“What the hell!” exclaimed the guard in anger and then reacted exactly as Jillybean predicted: she bent for the keys which she undoubtedly saw as evidence of a crime. This was part two.
To overcome a full grown adult is not an easy thing to accomplish for a skinny little seven-year-old. One must first have the element of surprise on their side. Secondly, they must be able to strike from a position that will allow the full use of their limited strength, and thirdly they must strike without even a wisp of mercy weakening their blow.
“Go ahead, Eve,” Jillybean said, unleashing the monster within her. Inside the little girl there was a roar of happy excitement and a hot lust. Her arms went numb and her hands felt ghost-like, but still the tire iron slid out of her pants without a problem and went high in the air.
Eve, wearing a crazed grin, waited to strike until the guard heaved herself up, keys in hand. The woman only had time to squawk like a chicken before Eve smashed the iron into the top of her head.
“Uhgi,” the woman blurted, her eyes losing their focus. Her hands fluttered like wandering ghosts in front of her bosom until Eve hit her again in exactly the same spot. This still didn’t knock the woman unconscious. She fell forward, knocking Eve backwards onto the next step up. Eve was in an awkward position, and unable to use either her height advantage or really much of her strength.
She began whapping the woman on the back of the head with the tire iron using only the power in her stick-like wrist. The woman twitched, sporadically with each strike; it was more than a bit disgusting.
“Stop!” Jillybean ordered Eve. Perhaps because the subsequent attacks had been so unsatisfyingly feeble, Eve relinquished control and did so without much of a fuss. When Jillybean had her body back, she squirmed out from beneath the woman who was making a pitiful moaning sound deep in her throat. The little girl then poked through the guard’s pockets, finding the keys to the bus as well as the keys to the chains that the thirty-two sex slaves wore.
“What did you do?” one of the women asked in an accusation. No one had moved or cheered Jillybean on. They were mentally whipped.
“I’m freeing you,” Jillybean answered, holding up the key to their chains. Except for the continued moans from the guard, there was only stunned silence on the bus. “You’re being freed whether you like it or not,” Jillybean groused. She went to Kay first and was happily surprised when Kay lifted her hands.
“I thought we were losing,” Kay said.
“No, we’re winning, the Azael just don’t know it yet.” The lock clicked open and Jilly helped the woman out of her chains. “Come on. We can’t let anyone see the guard.”
The guard was sitting on the steps of the bus as blood rivered out of her hair; she seemed uncertain as to where she was and even who she was. Kay put out a hand and the guard took it no questions asked and let herself be led back onto the bus where Jillybean chained her to Kay’s cringing seatmate.
“What the…what the fuck?” the guard said, slurring her words.
Jillybean ignored her. She turned to Kay and pushed the bus keys into her hands. “Whatever you do, don’t try to leave until the explosion.”
Kay had haunted eyes. They were dark like the circles beneath them and they jumped all over the place. “There’s going to be an explosion?”
“I hope so.” Jillybean’s contingencies were falling apart. The big army deuce and a half that was carting around Duke Menis’ munitions wasn’t the next truck in line as it had been all week. The one in front of the bus was loaded with boxes of MREs and shiny kegs that held beer. She could only hope that the munitions truck wasn’t too far ahead. It was daylight out, and she had only one way to get into the back of the truck: climbing up the rear gate…something that was sure to be challenged by anyone who saw it.
“Just keep in line with the rest until it happens,” Jillybean ordered, feeling as though she was the adult. The feeling left her as she turned and had to take overly large steps to get off the bus. It made her feel small.
The line of trucks had been moving forward in little spurts as the soldiers advanced into the valley and now the bus was fifty yards back. Jillybean jogged with her backpack swinging until she was just behind the last truck. On a whim she climbed up the tailgate and peeked into the back.
Only food and beer.
“Shoot,” she murmured under her breath and then jumped down. “Time for Plan B…or is it Plan C?”
