Wrong was a good word for how she felt—she was just wrong.
“Be careful next time,” Sadie said, taking the crying infant. “Go back to bed.”
The barn quieted once more, but it was a long time before Jillybean got up. She went to where she had left the gun beneath the ducky blanket. The other girl inside her grew like a summoned demon at the sight of it, however Jillybean was too quick. She grabbed it, leapt three different people as though she were playing an advanced form of hopscotch, and shoved the gun back into Neil’s pack before she could take over.
“Too slow,” Jillybean hissed in angry triumph.
A voice came floating up out of the inky depths of her mind: This time, it said. It was angry too; angry at everything: Angry at the death of her parents, and it was angry that Ram had been turned into a zombie and that Sarah had been tortured with fire and then shot for no reason. It was angry that Nico was murdered and that Big Jim had been killed for nothing. It was angry that Neil had tried to give her to Abraham, and it was angry that people hunted them endlessly. It was angry that she wasn’t able to be a right, proper little girl and go to school. Instead she had to kill people with bullets and bombs and flaming ships.
She was in a rage that Eve got to be a baby, but Jillybean couldn’t be a normal girl...and it made something inside her furious and hateful and...evil.
While everyone else slept in the barn, Jillybean cried.
Chapter 2
Brad Crane
The horseman in his bright armor and his tall wings, edged the stallion closer to the little man in the sweater vest, enjoying the way he leaned back away from horse, intimidated by the raw power of the beast. Brad Crane also liked what he saw behind the man: an entire barn full of cowering people thrown into fear by the appearance of one person...and a few thousand zombies.
He also liked what he saw outside the barn: four large five-ton trucks and a pick-up sitting side by side. They were likely jammed with supplies and they were practically his for the taking. He kept the smile from his lips, however. Now was not the time to gloat, now was the time to overawe the weaklings.
“We fight,” the little man in front said. He had his jaw set and his eyes were as squinting and as steely as he could make them, which, considering the ruined nature of his face was considerable. In Brad’s opinion, he was one of the most gruesome people he had ever looked upon. Every inch of his face was swollen and scabbed and his skin ranged from yellow to purple, with many unpleasant colors in between. There were zombies that were better looking. The man’s outfit did not match the face. It was an outfit straight out of suburbia: the checkered sweater vest was awful, but he also wore “Mom” jeans and ridiculous purple crocs on his feet.
His entire aspect was both confusing and pathetic. He looked like a nerd who had, for once, decided against giving over his lunch money. He was tense and nervous. His body was a quivering spring and his untrained finger was already on the trigger of his M4. He stood, poised for action but he was practically the only one.
Almost all of the sixty three people in the large barn had taken a collective step back at Brad’s approach. They stared at him as if he was greater than all of them combined. On his black horse, with his wings tall and stiff in the morning breeze he seemed a giant. There was silence after the little man’s grand proclamation; the hodge-podge group cowered.
Brad made sure to hold the contemptuous sneer on his lips.
It was obvious the little man with purple shoes was unimpressed with Brad. He ran his eyes over the wings on Brad’s back and saw they were only made of white silk, pulled tight over a wire frame, and his armor, which had been so dazzling before, was simply worked aluminum plating. It would repel teeth and the scabby claws of the zombies, but even a small caliber bullet would pierce it. He also took in the spear, seeing that it was more of a herding tool rather than a weapon of war. Lastly, the little man raised what was left of his right eyebrow as he glanced at Brad’s bolt action rifle strapped to his saddle—it wasn’t a good weapon for close action.
“We fight!” the little man cried again, louder. Had there been crickets in the barn they would have been heard to chirp. Confused, he looked back to see only three of his friends ready to go and one was a little girl! A deep-chested soldier and a striking blonde woman were the other two; the rest looked to be hiding behind their weapons instead of presenting them in a warlike manner.
