When she could talk, Eve said: “I am a princess. I am beautiful and powerful. You should be bowing to me!” As she spoke she worked herself into a squat and was again fumbling for the hand grenade but couldn’t manage to get it off the string. Jillybean was still near the surface of their collective mind and watched, in a bemused way, Eve’s fumblings. In a detached manner, Jillybean was interested as to what was about to happen because a part of her really thought that Eve was going to blow herself up, and Jillybean wasn’t going to stop her, especially since an explosion would kill the king as well and end this entire war at a stroke.
“You, a princess?” Augustus asked around a sneer. “And beautiful? Alice, get me my mirror.” Alice, the king’s assistant came mincing forward. She looked utterly ridiculous there on the side of a mountain in a skin tight miniskirt and five-inch stilettos. She held out a gilded mirror to the king who faced it Eve’s way.
Jillybean didn’t recognize the girl in the mirror. It was a stranger and an ugly one at that. Her skin was yellow and green from old bruises while under her eyes were blue-black circles. She was scabbed and scarred, and one side of her face was swollen from where Augustus had struck her.
In a word, the girl in the looking glass was grotesque.
Eve pushed the mirror away, hissing: “What did you do to us?”
She was talking to Jillybean; however, Augustus answered: “Nothing you didn’t deserve, Princess and nothing compared to what’s coming to you.” He stooped and picked Eve up by the front of her dress and glared into her face. “No one fucks with me, Princess. No one blows up one of my trucks and gets away with it.”
He threw her to the ground and turned to his brother. “Menis, get over here. This bitch is your doing. Cut off her nose. It’ll be a warning to anyone even thinking they can fuck with me. And cut off her right hand as well to keep her out of trouble.”
Eve was so stunned that she only laid there as Menis hobbled up with a gleaming Bowie knife in his hand. In vain, Jillybean began screaming in their mind: The grenade! The grenade! But Eve was too overcome by sheer terror to think about anything but the knife.
Brad Crane held up a hand to his king and asked: “Why don’t we just kill her? You don’t want to be known as someone who is cruel to children, do you?”
Augustus glared so hard that Brad dropped his gaze. “Yes, in fact I do. You have to realize that I don’t care if the people hate me, as long as they fear me. They’ll fear me for certain after today.” He nodded to his brother and Menis swept forward, bent to one knee and grabbed Eve’s flyaway brown hair at the back of her head, accidentally pricking the ball of his thumb on the bent paperclip hidden there. He pulled his hand away, giving Eve yet another chance to grab the grenade which was tied by the pin.
All you have to do is yank the grenade! Jillybean cried.
Eve, that primal creature, was the living embodiment of fight or flight. When she had the upper hand, she was full of fight—at that moment she was so stricken by the horror of having her face carved open that she fled and Jillybean found herself completely alone in her body for the first time in many months.
The feeling was disorienting. She was more aware of every sensation. Her skin tingled, enjoyably where the warm morning sun struck her...but it also vibrated , angrily where she had been hit. Her eyes were sharper than before and her hearing could pick out the screams coming from the valley as if they were coming from the people around her.
She felt everything except for Eve—the other girl was simply gone.
No I’m not, the doll in her hand said, turning its head around so it sat backwards on its shoulders. I’m right here, it said and then winked one its beautiful china-blue eyes at Jillybean.
“That’s not possible,” Jillybean whispered. “You can’t be in there.”
Yes I can. If Ipes could do it, why can’t I? It’s safe in here. They can’t hurt me in here, but the duke is going to hurt you. He’s going to slice you up until you won’t be any good except as a freak in a freak show. People will puke when they see you. They will point and laugh and...
The duke interrupted them. After putting his thumb in his mouth and sucking the drop of blood away he grabbed Jillybean again and brought up the knife. It was frightfully sharp but it no longer scared Jillybean; she had her own weapon. She reached back, found a grenade hanging on its short leash and pulled.
