Brad and Neil, with Grey and Deanna trailing, were at the far head of the line and were just disappearing around a corner when someone grabbed Sadie’s wrist in a steel grip. “It’s not wise to go about unescorted.” A man loomed above her. He was tall and slim and of an unknowable age, neither young nor old and it was impossible to tell to which side he was closer. His skin was brown leather as if he had worked in the fields his entire life, and yet his eyes were a soft blue and unlined. They were the eyes of a librarian and somehow they still managed to be striking.
“I’m not too worried,” Sadie said, with a reserve of cool that had come out of nowhere. As always, she had matched her surroundings: the man was dangerous, that was obvious. What wasn’t, at least at first, was that she was as well. She had drawn her pistol in the instant her wrist was grabbed and now she had the hard barrel shoved into the man’s side.
He grunted in appreciation of the slickness of the move. “So you’re nobody’s slave, I see.”
“Nor will I be. So, if you’ll excuse me, I should catch up with the rest of the tour.”
His hand sprang open, but he remained very close. Not only did he smell clean, there was a hint of cologne about him; it was alluring. “You should come visit with me,” he suggested. “They’re not going to say anything of importance. A lot of blah, blah, blah.”
“Blah, blah, blah about what?”
The man gave her a cryptic smile. “Do you want the truth or a lie?” he asked. “Lies are free.”
Sadie grinned right back. “What? You put a price on the truth? My guess is that your version of the truth isn’t worth much if you can change it with a dollar.”
He gave her a long look up and down before saying: “You must be young indeed if you think that’s a new concept. It’s being going on since the dawn of time, though in this instance the truth isn’t worth all that much. I’m sure it’s common knowledge that there’s friction between us and the soldiers in Colorado. ‘Growing pains’ is what I call them. So, they’ll go on a bit about treaties and crap. The Duke is just trying to gain leverage, one way or another. It’s the American way.”
“Not the America I knew,” she replied, stiffly. She liked the attention; however, he was still too close and his smile was just a little beyond friendly. “I was always taught that we were the good guys. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I should get back to my friends,” she said, realizing, with some amusement, she was sounding like Neil.
“Are you sure you can’t stay? I have treats.” Next to the open door was a locked filing cabinet. A key appeared in his hand and a second later, he was rattling back the middle drawer. Inside was a dragon’s hoard of chocolate bars and candy of all sorts. Sadie had been just about to turn away but the sight stopped her cold. Her stomach let out a lion’s growl that had the man chuckling. “You look halfway to being famished. Come, sit for a while. We can talk. I have some wine if you’re thirsty, free of charge.”
He gestured into the ten by ten office and though she should have been creeped out by the pedophile way he had gone about inviting her in, she wasn’t. Her Glock was still in her hand. “Free? I didn’t think that was in your vocabulary.”
“Normally it’s not, however, for you I will make an exception.”
She had never had a drink bought for her before and, as the man was handsome and personable, the feeling was exceedingly pleasant. “Ok, I’ll have a drink, but I have a couple of uh, rules first.” She had wanted to use the word “stipulations,” but it wouldn’t come to her tongue. “First, I’m not going in there. You are a complete stranger, after all. Second, I want to see the bottle.”
“Afraid you’ll be drugged? Smart. Let’s try a Riesling and see how you like it. Normally, I find them a bit sweet, but I’m hoping you’ll find it tasty.” He reached over where two bottles of wine sat ready for drinking and hefted the bottle of white as if he could judge its merits by its weight. With a practiced flourish, he spun the bottle so she could read the label; it was altogether meaningless to her since she didn’t know one wine from another. It was the cap she was interested in. She took the bottle and inspected it, closely. The seal was intact. She cracked it herself and, before drinking straight from the lip, she gave it a sniff. Both the scent and the taste reminded her lightly of pears mixed with apricots.
It was as sweet as he had suggested. “My name is Sadie,” she said, and handed the bottle to the man.
