Without asking, Neil stalked to the Camry. The three silk clad women were standing nearby, looking nervous and, in one case, dangerous. The straggly-haired blonde had a hand hidden beneath the overlapping scarves at her hips. Neil turned on her. “Get your hand where I can see it,” he snapped. “Or else.”
She had him by a head and could look over the top of him easily, still she slid her hands up to shoulder height. She saw the crazy in his eyes.
In the trunk was more water in a cooler, a number of weapons and radios, food, blankets, and yes, thirty bottles of Pepto-Bismol in a cardboard box. He heaved the box out. “Raise your hands if you need some. Brad has very nicely donated some medicine to make amends for giving all of you tainted water. Michael, pass it out.”
As Michael Gates took the box and began to go among the renegades, Brad glared at Neil. “You are playing a dangerous game.”
“I’m playing a dangerous game? Protecting my people is dangerous to you? Wrong, Brad. It’s you who’s playing a dangerous game. Do you think we’re so weak that we will roll over and take it when you poison us?”
Brad threw his hands in the air and cried: “You weren’t poisoned! That was just plain water, the same as what we all drink on the plains. Yes, sometimes it’s not the cleanest, but it’s not like we have water treatment plants working anymore.”
“And yet you conveniently have a box full of Pepto in your car,” Neil replied, heatedly. The M4 was up and pointed again. “And all this driving around in circles, are you going to still claim that it’s for our own good? Because no one here believes it. Just like with the water and the Pepto, you’re creating a problem where none was before and who is the only person we can turn to? You.”
“Perhaps it looks that way,” Brad answered, standing stiff and angry. “But it is what it is. There are mega-herds. You saw one yesterday for goodness sakes! That was far larger and far more dangerous than what you left back at the post office. I am the one keeping you out of harm’s way. Hell, you can’t even afford the bridge fees to cross over the Platte…”
Neil held up a hand. “There will be no bridge fees whatsoever. It’s preposterous. It’s preposterous for someone to charge a fee to cross a bridge he didn’t build and can’t maintain. It’s highway robbery, pure and simple, and if the Azael partake in such shenanigans then, by definition, they are nothing but a bunch of two-bit bandits themselves.”
Neil was sure he had crossed a line, but he didn’t care. Bullies had to be stood up to.
Brad’s blue eyes narrowed. “Bandits? These are our lands you are crossing! I don’t know who you think you are, Neil, but you are weak. This entire group is weak. If you weren’t, you would’ve gone around the long way where water is scarce as teats on a bull. Down there the people are crazy. The sun has baked their brains and the lack of food has made them into cannibals. But if you’re so tough, go on. I won’t stop you. However, if you stay in the land of the Azael, you will do what I tell you, and go where I tell you, and you will thank me and kiss my ass because I’m the only one who can get you through.”
For a second they locked eyes, neither backing down an inch, and then Neil threw his head back and laughed. “Cannibals! That’s a nice touch. Very scary, but I highly doubt it. It sounds like an old wives tale to me.”
“Sounds like bullshit to me, too,” Grey said, coming to stand next to Neil. “Are you sure you want to go down this road, Brad? I can assure you that you don’t want to mess with the people of Colorado. We won’t take it lying down.”
“Now I get it,” Brad said with a little chuckle. “Now I understand why you talk so tough, Neil. You think soldier-boy here has your back. And you, Grey, you still think the soldiers have the upper hand out here in the west, don’t you? Well, you couldn’t be more wrong. King Augustus has united all the separate bands on the prairie. We have ten times your numbers and, oh yes, we have weapons now too. Nice ones, good ones. And the king has been looking for an excuse.”
Grey was quick to reply: “What do you mean by that?”
“I think you know,” Brad answered. “You know these ‘great’ types. They’re never satisfied with what they have. We’ve heard about how nice your valley is and I’m sure he’s thinking to add it to his domain. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to be the excuse that starts a war.”
