Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned

by Meredith, Peter

  Just as good was the possibility of not just destroying the last of the Black Captain’s fleet, but also killing the Black Captain himself. He was here. She felt it on a gut level as well as a logical one. After so many debacles, there was no way he would let another subordinate command the last of his ships.

  No, he was here and he would stake everything on a victory. He would take chances he wouldn’t normally take, and she would crush him.

  First, she had to escape.

  “Leney, take us in,” she said, pointing at another dark squall that hovered just over the tips of the waves to their southeast.

  Before going in, Jillybean had the next smoker lit. “Cut it,” she ordered as the cold, penetrating rain pelted her. This time she didn’t alter course, even though Leney and Sticky Jim waited on pins and needles for her to. As she had guessed they would, the Corsairs slowed before going into the cloud; some turned west, others east and some eased into the darkness.

  It wasn’t half as big as the last cloud, yet the Hell Quake’s lead had grown even greater and it wasn’t long before the Black Captain began recalling his ships, perhaps in fear of a trap. He was right to fear it. If she had been in the position to spring one, Jillybean would have been able to rip a third of his fleet to shreds.

  “Get us home, Leney. We need to prepare for our guests.”

  Chapter 15

  Emily’s mind wasn’t so much as racing as it was spinning in circles. Somehow, her sweet and somewhat dainty Uncle Neil had become unbelievably strong. And where before he would limp when it rained and complained about his back when she wanted to play soccer with him, he was now twisted around her like a vine or the tentacle of a giant squid from some ‘50s B-movie.

  “Do you want me to bite you?” He hissed his hot, diseased breath directly into her ear. “I told you to be good and did you listen? Nooooo. And do you know what happens to kids who do not listen? They get punished.”

  “I-I-I’ll be good,” she whimpered. “Just don’t, please.”

  He squeezed her harder, getting a better grip with his legs. “Don’t what? Bite you? Hmmm, I don’t know. I’ve never seen a neck so tasty. Not since Sarah. She had a beautiful neck. Did I ever tell you that? I used to love to kiss it.”

  Neil bent and kissed Emily’s neck and then breathed her in deeply, running his scarred nose along the nape. She stiffened, and Neil’s anger came back more viciously than ever. He squeezed so hard her back popped and her ribs were crushed into her lungs. “What? Do you think you’re better than me? Or better than Sarah? That’s it, isn’t it? You think you’re better than her. You think you’re all that because of who your mom is. She’s only a politician and who do you think started all of this? Politicians, that’s who!”

  Emily began to shake. She felt it first deep in her chest; soon it radiated outward into her limbs and jaw. Neil was going to bite her and then she would be infected too, if he didn’t kill her that is. He was going crazy from the zombie virus and she had the feeling if he saw or tasted blood there’d be no coming back. In this situation, she didn’t ask what Jillybean would do. The Jillybean she knew had always been quirky to the point of being eccentric, and despite the rumors had never been violent, at least around Emily.

  And Emily didn’t ask herself what her mother would do in the situation. Her mother’s adventuring days were long past. Neil was right about one thing, Deanna had become a politician, skilled in the art of making it seem as if she were intently interested in each person she met.

  No, instinctively she wondered what her father would do. To Emily, he had become the fabled Captain James Grey. Everyone had sung his praises for so long she assumed that there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. He had been the strongest, the fastest, the most noble, etc. etc. She sometimes wondered how such a man could be killed even when facing two-hundred to one odds.

  A running theme throughout the many stories she had heard concerning her father, was that he always seemed to keep his cool no matter what terrible things were happening around him, and Emily had always hoped she had inherited that trait as well. This was her first test and the courage gene seemed to have deserted her. She felt a terrified scream building inside of her that was only held back by the fact she couldn’t breathe. If he released his hold, it would come exploding out of her.

  He did the opposite.

  His legs were clamped so tightly that her face went from pink to red. “C-Can’t…breathe,” she said in a high, strangled whisper. “C-Can’t…”

  “What?” he demanded. “What are you jabbering on about? Are you going to pretend your mom isn’t a politician?”