Brad chuckled, gazing at them as they shook with fear. “If you fight, then you die,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”
The tall blonde woman calmly took the binoculars from a skinny punk of a girl and gave another glance at the horde of zombies behind Brad. “There’s not many of the humans, Neil. I can only see three of them from this doorway. I’d bet there aren’t more than twenty of the riders all told.”
“Only twenty?” Brad scoffed. “I have more men than that surrounding you. And besides, we have enough grey meat to tear this barn down and kill the lot of you. Your name is Neil? Well, Neil, you have only two choices in the matter. Submit or die.”
“We will not submit and nor will we allow our belongings to be plundered,” Neil replied, stepping forward aggressively, only to step back again as the horse swung its large head around towards him. “We are all armed and you can rest assured that we will give a fine account of ourselves. If you think you have encountered a weak group, you are mistaken, sir. So go back to your friends and let them know that we plan on fighting to the death.”
This did not sit well with the rest of the group. There were whisperings and a general murmur of negativity sprang up. “We should bargain with them,” a man with slicked hair and a pinched, nervous face, said.
Neil looked to be thinking this over when the little girl standing at his side said: “No, that’s wrong, Fred.” She wore a yellow sundress which was wrinkled to such a degree that it might have been made out of paper fetched from a trash can and unballed before being cut to fit a little girl. On her feet were ancient Keds; they had been white at one time. Now they were dingy with river water, mud, and yesterday’s Oklahoma dust. Her fly-away brown hair was lightened by the first rays of the sun and strewn with the hay she had picked up in sleep. The rider and horse seemed not to have affected her at all.
At her words, the whisperings and the general murmur died away. “We should not bargain with him,” she continued in her little girl voice. “We should kill him, quickly.” She turned to Neil and whispered: “If I kill him can I have the horse?” Her eyes were greedy, whether for the horse or the chance to kill, it was hard to tell. Brad stared at her with his lip twisted in disgust and she glared right back.
“You would listen to a girl?” Brad demanded. “A crazy girl?”
“I would sooner listen to her than to you.” Neil shot back. “You come here demanding our surrender. The answer is: hell no! We have done nothing wrong. We are just passing through, so take your threats elsewhere, because we will fight you. Some of us are highly trained marksmen.” Neil inclined his head to the soldier and asked him: “Would you have trouble knocking some of those men out of their saddles at this distance, Grey?”
Grey took his eyes off the man for a second to look out at the horde. “With those wings they make excellent targets,” Grey said. “I couldn’t miss.”
Brad glanced back, squinting at the distant figures of his men. He had to laugh; a short barking sound of derision. He swung his shoulder length blonde hair away from his face and said: “I’ve heard my share of big talk since the apocalypse, but that’s some bullshit. I’m betting you couldn’t hit dick from this distance. And even if you could, how do you plan on dealing with two thousand stiffs? Really, Neil, your only choice is to surrender now and save your worthless skins.”
“That won’t happen,” Neil snarled.
“I told you we should kill him,” the little girl said. “It’ll be easy and there’ll be one less of them to fight. He might even be their leader and if he dies, maybe the others won’t know what to
do. They’ll be…what’s the word, Jillybean? Right, confused. They’ll be confused and stupid and easier to kill. And we can have their horses for ourselves.”
“Jillybean! That’s enough” Grey admonished. He glared her into silence and then turned to Neil. “She has a point. We can use horses where we’re going. We should make sure not to kill them.”
Brad felt his smirk begin to draw down. The group wasn’t knuckling under as he had expected. They were certainly an odd bunch. Neil appeared to be the classic wimp and yet he had more backbone than any of them. And there was something definitely wrong with the little girl. Her eyes weren’t right and she had a sick manner about her—sick in the head, that is. And Brad certainly didn’t care for Grey’s icy stare or for the tall woman’s calm demeanor. The rest didn’t look like much, but these four were trouble.
Despite his smirk and his confidence, Brad couldn’t afford trouble. The truth was he only had eighteen men with him, and five weren’t men at all. Two were middling teens and three were women; they weren’t much in the way of fighters, meaning he would have to play this smart if he was going to gain substantially. “And where are you supposedly going?” he asked.
