Just then, Eve was thinking that slitting Kay’s throat with the jagged piece of metal she had stashed under the seat on the bus, was a good idea. An image of blood spraying in a greasy red geyser played on the dark screen in her mind and sent a shiver down Jillybean’s back. To combat the hateful thoughts bubbling up from the blackness inside of her, Jillybean turned her mind to the problem of figuring out the sort of math needed to count so many monsters without actually touching each on their rotted heads and saying: one, two, three...
Her formal education with math only went so far as adding and subtracting simple terms and yet she knew there were greater and more complicated maths yet to be discovered. She had heard of multiplication and division but didn’t quite understand their meaning beyond the facts that multiplication meant to make more of a number and the division meant to cut a number up into pieces.
But why would anyone want to do that?
She shrugged and watched the monsters. The road up into the mountains was narrow and only so many could go side by side. Sometimes it was twenty, sometimes it was twenty-two, and sometimes it was twenty-three. In a blink, she bridged five years of mathematics and hit upon the concept of averages. Next she noticed that the rows would pass a skinny pine, which had grown up out of a fissure of rock, at intervals of about one every three seconds.
The idea of rate over time was playing on her conscious when one of the king’s brothers said: “I still don’t see why we need her. She’s done nothing at all so far.”
“Except try to escape,” another put in. There were twelve men comprising the king’s inner circle; eight relatives of which six were brothers. They all wore their beards thick and long. Some kept them under control with heavy rubber bands, while some let them run wild and loose.
Menis had his forked, which, along with the nasty look in his eyes, gave him the air of a demon. Even though Jillybean had risked her life to save his, she kept well away from him when she could. He acted as though she was a reminder of Neil, whom Menis hated with a passion. She was also a reminder of Deanna, whom Menis acted crazy over whenever she was mentioned.
“She’s done as much as you, Baldwin,” the king said to the first complainer. “So far all you’ve done is brown your nose with my ass. I need more than yes men around me. It’s one of the reasons that I want her. She is not a yes man. Isn’t that right, Jillybean?”
Tell him to fuck off, Eve said. Tell him that you’ll stick a knife in his eye if he doesn’t let us go.
Jillybean didn’t react to the voice that sounded as though it was being spoken just over her right shoulder. The voice meant she was ‘crazy.’ She knew that now and she didn’t like how the king’s men would make fun of her when she allowed the crazy to show.
“I don’t know what a yes-man is,” Jillybean admitted. “But if I had to guess, judging from your friends, it’s people who copy you and agree with you even if you say dumb stuff.”
For the most part, the men of the Azael glowered. The king, on the other hand, laughed loud enough to turn the heads of the distant monsters.
Tell him to stop his fucking laughing, Eve hissed. He sounds like a mule.
Jillybean hated the cursing nearly as much as the voice itself. She hated the idea that such talk could come from somewhere inside of her and she wondered if it meant that there was a cancer in her. When she pictured cancer, it was as an evil green blob that sprouted tentacles that had suckers on them. Each of the suckers ate you, slowly.
She sure felt thin, thinner than she ought to be.
“I haven’t copied shit,” Paulus, the king’s youngest brother said. “The rest of you brought a few lousy stiffs and a few hundred horsemen and Menis brought a little, fucking girl. I brought God’s thunder.” He lifted his chin to the line of trucks at the very back of the fleet. Each was towing a 155mm howitzer behind it. “Nothing they have will be able stand up those beauties.”
“Wrong,” Duke Menis said. “They have artillery, too and they’ll be manned by real soldiers.”
Paulus waved a hand. “Bah! They have 105s. They don’t have nearly the range. We’ll be able to stand off and shred them up and they won’t be able to hit back. And once their artillery is gone, we’ll be able destroy their walls and their buildings and everything else we want.”
Menis glared at his younger brother and when Jillybean was dismissed, he grabbed her and hissed in her ear: “You had better come through when the shit hits the fan.”
