The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead)

by Meredith, Peter

  He slept as he had in Iraq during those times when making it back to base wasn’t an option, and the desert, or the back streets of Fallujah was his nest for the night. He slept with a literal eye half-cracked and his mind in a state of “pause.”

  When, at two in the morning, Jillybean suddenly stood up, moving with the grace and silence of a stalking jungle cat, Grey’s dark eyes opened a hair wider. He watched her as she stopped over Neil and stared down at him, a sneer on her face. Her eyes were pale zeros in the night, devoid of thought beyond the unpleasant. With a derisive snort at Neil, she left him and went to Sadie and snorted again. When the Goth girl rolled over, Grey saw that it was the baby who was being glared at.

  This had Grey on edge, ready to leap up to protect the infant from the disturbed girl. There was no need. Jillybean blinked hard, shook her head once and then moved on, like the specter of death in a wrinkled yellow dress. Where her shadow, inky black, fell across the sleeping renegades, they stirred uneasily, something that seemed to please her and he saw her teeth gleam.

  Grey watched her through slitted eyes as she moved about them, pausing over some, ignoring others. She stood a long time over the still form of Joe Gates and then she knelt. When she straightened, a line of silver in her hand caught the weak light in a brief flash.

  She then crept to the doorway that led to the front where the now-dead postmen would receive mail and sell stamps and where the Christmas lines would snake and squiggle around the room, held in place by shabby velvet ropes.

  The captain stood, following after the little girl, and she was clueless to his presence. She was a genius in her way, mostly on a physical level where she understood the workings and mechanics of both nature and man on a level few adults were cognizant of; however, she was still just a child and her hearing and vision weren’t anything but average, while Grey could be slick as oil when he wished. Soundlessly, he followed her through the front room and lurked in the deeper shadows as she went to the building’s front door, which was propped open by a brick.

  Jillybean glanced out at the guard on duty. From his vantage, Grey couldn’t see who it was, but he knew nonetheless it was Veronica, one of the women from the Island. She had never shared her last name with Grey and he had never asked. This was true with most of the women, Deanna included. They acted as though, by being anonymous in this minor way, they could begin anew and that their pasts could be forgotten or ascribed to someone else. He was fine by that.

  Grey watched the little girl for some time and, at first, he assumed that she was about to make an attempt at running away. It wouldn’t be difficult for someone as smart as Jillybean. Even in the daytime it wouldn’t be all that hard, but at night it would be a cinch to slip out into the shadows and disappear forever. However, she didn’t make the attempt. After what looked like a whispered conversation with herself that involved very little sound but much moving of lips and gesturing of her hands, she turned back the way she had come.

  Instead of retreating further into the shadows, Grey stepped forward. To her, he must have appeared monstrous, dark and of course scary, and so, her reaction was amazing. She dropped into a crouch and within a blink she had the stolen knife out and held at the ready, looking like a trained knife fighter.

  Impressed, Grey stepped forward slowly with his hand out. “I’ll take that.”

  When she saw who it was, the signs of a quick mental calculation crossed her face and then she stepped back, putting her hand out to find the cracked door, just in case she wanted to run was his guess. “I don’t have to,” she said in a childish voice. Her voice was always childish in its way, young-sounding, but now it had a smarmy, know-it-all quality as well. “It’s my knife and I have the right to have it because...because of the monsters and such.”

  “It’s not your knife,” he answered, easing forward. “We both know that you stole it from Joe Gates. Thievery is a crime, Jillybean. We don’t allow thieves in this group. Now, give it to me. I won’t ask again.”

  More calculations made her eyes dart and her brow crinkle. Quickly, she came to realize that no amount of genius would allow her to keep the knife. “Ok, here.” The knife was out, extended. In the dark, it was pale, its edges blurry, its point seemingly dull. She stood relaxed and yet Grey had seen how fast she had stepped into a natural fighting stance. He didn’t and couldn’t trust her.