  She could only shake her head. Her thick, blonde ponytail swatted him in the face, causing him to lean back and turn his head. This gave her enough room to take a partial breath. As fast as she could she sucked in enough air to spit out: “Y-you t-told me it was Yuri Petrovich…” another thin breath, “who started this…and that he was a Russian scientist, not a politician at all.”

  “Yuri!” Neil raged, this time accidentally squeezing the air out of her worse than before in his anger. “I hate that bastard! If he was here, I’d tear his head off and drink his blood straight…”

  In his fury, he had forgotten Emily. His legs relaxed their grip for just a second; it was enough for a strong girl like Emily to rip herself from his grip. She backed away from him, panting and holding her ribs. Neil looked confused.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, his face livid with outrage. “We have to go get Yuri and we have to kill him. You and me, Emily. We can do it together. It’ll be just like when Jillybean was little. We’ll set the world on fire!”

  “I don’t want to set the world on fire, Uncle Neil. Neither do you. It’s just the fever talking. Do you want some more medicine or some water?”

  He stared at her as if trying to figure out what she was talking about. “Water? I said fire? Like the ferry boats, remember? I thought I was a goner just like Ram. Did I tell you how he…oh, wait. I am just like Ram. I’m going to turn into one of them just like he did.” With a tired sigh, he sat back, his chains clinking. “Maybe I can use some water. My head is killing me.”

  Emily backed out of the room. Once in the hallway, she ran for the front door and thought she was going to dash out to freedom; however, the door was chained shut from the outside—she was locked in! With not just one monster but five or six of them. Panic had her by the throat and she found that once more she could barely breathe.

  She wanted to hammer on the door and scream for her mother, only she knew that would attract the dead. It was common knowledge among the younger kids that the dead could smell fear and it made them stronger than ever.

  Rather than screaming, Emily hid in a mostly empty classroom. The only item in it was an unwieldy machine set in a metal rectangular box. Partially filling the box was a soft slime of algae. Perhaps possessed by some lingering spirit of Jillybean’s curiosity, Emily touched the slime.

  “Gah,” she cried, pulling her hand back. It had been beyond greasy and it moved like a jellyfish over a few feet of stagnant water. The slime was so nasty that it effectively killed her panic as well as any curiosity she had over the machine and why it had so many huge, toothy gears and gleaming pipes. It was a mystery she didn’t care trying to solve.

  Wiping her hand on the wall, she inched back out into the corridor to try to reevaluate her fears. Yes, she was afraid of the zombies, “Only they’re all locked up with big chains. If they were going to escape, they would have by now.” She decided that it was silly to be afraid of zombies when there was a killer on the loose.

  “First things first,” she said, picturing her Uncle Neil. She knew what she had to do: she had to put him out of his misery as gently as possible. “I don’t have a gun and even if I did…” She pictured herself trying to shoot Neil and she felt the blood drain from her head. Guns were not for her. They were messy, imprecise tools, something Jillybean had warned her against using when better options were available
.

  “I’ll have to OD him,” Emily decided. Jillybean had taught her to be careful concerning certain medicines, that taking too much could kill a person. Sometimes it was a slow debilitating process and sometimes it was quick and painless.

  “Like a good kind of poison,” Jillybean had said.

  Emily had only given her a strained smile at the time, but now she understood that there was a time and a place. This was one of those times. She went to a locked closet next to the principal’s office which Jillybean had turned into her personal pharmacy. It came complete with a massive book, detailing the uses and side effects of every medicine known to the people of before.

  It took so long to match the pills available to the job needed that Neil was sleeping again by the time she got back to him. He was snoring like a chainsaw and looked so peaceful that Emily decided she could wait to kill him. “When he wakes up,” she told herself. She settled down to wait. It was a long wait and the lateness of the evening was too much for her. Emily fell asleep across from a zombie and, strangely enough, the two were probably only ones on Bainbridge to get a good night’s sleep.

