Stu stood there letting the wind cut into him until the clouds finally let go, pelting him. He had on ill-fitting clothes; two sets in fact, as well as a coat, though this had been purposely torn into tatters as anti-zombie camouflage. The wind and the rain made their way through all of this to his battered flesh. Pulling up his hood, he hunkered into himself and headed south, not because the little town was closer, but because the wind would be at his back, at least on the way there.
The wind howled all around him, sweeping off the ocean unhindered. There was not a stitch of cover, not a tree or a bush from the cliff all the way to the edge of the town where trees had been planted as a wind-break. He wasn’t worried about zombies. With his limp and his bedraggled, torn clothes, he looked like the dead. He didn’t bother trying to “sneak up” on the town, either. It would have been impossible over such open ground, and he just didn’t have the energy for it.
He didn’t know exactly where they were and didn’t really care. To him, this was just another fading and forgotten town that had likely been picked over a hundred times by then.
With every step, the wind and the rain became more unbearable and by the time he got to the line of trees, the air was so full of whipping water that he squinted through a grey haze. Caution went completely out the window as he stumbled through the thin belt of trees guarding the town and found himself confronted by a nearly unbroken line of fences.
Beyond the fences were the backyards of what had once been multi-million dollar homes. They were set well apart from each other with plenty of brown, weed-riven space between. Although the weeds were thick and frequently waist high, Stu didn’t have any fear of stepping on a rusting bike or a hidden rake or even the crumbling remains of a lawnmower.
Rich people’s homes always had such a strict orderliness to them that it bothered him. It was almost as if a person had to give up his sense of self to own one. They had to regiment their life and exist in a state displaying outward perfection to belong to the tribe.
“And now it’s all crap,” Stu murmured as he crossed through the rampant winter weeds and went up a short flight of steps to a great expanse of warped decking. Before going in, he had to duck under a leaf-filled gutter that had partially fallen from the edge of the roof. “My, what would the neighbors think?”
Past the gutter was a smashed-to-pieces sliding door that led to an immense kitchen; there were granite countertops as far as the eye could see and hardwood floors that were once someone’s pride and joy. Both were littered with glass and shards of porcelain. The place hadn’t just been searched, it had been destroyed.
“I think the maid missed a spot and these carpets…” There was a short, seven-foot long hall between the kitchen and the dining room. The deep carpet had once been beige, now it was grey-green with mold. To the left was an open and barren pantry; not even crumbs remained. To the right, was a wall with a half-dozen pictures of the Ling family.
In every picture, pretty Mrs. Ling eyed the camera with a nervous look—she didn’t trust the cameraman. Mr. Ling had crow’s feet at the corners of his dark eyes and he always had a hand on one of his two children in the pictures, as if he thought they might run off to play before the flash went off. The children, a boy and a girl had identical smiles, but different attitudes: the boy was stiff, doing his duty by getting his picture taken, but not relishing it. The girl loved the camera and the camera loved her.
All four of them were dead.
More than likely they had been eaten or turned from a scratch or a bite. Then again, they might have starved to death or killed by raiders. If Mrs. Ling had been really lucky she might be still alive and a slave somewhere. With 99% of the world dead, those were just the betting odds.
Stu didn’t have any more snide comments. He gave the house a very quick once over and hurried from it as if ghosts were chasing him. Fleeing next door, he kept his eyes from the dusty, professional portraits that the Melendez family had paid a gob of money for thirteen years before. All Stu cared about was finding clothes that were warm, clean and dry.
Mrs. Melendez, a stout and homely woman, had birthed three sons, all tall and handsome—Stu didn’t let his mind stray at the very great possibility that they were long dead—and was soon dressed and warm. He flayed a dry coat and tugged it over a second one. Together they were tight through the shoulders and as he stood there in the oldest son’s second floor bedroom, easing his arms around and grimacing from the pain from the many wounds he had suffered, he gazed out the window.
The Melendez family had once had wonderful views from almost every window and this one was no exception. It looked southwest over a little town and beyond it to a snug little harbor.
“Huh,” Stu grunted, suddenly knowing exactly where he was: Bodega Bay. Not only had he been to the town twice before, he had stood in this very room three years before when he and four others had been out on a week-long scavenging trip. The drab of winter and the grey day had turned the picturesque town dull and ugly; nearly unrecognizable had it not been for the harbor, the low hills surrounding it, and the Pacific beyond them.
Bodega Bay was thirty-five miles north of the Golden Gate; they had drifted much further than Stu had expected. It was a good start, but they weren’t far enough away for his liking. If even a rumor that they were still alive made it back to San Francisco that would be the ruin of Jillybean. Her ex-Corsairs would rebel; they would destroy her. Likely, they would throw her off the same tower they had threatened to throw Stu, Jenn and Mike off of.
The very thought was enough to churn his stomach. It really didn’t matter how he felt about Jillybean since he would probably never see her again, but he knew he didn’t want her to die, or to suffer in any way. And he wanted her to be happy and…
He had been staring absently at the town while his mind filled with Jillybean, and it was only after a minute or so that he realized there was a curl of black smoke rising from a house down near the harbor. As if his legs had been kicked out from beneath him, he dropped to the soft carpet and only slowly edged back up to spy with a far keener eye all around the town.
