The Queen of the Dead

by Peter Meredith

  But this was different. Her sense of touch was perfect. She could feel that the air was warmer than it should have been and she could smell smoke and something else, something her waking mind was slow to catch on to. “Charred human flesh,” she said, below a whisper.

  Mixed in with the autumnal smell of burning wood and leaves was the occasional sent of broiled human or, more than likely, zombie, which was far worse.

  In the last six hours, the wind had shifted and was blowing east causing a great bank of smoke to roll down the hill. The fire had shifted as well and Jillybean could hear the unsettling noises it made. In her mind, the crunch, rumble and roar made it seem like the town wasn’t being burned, but rather consumed as if it was being eaten by some alien creature with a million mouths and an endless appetite.

  You did that, a voice whispered behind her. She still hadn’t budged. She had been warm and snug in a nest of blankets—now, she went stiff as she tried to reach out with her senses. She was on a strange bed, in a strange room and she was alone. She knew she was alone because a real person would have disturbed the air with their presence, they would have made noises. Jillybean would’ve heard the slightest shift, the softest breath, and maybe, if it had been perfectly quiet, she could hear a person’s heartbeat.

  The voice wasn’t real.

  I’m as real as you are, it said. In a way it was right. The voice had real-world implications and had been generated as a result of real-world actions. It couldn’t be wished away, no matter how much Jillybean tried. It would have to be dealt with in the real-world.

  Slowly, her breath held and her body rigid in preparation, Jillybean rolled over to confront the owner of the voice. She was a firm believer in the idea that facing her fears reduced them, making them at least manageable if not eradicating them altogether.

  But there was nothing behind her, not even a closet. It was just a wall. The closet was to the left and was wide open, the shadows easily pierced even with the dull light.

  Do you really want to find me? Do you really want to see what I look like? the voice asked. Now it was under the bed and, reflexively Jillybean pulled her knees to her chest. Gathering her feet under her, she sprang to the floor, her black Converse high-tops touching down lightly.

  Ready to jump away, she crouched to peer under the bed. The shadows were much deeper here, still she could see that other than dirty socks and a growing family of dust bunnies there was nothing there.

  You won’t find me in the dark. If you want to see the real me, come in here. The hateful voice was coming from the bathroom. Would it be in the tub? Would the voice be coming from some sort of alien creature sloshing around in a pool of blood and filth? Or would it be a dead body crouched down next to the toilet, a gun in its hand, a hole in its head, its face dry and wrinkled by age, its eyes sunken, its toes eaten away by rats?

  Steadying herself, she went to the door and slowly pushed it open. Save for an old grey ring, the tub was empty as was the corner next to the toilet. All the same, the bathroom was not empty. She could feel it in there and there was only one place she couldn’t see from the doorway.

  It was in the mirror.

  Jillybean was tempted to leave. Just walk out the door and not look back. “Face your fears,” she whispered. She stepped into the bathroom, her eyes on the sink handles which were both pitted from the salt air, or at least she assumed it was salt air corroding them, just as she assumed she was still in San Francisco.

  “Okay,” she intoned solemnly and looked into the mirror seeing a version of herself, one that was wrong. In the mirror was a girl with a wild mass of fly away brown hair, a pert nose and full lips. But this girl didn’t have blue eyes exactly. The sclera were no longer white. They were so yellow that they seemed to have turned her blue irises to green.

  “That’s not…” She had looked down at herself; her hand was an awful yellow. “That’s me?” She felt it then; the exhaustion, the sickness, the poison running through her veins. Her liver was failing rapidly now and with every pill she swallowed, the organ hardened and parts died, adding to the problem.

  Jillybean leaned closer to the mirror and now saw that there was practically a green cast to her skin and as she watched a sore developed on her cheek. At first it was a simple red splotch, but it grew and split, pus dribbling from its now grey edges. A second joined the first and then a third. Now her skin was grey-green and her eyes were listless. Her mouth hung open and a pale white tongue hung out of it.

  She tried to close her mouth but the effort was too great. Her energy was just about gone and so was her life.

