“Y-You won’t fall,” she said again.
Could you put me on the bike? Maybe in the basket? He asked this in the most innocent way he could, complete with giant eyes and hooves clasped together. It is awful hot out. Half of me might get sunburned and red and black really isn’t a good look for a zebra. Before she could answer, he added a long Pleeeeease at the end.
“Fat chance of that,” she said, frog-kicking to the reedy shore. “If you’re worried about getting a sunburn, I can put you in the shade but you aren’t going anywhere near those cookies, mister. Those are both of ours.” Only that morning, while poking through a cabin in the Missouri woods, they had come across a find of monumental proportions. Not one, but two packages of Girl Scout cookies. Yes, one had been Samoas and that was unfortunate since neither Ipes or Jillybean really cared for coconut even when lightly mixed with chocolate, however the other package had been S’mores which made up for everything.
The cookies had been guarded over by a squadron of voraciously hungry mosquitos and a skeleton in a moldy green coat lying cuddled in on itself. It was really and truly dead, something that was never a certainty anymore, but Jillybean still hadn’t been able to simply snatch its pack away. She could see through its cave-like eye sockets and into its head where an ugly brown soup of unspeakable stuff had congealed.
When she had finally summoned the courage to grab the pack and run, they discovered water bottles, canned soup and even bullets. These were huge fat slugs as big as her thumb. She took it all, but the only things that the pair really cared about were the cookies. Until they had found the pool of water beneath the bridge, it was all either of them could think about.
Ipes went back to grousing, while Jillybean climbed out of the water for the third time. She wore only a pair of white panties and a green shirt with a cartoon kitten on the front. It really made no sense even to wear this much since she hadn’t seen another human in the last six days. There were tons of monsters about, sure, but no people. Still, she had been raised—up until the ripe old age of six and a quarter-years old—to be a proper lady, and proper ladies did not cavort about in their “altogether.”
That had been her mommy’s way of saying naked.
Jillybean left tiny elf prints as she went back to the bridge where she hesitated for a few seconds. Don’t do it, Ipes warned. The rail and all its dangers beckoned. Your mommy wouldn’t care for you doing that, Ipes chastised, invoking her mom’s name in the hope of keeping her sane.
She was well beyond sane and besides, she couldn’t help it. Mountains were made to be climbed and kids were made to jump from the highest perch they could dare; she climbed up on the rail. You should get down before you fall off there and break your neck, or worse: do a bellyflop.
The idea of a bellyflop made her hesitate. There was little in life more terrible than a bellyflop. That was perhaps the most common of all knowledge. Everyone, even people living in deserts, knew that. On its own her right foot started searching for the lower wrung to climb back down. She stopped herself, hissing, “No. We gotsta face our fears, amember? That’s how we beat them up.”
Conquer them, Ipes suggested.
“Yeah, that too,” Jillybean said, through lips that were pressed tight to her teeth. It was not logical or based in anything even remotely mathmatical, but being up on the four-foot high railing made her feel as though she were suddenly six stories in the air, teetering on a tightrope with an invisible tornado doing a foxtrot of a wind dance all around her.
What was that about conquering your fears?
“Shut up,” she whispered, afraid that even speaking normally would tip her one way or the other. She had been in higher spots than this, but that was always out of necessity and usually there was something to hold onto. Now, all she had to grip with were her toes, and they had as monkey-like of a grip as a human could manage.
Jump or climb down, Ipes said. You’re making yourself a target. What if there’s a zombie way down in that copse of trees?
Far down the intricate, headlong rushing brook, a small squadron of nodding, sleepy willows kept an uncertain watch over that section of the river. Their whip-like branches hung down, creating a screen, keeping from sight whatever might be within them.
“If there are monsters in there, they woulda came out by now. And you know there ain’t no bad guys down in there.”
Isn’t any, he corrected. And you don’t know that.
“Sure I do. It’s all scrubby ol’ farmland from here to eternities. If somebody took a truck or something in there, where are all the tire marks? Why isn’t the bushes all knocked about or bent over? ‘Sides that’s a good place to hole up in at night, but why would anyone still be there now?”
