The Queen of the Dead

by Peter Meredith

  Along one wall the stains were strangely patterned, one every two feet or so and more old blood and bones were found in what had been puddles beneath each. They did not need to see the bullet holes in the walls to know that people had been executed there. The same sickening arrangement of bones, blood and bullet holes were found throughout the building.

  “What the hell?” Willis hissed. His voice carried in an unnerving echo which had the others shushing him. As far as they could tell, there were no zombies in the building, but it seemed like something haunted the halls. Sly noises could be heard whispering along the bone-filled corridors.

  Doors creaked and bones rattled. A giggle or a gurgle wafted down at them as they stood in a fifteen person huddle, guns pointed outward. “Did you hear that?” Jillybean asked Stu. He nodded. For once she wasn’t being crazy and for once she wished she was. She was used to being crazy, she wasn’t used to be being scared out of her wits.

  At first she tried to put logic to the noises: a broken upper floor window could be letting in a draft which would create pressure differences within the halls, resulting in doors opening or closing—and maybe water trapped in pipes was thawing from a freeze which would account for the giggling sound that kept repeating. Why it was so high and childlike she didn’t know, but was sure there was a logical explanation.

  They pressed on. Stu led the way, looking as he always did, but he too was sweating. Just like signs and omens, ghosts did not exist. He was in Jillybean’s way of thinking: there was a logical explanation for everything, but then they entered a pitch black staircase and logic began to grow fuzzy as they heard a soft thump, thump, thump coming towards them.

  His mind addressed the sound, categorized it and a mental picture formed: a ball was bouncing towards them. A shiver went up his back, because why on earth would anyone be bouncing a ball at a party of armed people? It wasn’t logical. This little thing undermined all reason and along with everyone else he felt a tremendous amount of dread over the coming of a ball.

  They all shied back against the stairwell door as it came into the light of their candles. It turned out to be only a red and white striped ball. It rolled up to Willis’ wet boots and he pulled his toes back.

  “What. The. Hell?” he said, over-pronouncing each word. “I’ve seen enough.” He tried to push his way through the crowd to reach the door, but Stu turned him around.

  “It’s only a ball, Willis,” he said and even picked it up to show that it was harmless. When his hand touched it, his arm broke out in a run of gooseflesh that he was glad couldn’t be seen. “Get my back. Mike, stay with Jillybean. You…” He snapped his fingers at the biggest of the ex-slaves; a middle-aged black man who had a keen intelligent look to his eyes.

  “James Smith, sir,” the man said, suddenly nervous. He had been hiding his fear pretty well to that point, now his eyes were big as pingpong balls.

  “Right, James, sorry. Take up the rear. Keep cool everyone. There’s nothing here.” Of course Stu’s candle took that moment to go out, causing Diamond to gasp. “That’s enough of that, Diamond.” He relit the candle and started up.

  Mike had to give Willis a push to get him going. He then let Jillybean go and followed right behind her, putting a hand on her shoulder to steady her. He wanted to say it was going to be alright but at the second level Stu was stopped by a five foot high pyramid of grinning skulls. The only way to get past them was to move them, but he was reluctant to touch them.

  “Someone’s just trying to scare us off,” he said.

  “They’re doing a damned good job,” Willis mumbled.

  Jillybean pushed through to examine the skulls hoping to be able to focus her mind which felt as if there was a black rose within it that was beginning to bloom. Half of the skulls showed signs of some type of trauma—bullet holes were obvious, depression fractures less so.

  “These are all women’s skulls and these two are fresh,” she said, shaking her head. The blooming black rose was unfolding, greater and greater.

  “What do you mean by fresh?” Willis asked in a soft, quavering voice. “Do you mean, like recently killed?”