With the wind, it seemed as if every bush was moving toward him and every shadow held some slinking criminal. His initial panic gradually abated until a new thought struck him: what if whoever this was had seen the smoke from their fire? Like lightning, he ran down the hall to the youngest son’s bedroom, which looked north. Far in the distance, out on the barren highlands overlooking the ocean was the house Stu had carried Mike to the day before. If there was smoke coming from its chimney, it was either lost in the grey backdrop or the wind was swirling it away.
Stu felt weak with relief, however that relief gave way to a quietly grinding anger. Pretty much the only people who would be here would be runaway Corsairs—and he hated Corsairs. As much as he blamed Jillybean for starting the war, Stu knew that it had been inevitable. They would have come sooner or later, and the death toll would have been far worse.
He did not know it until just at that moment, but he burned with a desire for revenge, and before he knew it, he was slipping down the stairs, the Sig Sauer in hand. With the cold and the slashing rain, he guessed the Corsairs were sitting tight and enjoying their little fire. They wouldn’t expect him or anyone, not even zombies, since it was common knowledge that they did not care for the rain.
Still, he was very careful. He used the cover of the intervening houses to slip in close. It seemed strange to him that they had chosen a smaller house, instead of one of the big mansions that were scattered like salt all around the town. It was strange until he got close. The house sat on a little nub of a hill and from its back porch was a set of stairs that led right to a pier on which was docked a black sailboat.
The boat, a thirty-three footer, sat prim and proper, looking ready to go at a moment’s notice. These weren’t runaways. One did not take a Corsair boat and then park it a quarter mile from the ocean. You took it and ran as far away as you could. And these weren’t stragglers left over
from the battle. The boat was in perfect shape; there was nothing stopping it from heading north.
“Then why are these guys here?” Stu wondered aloud. He didn’t want to hang around to find out. The spark of anger in him had been extinguished as much by the sight of the boat, the rain, his own exhaustion and the fact that they had only one pistol between the three of them.
He left the town from the same direction he had come, stopping at the house with the broken gutter to fill his jugs with cold rainwater.
Mike had been in a groggy state all morning, but when he heard about the boat he sat up straight and dug a finger into his ear. “There’s a boat and it’s not being guarded? Did you say that right?”
Before Stu could answer, Jenn put her hand on Mike’s arm and said, “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sick of boats and the water. Oh, and the cold. I don’t know if I’ll ever get warm again.”
“We need a boat if we’re going to get anywhere,” Mike insisted. He paused, a shadow of doubt overcoming his handsome features. “Where are we going anyway?”
For the last day, they hadn’t mentioned the future once. It was almost taboo. The future meant decisions and doubts and maybe death. Staying by the fire and nibbling away at the food Jillybean had thought to pack was a far better way to spend a day than thinking about the terrible and extremely limited choices open to them.
Traveling on foot with winter already on them was exceedingly dangerous. Because they were almost completely without provisions and supplies, they’d have to scrounge as they went which meant their pace would be snail-like—seven or eight miles a day in good weather and half that in bad. Worse, the probability of attracting zombies would be practically a hundred percent.
Then they would have to choose a direction. East into the mountains would only pack on more danger. The mountain bandits were deadly in their rock kingdoms. They had fortified all the passes which meant attempting to hike along deer trails that could reach 10,000 feet along the Sierra crest. Food and shelter would be scarce and with night time temperatures dropping well below freezing, death would be a constant companion.
North meant more bandits until they reached the Redding Five, which was run by five mafia-style families that were in a near constant state of war with one another. The only people they hated more than their rivals were outsiders. After that was wilderness until they reached the radiation belt around Portland. The three had seen firsthand the horror of that and not one ever wanted to see it again.
That left heading south and to the Guardians in their walled city. They were stoic, stout-hearted fighters. From the rumors brought by the traders, there were at least a thousand of them and were so well-provisioned that they could withstand a siege of a year or more. They were also fanatically religious. It was said the sinners were encouraged to scourge themselves using an eight-headed flail. Attending church services on a daily basis was compulsory.
They were so stern that both Mike and Jenn would admit to being frightened of even the women Guardians.
Unfortunately, they were doomed as a people. Jillybean had set her sights on them and no power on Earth seemed capable of stopping her.
The three of them discussed these terrible options in a dull monotone, not one of them able to muster any energy to care about the fate awaiting the Guardians, which wasn’t going to be pleasant. To retain her hold on her people, the Queen would demand kneeling and oaths of loyalty, something the Guardians were unlikely to agree with. Some would choose martyrdom and Eve and some of the other personalities inside Jillybean would gladly give it to them in some horribly disgusting form.
“What’s south of the Guardians?” Jenn asked. “Maybe something better?”
Stu shrugged, leaving it to Mike to say. “No one knows. The traders never go south to Los Angeles. Probably for a good reason.” There were rumors that suggested there was another fallout belt south of Los Angeles. And there were others that said the desert had encroached from the west and had eaten up everything, and that sand covered the city three-feet deep.