Just as the blade came up to her face, she showed Menis the grenade. The pin was out, it was all ready to go. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” she warned.
“Where did you...” he said in a breathy little voice. His hand went slack in her hair and he tried to back away, but she dropped the doll and grabbed a handful of his scarves, keeping him close.
“What are you waiting for?” Augustus demanded. “Cut off her fucking nose!”
Menis was stuck, half bent over the little girl, his blade up and, although it looked threatening, it might as well have been a butter knife. Only Brad was close enough to see the grenade. Very slowly he raised his rifle to point at Jillybean. “She’s got a grenade,” Brad explained. “And the pin’s out.”
The king began backing up but he hadn’t taken two steps when a gun shot rang out and Duke Menis made a retching noise like a cat about to get sick. He dropped to his knees so that he was basically looking Jillybean right in the eye. For a moment Jillybean thought that one of his brothers had shot him, but then she saw them all scrambling for cover of which there was very little on the barren ridge.
A few rocks like the half buried heads of giants, was all the cover available. The king and two of his brothers were behind one and they didn’t see Jillybean behind Menis wind her arm and throw her grenade. Desperation gave her strength and the bomb landed a few yards in front of the three and rolled almost to their feet.
Paulus saw it and screamed: “Grenade!” as he dove away. Augustus was slow to react however Baldwin was even slower. He looked stupidly surprised when Augustus grabbed him in an awkward hug and fell back, using his brother as a shield. The explosion was a gigantic wave of white noise that blotted out all sound and left everyone stunned.
Baldwin died wordlessly slumped over his brother. Paulus died seconds later as the shooter further up the ridge targeted him as he tried to get back to cover going on his hands and knees. The shooter was picking out targets left and right with deadly precision.
“Someone kill her,” Augustus yelled. He was pointing at Jillybean who was down on one knee, still using the dying Duke Menis as cover but no one seemed to be paying attention to the king. Half of the people were cowering behind the rocks while the others were shooting blindly up the ridge at a dark figure that flitted from cover to cover.
It was Sadie, Jillybean knew this as a fact. No one else was so fast and no one else would risk a fingernail for Jillybean because…because…because…
In all the mayhem and screams and smoke, Jillybean paused, realizing that she didn’t know why people wouldn’t help her. Yes, she had killed General Johnston, but she had been coerced. And she had helped their enemy, but for the same reason. And she had killed poor baby Eve, however she had been literally out of her mind when that happened. These were bad things but in each case there were extenuating circumstances. Extenuating wasn’t a word in her vocabulary, but it was the concept that counted.
And more importantly that these legal ideas, was the fact that she was suddenly and completely guilt-free. The weight she’d been carrying around like an anchor slung across her shoulders was gone, utterly, utterly and foreverly gone. Eve had used that guilt to worm her way into her body— and now the guilt was all Eve’s, and what was even better, Eve was no longer in Jillybean.
Euphoria, greater than any drug swept across every nerve in her body, making her want to cry and shout in joy simultaneously. Unmindful of any danger, uncaring that a dozen guns could be pointed right at her, she glanced down at the beautiful doll which Neil had given her.
You’re gonna die, it said, trying to form its plastic f
eatures into an evil grin.
The words washed right over Jillybean as though she were greased. The words were powerless as was the doll itself. “Remember what happened to Ipes?” Ipes had been thrown in a river and the moment he had, his mind had lost its hold on Jillybean.
“That’s what’s happening to you,” Jillybean said, dismissing the doll from her mind, just like that.
Jillybean turned to the real world and the real danger.
In spite of his order to kill her, no one seemed to pay her much attention. Perhaps they deemed her harmless compared to the shooter who was ripping bullets into everything that dared to show an inch of flesh.
Augustus seemed to know that Jillybean was the true danger, at least to himself. He was desperately trying to free a pistol from his dead brother’s waistband, however the proliferation of scarves had caught up the barrel and was refusing to let go. He yanked and he yanked, all the time with his savage eyes on Jillybean—he was bent on killing her. He was single minded.
