The Queen of the Dead

by Peter Meredith

  Sadie snorted, saying, “Let’s keep it that way.” They came to the clean area where three of the sickly warehouse people were trying to heave one of the water bladders up onto a six-foot high stack of pallets. They were supposed to be building a make-shift shower station but the entire structure kept tilting. “We have another one for you,” Sadie called out and settled the man down next to three other cadaverous beings waiting their turn to be scrubbed down by Diamond and Johanna, both of whom were pasty and pale.

  “Should those guys be doing it that way?” Jenn asked as the pallets fell. “I don’t think that’s gonna work.”

  “Uh,” Sadie said, squinting over at them. “Prolly not. They should use pulleys and winches or what? What was that last word?” She canted her head upwards, her eyes cocked so that it looked as though she were trying to catch sight of her own ear. “Vul-crums? Oh, fulcrums. Yeah, I know what those are. Look, I gotta go, Jenn’s staring at me like I got boog hanging off my nose. Sheesh, what a pain.”

  “Was that Jillybean?” Jenn asked, trying to make it seem like it was altogether normal and not crazy at all for the girl to be talking to thin air.

  Sadie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, always backseat driving. Do I get all loud when she’s in charge? Do I say anything when she blows up half a city or unleashes a zombie army? No. I keep to myself, I do my own thing which is mostly just playing pong on single player mode. It’s not the most exciting death, but it beats the alternative.” She rolled her eyes again and then thumped the side of her head with the heel of her hand. “Shut up in there. I’m going. Oh, hey, you know what you’re supposed to be doing right?”

  Jenn remembered. “IVs, but I’ve never done one.”

  “I wish I could show you but I’ve never done one either. It can’t be too hard, right?”

  Sadie gave her a last smile before walking away. “Not too hard?” Jenn said out loud. Diamond heard and gave her a dull-eyed, nonjudgmental look. Perhaps she thinks we’re all crazy, Jenn wondered. The two ex-slaves were scrubbing down the would-be patients using antibacterial soap and buckets of clean water from the bladders. They were doing a thorough but quick job of it. Already there were two pale, shivering men wrapped in blankets, waiting to be hooked up to IVs.

  Jenn glanced back to where Sadie was trying to work out the details of the simplest machine while trying to ignore Jillybean’s massively complex brain. Jenn would have traded with her in a second. One of the men was looking at her with teary eyes that were very old in a face that couldn’t have been over forty.

  “Maybe you should sit down. No lie down. There you go.” When he was lying down it was harder for him to see Jenn’s frazzled look. “Okay…what’s first?” She had never started an IV before, but she had seen Jillybean do it numerous times and Jillybean had never once failed to talk her way through it, not for her own benefit, but for Jenn’s.

  Step one gather supplies: belt, tape, tubing, catheter and IV bag. Step two: get the bag and line ready. Three: tie off arm with the belt and clean the injection site. Four: insert the tip of the needle into the vein without stabbing out the back of it. “You should feel a slight pop and then there’ll be the…” She felt it! She was in the vein on her first try. She slid the catheter the rest of the way into the vein and withdrew the needle.

  Blood immediately began to bubble out of the end of the tubing—a lot of blood. Enough blood to start an avalanche of panic in Jenn’s heart. She stubbed her thumb down on the vein which helped to slow the blood, but also caused the man to wince. “Sorry,” she said, easing up slightly, her eyes gaping as the dribble became a trickle, once more.

  This never seemed to happen to Jillybean—why not? Because she attaches the tubing, doorknob, her own cranky inner voice said. “Right.” Jenn made a bloody mess of things hooking up the tube and only belatedly realized she had forgotten to untie the belt. Still the IV was flowing and that’s what counted.

  “My first operation,” she said, using the loosest possible definition of the word. She went onto the next man who had veins like slackened earthworms. They were big and blue, but they rolled as if trying to dodge the needle. Jenn poked the man again and again, and each time he grimaced.

