“Circle of life, right Morganstern?” When the PFC didn’t answer, Grey cracked an eye and found himself staring up at the bluest sky he had ever seen. With more of an effort, he said again: “It’s the circle of life, Morganstern. It’s ok. It’s ok to leave me right here.”
Morganstern did not answer.
Grey pushed himself over and found the young man flat on his back, staring up just as he had been. His breathing was beginning to calm already. After a minute, Grey said: “Get up. Sadie needs you”
“I can’t feel my legs,” Morganstern answered in a dreamy whisper.
After the herculean effort, it was no wonder. “I can’t either,” Grey told him. It wasn’t an exaggeration. The pain was gone, but so was the feeling in his extremities. He could see his fingers move, but the sensation didn’t register. “Come on, Morganstern, get up. She won’t be able to hold them back much longer.”
“My legs…are they…are they there. I swear it’s like they’re gone.”
“They’re there,” Grey said, forcing himself to a sitting position. The world no longer spun, it just seemed to disappear a few feet away from his focus. He was very aware of his pulse. It was quick in his ears, as fast as a rabbit’s. He understood: his heart was working overtime trying to keep up with his body’s needs by pushing the remaining blood in his system around as fast as possible. There just wasn’t a lot of blood left in him.
“Come on, Morgan…” Grey’s words stopped midsentence as he saw blood creeping in rivulets along the rocks beneath Morganstern’s back. Grey tried to get to the soldier, but lacked the strength. He made it three feet and couldn’t go on.
Just then Sadie, who was sweating so much that the mud she had daubed on her face was streaked in wavy lines, darted up the trail with bullets chasing her. Before she glanced around, she threw herself against one of the bigger rocks and switched out the magazine in her weapon for a full one. Only then did she look up to see the situation in front of her.
“What is this?” she asked, her eyes taking in Morganstern’s ghostly appearance and the little steams of crimson flowing along the rocky surface of the dell they were in. The blood flowed into a natural basin of sorts and was already several inches deep.
They both knew what it meant.
“It’s a sign, Sadie,” Grey told her. “It’s a sign for you to get going. You’ve done everything anyone could have asked of you and more, but now it’s time to go.”
“Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks,” she said, letting her M16 clatter to the ground and rushing to Morganstern’s side. Gently, she slid a hand under his back and probed for a second before her face broke into harsh lines. Grief etched grooves across her forehead and down her cheeks.
Morganstern seemed to only just see her. He spoke her name in a whisper: “Sadie...I liked you. Did...you know that? I wanted to ask...” He swallowed, thickly and before he could finish, his eyes rolled in his head.
“Hey, Morganstern,” Sadie said, anxiously, giving him a shake. “Hey...” She turned to Grey and asked: “What’s his first name?”
Grey might have known the answer at one time but just then his ability to concentrate or dig memories out of his skull was practically nil. Morganstern came around long enough to answer. “Abraham....Abraham Morganstern.” He smiled at her showing shockingly white teeth in his pale face. “It’s a...it’s a, old man’s name. I was supposed to be an old man one day...and I was...supposed to sit...on a porch...with an... old lady...”
His words trailed away and the smile faded to nothing and his eyes turned glassy and vacant. He died with Sadie crying over him.
“You have to get going,” Grey told her. “Give me your weapon and go. It’s time. Just pull me close to those rocks and I’ll give you a few minutes.” She didn’t argue. He could no longer walk and she couldn’t carry him. The time for heroics was over. It was a time for fleeing or dying and they both knew it could be no other way.
She took hold of his shirt and, as he kicked with his burned leg, she pulled. Together they got him to the lip of the dell where bullets were chipping the rocks and flecks of quartz and granite skipped into the sky.
There were many words that should’ve been said, however, Grey was stoic in nature and as always Sadie matched the moment. Though her eyes sparkled with tears, she only squeezed his hands to say goodbye. It was more than enough for Grey.
“Don’t look back,” he ordered.