  She turned one over to show the scrap of dura mater clinging to an interior suture line where the bones had fused. “And it stinks.” No one knew exactly what fresh skulls meant and they didn’t know whether to be more alarmed or relieved. They all chose to be more alarmed and they began to mutter about going back. Their whispers echoed and echoed and seemed to crowd down on Jillybean until she suddenly grew angry.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” she snapped. “The Queen gave us a mission and we’re sticking to it. Come on, let’s set these aside.” She held one of the skulls out to Willis who only drew his hands into his chest. “Stop being a little girl. It’s only a bit of bone.” She tossed it to him, forcing him to catch it. “Set it to the side and try not to be disrespectful.”

  Mike gave Stu a look. He only shrugged. Sadie was better than Eve…for the most part.

  “What are you staring at Magoo?” she asked and tossed him one of the skulls. The skulls were moved and Sadie went through to the door and into a fresh hell. The walls were literally painted in blood and were a dull reddish brown, the strokes of a large brush were obvious. In most of the rooms headless skeletons were propped up in beds or chairs, books in their spindly hands, or they were found arranged on toilets or standing at the windows as if looking out.

  At the nurse’s station, however they were nailed to the walls and these bones weren’t the fading grey color like the others. They had been burned black.

  “Take a long look, Eve,” Sadie whispered. “You’ve met your match when it comes to crazy.”

  “Let’s just get what we came here for,” Stu said. He disliked the idea of Eve feeling there was some sort of competition in the crazy department.

  The vile insanity motivated the others to gather the supplies they needed as fast as they could. They filled their packs and carried as much as they could before going down to where they had left the carts. Then they went for more and more, clearing out floor after floor.

  Sadie drove them relentlessly and they didn’t rest until they had taken all there was and were back outside in the fine sunshine and the cold clean air. Along with some surgical supplies, ten large bottles of white pills, and more IV equipment, they had managed to gather six hundred bags of normal saline, which they distributed among the three carts.

  By then the four Corsairs and the two ex-slave girls who hadn’t wanted to be there in the first place, had begun to grumble, while the six warehouse people who still had the cholera floating in their system were dropping from exhaustion.

  “Do we really need all of this?” Willis asked, when he saw it all gathered at once. While inside, he had been as frightened as anyone else and had helped load the boxes without asking any questions. Now, he was beginning to worry about the trek back to the boat. “I don’t want to tell the Queen her business, but six hundred bags? It seems like overkill if you ask me.”

  “No one asked you, Willy,” Johanna Murphy said.

  “What, I’m not allowed to talk? You know we still gotta push all this crap back to the boat and you can hear them zekes as good as I can.”

  The ex-slave started to get mad that anyone was questioning the woman who had freed her, but then a zombie stumbled into view three blocks away. They all shrunk down—all except for Jillybean. She had sat down on a mat of dry leaves and had turned her face to look into the sun. It was warm on her face and it reminded her of being a child, back in the before.

  She was looking inward to a time when it was just her inside her mind. A long contented sigh escaped her that wasn’t even disturbed by the wail of the zombie. She didn’t need to open her eyes to know it was far off.

  “I wish we had the luxury of overkill,” she said, somewhat dreamily. “That would be nice but this will last only a little over a day. The math is simple: we have over two hundred patients and six hundred bags. That’s less than three bags
per person; it’ll go all too fast.”

  Willis went from complaining to anxious. “Are you saying we’re going to have to go look for more?” That meant going deeper into the city and he honestly didn’t think he could. He was already shaking and weak, and his guts kept wanting to explode out into his shorts.

  “No. We’ve cut off the source of the contamination which was key. For the most part the people will be able to go without IVs very soon. As long as we keep them adequately hydrated and they get their special medicine we should be good.”

  “What is the medicine?” Johanna Murphy asked. That she had spoken at all was a surprise to Jillybean who cracked an eye just in case the girl decided to reach for the bottles.

  “Acetylsalicylic acid,” was her honest reply. It was another name for aspirin. She was going to prescribe it, not for its pain relieving benefits, but as a placebo. Antibiotics were the proper course of medical action, however she did not have near enough for this sized population. She figured that as they were a simple minded, superstitious lot, the power of suggestion would go a long way towards curing them.

