“How can I be sharing my subconscious with her,” Jillybean said. The thought was disgusting. Again, her father lifted his eyebrows indicating that she was to figure it out on her own. The little girl slumped in defeat and exhaustion. “Just tell me. I’m tired of thinking.”
“Ok, darling, I’ll tell you. You share the same subconscious with her because you share the same mind. She’s you.”
Jillybean stepped back away from her father with suspicion clouding her normally sweet face. What he was saying was a lie. Eve was someone else. She was evil. She was mean and nasty and horrible. There was no way they were the same person and only a liar would say otherwise and as her father wasn’t a liar this couldn’t be him. “She’s not me,” Jillybean hissed. “She is a monster who only tookted me over. Like Ipes did that one time.”
“He did it more than once,” her father said. “And do you know how he could do that?”
Jillybean’s eyes began to dart back and forth, looking pretty much everywhere save up at her father’s face. Was he suggesting that Ipes had been in her? Was he saying that Ipes wasn’t real? “I don’t know how he did it,” she said stiffly. “He never told me.”
“That’s because you knew. You knew where his voice came from. It’s not like he had lips or a tongue. His words came from you because his thoughts came from you. You created him because you needed him to keep the loneliness at bay, and to drive away your fears. He was in here helping you.”
“No,” she said, taking a little step back. Just then she couldn’t have managed more; her legs felt wobbly beneath her. “No, he was real. He had a body. He-he was a z-zebra.” She could picture her old friend, perfectly: his little ears, his big nose, his beady black eyes, and his spiking mane. He had been real, she knew it—But he was a toy—a voice spoke in her mind—before your mommy died he had been just a toy.
“Yes, you made him up,” her daddy said. “He was just a ghost of your subconscious like me and like her.” Again, he pointed upwards. Jillybean’s chin canted up and her eyes followed the line of his finger. He went on: “A mind that’s damaged or subject to incredible stress can do these sorts of things to protect itself. You created Ipes because you needed a way to deal with your fear of being alone. That first bounty hunter started a fissure in your mind and, with every subsequent danger, that fissure grew, until Ipes was thrown away. With Ipes gone, there was nothing left in your mind to protect you so you created her in order to deal with the dangers in this world.”
“And I made her?” That seemed altogether impossible. Eve was evil in a way that Jillybean could scarcely comprehend.
Her father tilted his head in a manner that suggested he doubted her words. It was an ‘Are you sure?’ sort of look. “Really? You don’t know evil? Look around at these cages.” They were filled with her victims. “You know death and you know pain. And you know evil with the intimacy of a lover.”
“But not all of this is my fault,” Jillybean said stamping her foot. She pointed at the burned corpse of Brian. “That man worked for the River King. He was going to turn me over to him if he caught me. And those people,” she pointed over at a group of wretches, some of whom had burns and others were wrinkled in way that suggested they had spent a lot of time submerged beneath the water, while others had holes in them or large chunks missing—they were people who had died when the ferry boats sank. “Those people threw things at Ram and they let him get bitten and they cheered when he turned into a monster. They were the evil ones.”
“And them?” her father asked, pointing to a particularly shredded-up group.
“You know who they are,” she said fiercely. Their robes gave them away as being Believers. “You know who they are and what they stood for and what they allowed.”
“So it was ok to kill them or let them get eaten by monsters?”
Jillybean opened her mouth to denounce them but there was one thing she was certain of: no one deserved the death they had suffered.
Her father smiled in his old kindly fashion. “That is correct,” he said, “and that’s why you created her. My Jillybean isn’t a killer and never was. She was supposed to go to the second grade, and have friends, and play the part of the Scarecrow in the school play, and bring home pictures to hang on my walls, and straight-A report cards to go on the refrigerator. My darling, little Jillybean was never supposed to be put in a position to kill or be killed and so you made her.”