“Back to Colorado,” Grey replied, lifting an eyebrow.
“Colorado?” he asked nonchalantly. The one word had sent his hopes crashing. Men from Colorado had a reputation: they excelled at violence. Brad looked Grey over with a discriminating eye. He took in the soldier’s rough appearance and his cold hazel eyes and the way his weapon was as immaculate as his attire was purposely grungy. He looked as though he could blend in with any patch of dirt and, once invisible, kill with impunity.
Grey stared right back and there was nothing nonchalant about him. He was all business and there was no lie in the way he seemed completely prepared to take the little girl’s suggestion and shoot Brad on the spot. “Yes, Colorado,” Grey replied. “I am Captain James Grey of the 3rd Battalion. I am escorting these people by order of General Johnston.”
Fuuuck! Brad cursed, inwardly. This man wouldn’t be bullied and neither would Neil, regardless of his geeky nature. Brad certainly didn’t have the means to fight them. Yes, he could have sicced his horde on the renegades and probably killed them all, but where was the profit in that? Half of them were women and they were a bunch of ripe tomatoes in his eyes. They would fetch a pretty penny at the slave markets. It was even possible that the women were worth much more than what was in their trucks. The men and boys would be sold to the arena masters or, if they had that mercenary gleam, they would be asked to join the ranks of the Azael. Too bad the soldier would never sign up. The men from Colorado also had the reputation of being goody-two-shoes.
Brad looked at his options: he couldn’t bully them, and a fight would be a waste, so that only left trickery. Suddenly, he brightened and smiled, showing even teeth. “Hells bells, why didn’t you say you were from Colorado in the first place. That changes everything. Put up your guns, you are among friends. We know of the mountain people, in fact we trade with them regularly.”
The people in the barn let out a collective breath. It was such a unified chorus that it sounded like choreographed wind. They then began whispering to each other, excitedly and there were smiles where fear had been a second before. Only the little girl still glared with the same intensity as she had. Her disappointment was obvious. Whether at losing the opportunity to kill or at gaining the rider’s horse, or both, Brad couldn’t tell. Either way, she was freaky.
“I’m so relieved,” Neil said and then shaped his wounded face into something that could only be called a smile simply because teeth showed. Despite the “smile” he hadn’t dropped his gun by an inch.
“As am I,” Brad answered, releasing the bridle so the horse could pick at the hay, lying underfoot. “I thought you were part of one of the bandit groups operating around these parts. Very dangerous men they are. Murderers and slavers, the lot of them. But you’re from Colorado! How lucky. If you’d like, we can escort you to the border. Oklahoma isn’t far. Just a few miles.”
“But we’re going to Colorado,” the Goth girl said, speaking up for the first time. She held a baby in her arms and had seemed halfway between the sheep of the larger group and the shepherds of the smaller group led by Grey and Neil. “You heard us say we’re going to Colorado not Arkansas.”
Brad gave her a very slow and deliberate once over, liking what he saw and thinking she would go for a thousand easily in the markets. Many men liked them young. “Yes, but I didn’t know you’d be traveling through our lands. That changes things. Everyone traveling through our lands needs an escort.” He smiled down on the teen. “...for their own protection, of course.” He pointed with his spear out at the circling zombies. “The plains are home to millions of them. Sometimes in herds as far as the eye can see. You can’t get through without protection.”
Neil’s gun was still up and his baby-blue eyes were at squints. “I’m sure I must be misunderstanding you. What you just said has the ring of the Jersey mafia behind it—you know, providing the threat that people pay to be protected against. Is that what I’m hearing?”
It was exactly that. “No, of course not,” Brad lied. “The danger is very real.”
“And you say you’re with the Azael?” Grey asked. “I didn’t realize you were operating so far south. The last I heard you were only operating in Nebraska.”