  She said, “Sorry,” so many times the word lost all meaning. She looked around for Jillybean, only she had gone back to triaging the sick. Jenn was on her own until finally, Stu happened by with two men and a woman, all of them stooped and haggard from years bearing the chains and weights that many slaves were forced to endure to keep them from running. They had been sick just like all the rest and yet there was a stringy toughness to them, an endurance that ran deeper than most. They were eager to work as free people and couldn’t have cared less that Jillybean was crazy. They loved her already.

  “Stu, thank God. I can’t get this. Can you help me?” Other than reading signs, Stu had always been better at everything. She held up the little catheter needle combo.

  He frowned and didn’t take it. “I’d say ask Jillybean but she isn’t exactly herself at the moment, if you know what I mean.”

  Not three minutes before he had seen her coming down from one of the shelves arguing with empty air. There had been much hissing of angry whispers, but when he had asked her what was wrong she, or rather Sadie had smiled a lie behind her mask and said, “Nothing. Now go do your wooden Indian routine somewhere else.”

  “At least it’s not Eve,” Jenn said. There would have been gunshots, fire and screams by then if Eve had been around.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what the problem is,” he suggested, hunkering down on the other side of the man. She explained the rolling squiggly vein situation and even described it using an earthworm analogy. “Then treat it like one,” he said. “If you were going to stick a worm with a needle you’d want to hold that sucker down, right?”

  He pressed down on either side of the vein, stretching the man’s flesh tight across it. Quickly she jabbed the needle inside the vein, fed the catheter up it, released the belt, connected the tubing and lashed it down with tape.

  “That was pretty good,” he said, giving her his highest praise. He left to hunt down more slaves—there were dozens missing and he was sure that some people were hiding their slaves. Some were unwilling to give them up because of sheer laziness, while others were afraid to free them, certain that their cruelties would come back to haunt them in the form of revenge on the part of the slaves.

  Jenn couldn’t spare a second of thought for the slaves just then. She was up to her neck in patients. The aide station was filling up fast as rumors of a “treatment” spread. With Jillybean out looking for the people who were in desperate need of attention, Jenn stuck people on a first come basis. By the time she had done her fiftieth IV, she was something of an expert.

  With only a single candle to light her efforts, she worked like a machine, running the steps over and over on the newly cleaned patients, but as she worked, a question kept stealing into her mind: Where was the boy? Where was that awful, crap-covered boy? She dreaded seeing him drip down the aisle, leaving a wet, brown trail of disease behind him. But he hadn’t yet showed. Why wasn’t he here? He had been alive. Jenn could remember him looking up with one eye that was as brown as everything else. Even the whites were the awful color—but he’d been alive.

  She searched the line that had formed. It was a sorry, sagging line. Few people stood. Most sat, their bleary eyes unfocused, while some were curled in little balls, shivering on the cold floor. It was sad, and yet it could have been worse since there was no one who seemed like that boy had been. None of the people in the line looked like they were on the verge of dying.

  Jenn was afraid to ask about the boy when Jillybean returned, leading a string of invalids. It was really Jillybean again. She had the same brittle, restless energy.

  “You’re going to need an assistant or two. We can’t let the IV’s run that low.” All of Jenn’s earlier patients had empty IV bags and now blood was beginning to flow back up the clear tubes. Jenn f
reaked at the sight, thinking she was killing them.

  Jillybean was very casual about ripping away the old bag from the end of the tubing and reattaching the new one. “Remember, the bag has to be above the level of the heart. If people lie down, at least put the bag on their chests. And don’t run them full bore. A steady drip is fine but I don’t want to run out before morning. I’m going to be sending Mike and Stu over to a hospital off the American River.” She sighed, breathing out a plume of exhaustion. “I’m going to have to go with them. We need so much.”

  That meant that Jenn would be alone to care for hundreds of people. What if there was a riot? What if the Corsairs came back? What if everyone died and it was all her fault?