  He had seen too many soldiers with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Most of these men had the form of PTSD called Play The System Disorder. It was the version which every serving soldier had seen a hundred times, but never talked about. This version involved a lifetime of receiving “disability” pay from the army for a diagnosis that couldn’t be seen, and as long as the money kept flowing, was practically impossible to cure. Grey was embarrassed to be associated with a person with that form of PTSD.

  Then there was the true version, the very sad, real version. It was unpredictable and frequently led to deeper issues, although he had never heard of it deteriorating in the way it was happening to Jillybean.

  There was definitely something more serious going on with her than PTSD, which usually presented with headaches, night terrors, depression and anxiety. Jillybean’s mental state was worlds beyond that. Before he had met Jillybean, he never believed for a second in multiple personalities. Truly, he thought it was all a load of psychiatric bullshit, but Ipes had been an eye-opener. The stuffed animal had been completely real in Jillybean’s mind. For her, it was a distinct and separate individual, complete with its own personality, its own manner of speaking, and in many cases, its own memories.

  Having the stuffed animal speak through the little girl had been definitely strange to the arrow-straight and rational thinking army captain and at first he thought it had been nothing but a bid for attention, only the zebra and the little girl didn’t seem to care about attention. They cared and feared for their lives and the lives of their friends. That’s what had driven them to step boldly into one dangerous situation after another and, with each intense adult step, the damage to the little girl’s mind had grown.

  Grey had worried over her, fretting that she was taking on more than she could handle. He had watched Neil drive her and, perhaps use her, especially when he became leader of the renegades. Neil was determined to see them safely through to Colorado, but at a cost that Grey didn’t agree with. These were adults relying on a seven-year-old who had already been through way more than any child should. It wasn’t right and, for his part, he wanted to keep her far away from the least hint of danger…unfortunately that would mean locking her away in a windowless room.

  Even in Colorado, where the mountains held back the larger zombie hordes, there was still danger. Raiders were constantly nibbling on their borders and stray zombies made hunting as dangerous for the hunters as the deer they stalked. And then there was General Johnston’s insistence of carrying on a knightly and Christian image.

  Grey agreed that if mankind had a chance of rising above anarchy and the inevitable return to the dark ages where might made right and evil flourished, then “goodness” had to triumph. For it to do so meant someone had to stand up to the worst of mankind, it meant fighting, it meant death.

  It meant that Jillybean would always be one step from bloodshed but, if he could keep her that step away, Grey would do it. The Estes valley, thirty miles into the Colorado Rockies was the best chance she had. There was danger, yes, but there were also soft green fields she could run in, and icy cold lakes stocked with bass and rainbow trout where she could paddle little boats, and the air there was as clean as when God first breathed it onto the earth. She could fly a kite there and be nothing but a kid once more. There she could be happy. There she could grow and heal. There she could be whole in body and mind again.

  But to get there they had nine hundred miles of danger to traverse, starting with the two feet that separated them and the six inches of razor-sharp metal at the end of her hand. Joe Gates was always sharpening his knife in an attempt to demonstra
te to everyone that he wasn’t a boy, but rather he was a man in training.

  Jillybean had an adverse effect on him. Here was a tiny, strip of a girl who could blow up bridges and boats, and break people out of jails and to whom everyone looked the second things got sticky. Yes, she was clearly crazy, but she was also a genius and dangerous. She was a powerful force, not just in the group, but to the peoples of New York, and New Eden, and to the River King, and if the people of the Azael weren’t careful, to them as well. Jillybean’s very presence had made Joe bold and reckless and yet these traits went mostly unrecognized because Jillybean was always center-stage.

  Even there, in the dead of night, Jillybean held the group’s fate in her hand. Had Grey not been so vigilant, who knows where she would be now and what she would be doing? The knife had been stolen for a purpose. A gun could’ve been just as easily picked up, but guns were loud killers, while knives were quiet ones. Guns were for defense from the zombies or the wild men of the world, but a knife was for slitting throats in the dead of night or gutting a man in his sleep.