Chapter 11
Jillybean/Eve
Just like the day before, they sat four abreast, Grey, Deanna, Jillybean, and Neil. The air in the cab was stuporous and as still and hot as a swamp. They weren’t moving. Perhaps as revenge for Neil’s uppity mouth, Brad had steered them right into the middle of one of the mega-herds and now they were forced to wait until the edges of it washed over them.
Jillybean had never traveled in the west and had never been in a similar situation back in the days before the apocalypse when cars would sometimes get trapped among a herd of cattle being driven from one pasture to another. It was analogous to the pace but not to the stench. The earthy-manure stink of cows could be eye-watering. The rotting acid wafting up from the undead was overpowering. Jillybean had her shirt up over her face.
This helped to muffle her conversation, though with the others dozing fitfully, it didn’t matter. “I knew Neil would cave,” Eve said. She was picking at her bellybutton and wondering what would happen if it ever unraveled. Would her insides just come gushing out?
He didn’t cave, Jillybean replied like an echo in her own head.
“Ok, he knuckled under. Either way, he’s soft as that baby’s head. Do you remember when you touched her head and it was smushy?”
Jillybean had a sudden flash of unwanted imagination: her finger stabbing into the soft spot on Eve…the real Eve’s, head. She could feel warm blood gurgle up as the baby’s arms and legs shot straight out. There was laughter in her head, again like an echo bouncing all around so that her blue eyes traced a zigzag pattern in her sockets.
We never touched her like that, so stop. And Neil did what he had to. You heard what would’ve happened if we had gone around. Cannon-balls! That’s what means they eat people.
“Captain Grey didn’t believe it, so why should we?”
So you like Captain Grey now? Last night you were vowing to kill him. In an attempt to try to control the other girl inside her, Jillybean had tried to use the threat of imprisonment or banishment. It had worked to a degree. For a time her hate had slithered into the background.
Jillybean couldn’t understand the girl at all. She was jealous of everything and everyone. She stole constantly and ate like a pig. At meal times, she went from one little group of people to the next, complaining that Neil was practically starving her. The story she told was that Neil would only give her a few spoonfuls on account that she was so small.
She hated Neil to no end and actively plotted the murder of the baby. But for some reason she liked Fred Trigg who Jillybean thought was a jerk—‘jerk’ was just about the biggest putdown in her arsenal. The other girl also hated Sadie, which again was a mystery. Sadie had been the quietest person in camp since the renegades had been freed. It was as though she had retreated into herself, a little every day, until only her big dark eyes stuck out. Sadie seemed to care for the baby and nothing else. Sadly, Neil didn’t seem to notice. He was focused full square on saving the group. Deanna didn’t seem to notice either; she only had eyes for Captain Grey. Wherever he went, she was sure to follow.
“Like that nursery rhyme mommy used to tell us,” the other girl said. “The one about the sheep. How did it go again?”
Jillybean didn’t know. Ever since Ipes had been…she didn’t know if he had been killed or not. He tended to float after all…but ever since he was gone, she had trouble remembering things like she used to. Gone were nursery rhymes and the name of the street she used to live on, and she couldn’t remember what her daddy looked like or what he did for a job. She should’ve known these things.
“It doesn’t matter,” the other girl said. “Daddy is dead. Just like mommy and stupid
old Ipes. And like Eve, too, soon enough.”
Do you want to go to jail? Jillybean asked. That’s where they’ll put you and they’ll lock the door and throw away the key.
“Not if I do it right,” She said. “It’ll be an accident. Remember the marble from last night…or whenever that was, it’s hard to keep track. But whatever; a marble will do it. All I have to do is poke it down her little throat. She doesn’t even have teeth to bite me!”
A cascade of black laughter fell through Jillybean’s mind, burying her under what felt like an avalanche of bats. Compared to the sound, Jillybean was small and skinny and so very weak. Weak as a shadow and, like one, she matched the color of the strange laughing bats that threatened to bury her. Their laughter wouldn’t stop. It went on and on. It was insane laughter, Jillybean realized, and that’s what meant crazy, cuckoo for coconuts.