It’s not like people have jobs anymore. Maybe they’re sleeping in.
“It’s the middle of the day, for all gosh darn it.” Jillybean rarely slept more than five hours and couldn’t understand how people could lay about any longer than that. To her, minutes were precious. There was always so much to do, to learn, to discover!
All I’m saying is you can’t stand up there forever. Jump or get down.
“I’m gonna jump.”
Then jump.
“I am. Don’t rush me. Jeeze.”
I’m not rushing anyone. I just don’t think you got the guts.
“What? I got the guts.”
Then jump.
“I will.”
Okay. What are you waiting for?
She didn’t have an answer to that. She stood on the railing with her arms out for balance, looking down past her newly painted toes—pink on the right foot and purple on the left. She was all ready to procrastinate even longer—the brook really did seem a long way down, and she was pretty sure that half of it had drained away while she had been conversing with Ipes—when she heard a rumble that was somewhere on the scale between thunder and the roar of an extremely large monster.
Looking around caused her to lose her balance slightly and she pinwheeled her arms until she was able to stand straight again. As she was without shoes, even the four-foot drop onto the rock-strewn cement wasn’t exactly inviting. When she regained her balance, she looked around for the growing rumble and nearly lost her balance a second time when she saw an approaching cloud of dust coming up the road.
It was coming faster than any hurricane; faster than anything she could ever remember seeing in her life. “Jeeze!” she whispered. The thing was a black blur and the only reason she didn’t think it was a rocket ship was that it was clearly following the road. It had been about a mile away when she first saw it and as her eyes turned to round blue circles, it flew at her so quickly that she could barely run the simple calculation for assessing an object’s speed in her head.
It tore up half a mile in nine seconds which, if her mental math was correct, roughly equated to 225 feet per second or a jaw dropping 150 miles-per-hour!
The numbers were not just staggering, they were stunning as well. So stunning in fact that it took her three precious seconds to realize that she had left Betty Lou square in the middle of the low bridge.
Don’t! Ipes screamed as Jillybean bent slightly to hop down. You’ll never make it!
The decision to try to get Betty Lou out of the road in the eight seconds left to her was taken out of her hands as she over-balanced forward and then over-balanced backwards, way backwards, way, way backwards. A high, shrieking scream filled the air as she started falling, bottom first, towards the swollen brook.
It took her only a second to hit the water, another for her to sink so that her bare feet crunched softly into the sand at the bottom of the brook, and a third to shoot back up, just in time to hear the end of that scream and see Betty Lou, for that was what she had named her trusty her three-speed Schwinn, go flying.
Betty Lou had been a magnificent bike: a sparkly, purple body, white streamers jutting from either end of gleaming chrome handlebars, and a large white basket in front. Now, she sailed ass over teacups across the bri
dge, as an explosion of papers billowed and swirled in the air behind her. “My books,” Jillybean whispered.
My cookies! Ipes cried as though mourning a death in the family.
2-
Even as the bike and the papers sailed through the sky, there were three secondary bangs one after the other, as the car bounced from rail to rail, went sideways off the road on the other side of the bridge and struck a faded yellow Slow sign and bent it at a forty-five degree angle.
The car’s engine died with a rumbling choke. Jillybean’s first impulse was to slip down low in the water. She wasn’t just unarmed; she was mostly undressed. With the world filled with monsters and perverts, she was in precarious position. The brook was not wide or deep, and as she had mentioned to Ipes, the land around it was wide open. She was in a worse position than a sitting duck; they at least could fly.
Maybe the driver died in the crash, Ipes said, trying to be helpful. He wasn’t. If he had died, she would be mostly to blame for leaving her bike where she had, and her conscience couldn’t afford too many more innocent deaths piling up on it. The ones that were there: Baby Eve, General Johnston, a hundred or so people on board the two ferryboats that she had set on fire in New York, and at least twice that many witless Believers in Georgia, were already straining the band-aids and duct-tape keeping her mind together.