It didn’t matter. What did matter was getting to the munitions truck as fast as she could. Walking along in the shadow of the truck, she dug in her backpack, gently pushing aside the doll and finding her steak knife. It cast only a dull gleam. Still, the blade was sharp enough for what Jillybean needed. She ducked under the truck and scurried forward until she was between the twin fuel tanks. Then it was just a matter of cutting the fuel lines.
Very quickly, the engine sputtered and died.
Nervously grinning, she waited at the front of the truck until the men climbed out to investigate. They checked under the hood first and then, thankfully, one said: “We should check the back.” His words came out slow and a little uncertain. Although it only took one man to “check the back,” both of them walked back to look in the beer-filled bed.
Jillybean ducked out from underneath the truck just as a storm of gunshots erupted in the valley. The fight was on; she had to hurry.
Without looking back, she made her way to the next truck which contained Duke Menis’ personal items, including a king-sized bed and a portable bathtub the size of a Volkswagen bug. Jillybean ducked under it. She realized that she had been lucky with the fuel lines and so she attacked the brake line this time.
Seconds later, the truck revved and started forward. As it neared the truck in front of it, there was a curse, a grinding of gears and then, as the emergency break was pulled, the entire thing shuddered to a halt.
Again, Jillybean huddled near the front as a pair of men got out, however intuition struck her and she crawled out from beneath the vehicle to hide behind the front tire just as one of the men ducked down to look under it. “I don’t see anything,” he said after a cursory glance.
“So what do we do?” the other asked.
“I don’t know,” the first answered. “We ain’t mechanics. I say we leave it here, I guess. Come on, we aren’t going to get jack sitting back here doing nothing.” There was a creak of doors, a scrape of metal and leather, and then the two men jogged off with packs on their backs and guns in their hands. So far, so good.
Jillybean hurried to the next truck in line, twenty yards ahead. Thankfully, this was her truck. This was the munitions truck where she would find what she needed to kill the king.
She wasted no time as she climbed in the back.
Chapter 35
Sadie Walcott
The gunfire in the valley was at a fever pitch by the time they got to the Humvees. Grey was hobbling as nearly as fast as most people could run; his face set and so determined that it would have been useless for someone to tell him to slow down and think about his sutures. Not that Deanna didn’t try.
“Grey! What are you doing? Slow down. You could die right here.” She was beside herself with fear for him and was practically begging.
Sadie thought it was sweet how concerned she was. Sweet, but foolish. Deanna was a woman in love with a dangerous man and one thing was certain, he wasn’t going to change, especially when there were enemies threatening the people he cared about. He was going to risk everything for her, even if, later, the guilt killed her.
In truth, Sadie was envious. She had never had much luck in boyfriends, but since the apocalypse her luck was utter crap. Her first beau, John Crider had been an immoral criminal; her next was Mark Wilson who turned out to be a sniveling coward. After that was Nico, the Russian soldier. She had only known him for a month and she had been literally delirious for most of that time. She had thought she was in love, but now she could barely remember his face.
Then there was Morgans
tern who hadn’t been a boyfriend at all, but could have been if he had lived. He had been brave, handsome and gallant, but he died like most brave, handsome, gallant young men did. He could have been like Captain Grey and it could have been her instead of Deanna acting the part of the fool in trying to tame a beast of a man.
“I’m ok,” Grey said to Deanna. It was clear he wasn’t. Sadie had never heard him rasp like that with every breath and nor had she ever see him hold on to every trunk and branch they passed. He was sweating even though the pace was child’s play to Sadie.
He was almost careening from tree to tree by the time they reached the Humvees and still he was first into a vehicle that had a little four foot by four foot uncovered bed. Sadie allowed Michael to get in the passenger seat; she and Deanna took the back seats. The second the back doors were closed, Grey stomped the vehicle forward.