  “It’ll be okay,” Jillybean said, seeing her fear. “You’ll have the stripper twins and some of the other ex-slaves to help you. Now, keep doing what you’re doing. Just take a break every ten minutes and check each bag.”

  She started to walk away and Jenn blurted, “Where’s that boy?” She didn’t have to ask which boy. Jillybean stopped, her shoulders frozen in a hunch.

  Without turning around, she answered, “He died.”

  “How?”

  Jillybean spun and for a second her mind was overcome by anger. Jenn could see Eve trying to get out. With a force of will, the girl mastered herself. “He died like a hero so that his people could live and so did many others.”

  Jenn’s mouth fell open. “How many others?”

  “Too many. Jenn,” she whispered. “They never really stood a chance. They were so far gone that maybe, maybe IV therapy might have brought them back, but it would have taken days and days of treatment and between them they would’ve drained our entire supply. There wouldn’t have been anything left for anyone else. So, I had to make a terrible choice. Do I save the many or the few?”

  Jillybean had begun speaking faster and faster, hissing out the words, her face growing red. “I-I decided to save the many, only now I don’t know if that was the right thing. Was it?” Put on the spot like this, Jenn had no idea. She only knew that it was hard to call straight up murder the right thing, but that was no answer, or at least it wasn’t an answer that would do at the moment. When she failed to answer, Jillybean raised her voice, “Which was it? Tell me! Am I being the bad guy or the good guy? Because I really have to know.”

  “You’re the good guy,” Jenn blurted out with faked cheerful reassurance. “I never doubted it. I was…I was just worried about you.”

  “I am too,” Jillybean answered with her own fake smile, pretending not to hear the voices whispering in the deeper darkness: Murderer, killer, murderer, killer, murder…they had been chanting ever since she had removed the fat 30 ml syringe with its aggressively long needle from her bag. She had drawn the plunger all the way back and with her teeth almost fused together and her faced twisted she had inserted the needle into the boy’s heart and sent a huge bubble of air into the weakened organ.

  The air embolism didn’t kill him as quickly as she hoped. He gasped and clawed and writhed for a full minute as his heart stuttered around the big bubble. She had cried the entire time.

  Chapter 25

  The night was dreadfully long for everyone, but it was a particular torture for Jillybean. She lacked the supplies to perform proper mercy killings and yet, counting that first boy, there were thirty-two people who clung desperately to life without the least chance of actually lasting out the remainder of the week.

  Even if she had dumped gallons of IV fluids into them, their immune systems were too weak to take on the bacteria eating out their guts. The fluids would just come running out of them again in one form or another.

  She logically knew they were going to die one way or the other and if it had been her lying in a disgusting pool of her own making, wracked by pain she would want it over with. Still the voices haunted her. They gibbered and screamed and never in her life did she want her pills more. She even went back to the Saber at one point and scrambled around on all fours searching the carpet and the cracks, but she had done too good of a job when she had thrown them away.

  Sadie had come to her rescue but even she hadn’t been strong enough and her presence had slowly dimmed as the shadow-voices increased. Then it was just her, just Jillybean alone and afraid that she was an evil, terrible person. And in a way, she was. She had built a mirage out of reality, or was it a reality forged of illusion? She didn’t know. She only knew it wouldn’t last.

  Just like her foul victims, none of this would last the week.

  The only way she had to combat the voices was to throw herself as mindlessly as possible into her work. Thankfully, cholera was highly treatable in most cases. The first thing that had to be done was to remove the source of the contamination which at one point had been the Sacramento River, but once Tony Tibbs and his Corsairs saw what was happening they changed it to a small lake that lay just north of the industrial park. Unfortunately, the lake had an RV Park situated next to it and three years before, an underground waste-water holding tank had begun leaking, contaminating the lake with the same cholera producing germs.

