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

by Meredith, Peter

  Deanna shook her head. “It’s close.” She pointed beneath his right eyelid at the drop nearest.

  He developed a sudden jittery tic where her finger had indicated. “Oh, jeeze! What the heck am I going to do? I got to get this stuff off of me, but we’re out of water.” He swallowed, making sure to keep his lips slightly parted and his tongue retracted—all in all looking like a dog retching.

  “We’re out of water?” Jillybean asked, perplexed at the idea. “That’s not good because I’m thirsty real bad and you gots all that blood on you, which is real gross and all. You know what you can do? You could use dirt to clean up. You know, like a bird. Birds take dirt baths sometimes and have you ever seen a dirty bird? It doesn’t make any sense really, dirt to clean dirt, but they do it.”

  Neil looked down at the ground with a hound dog expression. “Dirt? Oh jeeze,” he said, before grabbing a handful of dirt. Deanna was skeptical over the idea and yet she wasn’t the one with zombie blood all over her. Neil started with his hands and wrists. The dirt was abrasive and it was only a minute before his hands were “clean” meaning free of blood, but otherwise filthy. He moved on to his cheeks and neck where the dirt and sweat mingled to make mud.

  Jillybean watched Neil with an amused expression as she pointed out each speckle. Deanna had to concentrate on not cracking up and this was not easy, especially when Jillybean suddenly said: “You know what might also work? Mister Ricky’s whiskey drink. He’s always taking secret sips, but he’s not all that secret, if you ask me.”

  Neil spat out little flecks of dirt from the end of his tongue. He seemed to have trouble thinking and spitting at the same time. When his mouth was clear, he said in an outraged rush: “He’s got alcohol?” Deanna understood this to mean: He’s got alcohol and you didn’t tell me?

  Innocently, Jillybean answered: “Yep. And you know what also might work? Eve’s baby wipes. If they can clean up poop I bet they’d work on those icky speckles. Hey, Mister Neil? Why do you look like that? You look angry.”

  He looked almost crazed with the smears of mud and his face red beneath and his eyes blue but wild. A strangled sound escaped him and his hands shook and were spaced as if there was an invisible neck about the size of Jillybean’s between them. It was at that moment that Brad sauntered up. His smile was back in place, only now it was wider than ever.

  “Giving yourself a facial, Neil?”

  The strangling hands bunched and, with some effort, Neil managed to force a hint of politeness into his voice. “What can I do for you?”

  “I just wanted to give you a heads up. Me and the girls are leaving for a few hours, while you fix your flat. It’s just too hot and we’re also running low on water. Would you like for me to pick some up for you? Just fifty rounds a gallon.”

  “Fifty rounds?” Neil asked, aghast. Deanna was stunned at the amount he was asking. At that rate it would cost them five thousand rounds just to fill their containers, and that would only last a day!

  In desperation, Neil looked up at the sky which was as blue and empty as it could be. Brad laughed and said: “Sorry my friend, there’s no rain in the forecast, just more sun and more heat. So what’s it going to be? I think fifty rounds is fair, especially since you guys aren’t nearly as thirsty as you will be in a couple more hours when the price will jump to sixty.”

  “Sixty?” Jillybean asked with an incredulous laugh. It was an odd sound from a little girl. All three looked down at her and Deanna saw that she had changed. She had gone flinty and cold. There was a brittle edge to her that was sharp and dangerous. “You take that sixty and shove it up your ass.”

  Chapter 13

  Jillybean/Eve

  Brad hadn’t been mad at Jillybean’s swearing at all; it seemed to stiffen him. He had only said: “We’ll see if you change your mind when it hits a hundred degrees out here,” and then walked away. Neil had stood there hot and tired, with the mud on his face, stunned at first and then angry. Deanna looked nervous and agitated, though Jillybean was only guessing that they were feeling any of these emotions. The world around her was ghost-like and intangible; not quite fully formed. Physical beings were ethereal at best, ghosts that ate and spoke and pissed behind the trucks in steaming arcs, and their emotions were not just hard to fathom, but also difficult to register on her meter of sympathies. They had the feel of actors going through the motions of a performance gone stale through endless repetition.