Next to her, Deanna sat stewing in an air of worry. Sadie knew that it was the wrong attitude when going into battle. Deanna should have known better, however the protective force of love wasn’t going to be denied, it was too strong. As they drove through the thin forest of pines and the heavy monuments of million-year-old rock, Grey shot a look back—first at Deanna and then at Sadie.
His eyes spoke to her and the girl in black nodded to the unspoken request. She knew the issue and she knew the remedy.
A minute later, as the two Strykers raced into the mouth of the valley blasting everything in sight, Grey kept the Humvee hidden among the trees before he pulled up behind a string of low hills where the three man FGM-148 Javelin team was sitting uselessly pointing their weapon down at the highway. “Get in!” Grey cried. He then glanced back at Sadie and Deanna: “Help them,” he said and again caught Sadie’s eye.
The pair of women hopped out and ran around the vehicle but the men didn’t look as though they needed any help. One man hauled a mottled green tube by one hand, another carried a missile on his back and one in his arms as though it were a very big baby and the third carried a rifle.
The two men with the Javelin jumped into the bed and the rifleman climbed into Sadie’s seat. Deanna headed for the empty seat and that was when Sadie leapt on her back, pinning her arms to her sides.
“What the...what are you doing?” Deanna cried.
“I have my orders,” Sadie explained, speaking into her ear. They were legitimate and sensible orders. The fight was going to be a sharp one and Grey needed to be free to engage the enemy without Deanna there second guessing him or worrying over him. He wouldn’t be able to fight under those conditions.
The captain fed the Humvee gas and he began to steer it around the hill and that was when Deanna dumped Sadie on her butt. The older woman was taller and much stronger; she was practically a Valkyrie. All it took was for her to plant her feet, torque her body violently and give her shoulders a tremendous buck, and Sadie was down.
Deanna took off for the Humvee yelling something that was drowned out by the thunder of the machine guns from the Strykers. They were close, way too close for a girl who had left her M4 in the Humvee! Regardless, Sadie jumped up as if she had landed on a spring. She did not follow after Deanna and the Humvee; even she wasn’t fast enough to catch the vehicle. Instead she cut across the low hill, guessing that Grey would wind through the trees in the same direction he had come from.
Which he did not. As Sadie topped the hill, she saw the Humvee skirting the edge of the valley where the cover was good. They looked to be searching for one of the Strykers to take a shot at; however the Humvee was behind a rise and didn’t see that the Strykers had turned back toward the mouth of the valley.
Sadie’s vantage was almost perfect. She could see all of the action from where she stood. The valley began as a slightly curving U shape opening into a natural bowl a mile wide that was covered in waist-high summer wheat. The bowl was supposed to be where the kill zone was, however the only people dying in it were the soldiers.
The premature attack had left more than half of the Azael at the top of the U where they spread out using the natural advantages of height and their greater numbers to split the soldiers of the valley into three separate fighting groups, none able to support the other. Those getting the worst of it were the soldiers in the bowl who had been playing dead, waiting to spring their trap.
These soldiers were without a hint of cover and even as she watched, one of the Strykers came roaring up and machine-gunned two men and then turned hard to the right to run over a third. The Strykers were twin dragons, spitting fiery lead. They roamed the wheat field at will and were impervious to everything the soldiers had left in their arsenal.
It seemed to Sadie that their moves were synchronized. When one banked all the way around and started racing toward where Captain Grey had broken out from the safety of the forest, the second Stryker turned at the same instant.
“They’re being directed,” Sadie whispered. Of course they were; it would be stupid if they weren’t. The only questions were: by whom and from where? Across the valley was a ridge with an even better view than Sadie’s. Without hesitation and still unarmed, the Goth girl raced down the hill and out into the valley.
In a second, she regretted leaving the safety of the hill. Bullets whipped across her face, sometimes invisibly sounding like sizzling bees and sometimes they flashed by in a glow of yellow. Undeterred, she charged on through the tawny grass until she tripped over a severed leg. Then it seemed as though it was raining lead. Holes erupted in the dirt all around her and the air was filled with golden slivers of wheat that had been mowed by 5.56MM bullets.