  This is me, the voice said in a silky hiss. This is me and this is you. Do you want that? Keep taking the pills and this is what we’ll be by the end of the week.

  “Wrong,” she whispered, clutching the sink with her yellowed hands, barely able to keep herself up. “The progression…” She swayed as her head went light. Before she knew it her knees had buckled and she collapsed onto the floor. Only slowly did her strength come back, not to its normal tweaking vibrancy, but to the same dullness that she had been feeling for the last few days.

  “You are wrong,” she told the voice. “The progression of liver disease can take months.” But hadn’t she been dealing with this for months already? Hadn’t her liver panels come back frightfully high over and over? This couldn’t be denied, but a week to look like that? Impossible.

  Then two weeks.

  Her eyes darted up to the mirror and she was just able to make out crazy strands of hair as if there was someone inside the glass. “Maybe,” she admitted. According to her reading sometimes people went downhill pretty quickly. If she kept swallowing ten pills a day it would be two weeks. But if she didn’t?

  “What would I look like then?”

  Come see.

  She edged up to the mirror seeing a girl with great wide eyes—blue as they should be. Her skin was like cream and her lips red as if she dieted solely on blood. Jillybean smiled in relief—then the smile kinked and the relief vanished. Behind the image in the mirror was drecks of black smoke billowing from an unseen fire. She spun and only saw a plain wall behind her. When she turned back the fire was still blooming behind her image. She bobbed slightly to get a better look at the source and that was when she heard the scream. It was coming from the mirror. It had been a girl screaming.

  Canting herself far over, she could just see a figure in the smoke being dragged away. She was being dragged away by one of the dead. And further behind her was an image: apartment buildings on a hilltop; its fence thrown down and the doors of its buildings beaten in. There were bodies scattered everywhere.

  “No,” she gasped. Covering her eyes as she turned away. She walked straight out of the house and stood on the front porch which overlooked the harbor. The sky was hidden by clouds of smoke and the sun was nothing but a lead disk the size of a nickel. As she stood there trying to get her bearings, ash coated her. She noticed it for the first time: grey snow that left a smear when she touched it.

  “It wasn’t real,” she said, meaning the illusion from the mirror. It couldn’t have been real since she didn’t believe in precognition, omens, or any of that nonsense. It wasn’t real, but it didn’t mean that it couldn’t become real. If she didn’t take her pills it was a very real possibility.

  Already she could feel the darkness stirring inside of her and she jumped as something moved out of the corner of her vision. There was nothing there. A normal person would’ve called it a trick of their eyes. She knew better. For her it wasn’t a trick of the eyes or the mind, it was a symptom.

  She paused, feeling out of kilter from the vision and the poison in her veins. It seemed like she was supposed to be doing something only she couldn’t remember much of what had happened the day before. Her last clear memory was standing over One Shot’s stiff corpse, then she saw the syringe and realized that someone had murdered him. Before that she’d been in the silly prison and before that…then it hit her: “I was supposed to be k
illed. Clearly, I escaped and now I’m here.”

  The only question was how had she come to be there? She looked down at her hands expecting to see blood. There was black crud under her nails and maroon smears on the backs of her hands, mixing with what smelled like soot. Blood and soot meant that she had not only killed someone, but also started the fire that she was pretty sure would wipe out all of Sausalito.

  Just Sausalito? Eve asked, her voice echoing up out of the dark. I set a hundred fires. This bitch is going to burn not just Sausalito, but also Marin City and all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. And if the wind backs around again, it might go all the way to Sacramento. I’m doing your mission for you. A thank you would be…

  With a weary sigh, Jillybean interrupted, “Where are the others? Are they back at the complex?” She hoped not, seeing as the fires had nearly cut her completely off from the hilltop. Eve only laughed. Jillybean was about to ask a second time when she saw movement down the hill from her—it was a person wearing a ghillie suit, a ghillie suit she had made. Mike, she guessed by his size.

  She gave the harbor and the burning hill a good long look before she began to creep on a course that set her right across his path. By the way he acted, she could tell that he was searching for a person and could only hope that he wasn’t “hunting” for that person as well.