  The other girl in Jillybean had swallowed her up in the black once again, though this time it wasn’t nearly so all-encompassing as it had been. Compared to before, there was a lot more light in her prison of bone. It came in spurts, like novas or speeding meteors, or a flicking of a bulb by a naughty child. This light was accompanied by strange utterances. Sometimes sentences, sometimes questions, sometimes the garbled reflection of messages off an aged transom. They zipped in a bat-like echo through the ether of her mind: Are we going to die of thirst? No, she won’t let us. Can’t we just get water anywhere? They poisoned it. Why can’t we leave the others? They are useless and stupid and I hate them. They will die soon and that’s good. What about Captain Grey? He can live. What about water?

  Jillybean realize that her other self was actually trying to think. It was laughable, as it had to filter though a mesh of hate. Even at the best of times, she wasn’t good at it. She had too much anger and fear, too much emotion to be good at thinking. She could plot, however. We have to get away from all of them before they all die. Now, before Brad gets back. How? Tell them we have an idea. Tell them we have a secret. Tell them we can find water, but no one can know where we got it.

  “I can get us water,” Eve said, the words spitting out of her mouth with no ideas behind them.

  Neil, who had been, staring after the Camry as it sped away, turned so fast that he almost fell over. “Where?”

  Tell him, you can’t tell just yet. Tell him he has to trust you. Tell him you want a gun. “No, I can’t do that,” Eve hissed aloud, mixing her thoughts with her spoken words. “That has to be secret.”

  Jillybean was near the surface of her mind and she guessed it was because there was thinking to be done. Jillybean was good at thinking. The other girl wasn’t. She was good at hating. When she hated, Jillybean tended to drown down where there was nothing and the world above was tiny and odd appearing, as though she were looking through a coke bottle—things were warped and blurry, untouchable.

  Neil asked again: “Where, Jillybean. Where can we get water?”

  The bat-like echo again in Jillybean’s mind: “It’s a secret that no one can tell in words out loud. But I can show you and one other per…” She paused as another face flashed like a billboard in her mind. The mental picture was of Sadie. No! Not Sadie, Eve thought. She’s fast and she’s a killer now. She killed all those men and that’s what means she’s dangerous. We can’t trust her.

  Another picture flashed and with it came a wordless echo: Say, Deanna then. The picture of Deanna in her mind started bright and white hot, but it quickly began to erode. There was a thought that came with the picture: We could kill her easy.

  “Deanna can come,” the other girl said, out loud, using Jillybean’s lips. “I can show her, too, but no one else. All those others will blab and that poop-face, Brad can’t know where we got it from.”

  Neil embraced the lie and ran back to the trucks yelling: “I want the water carriers and everyone’s canteens and bottles in the second truck, right now!”

  People were slow to act. Most of them stared in varying degrees of amusement at the little man until Joslyn asked: “Is that dog crap on your face?”

  “No, damn it!” Neil snapped. “It’s…it’s never mind. Where is Ricky?”

  Ricky was barked at for holding back the whiskey from the group; however, it was only a light dressing down. Neil was in too much of a rush to be properly angry. He ignored the excited questions from the renegades and pulled Grey to the side and spoke in whispers, pointing once at Jillybean.

/>   She and Deanna hadn’t moved, they were still only a few feet from the jumbled pile of dead zombie bodies. “So where are we going?” Deanna asked. They weren’t near enough to anyone to be overheard; she didn’t have an excuse not to answer.

  The other girl could think of nothing except hurting Deanna. She had no plan beyond murdering her and Neil, and she didn’t even have much of a plan for that. Their guns, she thought. Take one and kill them when they don’t expect it. A picture accompanied this thought: blood splashed on brown dirt, zombies feasting on warm flesh as crows jumped about in the background cawing and waiting their turn impatiently. The air hummed with flies.

  Then what? a voice asked.

  I’ll be free.

  I mean, how will you get away? Jillybean was surprised that the voice associated with the question was her own.