Jillybean had no clue what ‘coming through’ entailed, especially as the force of monsters, and artillery, and the thousands of soldiers, looked fully capable of destroying anyone. No group she had ever seen would’ve been able to stand up against such power. Not the people of New Eden, not Yuri and his hodge-podge of boats, not the River King and not any of the different groups in Philadelphia, either.
She was altogether superfluous. Everyone thought so. All except Kay, who constantly nagged Jillybean to come up with a ‘plan’ to ‘win.’ But that was not how Jillybean’s mind operated. She needed to see the barriers impeding them in order to overcome them and so far the only thing in their way were the steep mountains.
For two days, the horsemen of the Azael drove the monsters ahead of them. They went at it day and night, working in shifts, constantly pressing forward. The army of men followed after, trudging along in uneven lines with sweat pouring down their faces despite the slowly cooling air. They stopped frequently and took long smoke breaks and even longer naps.
They weren’t in a hurry. In fact, they were amazingly relaxed for an army marching to war. They didn’t think that they would do much hard fighting, figuring that the monsters would do their dirty work for them. The beasts would go first; they’d tear down the walls and overrun the valley. The king’s enemies would be stuck with the options of fleeing for their lives or seeking refuge in this building or that.
If anyone was still alive once the monsters were rounded up, they’d be easily crushed. And this left Jillybean in a dilemma. She was being pressured to be helpful, but the Azael already seemed irresistible.
The next day, the human half of the army came to a stop as the noise of gunshots, sounding like the crackling of far off fireworks came to them. Everyone but Jillybean grew excited. They let out cheers and when Paulus unlimbered his big guns they danced and threw their hats in the air. Some even shot their pistols at the surrounding mountains.
Even Kay started grinning. She turned to Jillybean and hissed: “You can do it, Jillybean. You can save us.”
“How?” Jillybean wondered. She tried to back away from the woman as well as the very idea, but the handcuffs wouldn’t let her. “They don’t even need my help.”
With manic strength, Kay pulled her in close and loomed over her, leering down in a strange and scary manner. “Of course they need your help. Those are just zombies. Zombies, Jillybean. Do you think fucking zombies will be enough? Think about it. You’re supposed to be smart. So use that fat brain and think about Captain Grey. Could a zombie kill him? No! And how many men just like Captain Grey do they have over there? A thousand or more, right?”
She dragged Jillybean forward and stood staring at the Azael, who were still whooping it up. “Those morons can’t win without us, Jillybean. I mean that. Because, think about it, if they do, what will happen to me…to us? They won’t need us, Jillybean, and if they don’t need us…”
Kay lifted her and Jillybean’s arm to point at the bus where the women who were virtual sex-slaves stared out of the squares of dirty glass with their blank eyes in their blank faces. “You know what they’ll do to us, Jillybean. They’ll turn us into one of them.”
Jillybean didn’t want to think about; however, she couldn’t help it and her fear over the idea was so great that she found herself smiling...smiling Eve’s wicked smile.
Chapter 5
Sadie Walcott
She handed over the radio to the hard-eyed staff sergeant and gave him a sweet grin that she hoped would convey some sort of a
pology.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, snatching the radio from her hands. “Don’t do that again. Now, get your ass back to the valley and turn yourself over to the CAB. I’m sure they will have a use for you.”
“You have a use for me here, I bet,” Sadie replied. “Give me your extra gun. I can shoot as good as the next person.” This wasn’t close to being true; she had gotten better; however, the soldiers were clearing the south face of the hill with an accuracy that was amazing. Calmly, they stood in a line and fired their rifles. They didn’t flinch from the masses of zombies and their aim was deadly.
The soldiers on the wall were just as good, though it wasn’t easy to tell. They were able to shoot from a position of safety and the number o stiffs packed shoulder-to-shoulder, was so great that even a poor shot couldn’t miss. Sadie held out her hand for the staff sergeant’s pistol.