Jillybean knew insanity on an intimate level. When she thought about it, she fooled herself with cartoon images of people bonking themselves on the head with a frying pan as little blue birds revolved around their heads. That was the thin illusion that she justified as understanding so that she was never forced into delving deeper on the subject. Deeper would’ve had her envisioning her mommy lying in bed, staring at the ceiling as she wasted into nothing, or seeing the cold look in the bounty hunter’s eye when she had shot him. There had been no humanity left in him. He liked killing. He ‘got off’ on it. ‘Getting off’ was also a subject that she left purposely vague in her mind. Its implications, that all of mankind was so very disgusting and disturbed, was something she felt she had to come to grips with gradually.
If she had delved to the very core of the concept of insanity, she would’ve seen herself with Ipes, harmlessly talking. Harmless, yes, but also insane.
Ipes wasn’t real. He couldn’t talk. He wasn’t her best friend. He wasn’t even an imaginary friend. He was a symptom of her mental disorder. Had she delved deep she would’ve understood these things and she would’ve been forced to admit that she was broken and perhaps unfixable. But she wasn’t ready to admit the truth, mainly because as one who was insane, the truth of the world could never be perceived fully or properly. It was a vicious and infinite circle.
Just then, sitting in the cab of the five-ton, she saw neither the truck nor the blazing hot July day outside it. She was in the dark of her mind with a crazed laughter taking the form of strange flapping things that resembled ebony books opening and closing on their inky bindings or uneven bats made from a blackness that was deeper than true black—they were shadows of a shadow. They fell on her softly, but thick, like night snow. She couldn’t see or think straight with it covering over her and only her fingers stuck out stretching for air or thought.
The strange, black webbiness was a mass that gave under her feet, so that any pushing resulted in maintaining the status quo of her being nearly buried. She panicked, afraid of being swallowed up for all time in the darkening depths of her own mind, where thoughts and memories faded over time, becoming thin, transparent and then, patchy and partial, until they disappeared altogether.
She didn’t want to disappear. There were things she had to do—though what, she didn’t know. And there were people she had to save—although who was lost on her. And there were battles still to be fought—although against whom she was afraid to know. And she had a life still to live, but she didn’t struggle for her life, it was her fear that caused her to spaz, uselessly. But then a voice spoke: You’ve tried pushing up, have you tried the opposite?
The voice was calm and came from the blackness where her thoughts went to die, and that was strange. Jillybean stopped struggling and looked down into the black and saw that she was wrong; it was not altogether black. There were silver lines as thin as a spider’s silk descending downward. She had no clue what they were and she really didn’t want to find out. This dark, more than any other dark scared her. There were whispers down there. Haunting sounds just on the verge of being understood.
They were puzzles to her, fear-filled ones, because they weren’t just puzzles, they were the flagstones of a path and although she didn’t know where that path led, she knew it would lead to bad stuff. Hard stuff. Stuff she couldn’t handle. Stuff that could turn her catatonic—that could turn her into a useless vegetable. Stuff that would make her like her mother: dead before she died.
But there was also that voice in the dark which upset the teetering deck of cards. The voice had been pleasant. Did that mean there were also pleasant things down there? Or was it all more shadow and fakery? Was the voice fake? Was it a lie? The problem with being insane, even just a little insane, was that nothing could be studied and known for fact because there were no facts that the mind couldn’t warp for its own good or its own destruction.
Still the voice was warm and reminded her of someone. And it caused her to think beyond her panic. Have I tried the opposite? she asked herself. She had kicked out with her feet but that had been like trying to gain purchase on a cloud. The opposite of push was pull, she decided, and so she began pulling the black webby stuff down. It came down in sticky strings like damp cotton candy and soon her face was out of the black and into the void of her mind.
“Why would pulling work when pushing didn’t?” she asked aloud. The words stopped the echoing, flat. Excited she looked up and saw twin lamps of a pale hue. They were the color of bluebells on the first of May. This thought sprung another and soft words floated up from beneath her: I’m a May Flower.