Sadie’s teeth set hard against themselves and her lips peeled back, but she didn’t argue. She handed him her last three magazines and then jogged away, heading the last hundred yards up to the top of the ridgeline.
He watched her for a moment, regretting that he hadn’t said more to her or that he hadn’t given her a message to take back to Deanna. But that had never been his style. It likely would have taken him ten minutes to come up with two very inadequate sentences, and he didn’t even have one minute. Already he could hear the scrape of boots on rock just down the slope. They were coming for him.
With his left arm, dangling uselessly, Grey brought the M16 up to his shoulder, resting it on the lip of the dell to keep it steady. The closest man was exactly twenty-three feet away. He was so close that Grey could see the beads of sweat on his upper lip and could hear his breath wheeze in and out of his lungs.
He was smoker; the climb had taken a lot out of him and he was slow to aim. Grey wasn’t. Even with a useless arm and his life dribbling out of his many wounds one drop at a time, Grey was a natural born killer. They both fired at the same time. Grey didn’t miss.
One down, he thought, two hundred to go.
The odds of winning this fight were impossible. The odds of giving Sadie a five-minute head start were very likely just as long as he could stay conscious. Grey fought the swirling in his head and ignored his pulse racing faster and faster and did his best not to think about how his blood was already trickling down the rocks to mingle with the blood of Morganstern.
He concentrated on what he did best. He was the sharpest of the sharpshooters and brought the Azael down one by one and kept firing right up until they flanked him, cresting the very hill that Sadie had jogged up—five minutes before.
A man in the swirling scarves of the Azael suddenly appeared on a rock outcropping fifty meters above Grey. He couldn’t miss and Grey was too weak to even attempt to try to evade the bullets that came raining down on him. It was now his turn to die.
Chapter 20
Jillybean
The long pursuit and the running gun battle could be heard for miles. To Jillybean it sounded like distant workmen wielding giant hammers and building houses that had to be as high as heaven.
She didn’t know who to root for—though in her mind she referred to it as “voting” for one side or the other. Of course, she wanted the Azael to lose, but she knew they wouldn’t. The monsters were unstoppable; there were simply too many of them. And if by some miracle they could be overcome, there were the Azael to battle. They were a bloodthirsty lot, full of bad manners and ugly looks.
For some reason many of them seemed to think Jillybean had been involved in the attack in some way. They pointed at her as she passed and whispered behind their hands. There were rumors flying about concerning her and she caught many unpleasant words such as schizo and possessed. Much to her dismay, she even heard idiot-savant. She didn’t know the meaning of the term, however anything with the word ‘idiot’ in it couldn’t be good.
Brad went in search of the king and his ragged court straight away and dragged Jillybean along. “They’re going to need us,” he said. “I swear these guys are useless sometimes.” The little girl only nodded and didn’t say anything. She hoped to goodness that they wouldn’t need her. The guilt she was feeling at what she had done was already like a sickness inside of her. It made her want to puke.
Seeing the destruction around the howitzers didn’t help either. Everything was black and the air was hazy with the foulest smelling smoke that Jillybean had ever smelled
. The explosion and subsequent fire had seared the high grasses, that had once swayed in the field, right down to their roots so that the charred bodies, lying here and there in clumps of two or three, were obvious, even at a distance.
The king and his brothers and the lesser dignitaries of the Azael stood just up the road from the carnage. They all appeared on the verge of murder, especially the king. His eyes blazed when he saw Brad. “Tell me that the wall is down,” he demanded.
Brad bowed low before answering: “We destroyed not just one wall, but two. I fought my way through a hundred thousand zombies and risked my life ten times over to guarantee success.”
“Then explain why the stiffs aren’t moving!” Duke Paulus cried. Jillybean noted that he was no long the smiling, confident man he had been the night before. His face was decidedly pinched and his eyes were a little mad as if he was the schizo.