“Then you’ve been out of the loop for quite some time. We’ve been expanding, franchising you might say. Ever since the king came up with the new look, we’ve been growing, taking over more and more land. Really, business is thriving.”
Just then, the horse swung his head and made a snuffling sort of noise in the direction of Neil’s purple crocs, causing the small man to take a step back, as if afraid the horse would take a bite of the rubber footwear. As he did, he asked: “Your new look? You mean the fake wings and the spear helps you in some way?”
Before the rider could answer, Jillybean snorted, “Sheesh, what a moron…no, I won’t shut up! It’s not my fault he’s a moron.” She seemed to be talking to someone just off her left shoulder, only there was no one standing there.
Those around the little girl glanced away from her, embarrassed. Brad gave her a queer look before answering Neil’s question. “Yeah, they keep the stiffs from hurting us. Because of the wings, they don’t see us as human, but just in case, we’re armored.” He smacked his mailed thigh as emphasis.
“It’s an improvement, I guess,” Grey said. “They used to dress like transsexual gypsies. No offence, but those outfits were lame.”
“What’s a transsexual gypsy look like?” the Goth girl with the baby asked with a laugh. “Did you guys wear pantyhose or something?”
Brad grinned, liking her white teeth and flawless, pale skin. “No, not pantyhose. We wear all these different colored scarves and shawls when we need to. It confused the stiffs and they rarely attacked. But, I would agree with you, Grey, those outfits aren’t in the least bit manly. I like the new ones better, especially the spear. It’s very handy. You’d be surprised to learn how easy it is to herd the stiffs.”
“That’s because they were people and people are like fucking sheep,” Jillybean said, in a soft, hating voice. Again, the little group around her shared embarrassed looks.
The grin on Brad’s face faded. The little girl was crazy. There was no questioning that now. And that was really too bad, a cute little thing like that would fetch two thousand in the market with no problem, otherwise. Brad didn’t want to know what a man would see in a skinny little runt like Jillybean, he only knew some would pay for her. Even warped in the head they would pay, they just wouldn’t pay as much.
Neil pretended Jillybean hadn’t said anything. He straightened his checkered sweater vest by pulling down on its lower hem, cleared his throat importantly and asked: “So, how much to be escorted through your lands?”
“Two hundred a head,” Brad answered, without hesitation.
Just as qui
ckly, Neil replied: “Too high.”
Damn, that geek is tough, Brad thought. Aloud he shot back: “One-eighty. It’s really the lowest I can go. I hope you understand.”
Jillybean had been watching intently, an ugly look on her soft features. “That’s a lie,” she said. When she spoke she had everyone’s attention. The little group looked nervous as though she was about to spew more crazy. “He could do it for free if he wanted to or at the least he could do it for just the cost of the gas, but he wants more. He wants whatever you’ll pay him. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s just making numbers up.”
She was exactly right. There wasn’t a fixed sum since the Azael charged the various people looking to cross their territory whatever could be extorted from them. Brad grunted, then leaned over the pommel of his saddle and stared down at the girl. She stared right back, not blinking an eye. “Hey kid,” he said to her in a low growl. “Why don’t you go play? The grownups are trying to talk.”
“And why don’t you go fu…”
Jillybean was cut off as Neil slapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry about that. She hasn’t been feeling quite herself lately.” He turned to the Goth girl. “Sadie, can you take her somewhere, please?”
Sadie took the little girl’s hand. “Come along Jilly…I mean Eve. Come on. Neil’s got this.”
“No he doesn’t. Neil is weak,” Jillybean said, as she was dragged away. “He’ll give everything away.”
Everything? Brad liked the sound of that. It made it seem that one-eighty a head was very doable. He caught himself grinning and quickly looked away, back to where his drovers were circling the zombies just beyond the reach of their eyesight. From this distance, the zombies could only make out the barn and even that just barely. He lifted his spear straight up and then brought it down straight in front of him three times so that the flag on it snapped lightly—the signal for stand down.
The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) Page 2