“Not on your life,” he said, covering it with a hand. “Now, go. I won’t ask again. We have work to do here.”
She saw that she wasn’t going to be able to beg a weapon out of him and with the ugly moans filling the air, she didn’t think he was going to fall for a cute smile even if she could manage one. “Fine, I don’t need a gun,” she said feeling distinctly teenager-ish. With a little wave to the apple-cheeked Morganstern, she turned and began heading along the wall to the string of hills to the north.
“What the hell do you think you’re going to do?” the staff sergeant yelled after her.
“I’m smart. I’ll think of something.” She liked the uncertain look that spread over his features at this. Of course, as soon as she turned away, her own face twisted into a matching one. “What am I going to do?” she asked herself. The declaration of being “smart” hadn’t been true. She didn’t think of herself as stupid, but smart? No, she didn’t think she was close to smart. “Something will come to me, I’m sure.”
As she climbed the hill, nothing did.
Her breath came sharp in her chest as she struggled from tree to tree. Behind her the shooting went on without let up and, other than feeding the growing fear blooming in her chest, the gunfire became nothing save a backdrop to what felt like an endless climb.
Winded, she crested the hill and, where before she had paused to catch her breath and look around, now she plunged down, again going from tree to tree, each catching her as gravity sucked her downward toward where the moans grew in volume.
Two hundred feet down the slope, she saw what had been the silver-tipped waters of the Big Thompson River. It was no longer silver-tipped; it was choked grey with zombies. The numbers of horrid, diseased bodies was staggering and seemingly endless. Her stomach rolled unpleasantly and she began to feel the butterflies in her chest start to swirl.
She stood over ten thousand zombies, weaponless and a little witless. She had no idea what to do.
Running away was her best plan and she felt the strongest urge to fly from there. Yet, she couldn’t. The zombies had to be stopped before they poured out into the valley...and besides, she’d feel awfully foolish going back to the staff sergeant having done nothing.
“If only Jillybean were here,” Sadie whispered. “She’d figure out…she’d figure out...what?” Sadie was trying to goad her mind into a Jillybean-esque plan, only she didn’t know what Jillybean would do and she lacked the imagination to come up with a cool idea to stop the beasts. “An avalanche would stop them,” she said. Unfortunately, the hill was heavily wooded and altogether stable. “A flash flood might do it.” She looked up and saw the pretty blue sky was just as empty as her head.
She ground her teeth in frustration. “The only thing I can do is drop some rocks on them.” It was pitiful as far as plans went.
Feeling somewhat useless and with her fear growing, she went further down the steep hill, collecting the largest stones she could carry until the sloping hill cut away into a sharp drop of about fifteen feet.
She was standing high above the rotting beasts and tried to tell herself that other than losing her footing and falling and being eaten alive, there wasn’t much for her to fear. “It’s too steep for the zombies,” she said with a nervous laugh. She was sure it was; the river bank was carved out of granite; it was practically a straight vertical wall, and covered in damp moss—it was unclimbable, her rational side knew it, but there was just so many of them. It was hard to think past all those thousands of zombies.
Sixty feet to her left, the lead wave of beasts was already past her, slowly chugging up-river toward Estes Park, to her right they were dense as flies and seemed to go on infinitely.
It wasn’t long before she was spotted and a great moan almost like a collective bellow erupted. As though they were sharing one rather dull mind, every zombie in sight turned and splashed through the thigh-high water, angling their way toward her. She stepped back and grabbed a tree, both to keep her legs from buckling and to keep her feet from flying.
“Ok, I guess I should’ve expected that,” she said, as the beasts began piling over themselves to get at her. It was a second before she realized that by standing there she was in fact keeping them from progressing on to the valley. “This is good. This is like a plan without the thinking.” It was her kind of plan...except for the fact that she was basically bait, like a worm on a hook dangling over countless piranha.
