The Queen of the Dead

by Peter Meredith

  Taking the ski pole, she walked to the far end of the basement and began knocking it against the ceiling. “Hey! It’s dinner time!”

  “Son of a bitch!” One Shot cried.

  Jenn shushed him. “If you’re going to complain, do it over there.” She pointed to where Jillybean was standing. Already the ceiling above her was bowing in as the dead rushed into the master bedroom. Once more, the rotting wood began to snap, and nails went flying. The noise of the house slowly collapsing was terrifying, especially to Jenn and she was the first to hurry to the stairs.

  The others followed and huddled as close to the top as they could, waiting for the ceiling to cave in. As relaxed as if she were knocking on someone’s front door, Jillybean was still smacking the ceiling as the sub-flooring was pulled up chunk by chunk.

  Finally, the zombies tore through and Jillybean found herself looking up at a goop-dripping grey eye. Calmly she walked to the stairs, stopping to hang up the wedding dress.

  “She’s friggin’ crazy,” One Shot whispered.

  Jillybean ignored the remark. “We’ll get Orlando’s ghillie suit first and then proceed to the…” The entire back half of the house caved in, interrupting her. So much dust filled the air that nothing could be seen, however the thrashing and the growls of the dead were enough to make the blood run cold.

  And still Jillybean was unperturbed—but she did lower her voice. “Jenn, take the lead.”

  Jenn checked her crossbow and was about to step out of the basement when Colleen pulled off her ghillie suit and handed it to Orlando. “I’ll buddy-up with Mike. It’ll be safer for all of us.” She inserted herself under Mike’s ghillie suit and snuggled right up against the handsome mariner.

  Jenn was suddenly furious, which did not lend itself to caution. With her lips twisted into a snarl, she marched out of the basement, through the blasted-in front door and went straight away to where Orlando’s ghillie suit lay pooled on the ground. She only waited long enough for Mike to grab it before she was marching again, taking the most direct route to the harbor.

  She was still mumbling curses when Jillybean stopped her after a few blocks. They had a clear view down to the docks—they were all empty.

  Chapter 3

  Seeing the empty docks had Jillybean’s head spinning and her heart running fast. Where had the boats gone? She’d kept watch from the hilltop all week and although the docks were hidden from view, she could see the Pacific easily and it had been empty. Nothing had gone north or south.

  They could see Alcatraz like a little grey rock sitting right out in the bay. If the people there had the boats, they would’ve been bobbing out where all the world could see them or, more likely, shooting around the bay, their black sails looking like the fins of hungry sharks.

  Without the boats, Jillybean was stuck on this side of the bay and that was a huge problem. “Jenn! I need my pills,” she whispered from beneath her poncho-like ghillie suit. She reached out a desperate hand and grabbed the girl. “You know what happens to me without them. H-how do we get across to the actual city? Is there another way?”

  She could only see little parts of Jenn through the holes in her ghillie suit. It was as if Jenn were a puzzle that was missing pieces. Her mind was beginning to feel the same way.

  “I think we have a canoe,” Jenn answered.

  Mike groaned at the suggestion. “A canoe? You can see the windsock, can’t you? And look at the chop.” He pointed angrily and as he did, a button on the sleeve of his coat caught on his ghillie suit, yanking it forward. With a curse, he pulled it off and began rearranging it, looking even more crushed by disappointment than Jillybean was.

  “Yeah, we can’t go out on the canoe,” One Shot said. “The wind will be in our face all the way back. And I’m talking a lot of wind.”

  Next to him, Orlando pulled back his hood and bobbed his head in agreement. He was visibly relieved. “We should go back to the complex. If ever there was a sign, those empty docks are it. Right, Jenn?”

  Jenn squinted at the docks and then shrugged. “No. It just means someone stole the boats. The only real sign I saw this morning was back at the…”

  “We don’t have time for this nonsense!” Jillybean cried. “We have to get across the bay today.” It had been ten days since she’d had her “good” pills. Since then she’d been using pills dug from beneath a partially collapsed supermarket pharmacy—they were crap, turning to powder with the least pressure.