  She allowed them to rest for as long as they wished—of course as they were resting in the shadow of “Hell Hospital” as Willis was already calling it, they didn’t rest long. Just as she guessed, even the sickest of them were ready to go after only a few minutes of casting glances upwards as if expecting a piano or an anchor would be dropped on them at any moment.

  There was undoubtedly a madman within its walls but he wasn’t so mad as to try to take on fifteen mostly armed individuals. Stu could no longer lead. He and Mike took hold of one of the carts, while the four Corsairs took two each. Willis led as he claimed to know the city better than anyone. He did a credible job getting them safely to a sporting goods store where they picked up five more water bladders four crossbow bolts, fishing gear and three water purifiers.

  At a nearby hardware store they picked up everything needed to make a larger water pump and then they were off to the hotels where Jillybean wanted the last bit of room taken up with clean sheets and blankets. “As many as they could carry.”

  So far they had been remarkably lucky when it came to dodging the dead. There had been very few in their path and when some did stray too close, the group would drop down next to the thousands of cars and disappear as far as the beasts were concerned.

  Their luck was even greater considering that a third of them were sick and couldn’t have run to save their lives.

  It wasn’t an easy trek back to the Saber. Each of the carts weighed close to five hundred pounds and this weight had to be pushed up the plywood ramps every hundred yards or so. They were all growing tired and cross of the constant up and down when at the top of a green Lexus, Mike saw his beloved Saber floating only five blocks away.

  They were in a residential neighborhood with lots of barren trees and ugly winter-brown shrubbery for cover. “She’s right there,” he said, pointing. Everyone looked except for two of the Corsairs who chose that moment to make a break for freedom. They’d been planning it all day but before that very second, Stu had been watching them with flinty eyes. Now he was eagerly looking across the intervening five blocks between him and their ride.

  They were halfway down the side street before Jillybean even noticed they weren’t craning their necks along with everyone else. She gave a shout and Mike was after them in a flash. Stu was on the wrong side of a Lexus and by the time he got around it he was trailing badly.

  Mike was young and fast while the Corsairs were both in their late thirties. He hissed for them to stop, but they weren’t afraid of being shot since gunfire would necessarily bring the dead. They kept on running, though after only a block the one in back was going at a fast waddle and was puffing badly. He had been a smoker his entire life and his lung capacity was that of a child.

  Mike planned on throwing down the nearest Corsair and going on to the next, only just as he caught up to the first, the man dodged to the side, throwing himself across the hood of a car and rolling to the other side. Mike’s momentum was too great and he shot past, stumbled, then righted himself. He jumped onto the hood of the next car and leapt into the street landing on the Corsair who had been running nearly blind.

  The Corsair’s legs might have been made of rubber and his lungs like tiny balloons, but his arms were very thick and strong. In a second Mike was pulled from the man’s back, twisted around and slammed face first onto the cracked street. Hands that were rough as slate found his throat and squeezed. He was seeing small black splotches in his vision by the time Stu tackled the Corsair.

  These two were more evenly matched in size and strength, while Stu was the younger and fresher which made the difference as he quickly gained the upper hand. He planted himself on top of the Corsair and rained down rock-hard fists.

  “I give! I give!” the Corsair cried through bloody lips.

  The moment he did, Stu was up. “Watch him. I’ll get the other one.” He trusted Mike and knew the order would be carried out without question. The words were hardly out of his mouth before Stu was running again, charging after the second Corsair who was now a full hundred yards away and looking small in the distance.

  Stu went after him like he was shot out of a cannon. At twenty-one he was in peak condition and unlike the sailor, who had spent most of his life onboard a small ship, he was used to running. In eleven seconds the man’s lead was down to a third of a block. Stu was already planning how he was going to bring the man down when movement to his right caught his eye.