Realization started to slip in: Jillybean saw Ipes as he really was, simply a toy. His lips never moved and his eyes never blinked. His words were her words, only they had been retrieved from a part of her—your subconscious—the voice said. Yes, that part. The part of her she didn’t quite understand; the part of her she was in at the moment.
“So why am I here?” she asked. Again, her father gave her ‘The look’. She knew the answer. She sighed, a sound that wisped up from her soul. “I made her to deal with the harder things in life and now she’s too strong for me to control?”
“Sorry, but yes,” he said. “She is you, only she’s the part of you that was never ever supposed to happen.”
Those were nice words but they soothed her little. “And can I get rid of her like I lost Ipes?” Another of his irritating eyebrow lifts told her she wasn’t going to be so lucky. “So how do I stop her? She’s stronger than me. I mean, really, really stronger.”
“I wish I knew,” her daddy replied. “She’s stronger than you because she has to be everything you are not. You created her to hurt people, to kill them. You created her to thrive in a world that wasn’t made for seven-year-old orphans. She’s strong but so are you. You are the original Jillybean. She’s only a flawed copy. You must fight her with everything you have or she will kill again.”
Thoughts and images flashed in her mind: her hand snapping up a shiny pistol. Ipes flying through the air and her thinking that the toy wasn’t important; her life was in danger and she fired the gun with all the compassion the rain showed for the mountain. Another image: the grenade and the block of C4 taped together and thrust down the hole where five-hundred gallons of diesel was stored—yes, the guard would die, but other lives, lives that were more important to her, were on the line…the same line that stretched from the grenade pin to her hand. She was so close when it blew up that she thought her mind had exploded along with the barge.
There were other images, however they came in a blur and she didn’t try to understand them. The images came with varying degrees of pain; needles that dug into her flesh searching for the nerves that ran right up into her soul.
“Don’t let Eve kill again,” her daddy warned. “She’ll only get stronger and stronger, until you won’t be anything more than a shadow, like me.” He said this with a sour, sickly grin. “Every day she’s in charge you’ll remember me less and less.”
“No, I’ll never forget you, Daddy.”
The grin made a brief comeback. “Down here you’ll never forget, but up there…I’ll be a distant memory and so will everything I have ever taught you. So, please, fight her.”
“I don’t know how,” she blurted out. His brow came up for a last time. Once more he expected her to have an answer to an impossible question. It was so frustrating! Didn’t he know that she was just a little girl and that she was all alone?
It’s why he’s trying to get you to think for yourself? Again the voice came to her. Wait, did that sound like Ipes? No, that was impossible. Ipes was gone. He had been thrown in the river and his words in her mind had been thrown right out as well. That didn’t make sense either, but as her father would only make her figure it out on her own too, she decided not to bring it up. Besides, it was too painful.
All at once, she realized she was running out of time. Mister Neil and Captain Grey needed her. “I can think for myself, Daddy, but right now I need your help. Tell me what to do, please, before it’s too late.”
“Fight her every step of the way. If she wants to go left, you go right. If she says yes, you say no. Force
yourself into her head and then force her to listen to you. She is all emotion. Hate is powerful but so is logic; use your smarts. Trick her if you need to.”
“Can I win?” Jillybean asked. The other girl was just so big and wicked that the idea of fighting her was daunting.
Her daddy looked up at the twin lamps. “I don’t know,” he said. “But you have to try. Now go and don’t look back.” She was about to ask how she was going to get all the way up there, when her father picked her up and, just like he had when she was a toddler, he tossed her high in the air.
Up and up she soared, yet she wasn’t afraid of how high she went; she was trapped in her own mind. She couldn’t be hurt from falling, she could only be hurt by her.
“Which means that I can hurt her as well,” Jillybean said. It was with a feeling akin to eagerness that she missiled straight at the right eye. When she got to it, the eye was the size of a manhole cover. Through it she could see the front office of the school in the late afternoon light.
Not knowing what else to do, Jillybean started to climb into the eye. It immediately clamped shut. “The opposite of shut is open,” she said before she grabbed the inner aspect of her own eyelid and pried it open.