  With the night throwing its dark arms over their shoulders, and wrapping them in shadow, the two stood closer than fencers. Grey could see her sizing him up, judging the distance between them, considering, perhaps, the ramifications of not handing him the knife but instead driving it into his guts and giving it a quick twist.

  He saw her lethality, knowing that, had it been Neil standing here, she would have lunged into him, piercing his flesh with the metal thorn and laughing at him as his blood crowded out of him. Grey saw this, but stepped forward anyway; her crazy was no match for his size, speed and skill. She saw his eyes and the fact that he stood ready to snatch the knife. She was too smart to make the attempt and her hand opened so the blade sat on her palm.

  Still, he didn’t trust her and took her wrist first.

  “I was just borrowing it,” she lied, as he whipped the blade away out of sight. “I had to go to the bathroom and I don’t like the ones in here. They’re very, extra stinky. Even Jil…I mean everyone thinks so.”

  “How about I escort you somewhere outside then? I’ll keep you safe.”

  “Sure.” Her smile was another of her bad lies.

  He led her to the front door and cleared his throat, so as not to startle Veronica. The woman jumped anyway. “You’re early Jos, but if…” She choked on her words as she saw Grey, but rallied with a smile. “Are you checking up on me or looking for an excuse to get me alone and chat me…” Again her words faltered. This time because she saw Jillybean. The girl might have been considered a good luck charm and a genius, but she was also strange and off-putting. When she looked at a person with her sharp eyes, few of the renegades could stand before her. They joked, when she wasn’t around, that it felt like they were bugs beneath an alien microscope when she looked at them. They felt naked and their secrets laid bare.

  “She has to use the bathroom is all,” Grey said. “Is it clear?”

  “It’s hard to tell. There’s a herd nearby,” she answered, keeping her voice low. “When I came on shift, William said a herd of zombies was moving through, but I don’t know. By the sounds of it, they stopped moving. Listen.” The three of them held their breath and the night became alive with sound: cicadas mostly, but there was also the distant moan of zombies as pervasive as the dark.

  “Probably a mile off,” Grey said. “Anything closer?”

  “A gang of them tromped right in front of me a half hour ago. They went that way.” She pointed across the highway where more derelict farmland sat. It was practically all they had seen during their long day of driving.

  Grey thanked her and then he and Jillybean walked off in the opposite direction she had pointed. The little girl was uneasy with him so close and snuck her eyes up at him every few steps. He directed her to a field of winter wheat that had gone unharvested and was grown tall, but was now browned from the endless sun. “In there.” He gave her back a nudge and considered giving her a warning against running away but decided against it. She knew as well as he did they were in the middle of nowhere and that running meant death from starvation or thirst or the zombies.

  At one point in the endless turnings that Brad had led them on, they crossed high over a wide, shit-brown river that had been chugged full of stiffs. There were more of them on either bank, thousands more, maybe even tens of thousands more. Brad had stopped the Toyota midway on the bridge, went to the edge and hooked a shoe on the lower bar of the guard railing. He had waved an arm in a grand gesture and said: “That’s why you hired me. That horde there is just a small one. Some go for miles in every direction. And look at that water. The waters are spoilt like that all over the prairie.”

  It had been an impressive display of propaganda that had quieted some of the talk that had been going around during that long hot day.

  It had been oppressively hot in the trucks, and the shut up post office had been little better, though it was as safe as Brad said it would be. Despite its supposed safety, Brad hadn’t slept there. He had claimed a need for gas and had driven off at sunset.

  Thankfully, it was cool under the stars. As he waited on Jillybean, Grey limboed a snap and crackle out of his back with the help of his knuckles and then stopped to listen. Sounds in the night carry easily through the dark. Far away the zombies moaned or growled and seemed nearer that they were. Closer at hand there was a whispered conversation in the dried-out wheat stalks where Jillybean had disappeared.