  A pause in her thinking and then another picture: Jillybean with sticks tied to her legs and Ipes sliding around on the dash. She was driving a truck that wished to be unbound from the road. It kept surging toward the curbs that held in the street and kept the asphalt from flowing away. It was a chugging and spitting sort of truck and could be described as unruly and ill-tempered, but Jillybean was more than a match for it and aimed it at the front of a building—a Piggly Wiggly where Neil was being held prisoner. Its doors were barred with wood and came up very fast and grew big in her eyes and then the crash and the glass flew and metal screamed as if in agony…

  “I’ll need sticks,” She said, instead of answering Deanna’s question. “Sticks or a…a handle from a rake or shovel.”

  After a look that held a great deal of suspicion, Deanna left to talk to Neil. This was all Jillybean knew for some time. There was a flash of hate as Deanna took a peek back at the little girl and then utter blackness that enveloped her to such an extent she couldn’t feel her heart in her chest or the air around her.

  Eventually, what felt like days later, Jillybean heard her name and felt a hand shaking her shoulder. She crawled out of a state of consciousness so thick it might as well have been tar.

  “Huh?” she said, her eyes blinking, slowly as she looked around, confused.

  “Where to now?” Neil asked, again. Jillybean thought it was an ‘again’ kind of question because it sure did have a familiar ring to it. Like one of those echoes in her mind that kept going and going…only this was real and that meant she was she.

  “Hey, I’m me,” she said, as the realization struck her. She was in charge of her own body again. She gave Neil a grin and Deanna one, as well, but when Deanna only gave her a narrow look, Jillybean heard the other girl in her mind: she doesn’t trust us. Figure out how to kill her.

  Jillybean saw in her mind why she had been allowed to come back. Neil didn’t have a weapon that the other girl could use. He had his axe and it was heavy. Deanna had a pistol in a holster strapped to her side. She kept her right hand very close to it as if she was ready to draw quick like a gun fighter.“But we need water,” Jilly whispered. “Even you need water, or you’ll die.” She was parched; her little tongue was dry as an old sock.

  Above, the sun was a silver-blue glare, while around them was more farmland cut up in lines. To their right, the corn formed a green wall. To their left were little, green, shrubby plants that made food of a sort, this Jillybean was sure of, however the plants had no name in her mind.

  As Deanna and Neil shared a look over her head, the other girl spoke in a ghostly voice in her head: Find the water for us and then kill them both or else I will.

  “You don’t know how to kill them,” Jillybean said in a hissing whisper, casting a furtive look up at Deanna, whose hand had slipped closer to the pistol at her hip. It made Jillybean wonder what the other girl had been doing or saying when she was gone. She was unable to connect the suspicious movement with her own mutterings. “You need me,” she added to the other girl.

  Although Deanna’s brows furrowed, Neil thought she was talking to him and so he answered: “Yes. We need a water source, remember?”

  “The waters are zombie soup and the wells are poisoned,” Jillybean said. A vivid picture leapt into her mind: they were high above a river that was simply clogged with a gazillion zombies. No one but Neil, who had been vaccinated against the zombie disease, could drink from it, and he looked as though he would rather die of dehydration than take a sip.

  But what about the wells?

  “Can you, uh, let me by, Miss Deanna? I need to check something out.”

  Grudgingly, Deanna opened the door and slid out. She kept her eyes full on the little girl as she did. Jillybean went to the open door but did not climb down; she climbed up onto the top of the truck’s cab where the heat radiated upwards. It had to be over a hundred and ten degrees and her head swam. She squinted into the shimmering glare in all directions. There were farms and more farms. Some were cut up in squares, some in circles. The idea of a circular farm made no sense to her unless they grew pumpkins, which she knew to be round.

  The farmland went further than she could see. They had been passing nothing but farmland for the last three days. If she had to guess, she would’ve thought they had driven by ten thousand of fields.

  There was a farm not far away. From atop the cab she could see a silo and the tip-top of a white building, which she guessed either to be a farmhouse or a barn. “We need to go that way,” she said pointing at the building. She knew about farms. Since she had met up with Neil and Ram, they had stayed in barns overnight on several different occasions, though they never got to do much in the way of exploring, which she had always considered “cheap.”