A foolish mindset, Jilly thought as she reached behind her for the second grenade. It came free with a simple yank. She held it up for the king and all his subjects to see. They blanched knowing that it could snuff out their lives in a blink.
Jillybean and the king locked eyes and a change occurred. He was no longer the king. He was no longer the one with power. He was no longer the one people feared—she was.
She threw the grenade at Augustus, who was now without a brother to sacrifice. With huge eyes he stared at the grenade as it bounced closer and closer. His choices were to eat the grenade blast and die, run around the rock and die by Sadie’s hand or…
He chose to leap off the cliff. It wasn’t a thousand foot drop by any stretch. It was twenty-five, maybe thirty feet at the most. He leapt, yelling: “Son of a bi…” The remains of the word were swept away as the grenade exploded, sending shrapnel flying.
There was a pause in the fighting as everyone waited to hear whether their king lived or died. Jillybean was the only one who didn’t wait. Menis had died on his knees and had pitched over sometime in the previous few seconds, his knife skittering away like a child’s precious marble. It was the only weapon left to her and she jumped after it. Not a second too soon her hand found the handle and she turned, brandishing the blade as though it were Excalibur.
The Azael were running at her. No longer were they thirty strong and no longer were they haughty and sneering. They ran as though an army was after them instead of two young girls.
This fact didn’t register on Jillybean at first. She thought they were charging her. She thought they were coming to exact their revenge and she was determined to sell her new found life with everything she had in her forty six pounds.
The blade was a line of silver between her and them; however they ran past without seeming to notice her or her knife. It was confusing and a moment slipped by before she realized they were running away.
“Huh,” she said as the remains of the royal house of the Azael pelted down the hill toward the long line of convoy of trucks. A grin stretched across her face as one of the remaining brothers tripped and bounced like a beach ball down the hill.
She turned to share her joy with Sadie who was even then emerging from cover at the top of the ridge. She raised a hand and Sadie raised one in return. Her hand pivoted on her wrist side to side, each minor flick of her muscles becoming huge, each occurring in slow motion. Time stretched and the next second was the longest in Jillybean’s life.
Brad Crane had not run with the rest. He had literally lain in wait, lying prone in a defile that was just big enough to conceal his body, holding his fire, perhaps knowing that Sadie would show herself eventually. Jillybean could see him settle in behind his rifle in much the same way that Captain Grey would, his finger slipping down to caress the trigger.
A scream erupted from Jillybean’s lips as she launched herself through the air. Brad was a beast of a man, every inch the size of Captain Grey and a hundred times more ruthless. She had no chance against him unless, that is, he chose Sadie’s death above his own life.
He had a choice, Jillybean did not. The little girl had to turn her silver blade to crimson before...
His gun barked and flashed a quarter second before she could get to him.
Epilogue
Sadie Walcott
The girl in black sat in the shadows, watching and waiting. She’d been there two days already, eating little, drinking just enough, moving, but only at night when she was swallowed by shadow. She had a gun, the same gun that she had used to such devastating effect high on the last ridge overlooking the Estes Valley.
The gun was locked and loaded, ready to kill again, but she didn’t think she would need it. It all depended on who showed up.
While she waited, she absently stroked the underside of her chin where a bullet had passed so close that it left a little burn mark, the size and shape of a hairy caterpillar. That had been two weeks before and still the mark was there, a reminder of how close she had come to death.
She’d been cocky. After the fight of her life where she couldn’t seem to miss and bullets passed around her as though she had angels sitting on her shoulders, Sadie had nearly thrown her victory away by being sloppy.
The bullet should have killed her. Brad Crane was an expert shot and at seventy meters he couldn’t miss, but he had flinched. While Sadie had been standing with angels, Brad had the devil in his midst taking the form of a seven-year-old girl.
