His hands began to slip and Jenn grabbed him, matching her paltry strength against the zombie’s. She leaned back and heaved with all her might; the branch bit into her one hand while the coat was slowly pulled from her other hand. She screamed in frustration as her hands grew weaker and weaker. At the end, she crushed her eyelids down tight, not wanting to see what was going to happen.
In the midst of her scream, there was a tearing sound that she feared was Mike’s head being torn from his shoulders, but when she opened her eyes she saw that his previously torn hood had ripped right off.
The zombie stuffed the hood into its mouth, while Mike laid across the branch, gagging and gulping in air. Jenn knew that swimming was now out of the question for him. She pulled him to her end of the branch and his weight nearly sent her under—as long as she held him, swimming would be out of the question for her as well.
They were barely managing to stay afloat when the monster began thrashing the water again, trying to finish them off. All Jenn could do was fend him off with the branch and kick madly to stay afloat.
“You’re almost there,” Stu said, from behind her. She glanced back and saw that the zombie was moving all three of them steadily closer to the pipe. A crazy laugh burst from her and she found the energy to kick harder.
They were very close when the zombie broke the branch in half with one of its flailing swings. “Mike! Reach for the stick!” she urged, pushing him towards Stu. “Come on, get it!” He seemed more dead than alive but still managed to find the end of the stick and hold on as Stu pulled him in. “Get him in the pipe,” Jenn ordered, as she swam for shore. Without Mike’s weight she suddenly felt free and light as a feather.
She got to shore so quickly that she was in time to help hoist Mike into the pipe. Like an earthworm looking for a place to hide from the sun, he moved sluggishly inside it. The zombie was almost to shore by then. Stu picked her up next and his adrenaline must have been pumping like mad because he practically threw her inside. She immediately started shoving Mike further on, hissing for him to hurry.
Stu waited until the last second to get inside with them. He didn’t like the idea of all three of them climbing into a pipe that might not lead anywhere. With the zombie struggling along the muddy bottom of the pond, Stu crawled inside the pipe and wiggled on his stomach until he collided with Jenn’s feet.
Behind him the zombie stuck its head inside the opening and breathed a plume of horror over them. The ghastly stench had Stu choking and pushing at Jenn’s feet. “Go. Move. Please.” She somehow got Mike slithering up the pipe and just in time. The zombie withdrew its head and stuck an outrageously long arm into the pipe and began to paw and scrape about, searching for Stu’s wet boots.
Even with pulling in his legs as far as he could, it was close. When the zombie failed to catch hold of him, it tried to stick both its arm and head inside. Grey flesh peeled off its shoulder in one long skein like someone was peeling an apple. The top of its scalp was sheared right off and black blood welled all around the edge of the opening. And still it kept coming, forcing its bulk into the small opening.
“Hurry, Mike. We have a Winnie the Pooh situation down here.”
“Winnie the what?” Mike looked back and all he saw was the pale blur of Jenn’s face surrounded by pure darkness. “What’s that mean?”
Jenn had the same question but when she cranked her head back, she couldn’t see anything. The dark was sinister and felt unnervingly heavy, as if the weight of the world was bearing down on the pipe, looking to crush it and bury them alive. She turned her head back so quickly that she thumped her temple on the concrete. It was worth the pain to see the trickle of light slipping past Mike.
“Get going,” she begged.
Mike began to inch along the pipe again. Pain radiated out of his chest and every movement made it worse, but he could hear the fear in her voice. “It’ll be okay, Jenn. We’ll be fine when we get out. I can see the opening. It’s only another fifty feet.”
His reassurances helped, and he kept them up even as the bars over the far end of the tunnel began to firm up in his vision. They’re old and rusty, he told himself. They’ll break. Or its part of a gate and its open. He was wrong on all accounts. The bars were thick and strong, and set only inches apart. In vain, he gave them a shake.
“What’s wrong?” Jenn asked, straining to look past Mike. He took up most of the pipe, but when he moved his head to the side she could see the tops of the bars. “Oh no,” she breathed.
