The Queen of the Dead

by Peter Meredith

  “I will never get used to that in a million years,” Mike said, in a low voice, ten minutes later as they crept down a city street, empty packs on their backs, their ragged ghillie suits pulled up over their heads. “I tell you, it gives me the creeps. And am I the only one worried about leaving her alone with the boat? She could steal it. There’s nothing stopping Eve from heading off to Mexico.”

  Stu commented with a grunt, though what he meant by it, Mike didn’t know.

  Jenn, who felt amazingly better, had asked to come with them, if only to keep watch. She was just about to put in her two-cents when she paused, with her head canted so she could see through the strips of material. “Hold on,” she whispered, stopping in front of a boutique, one of the few places on the street with an intact front window.

  She had heard something: a scrape of wood, like a chair being brushed aside. It seemed like too small of a sound to have been made by one of the dead and yet thirty feet ahead of them a zombie suddenly stumbled out of the remains of a hotel. As one, the three of them dropped into a crouch and froze—and prayed. Jenn sent out a prayer to the Christian God and her fingers itched to either grab her cross or make the sign of the cross, but she didn’t dare move.

  The beast had turned immediately towards them and with slow deliberate steps, it came stomping right down the sidewalk. It was up to Stu as leader to decide what to do: run or fight. Running was the smartest choice, only he couldn’t run, the best he could do was a gimping jog. And it would be a terrible way to start an expedition by shooting their rifles and attracting every zombie in the city right to them.

  He was rarely indecisive and yet three seconds went by as he dithered between his terrible choices. In that short time the zombie had cut the distance in half and now running wasn’t an option for any of them.

  “Don’t move,” he whispered, hoping that the beast would mistake them for three very schlumpy-looking bushes, and, unfortunately that is exactly what happened. The zombie went right for Mike and as the creature wasn’t roaring or going crazy, Mike actually believed it was going to keep walking past him, Instead it simply reached out and pulled the ghillie suit right off of him.

  Mike thought he was a dead man and trained his M4 up to shoot in a last-ditch attempt to live, but before he could pull the trigger, he saw the beast had been completely fooled by the camouflage. Thinking it was eating some sort of plant, the zombie shoved the blanket into its gaping pit of a mouth.

  It began chewing and chewing and then took to rending the blanket with its great clawed hands, and all the while Mike was in a crouch at its feet, alive only because the end of the blanket hung over his head, blocking the beast’s view. The situation, both precarious and absurd, couldn’t last. Any second, the zombie would toss aside the ghillie suit and see him.

  As it would be stupid to wait for that to happen, Mike tried to slink around it, hoping to put a bullet in the back of its head before it even knew he was there. He hadn’t quite got into position when his movement caught the beast’s eye and it let out a howl of rage. It tossed aside the ghillie suit and spun, but not all the way around.

  It had spun towards the boutique where Mike’s reflection, looking tiny and frail compared to the eight-foot tall beast, was perfectly clear. So clear, in fact that it fooled the zombie, who charged straight at the glass with a hideous screech that echoed down the empty streets.

  Even though it weighed nearly six hundred pounds, it was so close to the window that it couldn’t generate the velocity to smash it in. Instead it ended up smacking into the glass face-first with an oddly musical gong sound and leaving a smear of mucus and blood. As they were without fully functioning brains, it was very difficult to stun a zombie and yet this one had to blink three straight times before its vision cleared enough to see the little man gawping in surprise and again it charged.

  This time it charged and swung a haymaker that came all the way from left field. Its fist connected with Mike’s reflection and now the window came apart in a waterfall of glass that cut up the beast horribly. It didn’t notice the hundreds of lacerations or the quarts of black blood that poured from them.

  The zombie only knew that the man had somehow disappeared. Its rage doubled and then doubled again. In a perfectly volcanic manner, the zombie exploded, releasing that rage as it attacked the nearest human-like thing to it: a mannequin done up with a blonde wig and a stylish black pantsuit. In seconds the mannequin was destroyed, its plastic head torn from its plastic body. But there were more mannequins and the beast’s rage was infinite. It threw itself on each in a frenzy of claws and teeth.