  “It’s just the binding agent losing cohesion,” she tried to tell herself, but it wasn’t. The active ingredients were compromised; the fact that she had been gobbling them up like candy and still Eve kept crawling up out of the dark part of her soul was proof of that. For the most part, Sadie kept her at bay, but the fights the two engaged in were mind-numbing. Literally.

  For the first week or so, Sadie had been prevailing, but more and more Eve was coming out. Only that morning Jillybean had woken up and found herself in a strange apartment, a knife in her hand. She had fallen asleep in Jenn’s guest room, that she knew for certain, but the next nine hours were totally unaccounted for. The fact that the knife was unbloodied was the only saving grace and it was a very weak grace at that.

  She had hurried back to Jenn’s apartment, unable to look anyone in the eye, afraid she would see some sort of accusation that would be beyond her ability to explain.

  “You wanna go out to San Fran?” Orlando asked, covering himself with the ghillie suit once more. “Then go, just don’t expect any of us to go with you.”

  With bald reluctance, Jenn said, “I’ll go, too. I know where a hospital is that’s not far inland.”

  Jenn’s hesitancy was understandable. All the blame for their last journey, from stealing the Calypso, to Stu getting shot, to dragging the Corsairs back to the hilltop, had been laid at Jenn’s feet and she was sure that any trouble they found across the bay would become her fault as well.

  Jillybean had done such a good job of hiding her crazy that she was looked on as the eccentric but decidedly brilliant doctor; Stu was the stoic hero who had bravely fought despite his injuries; and Mike was the talented captain who could tame a hurricane and out-sail an entire fleet of pirates. Jenn was just bad luck, exactly as she had always been.

  And if she went across the bay with Jillybean, Jenn thought her luck would go from bad to worse. There was the danger of thousands of zombies, but on top of that Colleen had an animalistic air to her and she had her sights set on Mike who was getting pressure from all around to give up on unlucky Jenn. This was especially heavy coming from the Coven who made it clear that he must knuckle under to them or there would be consequences.

  Mike had every reason to go back to the complex with the others, however he didn’t hesitate to say, “I’ll go, too. We’ll be able to make it back tonight when the tide goes out.”

  Jenn was just beginning to smile when Colleen took a steadying breath and announced, “I’ll go, too. I’ve never been across the bay before. Heck, it might be fun.”

  “Sorry to burst that bubble in your head,” One Shot rumbled, “but you aren’t going. None of you are. All the orders I got was to go down to the docks and see what’s what. We done that, so we’ll be going back, now.”

  Jillybean felt a sudden sharp malevolence swell in her. It came from the sea of darkness in her mind that rose and fell like the tides. Eve was there in the darkness and when Jillybean spoke now it seemed to come from Eve’s throat and not her own. “Look at how big you are and yet you take orders from a bunch of old hags who are too chicken to walk out their front door. They got you leashed and do you know why? Because you’re their little bitch.”

  She brayed laughter, which turned into a great roar of static that filled Jillybean’s ears, and just before everything went black she saw One Shot heading at her, a dirty balled up fist emerging from beneath his raggedy ghillie suit. He thought he was going to hurt her and the idea was laughable. She laughed and laughed, the echoes tumbling into the darknes
s with her…

  The next thing Jillybean knew, she found herself in a musty-smelling bed with the covers thrown over her head. She was lathered in sweat and struggling to breathe silently because…it was a moment before she realized she was not alone in the room. A moan, deep as a foghorn, filled the air and the floor thudded with a heavy footstep.

  Through the worn blanket Jillybean could see the uncertain outline of a zombie coming through the door, its head knocking against the top of the jamb and its shoulders scraping the sides. She knew immediately why she was back in charge of her body: she had been in this exact position once before as a little girl.

  The memory was clear as a bell: shaking, afraid, pathetically hiding in some stranger’s bed with nothing between her and one of the dead except a threadbare scrap of cloth.

  The sense of déjà vu had triggered a deviation from Eve’s neural personality track back to her own.