  Jillybean didn’t trust anything that wasn’t filtered or boiled first and everything that had been touched by the contaminated water was scrapped. She devised a working filtering system, as well as a multilevel pipe and chamber pump designed to draw the water out of the river upstream from them and carry it through a chain of linked hoses straight to the warehouse. Of course, she provided a complete in depth list of materials needed and scale drawings. The drawings were, in her opinion, shockingly simplistic, but after watching through Sadie’s mocking eyes as grown adults couldn’t move two-hundred and twenty pounds of shifting weight, six feet into the air, she felt the step by step was needed.

  To her, moving the water bladder would’ve been as simple as breathing.

  Sticking people with IVs was even more so, and she went at that with a will. By three in the morning Jenn was stumbling and making mistakes. Jillybean sent her off to bed on Mike’s weary arm. Stu refused her order to join them on the Saber. He stayed with her throughout the night as she worked, placing IVs, changing out bags and cleaning the patients.

  The ex-slaves had disappeared one at a time hours before and soon it was just the two of them—it was the least romantic time the two had ever spent together and that was okay. Jillybean didn’t need romance just then, she needed someone she could count on, someone who was more than just a handsome face.

  She also needed mental help that Stu wasn’t able to give. As the hours went by she spent more time talking to people that weren’t there and though they were surrounded by a carpet of humanity no one heard but him. Everyone else was fast asleep or else gripped by delirium.

  “Tell me something,” he asked her. “Tell me something interesting.”

  Her eyes jiggered for a moment, each vibrating of their own accord as if each was looking at different parts of him, though there was no telling if she saw him at all, at least not until she asked, “What I would find interesting or what you would find interesting?”

  “Maybe a little of both.” He hoped she wouldn’t start in about math, he dreaded it, knowing he would never be able to keep up and that his agonizing boredom with the subject would show plain as day. Much to his eternal delight, she did not. She talked about the stars and their comparative sizes and masses, which it turned out were two different things. She also spoke about their chemical make-up and their age. According to her, our sun was in the middle of its long life at four and half billion years.

  He had trouble wrapping his head around the immense number and nor could he fully comprehend the reality of its size, but he did feel small in comparison. Small and somewhat pointless. If everything she said was true, he was only a spec of nothing on a tiny planet flung out on the edge of some random galaxy.

  “So where does God fit into all of this?” Stu wasn’t into signs and omens, and he didn’t think carrying a cross around and pointing it at things that scared him did a lic
k of good, but he had always believed in God. He didn’t expect her to, however. He expected her to smile that condescending smile of hers, the one where he could tell she was thinking: How can I put this so a complete idiot would understand?

  Unless Eve was running the show she never meant it as a mean smile, still it couldn’t be read any other way.

  “Oh, I believe in God; wholeheartedly. The universe cannot logically exist without God. All of this,” she waved her arms around at the withered near corpse-like people and the dark, stinking warehouse, “did not simply spring into existence. It is undeniable, something or someone created it. And yes, I know what you are going to say.”

  “I was going to say something?” Stu asked. “That doesn’t sound like me.”

  She found this far funnier than he had expected, and collapsed in weak laughter, her back to a pallet. She carried on, holding her belly with one hand and covering her mouth with the other trying to contain her mirth. “No, I don’t suppose you were going to say anything,” she said when the last giggle drained out of her. “But you were likely thinking it: by my same logic, how do I explain the existence of God? Who made him? How does he logically exist if matter can’t pop out of thin air?”

  Stu didn’t even bother opening his mouth. If philosophers and scientists, all of whom had made their living simply by thinking, couldn’t agree on an answer to the question, then Stu, with his sixth grade education, thought it was smart not to spout off about things he had no business spouting off about.

  He did shrug, however, a clear indication for her to answer her own question, which he had little doubt she could.

  “If you consider our lives and this universe to be somewhat like a book—a story book, if you want. It would be a giant book filled with every detail about everything great and small. It would be a hard cover book with a thick binding and its pages would be perfect and the lines within them precisely laid out. And the words would be impeccably drawn and spelled properly because within the book there are exact rules and logical laws governing every aspect of the writing.”