  Jittery, his heart pounding and a tremor going in his hands, Mike stood in front of the store watching the one-sided battle and picturing himself as each of those mannequins, soft and so easily broken. Stu handed him the torn ghillie suit. “Still good enough,” he said about the suit. “You’ll be fine.” This was his version of a pep-talk.

  He wasn’t wrong about the ghillie suit. That was the thing about Jillybean’s strange ghillie-blanket, it retained its camouflaging abilities no matter what sort of damage it took. In fact, when he slipped it over his head, he looked even less human than before. He just hoped he looked less like a plant.

  The three scampered away, leaving the zombie rampaging throughout the boutique, “killing” mannequin after mannequin, leaving arms and heads strewn, and a trail of black blood.

  After this, Stu had Jenn lead, while he trailed ten yards behind her and Mike a further ten yards behind him.

  Jenn crossed herself three times, kissed her M4 and started off, moving slower and with more care than before. She was a good choice to lead after how close Mike had come to death. Her nerves were a-tingle and her bat-sharp ears were attuned to every sound as she guided them on a roundabout course for the hospital, avoiding the many zombies.

  Only one managed to surprise her as it quite unexpectedly walked off the roof of a three-story office building. It kept walking even when there was nothing under its feet but air and only stopped walking when it met the earth with a stomach-churning splat-thud. The fall didn’t kill it, however it did add a new hinge to its leg—its knee bent one way and midway down, its shin went the other.

  It crawled and scraped along after them.

  Jenn guided them to a children’s hospital, but once there was reluctant to lead, afraid that she would actually see a child zombie or worse, a zombie baby. The three of them stood in the lobby, feeling the walls for the least vibration, their ears cocked and their breath held. Thankfully, the building was empty and deathly quiet.

  Satisfied, they went in search of the supplies on the list and in just under three hours they came back to the lobby loaded like pack mules.

  At the beginning of the apocalypse, San Francisco and its surrounding cities had not been well armed and when the dead came they swept aside the defenses that had been erected with particular ease, sending the people screaming north and leaving behind a city well-stocked in many items.

  Deep in its underground storerooms, the hospital had many, many crates filled with IV fluids. By candlelight, they went through each, taking only the normal saline. In all, they found thirty-nine boxes of the stuff. They didn’t just collect the fluids, they also gathered boxes of catheters and tubing. Then they went in search of cleaning supplies, gloves and masks.

  When they were done, Mike sat on a stack of boxes, the hood of his ghillie suit thrown back, staring at the piles. “I’m pretty sure when Jillybean said ‘get all they have,’ she didn’t really mean this much.”

  “She said she wanted to fill the Saber,” Stu reminded him, “and this might do it.”

  Mike knew better. Counting deck space, the Saber could hold twice as much, but he wasn’t about to admit that. “Okay, so how the hell are going to get it back? It’s not like we have a cart that will fit all this stuff or a zombie to drag it along.”

  Jenn was just getting her new logic-oriented mind in gear, ready to puzzle it out when Stu answered, “Gurneys.
You know, those rolling beds? We’ll lash six or seven together and take it all in one trip. I picked out a route on the way here. There’s a few places where the road is completely messed up that will be tricky, and we’ll have to manhandle the stuff past it, but it’ll let us do it all in one trip.”

  It was a very slow and exhausting trip. After tying down the boxes, the two men heaved, while Jenn led the way. When she couldn’t guide them around she was forced to distract them with thrown rocks or strategic fires.

  It was right at sunset that they made it back to the Saber, all three of them secretly relieved to find it still there. It was an ugly sunset. The fires had not burned out and the entire western edge of the bay, from where the Golden Gate touched to beyond what the eye could see, was enveloped in smoke.

  Guilt-ridden, they pulled the gurneys, one by one, down to the Saber but were stopped as they came to a four-foot wide gap in the planks that hadn’t been there before. In the water below them were two zombies wallowing, unable to either climb up or swim away.