Sadie hadn’t seen his death. She had thrown herself back behind the boulder she had been firing from and from there she scrambled to her right only to emerge a minute later as a pair of dark eyes beneath a pine sapling.
She had the entire ridge in view. Nothing moved. The only Azael in sight were sprawled in various death poses and each gave evidence of their mortality by their spilt blood or the holes that Sadie had put in them. Eventually, Sadie stood with her rifle at the ready. She crept down to the open area where there was nothing but corpses. There were fifteen dead men on the ridge—ten gunned down by Sadie and the rest killed by Jillybean and her wholly unexpected hand grenades.
Brad was the only one who had not died by gun or bomb.
Sadie found him with a Bowie knife in his back; it was buried up to its hilt. The bloody prints on it were tiny, so very tiny. They gave Sadie the creeps and she stood, warily, pointing her gun all around, half expecting Jillybean to come for her next.
But there was no Jillybean. The little girl had disappeared as neat as you please, leaving behind only a doll lying in the dirt. Sadie picked it up, stared into its china blue eyes for a second before she tucked it under her arm. “Jillybean will want this back,” she said as she walked to the cliff face and picked up a pair of discarded binoculars.
From there she watched the end of the battle. She watched the Stryker driven by Deanna charge the Azael. It was followed by hundreds of soldiers screaming bloody murder. She saw Neil and a group of thirty officers, medics, and radio operators leap down from the hill they had been fighting on and attack against terrific odds. Neil fought as though he thought he was as immune to bullets as he was to the zombie virus.
His reckless courage was contagious and soon every soldier was on their feet and pressing forward.
The Azael had panicked at this sudden reversal. They had come into the fight overly confident expecting only to find zombies in the valley. The stiff resistance and the unholy accuracy of the soldiers had come as a shock. Still they fought with bravery but once they heard the tremendous explosions behind them and heard what sounded like a new attack on their flank and saw their king die and his brothers killed, they were on the verge of panic. The final straw came when they saw one of their Strykers destroyed and had the second turn on them.
They collapsed as a fighting force, fleeing or giving up.
Sadie should’ve cheered; however, she couldn’t find the energy to. Exhaustion swamped her and she sat among the dead on the ridgeline until her legs no longe
r shook.
Only then did she climb down. She steered clear of the mop-up operations. She didn’t have the heart to look the prisoners in the eye and the number of wounded was horrifying. An hour after the last gunshots had died away, she found herself looking for the gruff sergeant she had met in the field.
He was dead, lying in the golden wheat and staring up at the sky.
“I came back,” she told him and then cried over nothing and everything, and especially she cried over this man she hardly knew. In spite of their great victory, she was in a funk and knew one of the reasons why: she had been able to kill with such ease that it scared her. She’d been so fast and so nimble—a snippet of a bible verse came to her: Who shall judge the quick and the dead? There had been times in the fight that she had felt more like an executioner than a warrior. It was unsettling.
She had knelt with the no-name sergeant for hours until the sun started leaning over to the west and in all that time she didn’t touch his eyes. She knew that some people closed the eyes of the dead; Sadie tilted his head so that he would have a better view of the valley.
Finally, she stood up and gazed around her with a blank look on her face. She considered searching for Jillybean—the little girl had run away and, unlike the Azael who had hightailed it and who would later find themselves starving or hunted by zombies, Sadie knew that Jillybean would be perfectly safe. The rest of the world was in danger with her out there, but she would be safe and, for the moment, that was what counted.
A billowing smoke had caught her eye then and she went to it drawn like a moth to a flame.
She found Neil directing the building of an immense funeral pyre. There was a great clot of dried blood in his hair and one arm was in a sling. “You should be at the clinic,” Sadie had said to him.
He lifted his arm like a chicken might lift its wing. “This? It’s nothing. I’m not going to bother the surgeon over something like this.” At the time she had let the word ‘surgeon’ flow right over her, thinking that he met Margaret Yuan.
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