“I would think the explanation was obvious,” Brad replied. “But why is everyone looking at me for an explanation. I did my job and I did it exactly as King Augustus asked. If you’re looking for a scapegoat, you don’t have to look any further than the man who screwed up and forgot to arrange the least amount of security for his guns.”
Paulus began to snarl curses but before he could force out a coherent sentence, Duke Menis limped forward to stand beside Jillybean. “He’s not wrong, Paulus. You screwed up, not them. They did everything I said they would and more. Who knew there were secondary walls?”
“If we could have sent men to the top of some of those peaks like I said to, we would’ve known that and more,” Paulus countered.
The king snapped his fingers before Menis could answer. “Stop it! No one has yet to explain why the stiffs aren’t moving if you blew up two walls on that God-forsaken highway. What’s holding them back?”
Brad shrugged and stated what should’ve been obvious. “A third wall. It was protected by a very steep hill, but we were in the process of knocking it down when the howitzers blew up. A few more minutes and the valley would have been ours.”
Augustus turned his gaze back to the west and stared at the mountains. “So what do we do?”
Brad opened his mouth to speak, but Menis gave him a sharp elbow and answered: “I recommend we keep the pressure up with the stiffs. We keep driving them and driving them. Our enemies are tired and the wall across 34 is damaged. It will only be a matter of time.”
“Wrong,” Paulus declared. “We need to bring the fight to them. We have the numbers. With the stiffs pinning them down, we can sweep over the same mountains they attacked us from and come down on them like an avenging fury.”
One of the other brothers shook his shaggy head. He was the hairiest of them, looking like a Bigfoot to Jillybean. “I doubt that will work. One of my men just gave me a count of the dead. So far we’ve recovered eight of their bodies and guess how many of ours.”
“Sixty?” someone ventured.
“Nope,” the brother said and then waited expectantly for more guesses.
King Augustus was in no mood for guessing games. “Just tell us, damn it! How many?”
The hairiest of the brothers suddenly realized he had put himself in the position of ‘bearer of bad news’ and he didn’t relish it. He pointed Paulus’ way as he said, “Because there was no security, we lost a hundred and eighty-four.” This caused the assembled group to gasp all except Paulus, who again began to splutter.
“I wasn’t in charge of security. I was in charge of the guns. I was the one who found them and the men who could shoot them. I wasn’t...”
Menis waved his hand, dismissively. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? Your guns are gone. What matters is that we don’t throw good men into a bad situation. One hundred and eighty-four dead versus just eight of theirs? That’s unsustainable and the surest way to see our army dissolve into nothing.”
“What does the girl think about all of this?” the extra hairy man asked.
Jillybean tried to shrink away from the question, but Menis held her in place. She had been worried they would turn to her eventually and, as much as she didn’t want to, she had to answer. The fate of thirty-two women depended on her and she knew she wasn’t strong enough to see them tortured right in front of her. Eve would take her over for sure and then there would be no knowing what evil would occur.
“I wouldn’t attack if I was you guys,” she answered. “They’ll know you’re coming and this sort of hilly land with all these big rocks is easy to defend, which is good for you because they’re gonna attack you again. At least I think so. Captain Grey isn’t the type of fighter-man who is gonna sit around and wait to be attacked. He’ll come for you, starting with the angel-horsemen pushing the monsters on this road. He’ll want to stop them real bad because if they’re all dead, the monsters will go away. You know?”
King Augustus eyed her shrewdly as the last embers of the pursuit of Grey and Sadie sounded in a brief fury of gunshots. When all was silent from the mountains, he smirked and said, “We’ll take both routes,” he said. “We’ll stand on the defensive along that ridgeline.” He pointed to a stiff, foreboding wall of earth and rock stretching into the distance to the west of them. “With the heights under our control, they won’t dare attack us. And, at the same time, we will protect our drivers so that they can keep pushing the stiffs.”
The brothers nodded and stroked their beards in appreciation as if this was a stroke of genius on his part when it was exactly the advice Jillybean had given.