  “Hi,” she whispered as he got close. To his credit he didn’t jump. He was draped in camouflage all except the barrel of his M4, which swung towards her.

  “Eve?”

  “No, it’s me, Jillybean. Is everyone okay?”

  Mike interpreted the question correctly. “No one’s dead, but Jenn was shot in the head.”

  Distantly, Jillybean felt her knees buckle and there was a thud as her bottom hit dirt. The next thing she knew she was staring up at the angry clouds of smoke, tumbling across the sky as the wind took them east. Mike was patting her on the cheek. “Hey, you okay?”

  “Jenn? She’s been shot?” Jillybean tried to sit up, but found she was too weak to do so without help. “Did I do it?”

  To her great relief, he shook his head before going on to explain what had happened. The relief gave her a surge of energy in her otherwise hollow chest. She struggled to her feet and together they marched straight away to where Jenn lay alone in the Saber.

  “Find Stu,” she ordered Mike. “I’m going to need clean water in big pots, wood and real bandages. If there’s a hospital or a clinic nearby go there and get me a suture kit, a stethoscope, a BP cuff and something to disinfect the wound. Try Clorahexidine or Hibiclens, something like that. We’ll start with that and hope for the best.”

  He sped out there as Jillybean lit one of the candles and drew back the curtains on the small portal-like windows. It gave her some light, though not as much as she wished, and not enough to do surgery by.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First things first.” She rubbed Jenn’s arm saying, “Wake up. You’ve been asleep too long. It’s time to get up.”

  A flicker of eyelids was followed by the gleam of Jenn’s blue eyes. It wasn’t much of a gleam, just as a slash as she struggled to lift her lids. “What times it?” she slurred.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe around ten in the morning. Can you tell me your name?”

  Jenn seemed to take forever to answer. “Jenn Lockhart. Why’s my head so big? It hurts and it feels big.” She reached up a wavering hand and touched the bandages, a smile curving her lip for just a second. “I guess my head has always been this big.”

  A smile was a great sign and Jillybean breathed out a big sigh of relief. Jenn was going to live.

  Maybe, Eve whispered, from out of the darkness. She was surprisingly close to the surface. So close, in fact that for a few seconds Jillybean’s vision blurred and the tips of her fingers went numb. She thought that Eve was about to seize control, however the girl slid back down on her own whispering, Maybe she’ll live.

  Chapter 16

  Eve was too close. Jillybean passed a hand over her face, the relief at seeing Jenn alive was utterly gone, replaced with a cold lump in her chest and an overwhelming desire for her pills. It was an addict’s hunger and it overpowered everything.

  “Your head is going to be fine. Just fine,” she patted Jenn’s arm, absently, her eyes searching past the glow of the candles for her pack. “Look I have to get some, uh some supplies. Wait here.”

  Jenn’s eyes were already closing as Jillybean grabbed one of the candles and went forward into the main cabin. Other than a pile of blankets it was empty. In the aft cabin, she found more blankets and two packs, neither of which were hers. “They left my pack? Jeeze.”

  Eve began to laugh as Jillybean hurried to the cramped set of stairs that led up. She even laughed when Jillybean saw her pack sitting with Jenn’s on the deck near the mast. In a flash she had a bottle in her hands.

  If you take the pills you’ll kill us both, Eve said. Is that what you want? Do you want us to go out looking like this? The image of the sickening pus-dripping, yellow-faced girl she had seen in the mirror flashed into Jillybean’s mind, making her drop the bottle of pills.

  They rolled to the starboard side of the boat and Jillybean scrambled after them. “That only might happen,” she cried. “I just need enough of my meds to get rid of you. Then, then I’ll be good to go. I’ll stop, then.”

  The only way to get rid of me is for you to take all of those pills. Go on, I’ll wait. The image again with one change, Jillybean’s left eye suddenly began dribbling green-grey gunk and as it did, the eye fell in on itself.

  “Stop it!”