As fast as she could, Sadie crawled from what had become her own personal kill zone. She crawled just ten feet before she found a blood trail and for some reason she followed it until she found the soldier who had lost his leg. He was a miserable thing: covered in dry, brown mud that was iced by bright, almost merry looking red blood. With shaking hands he was trying to tie his belt around his stump.
“Oh, Sadie,” he said with weak relief. “What are you doing here?”
She didn’t recognize him; not his face, or his voice or the mostly obscured name stitched on his shredded uniform. “I’m...I’m trying to get to that hill,” she answered as she crawled to him and shoved his hands away. Blood was jetting from the leg at regular intervals making the belt slick; quickly her hands were filthy with blood.
“I was too,” the soldier said in a drifting whisper. “I—I think a lot of us were, but—but the only way to get to it is to run west first, like you’re running away. But we have to—to hurry. They’re shifting...” His words fell away and he suddenly looked as though he couldn’t care less about the battle. “Ol’ Morg liked you, you know.”
Sadie heaved the belt tight with all her strength and then looked again at the man, closer now, realizing it was the gruff staff sergeant she had met at the top of Red Gate 1 when the zombies first attacked. “I liked him, too,” she told him. “He was very brave, just like you, sergeant.”
Even dying, and Sadie was sure that he was a minute or so from dying regardless of the belt, the sergeant wasn’t soft. He grunted a quiet laugh and changed the subject back to Morganstern: “He said he was going to marry you. Right there when we were fighting the stiffs...hey, where’s your weapon?”
It was sitting uselessly in Captain Grey’s Humvee. “I lost it.”
He gave her the hardest look left in his barren arsenal; it was more of a fatherly frown, like one given out when a child brought home a report card with C+ in English. “Take mine,” he said. The sergeant might have lost his leg, but his M16A2 was sitting in the wheat, inches from his hand. “And this, too.” He hauled off his chest rig and then sat back with his breath laboring in and out.
Sadie gladly took both. “I’ll be back for you,” she said getting to a crouch.
“No, you won’t,” he answered. “I’ll be dead soon.” There it was, the truth spat out like a lump of rock. “Now, go on, soldier.”
She didn’t hesitate. Time was not on the
ir side. Taking the sergeant’s advice, she booked it straight west and this time fewer bullets streaked after her. Eight other men were running as well and she quickly caught up with them. The lead man was an officer; he glanced over at Sadie and then past her with eyes that bugged.
As she ran, Sadie turned to see Captain Grey’s Humvee darting through the trees. It was being hemmed in by the two Strykers and being peppered by bullets. The Javelin crew in the back got off a shot; however the missile struck a tree branch, and spiraled into the ground in front of its target sending up a torrent of dirt.
Grey spun the wheel to the left, using an outcropping of rocks to cheat the machinegun bullets that had been coming closer and closer to the mark. He should have come shooting out from behind the rocks a second later, but he had double back and was now behind the Strykers! He slammed on the brakes, yanking the wheel hard to the left to give his team a better shot.
The Strykers stopped at the same time, spinning hard as well to bring their guns to bear. They weren’t in time.
There was a gout of sparks from behind the missile tube and something silvery leapt out of the tube and raced at one of the Strykers, trailing flame and smoke. A second later, the Stryker disappeared in a flash of orange light and a pall of smoke. Grey was already moving but too late—the other Stryker had him dead to rights and opened up with its .50 caliber machine gun.
First the Humvee’s glass blew out, then its crew cab was filled with hot chunks of metal; blood and flesh flew. The heavy rounds turned the Humvee into Swiss cheese and the Javelin crew in back was literally torn apart. The Stryker fired for half a minute.
Sadie staggered, her legs going to jelly, her head torquing further and further around, her eyes sprung with sudden tears, and her soul hoping, praying to see Captain Grey emerge from the wreckage—he did not.
The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7 Page 36