“Remember, they can’t last forever,” Augustus added, pacing back and forth. “We’ll keep grinding forward. We’ll keep wearing them down until they can’t take it anymore! This was the plan to begin with and one minor setback with the big guns shouldn’t upset that. Tell your men that. Tell them we are on schedule. Tell them that it’s just a matter of time before the walls fall and our armies surge forward to victory! We will plunder the valley and take it for ourselves! It will be ours!”
The men and women roared their excitement.
Orders were given and men rushed about and each went to their posts with a fire in their eyes. Jillybean watched with a tummy ache eating her up. It felt as though she had feasted on a banquet piled high with guilt. Course upon course of it until the guilt crept up her throat and threatened to come spewing out with the slightest hiccup.
With so many people going this way and that, the little girl wanted to slink away and hide under one of the seats on the bus. She missed Ipes terribly just then. He would’ve known exactly what to do. He would’ve helped her steer the course between betrayal and ultimate victory for her friends. Without him, she knew they were doomed.
Duke Menis caught her as she tried to slip away unseen. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I…I just was going to, uh, the b-bus.”
Brad had left to set up a defensive line along the hills above the drivers on I-34, leaving Jillybean under the care of the duke—a most repulsive thought to the little girl. He offered her a smile; the look she returned was part misery, and part giving up; her face was tight and tense, like a CEO fighting against the pain of a stress-induced ulcer.
“Try to relax, Jillybean,” he said, throwing an arm around her thin shoulders. “It’s a done deal and has been from the start. With or without you, those walls will fall and we will be victorious. It’s just a matter of time. I think I might want to take Estes for myself. I’m due you know. I took that crappy little town in Kansas as a favor to my brother, but I think I want something better; something bigger.”
He smiled down on her as if expecting some sort of acknowledgement or approval of the idea. “I guess that sounds good,” she lied. What actually sounded “good” to her was the Azael leaving as fast as they could and never coming back.
“Yes it does sound good,” he said. “Good walls, a good defensive network, fertile land to grow crops, plenty of space, a place to grow a community. It sounds ideal if you ask me.”
Jillybean wanted to point out that everythin
g he had just mentioned had already been in place before the Azael arrived. She hid her gritted teeth behind a thin-lipped smile and could only nod.
Menis didn’t see her minor deception. The hand on her shoulder squeezed. “I’ve been thinking of keeping you for myself, Jillybean. If I get Estes, I’ll need someone who can give me good advice. What do you think about that?”
The idea was appalling to her.
Had he forgotten how much pain he had caused her and the people she cared about? Had he forgotten how he had urged Brad to hurt Kay? Had he forgotten that she was only helping him because her guilt was a disease eating her alive?
We could kill him, Eve said in her ear. It was like Eve was standing just behind her; Jillybean could almost feel the imaginary breath tickle her ear. She did her best not to react to the words. It was easy. The idea wasn’t exactly original. The thought had crossed the little girl’s mind a minute before and this time it hadn’t come from someone other than her.
She wanted to kill Menis, plain and simple.
He was a bad man. Really, he was worse than that. He was evil, worse than any monster. They, at least, had an excuse: they couldn’t think. They were monsters and monsters only knew how to attack and how to feast on the flesh of people. Menis knew better. He was a man, a thinking human person.
He deserved to die. Just like the other bad guys: Abraham, Cassie, the bounty hunters. They all needed to die.
But she couldn’t kill the duke. The rest of the Azael would know and they would hurt the women on the bus.
Then do it smart, Eve said with what was practically a giggle. Kill him and hide his body in a ditch or, better yet, let it float down the river. It’ll be in Kansas before anyone knows.
It wouldn’t take much. Menis was far too trusting not only in Jillybean but also in his own abilities as a fighter. But Jillybean wouldn’t fight him. That was just stupid. She was a tiny thing and knew it. Her strength lied in her mind not in her muscles. Still, she could kill him easy. She could kill him even without Eve’s help.
The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7 Page 20