“Oh yes,” a hissing voice, laughed. It was Gunner. He appeared on the other side of the bars. She could just make out his angry dark eyes and part of his burned scalp. “Looks like you’ve got yourself trapped. I could help, but…”
“But what?” Mike said. He meant for it to come out as a tough growl; however, he still couldn’t take more than wheezing sips of air.
Gunner ran a dirty finger along the bars. “But I don’t want to. Not for free at least. I saved you guys and what thanks do I get? You run off the first chance you get. Not very Christian of you. No, if you want me to save you, you’ll have to tell me your story and you’re going to start by telling me everything you know about Jillybean.”
Chapter 33
“Jillybean?” Mike asked, feigning ignorance. “Th-that’s an odd name.”
His transparent lie earned him a snide laugh from Gunner. “It sure is. You know what’s more odd? I have it on good authority that you three were traveling with her. You snuck out of Bainbridge weeks ago. It’s odd you didn’t remember that.”
“Oh, her. Her name was Jillian. That’s what she liked to be called.”
“Uh-huh,” Gunner replied, dryly. “Let’s talk about her then. Where did you go? What did you do and where is she now?”
Before Mike could say a word, Stu’s voice rolled up from the tunnel like the voice of an angry god. “Don’t tell him a thing!”
Mike pointed behind him. “He is the leader, so maybe we’ll tell you what you want to know, if you get us out of here. I think that’s a good compromise. What do you say?”
Gunner reached up under the cloth and scratched his face with his good hand. “I’ll have to think on it for a while. I’ll come back in an hour and let you know.” He stood and stretched his deformed body, gave Mike a wink and disappeared.
After a few seconds, Mike whispered Gunner’s name without receiving an answer. “He’ll be back,” he assured Jenn. “Or maybe the zombie will give up and go away.” To make that a possibility, they all quieted down. Jenn fought her new found claustrophobia, which had spiked when Gunner left. At first, she concentrated on the light sneaking past Mike. She made it her whole focus, which didn’t do a damned thing. After ten minutes, it still felt like the world was crushing down on her.
It even felt like the pipe was shrinking, closing in around her. This grew worse as a shriek built up inside of her. She tried counting to take her mind off the fact she was buried alive. Then she tried tracing her father’s face on the pipe above her. That stopped when a piece of the cement broke off. To keep from screaming, she bit down on her tongue.
It was Mike who saved her from going mad. She began to worry over him far more than herself as his breathing did not improve over the miserable course of the long hour. He wheezed constantly no matter which of the many positions he tried to get comfortable with. Nothing could make the bare cement comfortable. Worse than the hardness of the cement was the cold that emanated up from the pipe. All three were soaking wet and although it was a forty-eight degree day, inside the dark tube it was ten degrees cooler.
They were all shivering by the time Gunner came back and lounged by the opening of the pipe, wrapped in his ugly crow feather and fur cape. “I’ve come to a decision,” he told them without bothering to moderate the volume of his voice. The beast let out a fearful roar, which he ignored. “Here’s my deal: I’m going to let you tell me everything I want to hear and only then will I let you out. You can either tell me now or if you’re fe
eling exceptionally tough I can come back in two hours. By then, it’ll be downright chilly. Don’t you worry about me I have a fire going in my place. I’ll be fine.”
More than anything, Mike wanted to give in. Instead, he lowered his head and closed his eyes. Jenn was even more desperate, but also said nothing, less out of loyalty to Jillybean and more because she cared about Stu and knew he still loved her. If anyone was going to say anything, it would be only if he allowed it.
“Go ahead, Mike,” the Hillman said. Gunner wasn’t bluffing. He would wait exactly two more hours and Stu was afraid what shape they would be in then. He’d heard Mike’s wheezing and Jenn’s teeth chattering. His own hands were painfully numb, and his feet were like blocks of wood. After two hours everything would be far worse. Mike would likely add a phlegmy cough to his wheeze and Jenn would be borderline hypothermic. Stu knew he would give in then, for their sakes, which, in the end, would make their suffering pointless.
Mike began his story with the Calypso and the rescue in the San Francisco Bay of Remy and Jeff Battaglia, which led to Aaron Altman losing an arm and William Trafny getting shot in Sacramento. He talked about Jenn’s visions and how she slew the giant zombie, Frankenstein that everyone had been deathly afraid of for years.