“Hey!” the other girl hissed.
Jillybean saw her giant hand come up, palm first and again the light dimmed as the other girl rubbed her eye. It was working! She was making some sort of difference. The other girl was reacting.
On instinct only, Jillybean leapt out of the eye and into the hand. It was the strangest feeling in the world to be a living thing inside her own body. The inside of the hand was filled with long bones that were as tall as she was. The flesh of it was pale and translucent. Jillybean could see out, although everything was blurry.
The first thing she did was pull the hand back from her eye.
The other girl stared at the hand, holding it out at arm’s length. “Stop it, Jillybean! This is my body now. I control it.”
“Oh yeah?” Jillybean asked. “Then stop this.” Jillybean threw the hand at her own throat and began to squeeze as hard as she could. The other girl tried to stop her by using her left hand to peel back the fingers, however the right was her dominant hand. It was too strong and slowly she choked herself into unconsciousness.
Jillybean’s world went black. Gone were the long bones of white and the pale flesh. At first, she couldn’t see anything but then she was aware of swirling shadows and then, suddenly, she was there.
“It’s time to end this,” she hissed. “This is my body and this is my life.” Without another word, the other girl launched herself at little Jillybean. She was bigger than her daddy and was very strong, but Jillybean was desperate and, buoyed by her daddy’s words, she was filled with the will to fight.
Together, they grappled in the dark. They punched and kicked and pulled hair and bit each other and wrestled in the horrible world they had created. As day passed into night and, as Captain Grey went on his recon mission and Neil fretted the hours away, the two girls fought. For Jillybean, the fight had a nightmare quality. No punch or kick seemed to make the least difference, the other girl kept coming and she grew in strength as Jillybean faded.
It felt like days of endless fighting went by until Neil’s voice echoed through their subconscious: “Jillybean, I need you.” The fear in his voice had the other girl laughing.
With a supreme effort, Jillybean pulled herself from the other girl’s grip. “They need me,” she said. “And that means you need me. Yeah, it’s true. The Duke knows who we are and he is coming to get us.”
She laughed again, louder. “I know. Who do you think told Brad?” Jillybean gaped at her and the evil laugh went on and on. When she could gasp, she said: “I am going to be Lady Eve. Brad promised me a title. Now, who’s the smart one? I just dangled the words: I can make you rich, in his ear and now I’m going to be a lady with gowns and servants and horses. I get to have all of that simply by getting rid of Neil and the rest of them. They’re going to be sold back to the River King or the Colonel or whoever offers the most money.”
In flashes, she showed Jillybean the memory of her secret conversation with Brad. It had happened at some point after Deanna had been drugged and before Eve was found dead. The little girl had tracked Brad down to an ugly storage rental facility two blocks behind the courthouse. It had been converted into thirty horse stalls and the air was sharp with the stench of manure. The other girl wanted a horse so badly, she would’ve done anything to get one and a bargain was struck.
The dirty deal shriveled Jillybean’s heart, but it did not dim her mind. Brad shook hands on the deal but his face was full of lies. “You’re not smart,” Jillybean said. “You’re a moron. Brad’s not going to give you anything. Look at his eyes.” The memory was now a shared one and, with Jillybean’s attention to detail, the condescending look was clear as day.
“No,” she hissed. “He...he promised. He said I could have my pick of the horses and the dresses.”
“He lied,” Jillybean said, feeling not only smug but also stronger. Jillybean had grown while she had diminished slightly. The other girl started to shake her head in denial which Jillybean stopped with a question: “If your places were reversed, would you hand over a horse and dresses and a title to a little, defenseless girl, or would you sell her, as well?”
The other girl’s hands clenched into fists and shook as her face slowly contorted: twisting, snarling lips, a nose that wrinkled in disgust, and eyes that blazed and grew ferocious in their anger. She was huge again and the power rippled off of her. “That bastard! I’m going to kill him. I’ll kill him!”