  But that wasn’t the only way she was acquainted with farms. She used to have a picture book called: Sissy and Me on the Farm. It was full of all sorts of information about the entire farming experience, as long as one was observant that is, and Jillybean was very observant.

  They climbed into the truck and Neil guided the beastly vehicle down to the first turn-off and then down the gravel road, until they pulled into the farm proper. There was the white house with its shutters sitting at diagonals and the roof beginning to peel back. And there was the silo standing as an imposing sentry, and a low slung barn with the carcass of some great beast lying in front of its doors. It had been a bull, or a buffalo, or a wooly mammoth or some such, Jillybean didn’t know which.

  In the yard of the house Jillybean saw half of what she was looking for. The other half was something she had never seen in real life; only in books such as Sissy and Me on the Farm. “Can you drive around a bit, Mister Neil? Like around the barn and the silo and the house and such?”

  Neil gave her a skeptical look, but said nothing as he put the truck in gear. He wasn’t nearly as smooth as Captain Grey, who could walk the truck around as if it were sliding on ice. Neil somehow bounced the ten-thousand pounds of metal, rubber, and glass, as if he could only make it go by hopping it forward. In that bone-rattling fashion, they turned the curves of an “eight” around the building until Jillybean said: “Nope, it’s not here.”

  With a sigh, Neil said: “Maybe it would help if you told me what you’re looking for.”

  “Oh, that’s ok,” Jillybean said. “It’s not here and that’s ok. I was hoping not to see what we didn’t see.”

  This caused both Neil and Deanna to look around, both wearing matching crease lines cutting up their foreheads. “Ok,” Deanna said. “What aren’t we supposed to see?”

  “A well,” Jillybean said, happily. She couldn’t be happier by not seeing one. The truth was she had never seen a real well. She had only seen them in books, but she had seen the metal contraptions that reminded her of stick-horses she used to gallop behind back when her mommy and daddy had been alive.

  “I don’t get it,” Neil said. “The wells are all poisoned. We can’t take the chance of drinking the water from one. Knowing Brad, he had set it up so that we broke down with a poisoned well sitting right down the road.”

  “Yes,” Jillybean said, smiling. “There’s no well.
But there is one of those hickey-doos.”

  Neil was clearly flummoxed by the word “hickey-doos”, and the concept of a pump not in conjunction with a well had his face all scrunched, making his scars and the primitive stitching around them turn his face nearly as ugly as a zombie’s. “But…” was all he could say in his confusion.

  Deanna seemed to be mired in the same sort of puzzled quagmire. She was staring at the pump with its long thoracic pipe and its horsey nose and the mane of a pump. “Won’t it be…”

  “No,” Jillybean answered the partial questions, grinning. “Brad says he poisoned the wells but there’s no well here. That goes down to the water underground and it’s very deep. He’d have to drill down pretty deep to poison it and would he really? I don’t think so. We’ve passed a thousand farms and each has a well or one of these pump things. Did these Azael people really go to each one with a vial of poison, or did he just say they did?”

  “Son of a bitch!” Neil cried, happily. “Why am I so blind?”

  “You’re not blind,” Deanna told him. “You’re just too trusting.” With a quick look around for zombies, she climbed down from the truck, followed by Neil and Jillybean. “Someone’s got to test the water. Jillybean could be wrong.”

  There was a moment of hesitation and then Neil stepped forward. “I’ll do it. Jillybean has my full confidence. Now, how do you get this thing to go? Is there an on switch or a button?” He poked around before actually trying to work the pump’s handle. It didn’t take much more than that to get the water flowing and when it did, it gushed out in a rush, quickly filling a rusty old trough that sat beneath the pump’s nose. Neil cupped a hand beneath the flow, brought a small handful to his nose and sniffed.

  “Seems ok,” he said. A first tentative taste on Neil’s part was followed up by the three of them standing stock-still, waiting in silence for something bad to begin happening to him.