“Richard,” he said. There were no glasses available and, like her, he drank from the bottle. He wasn’t shy about it; he tipped the bottle back and drank deeply. After two large swallows, he righted the bottle, grunted and smacked his lips in appreciation. “That’s better than I remember.”
Sadie accepted the wine back and drank. The bottle was half gone when she allowed Richard a turn. Around them were a few others of the Azael. They kept a discreet distance back and pretended that they weren’t interested or jealous that they were drinking. Richard sipped this time, but she didn’t notice.
“Where’d you get all this stuff from?” she asked. He seemed to have a bit of everything a person could want.
He gave her the bottle and then made a face at his ramshackle little shop. “You mean my sprawling corporate enterprise? Ha, this is all junk. I used to be something. I mean back before the apocalypse. I had a life, a good one, too. I had a Porsche and a fucking penthouse overlooking the lake.” He sighed and his face fell a bit. “I used to be big shit and now I run a Quickie Mart.” He laughed at himself and reached for the bottle, but this time she wasn’t nearly so quick to hand it over.
“A penthouse?” she asked and chugged. “Sounds nice. Where are you from?”
“Chicago, and you?”
She was about to say New Jersey, but a movement caught her eye. Jillybean was standing within arm’s reach of her. Sadie jumped, startled. “I need to talk to you,” the little girl said. Her voice was flat and her eyes very dark. It was Eve in there, not Jillybean.
“Well, I don’t need to talk to you and I don’t want to. I’m having a drink with my friend Richard, here, so if you’ll go somewhere else that would be great.”
“I said I need to talk to you,” the little girl repeated with an edge to her voice. She cut her eyes to Richard.
Sadie shook her head. “Sorry, but I don’t need to talk to you, so run along.”
The girl glared and hissed at a decibel that could barely be heard by Sadie a foot away: “You are being a fool. Neil sent me to find you before you did something stupid. That might not have been what he said, but I’m sure it’s what he was thinking.”
At this, the two locked eyes long enough for Richard to clear his throat. They ignored him, continuing their contest of wills. “You’re bringing danger on all of us,” the little girl finally said. “We can’t allow that.”
“We? Let me hear that from Jillybean,” Sadie replied and again there was a moment that drew out between them. “I’ll believe it from her, not from you, so come back when she’s ready to talk.”
With Richard standing silently next to the two girls, they glared fiercely until Eve turned away. She brought a hand up to her fly away brown hair and took a patch of it in a grip and pulled hard enough for her arm to shake. It looked as though she wanted to pull her scalp right off her head. Sadie refused to say a thing to her, hoping that ignoring the self-destructive behavior would limit it.
A second later, Jillybean brought her hand down in front of her face and stared for a moment. She then turned around and when she saw Sadie, she gave a quirky little half-smile. “Where are we?” she asked. “Where are the trucks? Who’s that?” She pointed at Richard, who was watching her with sharp eyes.
Sadie didn’t trust the girl for a second. She dropped down to one knee and looked into her face. It seemed innocent enough and free of the evil within her, but that could be a ruse of the other girl’s. There was only one way to know for certain—Sadie held out a pinky to the little girl: “What’s this mean?”
“It means we’re s
isters,” Jillybean said, hooking Sadie’s pinky with her own.
Chapter 16
Jillybean/Eve
“Can I have just a second,” Sadie said to Richard, handing him the bottle and then pulling Jillybean to the other side of the hallway. Again, she came down on one knee and huddled her forehead close to Jillybean’s. She asked in a whisper: “What’s wrong? What sort of danger are we in?”
“Huh?” Jillybean asked. Sadie’s words were floating in through her ears and instead of lighting upon her brain so she could grasp their meaning, they seemed just to float out again. Everything about her was nebulous and fleeting. A picture on the wall hung at a crooked angle. It made no sense. She went to reach for it but Sadie pulled her hand down.
“You said I was being foolish. You said I was doing something dangerous. Hey, Jillybean, focus. Look at me. What am I doing that’s so bad?”