Dwarfed by the black shadow of the other girl, Jillybean stepped back, thinking: This isn’t going as planned.
“It won’t do you any good,” Jillybean said. “The Duke is the one you really should have spoken to. Brad is nothing. But either way it’s too late. You screwed up and now we’re surrounded with no way out. We’ll be sold back to the River King, I bet or maybe to Yuri in New York. You know what they’ll do to us there, right?”
She knew what would happen and the two of them shivered in unison as very bad pictures flicked into their minds. “You need to do something!” the other girl said. “You’re smart. You can get us out of this.”
“I can, but that means you’d have to give me total control of our body.”
“No way,” She spat. “You’ll hurt us or do something stupid like rescuing all of them. No, you just tell me what to say or do.”
Jillybean smiled easily and, without lying, said: “I would rather die.”
Chapter 23
Sadie Walcott
In her usual black, Goth clothes, Sadie was able to slip away in the dark from the other members of the strike teams. She wasn’t in the mood to be around people, especially as some of them had been openly questioning her place among them; the name Lindsey had been whispered frequently whenever she passed by. Sadie, who couldn’t close her eyes without seeing the terrified woman’s face as she was being eaten alive, didn’t need any reminders of her latest murder.
She went to look for Neil and found him huddled over Jillybean’s limp body and whispering: “Ipes needs you.”
This seemed unnecessarily cruel and Sadie was just about to admonish him when, Jillybean suddenly stirred. The little girl put her hands out as though she were blind. She felt the things around her: the gym floor, Neil’s sweater vest, her own pink shirt. Her hands played on each with great interest.
It was a few seconds before she pulled her head up and asked: “Mister Neil? Is that you? Where’s Ipes? Did you say something about him being in trouble?”
“We’re all in trouble,” he answered. “We need your help...oh! Jeeze, Sadie, you scared the dickens out of me.”
Sadie had come ghosting up, her black Converse sneakers not making a sound. Under other circumstances she might have laughed at how high he jumped and the way his fingers wiggled like spiders just under his chin, but there was a battle coming and
she was in no mood for laughter.
“You’re going too fast with her, Neil. We should find out what happened to her first,” Sadie said. He gave her a pained look, suggesting that there wasn’t time for that sort of thing.
Jillybean made it a moot point by answering simply: “I strangled myself is all.” She started to get to her feet and then saw Deanna lying motionless next to her. “Oh, right,” she whispered as a shudder racked her.
Neil saw it, and grabbed her shoulders and stared hard into her face. “You know what happened to her, don’t you?”
Jillybean took a shaky breath and nodded, then without warning, she yanked the IV catheter out of Deanna’s arm; blood started seeping out of the hole and the little girl pressed her thumb down on it while she jutted her pointy chin at the IV bag. “That’s got morphine in it. That’s what means a type of poison that knocks her out if she gets too much. But I didn’t do it. The Duke gave it to her.”
“Morphine? So she’ll get better on her own?” Neil asked. When Jillybean nodded, he stood up and grabbed her hand. “Good,” was all he said and started leading the little girl away.
Sadie leapt up and pulled him back around. “What about Deanna. We just can’t leave her lying here all alone.”
Neil glanced down at Deanna with a confused look. “Why not? The morphine is no longer flowing. She’ll be better pretty soon. Better than we are going to be if I can’t get a new plan cooked up. Grey’s plan is...is just wrong. We’re not trained soldiers. You know that, Sadie, and you know that if we try his plan too many of us will be killed tonight.”
She had no choice except to agree. Grey’s plan called for perfect coordination and precision between the seven teams. They would have to fight in the dark and retreat at exactly the right moment for a slaughter not to occur. If any team broke for the trucks too early, it would leave the defenseless renegades open to a withering assault. If teams retreated too late, they would either be left behind or the trucks, crammed with people would be stuck waiting out in the open. If it all came together perfectly it would be a miracle.
The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) Page 26