She had said that to Ram before he died, when they were in the cleaning store where a heavy black smoke was billowing from the fire, making the room blistering hot. They thought they were going to die but they hadn’t. The memory was just as clear and crisp in her mind as an autumn leaf fresh from a leap off a branch.
Jillybean smiled and felt her face work. Above, the twin lamps crinkled. Those were her eyes! Eyes ready to see and a mouth ready to work. How strange. She had never seen herself from the inside before. Normally, when she was taken over by Ipes or this new, nasty girl, she was just a vague notion in her own mind that would come and go, sometimes running the body and sometime riding along as if in the back seat of a car. This was different and somewhat exciting. It was like putting on a turtleneck sweater. There was endless cloth and tunnels going off at angles for the arms to poke through and then there was the long passage for the head and the odd fear of suffocating that always came with it and there was…
“No!” the mouth spoke with sudden, angry authority. “No, you stay in there,” the other girl said. She was suddenly there in the construct of Jillybean’s perceived reality. She was a giant with a giant’s hand. She took a train-sized finger and poked Jillybean down back into the black just like she would poke the marble down Eve’s throat.
Jillybean tried to fight. Mindlessly, she battled in the inky black nothing, straining against nothing, and receiving nothing as a result. As before she tried pulling but it was only panic, not thought, that drove her limbs. She only sank lower and lower, until she was too afraid to move anymore and there Jillybean waited, held in place, not by the strange cottony blackness, but by that which created it. It was the same force that had created Ipes and the nasty girl running her body. It was the insanity of fear.
Chapter 12
Deanna Russell
The mega-horde finally broke up around them, wandering off in a westerly direction. Brad, who had somehow managed to slip the Camry away when the beasts first appeared, came tooling back. As usual, he was all smiles. He also seemed refreshed and perky. The renegades were haggard in comparison. The heat in the trucks had been stifling and now they began to clamor for water.
Gritting his teeth and biting back a menu of curse words, Neil said: “Well, you got your wish,” he said to Brad. “We’re at your mercy. We need water, badly. Please show us to the nearest clean stream.” The ‘please’ had been barely civil.
“Careful,” Deanna said, under her breath. In her opinion, Neil was being unnecessarily belli
gerent, antagonizing the one man who could get them to Colorado safely.
Brad shook his head at the angry little man and then seemed to voice Deanna’s thoughts aloud: “Gonna fight me tooth and nail? Not the smartest move, Neil. I’m sure your people won’t appreciate it if I get angry and leave you bone dry in the middle of Kansas without gas or water.”
“You wouldn’t,” Neil reply. “There’s no profit in ditching us. You’re here to make money. We both know it so please stop with the savior routine. Just tell me how much it will cost to refill our water supply.” In the back of each of the three trucks was a large plastic container that held twenty gallons. Along with their numerous water bottles they had about ninety gallons left, enough to last them a day and a half.
A shrug, a tiny lift of Brad’s shoulders was followed by: “Well now, that depends on which of the water stations we go to. Some are more and some are less, but they’re all very expensive. It’s a resource after all. If we can make it to the North Platte, you’ll get the best price. The King is very fair. He only charges market price without adding any fees.”
Deanna was confused since the two terms: ‘very fair’ and ‘very expensive,’ didn’t seem to go either with one another or with the words ‘market price.’ She stepped forward and demanded: “What do you mean by market prices? We’re talking water, not lobsters.”
Neil made a sound that was part laugh, part derisive snort. “He means he’s going to charge us whatever he can squeeze out of us.”
By the shark-like look in Brad’s eyes, Deanna saw that he meant to do exactly as Neil said. There was an angry murmur from the renegades who, as usual whenever they stopped, had come gasping out of the trucks. They were beginning to understand that they were getting screwed and that unless the blue sky flipped to black and the heavens opened up, they’d be forced to accept whatever despicable terms were offered by the king of the Azael.
The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) Page 12
