’t walk quickly he would die before he reached the end of the corridor. As he passed locked and bolted doors, he blurted out what was in each room: “In there is where she uses a drying process for nitrocellulose guncotton. This one is where she sterilizes instruments and microfilaments and that sort of thing. This one is where she is trying to replicate the Super Soldier Serum. Here is where she condenses synthetic alkaloids. She wanted to grow her own poppies, but I told her no.”

  As they passed each room, Deanna gave each lock a firm tug while Emily listened or sniffed at the doors. Finally, they made it to the main section of the school where the offices, the cafeteria and the gym were located. It was also where the zombies were housed. The smell from the locker rooms was outrageous even through the triple-barred door.

  “You wanted to know how big they were,” Neil said and gestured to the door.

  Brave as always, Emily started first. Deanna held her back. “I’ll go first.” The Governor opened the door just a crack and the roars intensified. She went paper-white when she caught sight of the monster. It was ten feet tall with shoulders as wide as a kitchen table. The chains on its neck, arms and legs were as thick as anchor chains and looked like they needed to be upgraded.

  Each of them gasped and gaped in turn, hardly able to avert their eyes from what was truly a monster.

  At last, they turned back to Neil and found him slumped beside a rusty water fountain. He was unconscious, his face no longer sweating, but bone dry, which meant his fever had reached a point that his body couldn’t cope. It would begin to burn down his brain soon.

  “I guess it really is time,” Norris said. “Back in the day, I must have seen around thirty people who got scratched and the question was always when was right? For once, the time couldn’t be more right. I’ll just step outside.”

  “Go with him, Emily,” Deanna ordered in a choked voice. She looked like she was about to argue, but changed her mind. Kneeling, she kissed her hand and then touched his forehead with it. Quickly, she drew it back; this was her first and she had never felt a person so hot.

  Joslyn had a snub-nosed .38 in her hand. It was the preferred weapon for the situation since exit wounds were rare with the smaller caliber. “I’ll do it, Deanna. I know he was your frien
d.”

  “That’s why I have to.” She took a huge breath and held out her hand for the gun. Joslyn handed it over and then stood back. Deanna shook her head. “No, this is something I have to do alone.” When Joslyn was gone, Deanna wrapped Neil in the pink blanket and thought to herself that Neil was lucky to the end. Most people would be turning practically feral by then.

  “It’s better this way,” she said, and took another deep breath. “When you see him, tell Grey that I’ve never stopped loving him. And tell Sadie that we can’t get Jillybean to wear any other color…” Her eyes were fountaining tears and she ripped a sleeve across them before continuing, “Tell her that she only wears black. And tell everyone I said hi and that I miss them.”

  She had lost so many friends she’d be still running down their names when Neil turned if she tried to list them all. “And I’m going to miss you and so will Emily and I…and I…” She broke down again and knew she wouldn’t be able to go on. She stuck the gun against his head, closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. The barrel went around and the hammer came down and at the last possible moment she remembered the safe, and there was an instant of stupid hope that ended just as quickly—revolvers don’t have safeties.

  Chapter 9

  The next day Stu limped out to the cliff face where the Captain Jack had met her end. He was supposed to be collecting fresh water and had the empty jugs to prove it, however he went to the cliff first.

  Although the rain was, for the moment, pent up within the heavy brooding clouds overhead, the Pacific had wetted the edge of the freezing wind. He had recovered enough in the last day of sleeping for the cold to sting once more. It was a hurt that went ignored as he gazed down at the last of the wreckage, looking for a blue box.

  It was embarrassing. He was twenty-one, but he was acting like a fourteen-year-old with a crush. Did she leave me a note? Does she want to go to the sweetheart’s dance? Does she want to be my girlfriend? He groaned as much from his immaturity as from the pain racing across his body. He might have been acting like a fourteen-year-old, but his body felt like it was seventy-one.