It turned out that the driver was far from dead. Just as Jillybean swam under the bridge, there was a thud and a creaking sound. This was followed by a low curse, a light thunk—metal on metal—another curse and the distinctive click of an M16’s safety being flicked off.
As distressing as the sound would have been to most people, it added little to the girl’s fear. On her hierarchy of preferred deaths, being shot was number seven, behind: old age, any death while asleep or unconscious, catastrophic stroke, sudden massive heart attack brought on by years of overeating, suicide by lethal injection, strangulation and then being shot.
Ipes preferred “death by chocolate” though what that exactly entailed, beside massive amounts of chocolate, he could never articulate.
One of the reasons guns failed to throw that much fear into her was due to the fact that she was so small that using a gun on her made little sense. They were loud and would be a waste of ammo, when every grown man alive could crush her throat with just a squeeze of his hand.
And the man who came softly stalking up to the bridge, walking not on the sandy cement, but in the high grass so that his steps were barely audible, could have crushed her throat with just two of his fingers without any effort whatsoever. He was long and tall, wearing blue jeans, black biker boots and a sharp, white V-neck t-shirt that still had the creases in it.
He went into a wary crouch at the far edge of the bridge, holding an M16A4 up to his shoulder, but not quite to his eye. He was searching the reeds and the shallows.
Looking for an ambush, Ipes told her.
She wanted to say: No duh, only she had to remain perfectly still and absolutely quiet. Her green shirt was a match in color for the reeds and her dark brown hair could be mistaken for shadowed dirt. Her giant blue eyes, however could not be mistaken for anything else. The man stiffened as he saw them and the gun jerked up, quickly, but he didn’t shoot—this was the other reason Jillybean didn’t fear guns: since her true, inner villainy was hidden away, people had a tendency to see her “cute” exterior and dismiss her as just a kid.
This man was not so quick to dismiss anything. He gave her a nod and then scanned past her.
He’s looking to see who you’re with, Ipes noted, displaying a keen grasp for the blatantly obvious. Even if there hadn’t been zombies making a mess of the world, children Jillybean’s age never traveled alone.
The man stared into the reeds and along the banks of the brook and while he did, Jillybean stared at him. He was very tall and up on the embankment as he was, he seemed to tower over her like some primitive beast. His hair was deep and dark, almost black, and it was as wild as a lion’s mane and just as long. His eyes were the color of the forest; a beguiling mixture of green and brown.
He said, “Hmmm,” a lot, letting one slip when he had examined both sides of the bridge, and again as he spied up the brook as far as he could see, and a third as he turned and gazed far behind him across the fields. Oddly enough, he even said, “Hmmm,” as he gazed up at the sky.
“Who you with?” he asked when his eyes came back to earth.
Don’t bring me into this, Ipes whispered. The zebra was still right out on the bridge, doing his best to blend in with the background by acting the part of a tiny white and black shrub in a light blue shirt and darker blue shorts.
“No one,” Jillybean lied. “It’s just me and I don’t have a gun or nothing.” This was only technically the truth. Hung on the belt of her pants was a bowie knife, while sewn in to the back of the belt itself was a razor blade—but those were up on the bridge and she was down in the water.
“It’s just you.” He didn’t ask this, he said it, incredulously. He looked around a second time in visibly growing ire. “It’s just you in this great big world and you choose to park your mother-fu…your stupid bike right in the middle of the road? What the hell is wrong with you? You could’ve killed me!”
Tell him he was driving too fast for the condition, Ipes whispered, out of the corner of his non-existent mouth. We saw the speed limit sign. It said 40MPH. Not a bazillion miles a second.
There was firm logic to this, however when one was a mostly naked girl and there was a big, angry man with a gun yelling at you, it’s hard to deliver the most cogent arguments. “Sorry,” she said, dropping her chin. “I-I didn’t know anyone lived around here.”