  There were marked differences in the two situations. The monster from twelve years ago had been a sickly thing. It had been a suburban housewife who’d been half-eaten before she turned and was probably one of the weakest zombies Jillybean had ever faced. Then again, Jillybean was just six-years-old at the time and every zombie terrified her to no end. Luckily, she’d had Ipes with her.

  Ipes might not have been anything but a stuffed toy and the first symptom of her mental aberration but he was smart back when her mental powers were rudimentary and imprecise.

  Ipes had kept her calm and kept her from moving. Ipes kept her alive.

  Now, all Jillybean could rely on was herself. She closed her eyes and concentrated on controlling her diaphragm. Her lungs were filled with panicked desperation and, if allowed to, they would billow and blow into a hyperventilated state—and the zombie would hear her and kill her. Still, her diaphragm was a voluntary muscle and was under her nominal control, if she could master it that is.

  With a force of will, she overcame her body’s demand for oxygen and reset her diaphragm’s rhythm so that the muscle expanded and contracted at a pace similar to that of deep sleep. Her breath became only a whisper.

  The zombie, on the other hand, sounded as if it were trying to slog its breath through a wet rag as it stomped into the room, knocking heavily into a dresser and sending a once neat line of books spilling onto the floor.

  Jillybean could hear the directional change in the creature’s breathing and knew that it was now peering down at the books. She also heard a long, shuddering human gasp. Chancing a peek from beneath the blanket she was shocked to see Jenn Lockhart squatted down next to one end of the dresser, the toes of her boots poking out and catching the slow eye of the zombie.

  The child version of Jillybean might have frozen in terror at Jenn’s situation, knowing the girl was a fraction of a second from being eaten alive, however the near adult Jillybean reacted with practiced speed. She reached into her pocket for one of her magic marbles and, with a flick of her wrist, sent it bouncing away down a corridor making its predictable, steady clacking sound.

  An incoherent cry of rage bellowed from the creature as it swung about and charged into the hallway, tearing pictures from the walls and leaving a trail of glass and black blood. It failed to see the small marble, kicking it further on until it eventually bounced out onto a deck which collapsed under the beast’s tremendous weight.

  Somehow it managed to impale itself on a spear of wood and its struggles to free itself only shoved the shard even deeper into its chest.

  “That worked out well enough,” Jillybean said, pleasantly as she slipped from the bed. She looked down at Jenn who hadn’t budged. “Why did you pick that as your hiding place?”

  “Why did I…” she began to demand before pinching her mouth closed. After a breath, she arranged her lips into a frightened grin and answered, “I was halfway in that bed and then you threw me out of it and took it for yourself.”

  “Oh my, that wasn’t very nice of me.”

  Jenn let out a tittle of fake laughter. She was shaking and the sound came warbling out. “Thaaat’s okay. I’m not mad or anything. So, is it safe to leave yet? Or do you want to talk some more? You were saying that Jillybean wasn’t so smart, which I totally agree with. But she can do all those math problems, like the one with the parentheses and square Xs.”

  “Square Xs? It’s okay, Jenn it’s me, Jillybean. What happened? And where are the others?” It wasn’t a good sign that Jenn immediately looked away.

  Since when did you ever care about signs? The sly voice was like a cold wind creeping down Jillybean’s back. She jerked and looked around. The closet door was partially open and, in its shadows, something stirred. Despite catching only a glimpse, there was a touch of something maddeningly familiar about it.

  She took a step towards the closet door just as Jenn said, “You shot One Shot.”

  Jillybean jerked a second time and, forgetting the thing in the closet, she spun. “I-I did? Why? Why would I do that?”

  Because you’re crazy, the thing in the closet answered a second before Jenn shrugged.

  “It was Eve, wasn’t it?” Jillybean asked. Jenn nodded and Jillybean’s stomach, feeling as if it was filled with rancid lard, turned over.

  Evie liked it. She got excited by it. The gun was hot and smelled like…

  “Shut up!” Jillybean cried, glaring at the closet, thinking that if she heard one more syllable she would charge in there and tear the place apart. She would tear it apart, as well. In fact, if Jenn hadn’t been there, looking at her with frightened wet eyes, she would have already done so. Clearing her throat and doing her best to compose herself, she asked Jenn, “What happened?”