  “Stop what?” Stu had just slipped around the barbed wire-topped wall that surrounded the rear of the repair shop. Mike was right behind him, accidentally tripping over a rusting fender that sat partially buried like some sort of newly uncovered dinosaur bone.

  Guilt and fear had Jillybean clamping the bottle between her hands. “It’s nothing,” she answered as Eve laughed and laughed. Jillybean knew she could surface anytime she wanted to but, for reasons known only to Eve, she kept just below the edge of Jillybean’s consciousness, making jokes, snide remarks and sometimes screaming as if her intestines were being torn out.

  Jillybean jumped every time. After asking what was wrong once and receiving a blatant lie, Stu pretended not to notice. Nor did he mention Jillybean’s twitchy eyes and shaking hands as she cleaned Jenn’s wound and inspected it. Blood had clotted her hair into a crusty gob that made the wound seem huge, but once that had been cleaned away it became obvious that the girl had been incredibly lucky. Her skull had barely been touched by the grazing bullet that had opened her scalp above the ear as neatly as a surgeon’s knife.

  “I’ll need a razor, or the sharpest knife you can find,” she told Stu. She had to clear the area around the wound of hair or infection would almost be a given. By the time Stu returned, the various pots of water were boiled and the instruments sterilized. She took the razor from him and just as she was about to set it against Jenn’s flesh, her hand jerked.

  Careful now. You don’t want to slip.

  Jillybean hesitated, unwilling to speak to Eve when people were around. “Mike could you, uh, stand guard? And Stu, could you get me some food. Something warm please?” The moment they were gone, she hissed, “Get out of my head!”

  No. A sudden image of fire, and explosions, and arterial blood spraying in a fountain passed before her eyes. Jillybean’s hand went to her pocket to where her Zyprexa was sitting. The pills had deteriorated to such an extent that five of them were only temporarily keeping Eve away and Jillybean didn’t dare take six.

  The pills began to rattle as her hand shook.

  That’s the sound of me winning! Eve cried in a huge voice that echoed like thunder and made Jillybean’s blue eyes bulge. I have grown strong while you have done nothing but hide in your books and your useless experiments.

  The razor fell from her hand. Her fingers were beginning to wiggle on their own and as if she were watching
someone else’s hand, it reached out on its own to pick up the razor. The gleaming edge turned toward Jenn who was awake and looking at her.

  “Hi,” Jillybean said, pulling the razor back, in control of her hands again. “I was just, um, running something over in m-my mind. You can relax, I’ll have you stitched up in no time.”

  In one hand she held the pills, in the other, the razor. With Jenn staring at her, she put the pills down.

  Jenn was only vaguely aware that something was wrong. All that came through her pounding head were mumbled words. She had classic concussion symptoms: headache, blurred vision, dizziness and a terrible lassitude that kept her from caring about Jillybean’s oddness or even about the coming fire which was closing in on the harbor from three directions.

  Somehow Jillybean was able to clean and stitch up the wound without Eve coming back. She had just finished wrapping Jenn’s head when Stu came into the cabin, moving stealthily as always. “We’re going to have to move the boat.” He explained why in two words: “The fire.”

  Nervously, Jillybean hurried onto the deck. The smoke had become heavier and fuller so that the sun was utterly obliterated and the daylight had the strength of late evening.

  The smoke had her coughing and squinting. Mike and Stu, barely visible in the haze, were forty feet away, pushing open the gates, which screeched like a lamb at its first shearing. A block or so beyond them the fire was an eye-watering glow mostly hidden by the smoke.

  Even as close as they were, both men were also partially hidden. They looked ghostly and indistinct as if the wind might blow them away as well and for a moment Jillybean paused, uncertain whether she was really looking at actual spirits or whether her broken mind was playing tricks on her again.

  She coughed and pulled her shirt up over her nose, noticing that Mike and Stu had done something similar. “And would ghosts need to worry about smoke?” she asked herself. “Maybe not. I hope not. It’s me being foolish.” She tried to laugh at herself before remembering the image of herself in the mirror. That soured her stomach and she descended the ladder, carefully, holding to each rung.