It sounded bad, then again, it almost seemed as if there were rumors about every place they had ever heard of. Most of the rumors were completely wild and unprovable: Utah was said to be filled with cannibals; Las Vegas had zombie snakes and scorpions that could inject the zombie disease with just a bite; in Kansas, the zombies were corn-fed and stood fifteen feet tall. Even Jillybean herself had been a rumor. In her case, the “Girl Doctor” had been proven to be an actual person.
One true story out of hundreds of crazy tales were Mike’s kind of odds and with a boat involved he was willing to take the risk.
“You know what?” he said with a touch of his old boyish enthusiasm. “I say we snatch the boat and zip south past the Guardians and see what’s true and what isn’t. If we find a fallout area like we did up in Cathlamet, we can always scoot around it, you know? And if there are bandits or giant deserts, we can go around them, too. We’ll be able to fish for meals and maybe sneak ashore here and there for fresh water. It’ll be perfect.”
Jenn tried to smile. She tried to pretend the idea of a journey by boat was a great idea. She nodded as pleasantly as she could and tried with all her might to come up with a better, safer idea. The shipwreck was still fresh in her mind and would be for some time, perhaps even forever. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the boat tear apart beneath them as if it was made of tissue paper. She thanked God that the anchor had held just long enough so that the greater part of the wave had already struck when she and Mike went under. Even with that blessing, she had been within minutes of freezing to death, within seconds of drowning, within inches of having her head caved in by the rocks. Her body was raw and aching, nowhere near ready to move. She didn’t have the energy to steal another ship. It was simply beyond her.
The same sort of thoughts were crossing Stu’s mind as well. The idea of getting on another boat had a strange visceral effect on him. He could feel his cowardice swell in his gut like a black cancerous flower blooming. It was an embarrassing sensation and that alone might have prodded him toward siding with Mike, but there was another, far more logical reason to take the boat. He had already made the very short, two-mile trip to Bodega Bay and back, and it had left him drained and lethargic. He needed a nap, a long one.
“We’re not ready for any sort of journey,” he told them, his voice a rasping whisper. “I don’t think I could walk more than a few miles today.”
“That’s why we need the boat!” Mike said, butting in.
Stu nodded. “And that’s why we need the boat. We can’t stay here. We can’t risk being seen by those people.”
Wearing matching looks, they both waited for Jenn to agree. They wouldn’t do anything without her and she couldn’t do anything because her fear of the ocean overrode their version of logic—her version of logic said: Keep away from the sea at all costs, it’s trying to kill you.
That was the truest thing she had ever thought, but Stu was also right. They couldn’t stay and she was too weak to go.
Would it be different on a boat? Their energy levels would be even lower. The cold would sap them and leave them vulnerable, and with the storm still going strong, being out on the water was too dangerous. It seemed as though they couldn’t go and they couldn’t stay—could they fight? Was trudging to town and killing these Corsairs the answer?
The burning logs in the fireplace took that moment to collapse on themselves—a sure sign in Jenn’s eyes. They weren’t going to fight, which left fleeing by foot or by boat. She stood, went to the window and pulled back the curtain. Everything about this simple act was painful.
As she stared out, the wind howled under the eaves of the houses. The wind was a sign in itself. “We can’t leave with the weather like this, not by boat at least.”
“But the storm is the perfect cover,” Mike insisted. “We could get in close and be gone before anyone has a clue.” With growing strength, he turned to Stu. “Did they have a guard?”
&nb
sp; Stu shook his head. “I didn’t see one, though there could have been someone in the boat itself. Remember how it was back at Grays Harbor?” There was someone asleep in every boat, which had come as quite a surprise.
Mike looked ready to discount a lone guard, who was likely armed with a much better gun than their pistol, as hardly even a speed bump on their road to escape. When it came to boats, he was eternally optimistic.
Jenn held up a single finger to keep him from white-washing away the very obvious problems with stealing the boat. Jillybean had called her a queen. The truth was, however that she was only a fifteen-year-old girl who looked and felt like a sewer rat that had been pelted with stones to within an inch of her life. The only queenly thing about Jenn was the knowledge that for a few brief days she had been a true queen. She had worn the mantle, she had made decisions when others wouldn’t and although she felt as though she had failed, she had not backed down.
All of which had changed something about her. That one finger silenced Mike. “We’ll wait until dark,” she said, speaking as if her words carried so much more weight than Mike’s and Stu’s. “If the wind is calmer, we’ll take the boat. If not, we’ll go on foot. We’ll let the signs guide us. They haven’t let me down yet.”
Chapter 10
Stu opened his mouth to object. He had heard the commanding, royal tone in her voice and he didn’t like it. He hadn’t liked it when Jillybean had pronounced herself queen. It hadn’t been right, and it seemed that so much of what had gone wrong in the past week could be laid at the feet of that choice.
She could have made herself president or prime minister and could have given herself the same dictatorial powers. The difference in his eyes was that a president or a prime minister could not have arbitrarily ordered the three of them to their deaths.
Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned Page 9