  Jenn was almost too afraid to answer. “H-He got mad and came at you. I-I guess you thought he was going to attack because you pulled out a pistol and shot him.” She paused as Jillybean’s knees buckled and she sat down on the bed. “He’s not dead. You got him in the belly. Mike and Orlando had to drag him back up the hill. I don’t know what’s going to happen to you now. You might be a criminal. They may kill you and they probably will if he dies.”

  This was understandable in the primitive eye-for-an-eye world they lived in. “Whatever his faults, I don’t want him to die. We should go back at once. Where are we?” Before Jenn could answer, Jillybean heard the gentle wash of water against a ragged shoreline and she heard the wind blowing from the same direction as the waves. “We’re on the other side of the bay?”

  “You, or I guess it was Eve, made me tell you where we kept the canoes and the other small boats.” She hesitated, once more looking down. She had more to say, more evil tidings, no doubt.

  I know what you did, said the voice from the closet with a croaking noise that could only be its way of cackling. You sank them! A flash of a memory: gunfire and water leaping around slowly sinking metal canoes.

  “What about the canoe that got us here?”

  Jillybean had been looking towards the closet when she asked this and after a glance in that direction, Jenn answered, “You scuttled it. That’s the word you said right before you called me a scurvy dog.”

  “I did?” Jenn answered with a nod and Jillybean slumped on the bed, her spine curved into a C. “Sorry. I swear I didn’t mean it. I-I just need my pills. Once I have them I’ll get better. Are we near a hospital?” This brought more laughter from the closet. Jillybean lacked the will to even glare.

  “No. You said you’d shoot me if we came anywhere near one. We’re south of Oakland, very close to where we were going to meet the traders before the horde came in. I can’t believe that wasn’t even three weeks ago. It feels like a year.”

  Jenn hadn’t budged and was staring glassy-eyed at her boots which were trimmed with slowly drying mud. She refused to look up at Jillybean, suggesting that Eve had called her worse than a scurvy dog.

  Yes, you did. You said she had a face like a dog’s cu…

  “Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to come this way,” Jillybean said, speaking hurriedly and loudly over the thing in
the closet and trying to put a good spin on a terrible situation. “There’s no telling what the traders left behind.”

  “I’m sure it has all been taken by now. Gerry the Greek would’ve gone after it days ago. And if he hasn’t, the Santas would have.” Jenn looked like she was about to cry. “What are we going to do? When One Shot dies, the Coven’s going to kill you and then blame me for everything. Even though it was Stu’s idea to go find you in the first place, he’ll only get a slap on the wrist and Mike won’t even get that. He’ll get Colleen.” She said this last so quietly that it seemed she was almost talking to herself.

  “What we can’t do is just sit here,” Jillybean said, especially with that thing in the closet, she thought to herself. In fact, she did her best to put it out of her mind. She stole a quick peek towards the remains of the deck where the zombie’s struggles were growing weaker. Judging by the fantastic pool of blood it was standing in, it had undoubtedly torn open its descending aorta.

  She stuck out a hand to Jenn who reluctantly took it and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. They slipped out of the room and were halfway down the hall when the thing in the closet called out in its hideously cold voice, Aren’t you forgetting something?

  “Huh?” It took Jillybean a moment to realize that Jenn was missing both her ghillie suit and her crossbow. There was no reason to ask where they were: Eve must have stripped her of them. No doubt seeing the fear in Jenn’s eyes was theater for the evil creature inside of Jillybean. “Take this,” Jillybean said, handing over the Sig Sauer P226 she had picked up years ago. She then slid her ghillie suit over her head. “And this.”

  The kind, polite part of Jenn looked like she wanted to refuse the gift, however the survivor in her took the ghillie suit and put it on. As she was doing this, Jillybean slid the old blanket from the bed and proceeded to shred it with a razor-edged knife she carried. She then draped the remains over her head and shoulders.