  Everyone else was on edge, wondering where the assassin would strike next.

  Deanna oversaw the burning of the zombie body before she redoubled her efforts to catch the assassin. The wall guards were all questioned, the harbormaster was brought in and even the fishermen who went out over the last two days were interrogated—Eddie Sanders was one of these.

  Joslyn Reynolds handled his interrogation. It was the middle of the night and yet she was perfectly made up, her deep brown hair washed and brushed, her grey pantsuit showing sharp lines from her iron. In front of her was a folder, half an inch thick. His name was written in red ink along the tab. He felt like throwing up.

  A folder could only mean they knew about him. For how long? Had they known from the beginning? Had he been played like a fool for all this time and now they were going to charge him with treason? It couldn’t have been simply happenstance that they had asked to talk to him in the one police station on the island.

  Joslyn smiled at him. It was a wide, easy smile and Eddie didn’t trust it one bit. His breathing began to pick up in speed and there was a seismic flutter going on in his chest. “C-Can I smoke?” he asked, trying, and failing, to smile back at her. “I-I don’t n-need one, it’s just I’m w-worked up over this whole thing. I mean a spy? Here? In, uh Bainbridge? It’s crazy, right?”

  Her brown eyes narrowed. “Spy? The worry is of an assassin, but you may be right.”

  “No. I, uh, meant like a uh, like a uh, like a uuhhhh…” His mind had gone completely blank. He had no idea what he was about to say and now he was sure his guilt was stamped squarely on his forehead.

  She looked pained as she asked, “Are you saying like James Bond? Is that the sort of spy you envisioned?”

  “Yes!” Eddie practically cried. “The-the name was almost right there, you know? Yes, James Bond. That’s the sort of guy we should be looking for. Someone slick like that could come and go in a cinch. He might even have disguises or something.” Now Eddie was on firmer ground. What he needed to do was point the eye of justice away from little Eddie Sanders who was a redheaded nobody, and onto the “spy.”

  “You know what? He probably got on the island right at sunset. You know there’s a shadowed area right by tower nine. I told, uh…” He was about to say my wife, but he didn’t want to bring her name into any of this. “Uh, McGuinness. Yeah, I told Danny, I thought it was a perfect place for someone to get on the island. But you know what? That was months ago. He might not remember. He probably doesn’t.”

  Joslyn looked troubled and that made the fluttering in Eddie’s chest come roaring back. “You seem pretty nervous there, Eddie. Try to relax. No one thinks you’ve done anything wrong. You have a new baby. A man with a baby would never do something like this. That’s what I told the Governor and she agrees.”

  She had just inadvertently called him the worst excuse for a dad in the history of the world and he let that blow right past him. There was hope in front of his eyes. “So, what am I doing here? I don’t know anything, I swear.”

  “I told her we had to cover our bases. After all, you took the Scamp out alone. McGuinness said you practically demanded to go out alone. He even said you offered him a bribe and asked for the Scamp in particular.”

  “Because it was the only boat and he said that…well, he said someone might be using it to go behind someone else’s back because it has that cabin. And he was the one who suggested a bribe. Two nines to fudge the reservation. That’s what you should be investigating. Everyone knows he’s dirty.”

  Joslyn bent over and began to scribble a note. “And what did you say to the offer? Did you turn him down?”

  Eddie swallowed convulsively. “Yes I-I did. But you know what I did do. I suggested that we try to keep those two people apart, you know, to keep them honest. For that, I suggested I could give him half a nine to use the boat. For me that wasn’t so much. You know how lucky I can get scrounging.”

  “Yes, Gina’s always talking about her ‘Lucky’ Eddie.” Joslyn began tapping her pencil up and down. “I think that’s all the questions I…Oh, wait. What did you cross the Sound for? More scavenging?” He bobbed his head like a balloon on a string. “Were you lucky?”

  His mouth came open to spill out another lie; however the truth was better. “No. I wish I had never gone.”