  Stu had a bad feeling as he leapt across the gap and hurried down to where Jillybean was sitting in a crouch at the edge of the dock. She hadn’t been resting and she hadn’t stayed with the boat. Just then she was worrying over three separate fires each of which had a number of pots sitting right in the flames. Whatever she was cooking smelled ghastly.

  “Oh, it’s almost night,” she said, glancing around, noticing the setting sun for the first time. She grinned at Stu, not even seeing Jenn and Mike. Her smile was almost drunkenly giddy. “It’s good you’re back. I need someone to keep stirring this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Mostly bunker fuel and a sludge of old grease I got out of a McDonald’s holding tank.”

  Stu couldn’t tell if this was one of her other personalities talking or if she had gone to a whole new level of crazy. She was almost like a little kid playing pretend chef. “And this other stuff? What’s it all for?” There was a tumble of supplies around her; strange items that didn’t make any more sense than the old grease: spools of wire, short lengths of threaded pipes, tape, radios, tools and bags of fertilizer.

  “I know I told myself I wouldn’t, but I’m making bombs!”

  Chapter 18

  Stu opened his mouth to ask the obvious, but the question must have turned sideways in his throat because it refused to come out until he had swallowed loudly and coughed purposely. “A bomb? Why do you need a bomb?”

  Jillybean’s gay smile dimmed. “Just in case, I suppose. You never know, right? You never know when a bomb might come in handy and you know they’d be awful useful against zombies. I can see you’re worried, Stu. Just think of them as tools.”

  “Them?” Mike asked, from behind his hand. The rancid smoke had just blown across him. “And why do you have bomb parts in the fire? Aren’t you worried it’s going to blow up?”

  Jenn knew next to nothing about bombs. She hadn’t even known this was a possibility and subconsciously shifted behind Mike. From over his shoulder she asked, “Are you even Jillybean?”

  “Of course, I am. Everyone needs to relax. The bomb won’t just go boom on its own. I’ve done this before. Except, I’ve never used magnesium and ammonia perchlorate as a primary explosive before.” Her lips pursed as she picked up a small black tube.

  Stu leaned forward and by the light of the fire he read the block print written on it. “Hold on, does that say grenade?” Mike and Jenn stepped back in what looked like a choreographed synchronized dance move.

  Jillybean held it up so he could read it better. “It’s a stun grenade. You know, like a flashbang. It doesn’t actually blow up. I couldn’t find any blasting caps and I needed something. It’ll probably work once we get the casing off and when we get the batteries going. You guys don’t know where I can get some hydrogen sulfide, do you?” Their lost-in-the-woods looks told her they didn’t. “Then I guess you wouldn’t know where I could get boric acid, either. Never mind. We’ll find a college or something on the way to Sacramento.”

  She stared down at the mixture in the pot in front of her and became so lost in thought that she almost seemed to fall into a trance. Stu watched her for a minute before shrugging. “I guess we’ll get the stuff,” he told the others.

  When they were back at the gurneys, Mike whispered, “She’s up to something. Something bad. We shouldn’t do anything or help her anymore until she tells us.”

  Stu looked back at Jillybean who was well lit by the fires. She finished stirring and was now sanding the end of a pipe she had threaded earlier. She seemed perfectly content, which was surprising since she didn’t seem to have taken any pills; her eyes were as clear as day.

  “That’s not Eve,” he said. “I’m sure of it. And I don’t think Sadie is smart enough to do all that.”

  “Okay, it’s Jillybean. It’s still Jillybean with a bomb. Of all people, she shouldn’t be playing with bombs. And her reason for making them is…what’s the word? Suspicion? Whatever the right word is, doesn’t matter. There’s something bad about this. What do you think, Jenn?”

  The first thing Jenn did was look up at the darkening sky, searching for a sign. There were more stars out than she had expected, and yet they told her nothing except that the wind had picked up and had shifted to the northeast—towards Sacramento.

  “All the signs point to us going to Sacramento. There’s nothing about Jillybean.”

  “Signs?” Stu growled. “What about logic and all that? What happened to thinking three steps ahead?”