Gunner kept saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, then what?” He seemed to want Mike to hurry, so Mike spoke quickly, hitting the highlights: The stormy trip north, the crazy people of Cathlamet who shot Stu, meeting Jillybean and how Neil Martin basically hijacked the Calypso.
Gunner interrupted. “Tell me about this Neil. Everything about him.”
“He’s small,” Mike began and then went on to tell Gunner the little he knew about the man. This led to questions about Deanna and then to Emily. The answer elicited a rumbling sound from Gunner that was as close to an evil purr that Mike had ever heard.
“Did the girl mention any hobbies?” Gunner asked. “Fishing or boating, or anything like that?”
Jenn answered quickly, her voice rising enough to aggravate the zombie. “No! She’s too young to leave the island, you sick…”
Stu squeezed her ankle hard enough to make her wince and to bring her to her senses. He didn’t want to anger Gunner and risk being trapped in the pipe forever.
“She didn’t mention anything,” Mike said, hurriedly. “Sorry. Where was I? Oh, we had lost the Calypso…” He went on, describing how they stole the Saber and the chase that followed. After that came the first battle with the Corsairs, which he quickly blurred with Jillybean becoming queen of the Sacramentans. He was eagerly telling about the Floating Fortress when Gunner pulled him back.
“Did you call her the ‘Mad’ Queen? Forget the damned boats for a moment and tell me about that.”
Mike explained about her being crazy. He was painfully truthful which made it all the worse. She came across sounding more evil than anything else and he finished up by saying, “But she’s not all bad.”
“No one ever is,” Gunner replied, softly, with what Mike took to be regret in his voice. “Go on, but if you mention the different types sails any of these boats had or their damned rigging one more time, I’m going to leave you here until dark.” Mike did his best, though he thought his story suffered especially when he wasn’t able to describe the final battle aboard the Saber and how he had tacked counter to the other boats, holding the edges of his flaming mainsail in his bare hands.
When he finished, Gunner sat quietly for a long time, gazing westward towards Grays Harbor and the lair of the Black Captain. Finally, Mike asked in a weak voice, “Are you going to let us out? I told you everything.”
“Hmm? Let you out? That’s a tough question.”
Mike didn’t see what was so tough about it and wanted to remind Gunner of his promise. He didn’t, however. He did his best to keep a friendly, neutral look on his face, knowing that promises meant different things to different people, especially to Corsairs. Although Gunner claimed not to be one, he was still clearly in league with them.
Five achingly long minutes passed before Gunner made his decision: “Yes, I think I will let you out on the condition that you three will do exactly what I say, when I say it. If you don’t, I will leave you to fend for yourselves, which means you will die. Agreed?”
“Of course, of course,” Mike said, hoping he didn’t sound too relieved. “We can do that. Whatever you say.”
Gunner smirked and then disappeared from view. Mike assumed that he had a hacksaw or something to cut the bars. Gunner had a simpler way out. He killed the zombie blocking the tunnel by driving his knife into its back and through its heart.
Having a ruptured heart only seemed to annoy the monster. With a scream of rage that partially deafened Stu, it yanked its huge body out of the pipe and promptly fell back into the pond, where it splashed about like an enormous toddler. Gunner looked to be in no hurry to kill the thing. He patiently waited for it to get itself turned around and then, rather casually, used the branch Jenn had tossed aside to puncture its one remaining eye. The zombie was harmless after that. It splashed and moaned, moving off to the left. Gunner didn’t give it a second glance as he watched Stu worm his way out of the pipe.
They had to back out with undignified wiggles, and frozen as they were, they came out feeling prematurely aged. Stu was the oldest of the three at twenty-one, but his joints ached like that of a seventy-year-old who’d spent the night on a friend’s couch. Because of his broken ribs, Mike was even worse off and Gunner had to reach into the pipe and drag him out by the foot.
“You guys look like crap,” Gunner blurted out. “Lucky for you, I don’t judge people on their looks. Now, stay close and keep quiet.”