  Chapter 16

  Jillybean began dictating orders to her fleet in San Francisco when they were still twenty miles away—which was the very limited range of the handheld radios. The words flowed nonstop from that restless mind and there wasn’t a person who called themselves a royal subject who didn’t think this was going to be the final, crushing battle with the Corsairs.

  Oh, and they couldn’t wait.

  At one point or another, every one of the ex-Corsairs had found themselves stuck in the middle of one of Jillybean’s terrifying traps while its steel-edged jaws clamped mercilessly shut on them. They knew the dread and the hopelessness as the billowing smoke grew so thick that it shut out the daylight, and they felt the terror as explosions went off here and there all around them, like someone was playing hopscotch in a minefield. And the screams that followed became so deafening a person didn’t know if they were screaming or it was the man next to them.

  But the worst were the endless rotting corpses which began to pile up like pyramids, a foul mixture of clotting blood and runny mud seeping from beneath the piles. Sometimes the blood ran like little rivers and sometimes it pooled. A man could never tell how deep one of those steaming pools were.

  Having managed to survive the living hell that Jillybean had created, the ex-Corsairs were particularly eager to be on the dishing out side for once.

  And yet, those on deck of the Hell Quake weren’t thrilled with the orders being given out. It seemed, in their limited understanding of the situation, that Jillybean was throwing away a huge opportunity by not fortifying the Golden Gate Bridge as she had the first time they had attacked. Every one of them remembered the slow-motion nightmare as their ships ran up against the heavy ropes that had been strung from buoy to buoy across the mouth of the bay.

  Sticky Jim had been on board The Devil’s Eye when it had tried to break through. Of the twenty-one men on board, he had been the only one to make it out alive as rocks rained down like God’s revenge, killing everyone on deck in minutes. He and half a dozen others had been below, cringing as blood poured in through the many holes. At least, at first it had been blood.

  Sea water had rushed in next, drowning those who hadn’t been put out of their misery from the thrown rocks. He still walked with a limp from eight crushed toes and even days later, he woke in the night bathed in sweat.

  “She’s letting them in so she can trap ‘em in the bay,” Leney assured those who could hear his whispering. “Don’t worry about that. Once in, bam! She’ll slam the door on them. Then it’ll be the world�
�s biggest turkey shoot, boys. They won’t have anywhere to go. We’ll drive them into one of them little bays and then we’ll send in the torps.”

  The idea of blowing up a fleet sounded even better than dropping rocks on them, and they all listened with excitement for Jillybean to move their hundred ships into position for just such a stroke, but again they were disappointed. Unbelievably, she had the fleet sail out of the bay altogether. She had them skirt along the southern edge of the coast before sending them out to sea…out into the sloppy sea, where the waves were growing, the wind was running hard and the visibility was sometimes less than a hundred yards.

  Even the dullest sailor knew that their homemade torpedoes were not the most reliable to begin with and that trying to steer them through an ugly chop made them even less effective.

  To make matters worse, she pulled all the remaining men who had been left defending Alcatraz, the Floating Fortress, and even Treasure Island, and had them hurry to the barren, fire-swept hills north of the Golden Gate. The only people guarding the southern approach to the bridge was a platoon of near useless Islanders, most of whom were women armed with bells of all things.

  This had the sailors shaking their heads in complete disbelief. None of them could understand taking men from perfectly good stone, metal, and earthen fortifications, and sticking them on a ridge where there wasn’t any cover and the only way to camouflage themselves was to roll around in an ash-mud-stew.

  As the Hell Quake passed the hills, Sticky Jim looked to Leney and in a hissing, garlic-stinking whisper said, “I don’t get it. That is the one place the Black Captain would never attack. Look at them hills, Leney! Only a fool would try to slog across open ground like that.”

  Leney took a long look at what had once been the picturesque Marin Headlands. The fire Eve had lit a month before had turned it all to ash, and now the rain of the last two days had turned the ash and bare dirt into a foul slime that made the hills treacherous and had turned the low points between them into bogs that could suck a man down and hold him there, perhaps forever.