  The little girl was quiet and he only caught segments of what was being said: “That’s not true…They’ll never know…Do you think they’ll blame….Oh, please…have jails, if everyone is good?”

  Grey could make nothing from the snatches of words and he was just creeping forward so he could hear better, when Jillybean addressed him: “Mister Captain Grey, sir? Are all the people in Colorado good? Like you I mean?”

  “Yes, for the most part,” he answered, hedging slightly. No group was comprised solely of good or bad people. There was always a mix of the ambitious, the driven, the greedy and the conniving, though in this case they were what he would call good. “Why do you ask? Are you worried about fitting in? Because you shouldn’t. You’re a good person. Deep down you are sweet, and caring. You just have to remember that.”

  She giggled, an evil sound that sent a shiver down his back. Before he could recover from this, she began hissing at herself to be quiet. If he hadn’t known better, he would’ve bet good money that there were two girls hiding in the bush.

  “What if I do something bad?” she asked. “You’ll punish me, right? You just don’t let bad people walk around like everyone else, right? You have jails, right?”

  “Not for people like you, Jillybean. No matter what you think, you are a good person. Jail is for evil people, murderers and rapists, people like that. So please, don’t think you’ll ever go to jail.”

  More whispering from the brush. “You see, it’s going to be like…you don’t know…seen it myself. They banished her…what’s that mean? …you out of the group…and we’ll be alone.” From what Grey could tell, the Jillybean voice was trying to get the other side of her, the evil Eve side, to be good so they wouldn’t be kicked out or banished.

  Grey was leaning in to hear more when Jillybean suddenly appeared. Her yellow dress, muted by the dark, had blended in with the wheat and only her pale white face stood out. He felt a moment of shock, realizing that if she had another knife she could have gutted him. “Whoa, you scared me,” he said.

  She grinned and it was the grin of a hungry skeleton; for a second, she was unrecognizable. “I should scare you,” she hissed. “I…I…I…” Her words ground to a halt and there was a confusion of lines on her little girl face, which she forced carefully back into place so that she looked again like Jillybean. “I mean, uh, that I didn’t mean that. I meant that because it’s dark I should scare you.”

  “You shouldn’t lie, Jillybean,” Grey warned her. “Tell me what the other person in you wa
nts to do.”

  “Hurt people,” she said in a rush and then stood looking about as if expecting something bad to happen. When whatever it was didn’t happen, she let out a breath and went on: “But I told her she’d go to jail or be banished, like that one woman. Won’t that happen?” She asked this as if pleading with Grey to agree. She had her small hand on his hip, her nails, quick-bit near to nothing, made scritching noises on his BDUs.

  “Yeah, that’s what will happen,” Grey lied, thinking, incorrectly, that he was helping Jillybean control the evil side of her.

  Chapter 9

  Melanie Hewitt

  Twenty minutes before the sun broke the horizon, the brick post office had finally reached a point that could be called comfortably cool. By twenty minutes after dawn, the sun was once again pounding down. The rays baked the red bricks and, with the dusty windows capturing the heat, the post office was as hot as a green house.

  Grey and Jillybean were the last to stir. The rest sat up, smacking cotton-dry lips and began to scramble for water bottles and warm canteens. A number of the renegades, twenty three to be precise, felt an urgency and began scrambling for the bathrooms. The twenty three, as Neil was able to deduce later, had two things in common: explosive diarrhea and they were the only ones who had bought Brad’s cold water on credit.

  Soon the six stalls, evenly divided between the men’s and lady’s rooms were brimming with foulness causing the last woman in line, the sad and disfigured Melanie, to figure something else out before her bowels let go in a rush.

  Melanie had been a slave in the River King’s kitchens; it was hot work and sometimes dangerous. The women were weighed every morning with any increase in weight three days running being considered prima facie evidence of theft of food. Beatings were frequent and she generally worked from before sun up until just after ten at night; it was bad, but at least she wasn’t being raped.