Keeping quiet wasn’t easy. They were exhausted, wet and shivering. Jenn walked hunched over like a crone and stumbled over everything in her path. Mike walked, holding his arms in close as if he were hugging himself; his ribs were so sore he couldn’t scratch his nose without wincing.
After ten minutes of misery, Mike asked, “Where’s this house you mentioned? Remember, you said you had a cozy fire going?”
“Oh, right. That was more of what I like to call an inducement.”
“You mean a lie,” Stu snarled.
Gunner turned on him and the two matched hard stares for a few seconds until Gunner shrugged and said, “No, it was an inducement. In case you forgot, it was you who put yourselves in that pipe. I was just trying to get you out. My fee for the service was information, which I knew you’d give me eventually. I was just trying to save you unnecessary pain and discomfort. You should be thanking me.”
Stu dropped his eyes and mumbled, “You’re right, thanks.”
“Yeah, I am right. Even if there was a house or cabin within miles of us, a fire would be stupid. You have enemies nearby, or have you forgotten?”
They had all forgotten the Corsair who had sicced the zombie on them in the first place. “I remember,” Stu said, leaving off the word “now” which would have been more accurate.
“Sure,” was all Gunner said, before he turned and began marching them at a torrid pace. He led them through the hills, always keeping to the lower slopes when he could and when they had to cross any peaks, he found places where the slopes were tree-covered, and even then, he had them creep from shadow to shadow. Although they saw many zombies foraging for food, only once did one of them see the group.
It had been squatting behind the trunk of an old hoary elm, eating the remains of a crow. When it saw them it roared, spewing out a bizarre cloud of black feathers. The zombie was such an unusual sight that even Gunner was caught flatfooted as it charged.
Stu ducked around a tree with Mike following after. Jenn was about to go next, when Gunner grabbed her. “Cause a distraction,” he ordered her and then basically flung her toward the zombie.
“A distraction?” she cried. He was already disappearing into the forest. The only distraction Jenn could think of was to run away as fast as she could. She sprinted away like a deer and, because of his love for
her and his foolish notions of heroism, Mike ran, too.
In this case, heroism equaled being zombie bait. He tried to keep up, but couldn’t with his broken ribs, and very quickly, he replaced Jenn as the distraction. At six and a half feet, it was one of the smaller zombies they had seen, and it was missing a hand. Still, it had all the ferocious rage of its bigger brothers and raced after Mike, its black eyes staring with greedy hunger at the young man. It didn’t see Gunner leap out from behind a tree with his axe swinging like a scythe.
The razor-sharp blade took off the zombie’s leg at the knee and the beast went rolling and sprawling, stopping at Mike’s feet. Mike had stumbled when Gunner appeared and was so stunned by the suddenness of the attack that he didn’t back up quickly enough. Heedless of its missing leg and the jets of black blood shooting from its stump, the beast grabbed Mike’s ankle. Gunner calmly chopped the thing’s arm off at the elbow.
“Let’s go,” Gunner growled, and began marching again.
The hand was still clinging to his ankle even without a body attached when Mike kicked it off and hurried after the others.
As before, Gunner pushed them to their limit and they were stumbling from exhaustion when they finally found a small community tucked away in the hills. Gunner left them hiding in the woods while he scouted to make sure the village was deserted.
He wasn’t gone long. “Let’s get that fire going that I promised you,” he said, grinning behind his scarf. They didn’t know if he was serious or not, but not only did he get the fire going, he also fed them and fetched water. As they ate he watched them, especially Jenn. “So, you are a queen?” he asked, after the silence became tense. “Should I bow?”
Stu glared and Mike began to get as huffy as his broken ribs would allow, which amounted to only strident breathing. “Relax,” Gunner said, laughing at them. “I was just joking. It is interesting that you were a queen even for a little while. I wonder what the Black Captain would think about that? It’s my guess that he probably doesn’t know…yet.” This wiped the glare off of Stu’s face and Mike turned even paler than he had been. Gunner chuckled again and then stood to stretch his twisted body. “I’ve got work to do. Don’t stay up too late.”
Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned Page 32