A frown crossed Jillybean’s face as she tried to figure out what Sadie was talking about. The last thing she remembered was being in the wide open with blue above her. It had been hot, the kind of heat that turned people nasty when they were in it for too long. She had turned nasty and so full of hate that it made no sense to Jillybean, just like the crooked picture.
Really, nothing made sense to Jillybean, not just then. She remembered the Kansas sky and before that, she remembered finding the water and bathing as Mister Neil dumped cool water over her; that had been nice. But since then, she hadn’t been allowed to see out. There had only been that deep darkness and the lines of silver dropping down into the nothing where Jillybean feared to go.
“Maybe if you tell me what you were doing that would help,” Jillybean said. “She has gone deep and tookded all her memories with her and I don’t know what’s what.”
“I wasn’t doing anything,” Sadie protested. “All I was doing was…wait, let me catch you up a bit. Brad brought us to some town run by a duke of the Azael. We just got here and all I was doing was talking to this guy and having a drink. Everyone else is in with the Duke. They’re probably in more danger than I am.” She tapped the Glock in her hip holster, meaningfully.
“Oh, then I don’t know why you’d be in danger,” Jillybean said. “It’s strange, but everything’s strange right now. Is it day time? Or night time? I feel hungry and thirsty and I gotta go baffroom, and…whoa look at all this stuff!” Her eyes went suddenly big as, for the first time, she became aware of Richard and his shop. Before, he had been a somewhat faceless adult and his store only a jumble of colors. Now, her mind clicked in. She saw the world in detail.
Richard grinned at the eager look on the child’s face. “You two sisters?”
Jillybean nodded vacantly as she noted the odds and ends, the knick-knacks, and the miscellaneous wares. It was everything that people in the before took for granted. All of it made her realize she wasn’t wearing her backpack. She had no idea where it was. “Have you seen my backpack?” she asked Sadie.
“No. Maybe Neil has it or maybe you left it in the truck.” Jillybean frowned at the idea, which had Sadie laughing. “You’re like Batman without his utility belt.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Jillybean told her. “I just wish I had it.”
Richard put out an arm to usher them into his store. “I’m sure I have everything that you might possibly need.” He seemed to anticipate the obvious objection on Jillybean’s lips. Before she could utter a word, he said: “Don’t worry about money. I offer very generous credit terms and there are other ways you could work off a debt.” This he said, giving Sadie a smile.
There was an uncharacteristic pause in Jillybean’s mind and then what Richard was suggesting clicked into place. He was suggesting that Sadie become a prostitute! Jillybean reached for Sadie’s hand and started pulling her away, saying: “I don’t need anything, really.”
“Not even candy?” Richard asked, once more rattling back the middle drawer of the filing cabinet and displaying the colorful heap of sweets.
Jillybean stopped in her tracks, her eyes going even wider than they had before. “No…I’m good,” she said, weakly, as though the sight of all that candy was draining the willpower out of her. Sadie had her head cranked around, also. She swallowed loudly.
“Ok, if you’re sure you don’t want any,” Richard said, and then, very slowly, closed the drawer. The two sisters watched until the drawer closed with a thump.
The little girl immediately began pulling Sadie away, her free hand going to her forehead where she felt damp as if from fever. “That was a lot of chocolate,” she said, her mind still taken up by the sight. She could remember the last time she had chocolate; Ram had given her a Snickers bar to coax her into eating her beans. He had gone without even a bite of the chocolate and died three days later. She hadn’t thought about that in all the months since it had happened, and now it struck her as having been very selfish on her part.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. Inside her, the other girl grew restless and strong. Whenever Jillybean felt weak, or afraid, or just drained of life, she could feel her begin to take over.
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” Sadie said. “Remember that you are a good person. You’re not a monster.”
Jillybean shrugged. “Ok, sure.” She had never considered herself a bad person. She, the other girl inside her, was the bad one.
They passed the remaining office/markets with their heads swiveling at all the merchandise and, despite the pleading of the shopkeepers, they didn’t pause to browse at any of them. The temptation was just too great. When they passed the last, Jillybean stopped in her tracks.