  “I’m sorry, Stu, but I can’t think three steps ahead of her. I’m lucky if I’m not a week behind. I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about back there. I’ve never heard of stun grenades or gymnasium acid. Besides, I thought you wanted to go with her.”

  She had been loud, her voice edged with hurt. “I do and I’m sorry if you thought I was calling you dumb. I’m just worried about all this, and I hoped you had some insight, more than the stars, I mean.”

  The three of them stood for a time in silence, not really knowing what to do about the bombs. In the end they felt as they had no choice but to load the Saber with the supplies and help Jillybean, who was delighted to have a somewhat captive audience so she could explain her “modified ANFO munitions.” She also set them to work on a dozen little chores—cutting old soda cans into tiny strips, shaving the plastic ends of wires, hand-drilling a tiny hole into each of the pipes and testing the radios and the receivers using her two remaining batteries.

  Jillybean took it on herself to prepare the actual bombs and although she claimed it was perfectly safe, the others stood away from her as she did. She made a baker’s dozen and when, after five hours, she was done; the energy seemed to drain right out of her. She began to yawn repeatedly and argue with Eve, the two getting snippy with each other in a bizarre back and forth that made everyone uncomfortable.

  Stu stepped in. “It’s bed time.” She didn’t fight him and went aboard the Saber willingly.

  She was the only one who slept past sunrise when the gulls began to screech. Throwing their ghillie suits over their heads, Mike and Stu went in search of fishing supplies, something that didn’t take long at all as there were condos sitting practically at the end of the dock. While they were gone, Jenn tiptoed out from the little cabin she shared with Jillybean and out into the sunshine.

  It was a cold morning and she was glad for the shredded up blanket/ghillie suit, even though it was beginning to smell of mold and the bottom edges of it were coated in dried mud.

  As always, she looked for signs, but her eyes got caught up by what she saw across the bay. The great mountains of smoke and flame had moved north leaving behind a nightmare of soot and ash and cinder. Spindly black spires took the place of living trees and these poked up out of a grey mist that shimmered up from the devastation. Here and there, fires were still burning, though there were fewer of them and they were far less intense. There was little left to burn.

  Sausalito was
gone. Pelican Harbor was gone. Probably the hilltop complex was gone, too. Jenn thought she was going to cry. Orlando had been a jerk and Donna had been unfair but neither deserved to die.

  Mike and Stu came up with four fishing poles and a tackle box the size of a piece of carryon luggage. Stu’s face was like a piece of white granite. He stared alongside of her for a few moments, growled something under his breath, before dropping his pole and sprinting away back up the dock.

  “Where’s he going?” Mike wondered, his stomach beginning to growl. They watched Stu race down a frontage road to a white office building that rose fifteen stories. When he disappeared inside, Mike turned his attention to catching their breakfast. They had very little food and the subject had been on his mind ever since they escaped from the fire.

  The tackle box held every type of lure he would ever need and he was able to land a starry flounder before Stu came back, walking now. He had his binoculars still about his neck. “I think they’re okay. I could see the top of some of the apartments and they were untouched. Not even smoke damaged.”

  “Oh good,” Jenn said, with another glance across the bay. It was then that she caught sight of the Puffer, unfurling her small white sail and gliding out from behind Treasure Island. The sight of it jolted her. She could picture the boat crammed with sailors and Gerry the Greek’s mad, bearded face leering at the Saber. If they came, he would demand the boat without hesitation and perhaps arrest them as well.

  Mike must have been thinking the same thing because he didn’t bother unhooking his fish as he headed straight down the dock to the Saber. Stu and Jenn followed, clambering on board as silently as possible. Neither wanted to wake Jillybean, worried how she would act in the face of this danger. Even though the wind was light across the bay, Mike had them moving in less than a minute.

  Up shot the black sail, catching all of the northwest wind it could and the Saber began to plow a white groove through the bottle green water. At the sight of it, the Puffer heeled around, tacking south as fast it could. “They must think we’re Corsairs,” Mike said, relaxing now. He moved to grab the flounder which had flapped and flipped its thin form almost off the boat. Whipping out his knife, he cut away the head and fins, before slicing it open as easily as opening a book.