“Who said anything about living around here? And you’re really all by yourself? Hmmm.” Once more he glanced around, even squatting low to see if anyone was clinging like a spider to the underside of the bridge. His lips were puckered as if he were just about to kiss his grandmother. When he looked at Jillybean again, and said, “Hmmm,” those puckered lips cut to one side of his face, giving his straight nose a slight bend. “You’re really all alone?”
The idea seemed to disgust him.
She nodded and shrugged. “Yeah, can I get my pants on, please.” He grunted but didn’t turn around; she swam backwards to the far bank, and after tugging down her shirt to mid-thigh, she started edging up the bank. He rolled his eyes at her and turned to the side with a sigh.
“It’s really too bad about being alone and all,” he said, speaking loudly, as if he were speaking through an invisible bathroom door. “But that’s the nature of fate, you know? Maybe you were just meant to be alone. Then again, maybe not. We never know what will be, so why worry about it. Right?”
He glanced over and caught her trying to get one wet leg into her jeans. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, again staring out over the fields. “You just have to learn to let all of life’s miseries go. That’s what I do. I roll with the punches and there have been a lot of them in my past. You got any parents?” There was a note of hopefulness in his voice.
“They’re both dead,” Jillybean told him.
“Oh.” Now he sounded disappointed. He rallied, however. “At least you had parents. I was given up ages ago even before the apocalypse. Can you believe that noise? Your own parents saying they don’t want you? I used to say that if I ever found my father I’d tune him up good, but now, I’d just laugh in his face and let it go.”
A second glance caught her trying to hide the bowie knife behind her back. “Keep it,” he said, all smiles. “A girl all alone should carry a knife or a gun. And if I had one, an extra I mean, I’d let you borrow it. Who’s your friend?”
He had an easy smile to go along with his tanned, handsome face. Ipes didn’t like him one bit. Don’t tell him my name! I’m a wanted zebra in seven states for crying out loud.
“Just a, you know, a run-of-the-mill stuffed animal.” Jillybean tried to slip the zebra behind her back along with the knife.
R
un-of-the-mill? You make me sound like some dusty, old, left on the shelf, Walmart teddybear. Sheesh. You could have just said I was your friend, or maybe your confidant. That would have been better. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to mention that I am something of a genius. It impresses the little people.
Jillybean cleared her throat to shut him up and stuck out a hand. “My name is Jilly…ah, I mean it’s Jill. My name is Jill.” At the last moment she had realized that she too was wanted in seven states.
His lips pursed again and she could almost hear his mental Hmmm as he took in the extended hand. He scratched the underside of his chin before he decided it was safe to shake the seven-year-old’s hand. “Mine’s Christian Niederer.”
“Need what?”
“Niederer.”
Shouldn’t it ‘Niederest? Ipes asked with a little snort.
“Behave,” she hissed, giving the hand a shake. “That sounds like a great name. So, do you live around here? Was your wife about to have a baby or something? You were driving awful fast and whoa! What kind of car is that?”
She had just got to the crest of the bridge and saw, resting against the canted Slow sign, a yellow and black racing car. It was beautiful and sleek. It hugged the ground with only inches to spare. Its body was like an arrow, swooping back to what looked like a sideways fin. She had never seen anything like it.
“That is a McLaren P1,” Christian stated proudly. “It has a top speed of 217 mph, with a 0–60 miles acceleration time of 2.7 seconds. Under the hood is a 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 engine that harnesses over nine-hundred horse power. Huh? That’s not too shabby if you ask me. But what’s even better…hey, hold on.”
She had been drawn to it and was now close enough to touch the fancy car; he seemed to think her tiny fingers would do more damage than the sign had.
“Okay little girl, we are in what’s called a looky-no-touchy situation here. Kids and cars don’t mix. Sorry, but that’s the law.”
“Hold on, yourself, Mister Christian, sir that’s not a real law. And I droveded before. It was a truck and I did just fine.” She had ended up crashing the truck through the front doors of a PigglyWiggly, but as that had been her aim, she figured it shouldn’t count against her driving ability.
The Undead World (Book 12): Jillybean & The First Giants [An Undead World Expansion] Page 2