“I see it now,” she said, turning to look down the hallway. Although no two of the shops were exactly alike, they each had precisely one thing in common. The shops all had two bottles of wine, one red and one white, sitting within arm’s reach. “The wine,” Jillybean whispered. “They all have the same label.”
“What’s that mean?” Sadie asked.
Jillybean was slow to answer because she didn’t precisely have the answer; she only had guesses. “I suppose it means they all came from the same box. And...and because each of them has only two, I think that means they were given the wine.”
“To give to us,” Sadie said. With a sudden scared look she began rubbing her belly. “Do you think it’s poisoned? Or drugged? I checked the cap and it was on like it was new. And...and I feel ok. I mean I feel a little buzz going but nothing else.”
“I think they were just probably trying to get you drunk,” Jillybean explained. “That’s the most likely. Ipes used to say when you hear hooves you think zebras not horses. That’s what means we shouldn’t jump on conclusions and get ascared for nothing. They probably want to get you drunk so you’d buy more stuff or talk about your secrets, and that would be dangerous.”
Sadie opened her mouth but just then they heard a rumble of angry voices coming from beyond a heavy door. Together they crept in and found themselves in what must have been the largest of the courtrooms. Big though it was, it was bursting at the seams with people. Along with the sixty renegades there were a couple dozen of the Azael, led by a man who sat in the judge’s chair.
He was a burly sort with black hair on his arms that matched his beard which was fashioned, via several colorful rubber bands, into a long point. Jillybean thought he looked as though his family line might have crossed with a bear at some point in the not so distant past and, like a bear, he seemed exceptionally cranky.
“These are my lands,” he was saying. “I have absolute authority. You cannot go here and there without an escort. You will travel when I say and not a minute before.”
“What’s going on?” Sadie asked, one of the women from The Island. It was Joslyn and she looked to be hiding in the back of the group.
She put her hand to her mouth to cover the sound of her voice and whispered: “Neil wants to leave first thing in the morning and this duke-guy is saying ‘no.’ It’s getting tense.”
Neil had been shaking his head a
nd now he answered: “Duke Menis, you do reign supreme in your lands; however that does not mean there won’t be repercussions to your actions on a much larger scale. We have paid for safe passage and, diplomatically speaking, it would be wise for you to allow us to leave at our preferred time. If you think our group is weak, I can assure you it is not, and even if it were, we are traveling under the protection of General Johnston of Colorado. This is Captain James Grey, one of his agents.”
Menis waved a dismissive hand in Captain Grey’s direction. “Johnston’s reach is shorter than you realize. His walls are mighty, but outside of them he is nothing compared to the power of the Azael.”
“So you and Brad tell us, however, I don’t see evidence of it,” Neil answered. He held up a palm and gestured to the armed guards who were outnumbered by the renegades. “I see a small town and a bunch of small town traders. I don’t mean to be offensive, but you do not strike fear in us. We have been through hellfire and have been tested in combat. We have...”
He was stopped mid-sentence by Eve who said: “Da-da,” in a piping voice.
Jillybean glanced around and saw Eve with Deanna, who, like Joslyn, was hiding behind some of the larger men. Duke Menis’ face grew wrathful at the interruption, but when he saw Deanna his dark brows shot up and a gleam that was unmistakable, even to a seven year old, grew in his eyes.
“Well, who is this?” he asked. The question could have been put to either the woman or the baby.
“My daughter, Eve,” Neil replied. “And this is Deanna.”
Menis stroked his beard down to its point and said: “Bring them forward. Don’t be shy, step forward. Neil! Why did you not tell me you were traveling with royalty? Surely this is a queen.”
Deanna, holding Eve, looked radiant at that moment, like a queen, indeed, thought Jillybean. Her recent bath had brought out the rich gold of her hair, the Kansas sun had bronzed her skin to perfection and there was a simple glow of life in her eyes.
The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) Page 17