The only thing missing from this “plan of opportunity” was that the lead elements hadn’t seen her and were still slogging on toward the valley. “Hey!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Hey, you morons! Dinner is this way.” This got their attention and most turned back, but not all.
The zombies liked her yelling. They grew excited at being so close to an easy meal and were moaning with a sickening animation that drowned her out.
She tried clapping two stones together but it did almost nothing to attract any more of them to her and a vanguard of a thousand or so zombies kept going up river. “But at least I have you, my loyal fans,” she said. The main body, probably ten thousand strong was now pressing in at the base of Sadie’s hill.
Those directly below her clawed at the rocky cliff and stared hungrily up at her. The ones behind, mindlessly clawed at the ones in front, first dragging down one, then another, and so on. Those that fell were crushed by the mass of bodies and drowned.
At first, Sadie grinned at this since they were killing each other, in essence doing her job for her. Her grin faded when she realized that with each body pulled down, the grasping claws came closer to her. “Pyramiding,” she said, remembering the word used by one of the soldiers at the wall. She was watching the word as it was put into action, once more. Already a mound of the dead was building below her as the zombies began using the corpses of their brothers to get at her.
The cliff, steep and slick as it was, wasn’t a place of safety.
“It’ll be just a few more minutes,” she told herself. “The army will get here really, really soon.” The zombies were halfway up the wall when she remembered the rocks in her hands. Feeling stupid, she threw them down at the mass of rotting bodies struggling to get at her. She used all her strength and when they struck, they made a very satisfying sound; sort of a cross between a squish and a splat.
“Huh,” she said, reaching for more rocks, her grin returning. The hill was full of rocks, it was practically composed of little more than rock and root and trunk. Right away she went for the bigger rocks and, hefting them as high as she could, she flung them down.
It was fun, at least for the first twenty stones or so. When she managed to crush a skull, which occurred with at least half her throws, she would cry: “Score!” Or she would say: “Down goes Charlie.” She didn’t know where in her young mind that saying had sprung from; she just thought it was appropriate.
The fun started wearing off some time after that twentieth stone. Her cries of Score and Down goes Charlie were replaced by the sound of her breath, ragged in her throat. Bending, hefting and chucking fifteen pound rocks became a chore. But at least it wasn’t an endless one.
With each crushed head, the pyramid below her grew and the zombies came closer and closer.
Further downstream, the backlog of zombies was causing them to overflow the lower banks and now hundreds were on “her” hill, fighting the sharp slant to get at her. Still, she was relatively safe and as long as she was, she decided she would continue to pull up the heavy rocks and throw them down.
Closer they came. Closer. Long minutes went by and still the beasts did everything they could to get at her. They were soon piled as high as the cliff and were crawling up the steep hill. She threw rock after rock, slowly backing away and she kept telling herself she wasn’t afraid; however, she breathed a sigh of relief when she heard the sound of gunfire from the west. The reinforcements had finally come! All she had to do was hold on for a few more minutes and she would be safe and everything would be just peachy.
It took twelve minutes before the vanguard of zombies was destroyed and she could see the first of Captain Grey’s men creeping downriver in a long line. By then the mound of bodies had grown to overflow a hundred feet of the bank and Sadie had backed well up the hill and was surrounded on three sides.
She was hurling the stones desperately now, as fast as she could. Her arms had grown too weak to pick up the bigger rocks and her legs shook from the strain of holding her upright on the slope. Sweat lathered her face and she was gasping and reeling, and she wanted to run so badly. Every natural part of her wanted to bunny right out of there before any of the creatures got behind her and cut off her escape.
Then came the snap and crackle of rifle fire. It was close. A squad of soldiers suddenly appeared out of the brush and laid down a withering barrage of lead, exploding heads and sending blood flying. Sadie let the last stone fall and staggered eagerly toward them. But then one turned a gun in her direction, she put up her hands. “Wait, I’m…human.”
He fired anyway and she had only the strength to cringe. The bullet singed a path through the air, passing unsettlingly close to her left ear. “What the...”
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