  Without thinking he dropped and rolled beneath a Range Rover that still had just enough clearance to fit his thin body. A second later the lower legs of a zombie rushed past in a grey blur—it had come from behind an overgrown hedge and, luckily for Stu, its focus had been entirely on the Corsair.

  It was even fresher and stronger than Stu and it sprinted along with such horrid eagerness that it ran with its enormous mouth gaping wide, a hungry moan escaping from it. Sheer terror seized the Corsair when he looked back. Panic took him and he made the mistake of running straight into the next house he came to without any turn or feint, without any deviation when he had cars all around him that might have slowed the beast. He simply ran inside and slammed the door behind him with an echoing boom that woke half a dozen more zombies who converged on the house.

  Stu slunk down, slipping to his left, becoming one with the shadows, listening for the sound of the back door opening. If that had been him, he would have cut through the house, sped out the back door, jumped a few fences, made some quick turns and been home free.

  The Corsair never came out the back. Stu could hear a thrumming from the house, and then crashes and screams that mounted higher and higher. The fool of a Corsair had managed to trap himself.

  Mike came up just then. His Corsair had been turned over to Willis and now, winded and nervous, he sized up the situation. “What’s the plan? How do we get him out of there?”

  “We don’t,” Stu answered.

  Chapter 27

  “We should do something,” Mike insisted. “I can draw at least half of them off. I’ll get the ones outside to chase me and then…”

  “It’s too late,” Stu said, quietly. There were at least four of the beasts inside the house and there would be no getting them out again, or so he thought, only just then the Corsair proved him wrong by flinging open a second floor window and crawling out onto the roof.

  He was twenty feet up with a drop into an overgrown yard as his only option. He should have taken the jump without hesitation. Instead he went to the edge and look down, then scampered fearfully along the roof to another spot and looked down.

  “Why doesn’t he jump?” Mike asked. Stu only grunted.

  Behind the man the window from which he had exited was being torn apart. The glass went with one swipe of a huge claw, then the zombie tore out the frame and part of the wall before it pushed its enormous head and shoulders through the gap it had made.

  Now Mike
understood why the man hadn’t seized his one chance; he had been hoping the beast would get stuck. He hoped in vain. The zombie’s shoulders did get wedged in tightly—for a few seconds. Then it gathered itself and heaved in a ferocious display of strength that tore a gaping hole in the wall.

  The hole wasn’t big enough for all the zombies to come through at once and the others attacked various parts of the wall, tearing jagged gaps in it—and still the Corsair didn’t jump. He backed to one end of the peaked roof and made some abortive gestures toward jumping, even going so far as to swing a leg, but went no further even as the first zombie came out onto the slanted roof.

  It only made it three steps before falling off the roof and landing with a ground-shaking thud. The fall didn’t kill it, though one of its long arms was bent oddly. It didn’t even notice as it glared hungrily up at the Corsair. There would be no jumping now. He thought that his only hope would be if all the zombies fell and the first three did, but they didn’t content themselves with waiting.

  They attacked the house beneath the stranded Corsair, tearing down the siding and then the studs beneath until it seemed the entire house was going to fall. With no other option, the terrified man tried to jump from a house to a nearby tree. His hands clasped the ends of spindly branches that could never bear his weight. They bent and snapped and down he went.

  Stu turned away. He didn’t glance at Mike who hissed, “We might have been able to save him.”

  “He didn’t deserve saving. He was a Corsair.” There didn’t need to be any other argument as far as Stu was concerned. Mike bristled, yet couldn’t come up with a counterargument and only continued to look sullen.

  There was nothing to be said to the others when they got back. They had heard the screams, too.

  Stu rallied the group and set them back to work, half pushing the carts the final five blocks and the other half keeping watch for the dead. The Corsair’s violent and unsettlingly loud death had attracted all the zombies for a mile, allowing the little group to make it back to the Saber where they set up a human chain. Everything was passed from person to person and then up into the boat where it was all stowed away. Finally, the carts themselves were manhandled on board.