Still he tried. “Let’s get that chain off. I bet it will be a piece of cake.”
It would be if Jillybean was here, Sadie thought to herself. These sort of mechanical obstacles were one of her strong suits. She would’ve noticed the twenty foot length of chain that Mr. Crenshaw had used to pull stumps out of the ground. Crenshaw’s chain was twice the width of the ringbolt holding the fuel truck chain in place. The little girl would’ve known that the power of the Cummins 240 horse power engine in one of the five tons combined with the strength of Crenshaw’s chain could’ve snapped the bolt off in a second.
Neil put his faith in an old hacksaw and his somewhat undersized arm muscles. When they got back to the fuel truck, he went right at the chain instead of the thinner and stationary ringbolt.
Sadie watched for a moment and then said: “I’m going to check on Marybeth and Becca.” As she passed the five ton trucks, she saw the renegades loitering. “Someone should be keeping watch,” she said. “Joslyn climb up there and keep watch, will you please.”
Joslyn took a look up at the tall truck and smirked. “I’m not going up there.”
Sadie rounded on her, filled with a sudden rage. “If you won’t climb up there then get your dumb ass out of here.” Her hand was on the butt of her Glock and she was within a quarter second of whipping it out and shoving into Joslyn’s mouth.
“Who died and made you boss?” Joslyn asked.
These were the wrong words to say to Sadie right at the moment. The gun was out before Joslyn could blink and cracked the woman across the cheek a half-second later. She went down on her back and lay there with her hands up, defensively. Sadie felt a moment of regret but bit it back.
“You want to know who has died? You want me to give you a list of everyone who has died because someone was lazy or stupid or just plain unlucky, or do you want to get your ass up on that truck before someone else dies?”
Joslyn began scrambling to her feet. “Ok...ok, I’ll do it. Ok.”
Sadie glared until Joslyn was mounting the cab. She then turned to stare at the renegades who had witnessed the incident. With the fire in her dark eyes and the gun still in her hand, no one said a word.
“Good,” Sadie said and holstered the weapon and then marched off toward the last truck. Behind her were whispers. She hadn’t done anything to cement her position in the group; she didn’t really care.
When she got to the rear of the last truck, she went to William Gates and asked in a quiet voice: “How is she doing?”
The usually quiet William, staying true to himself, only shook his head but there was a glint of tears on his cheek that caught in the star light and spoke volumes. Sadie would have to see for herself. She took Jillybean’s betrayal as a failure on her part. They had been sisters after all and as the older sister, she should have done more to protect Jillybean.
The back of the truck was peopled to a greater extent than Sadie would’ve guessed. The entire Gates family, minus William, was huddled around a moaning lump on the floor. The sounds coming from the lump were so low and guttural that it seemed as if they were coming from an animal and not from sweet Marybeth who had never raised her voice as far as Sadie knew.
Becca was there as well. She was a quiet thing and in the month Sadie had known her they hadn’t spoken once. She had been one of the fifteen or so women who had been freed from the rape-room in the Piggly-Wiggly. She had been carried to the last truck by her friends and now, they stood around her, hunched by the low ceiling of the five-ton, and wept as though she was on her death bed. Becca fed into the depressing atmosphere and cried with more strength than any.
When Sadie peeked in at Becca’s wound, the Goth girl wanted to give her hardy slap. It was fair to say the wound was probably painful, but it wasn’t that painful. Captain Grey had to stop what he was doing from time to time and ask her to quiet her “caterwauling” before she attracted every zombie from miles away.
Sadie quickly saw that she was not the only lonely individual: Deanna was lying alone and seemingly forgotten at the very back of the truck. Sadie started to push her way to her, but Grey grabbed her with a freshly bloodied hand.
“Tell Neil I need twenty more minutes,” he said, speaking in a low tone directly into her ear. “She’ll die if I can’t tie off this bleeder.”
The request was shocking. Their head start couldn’t have been much more than twenty minutes. “I’ll-I’ll ask him,” Sadie said. She turned and paused at the tailgate, again looking northward, this time not searching for an explosion, but looking for the glow of headlights.
The horizon remained dark.
It was small relief. Neil had the same reaction when she told him of Grey’s request. He was standing on the step-plate, half in and half out of the cab of the fuel truck, sawing like a madman at the chain when she told him. “What? Twenty minutes?” he exclaimed. He stood up straight and looked eastward with squinting eyes.
“The town is that way,” she said, pointing Neil north. “There’s no sign of them, yet. I have Joslyn keeping watch.”
Slowly, Neil turned his eyes from the north. “Ok, good, thanks. And, uh, tell Grey he’s got fifteen minutes and even that’s cutting it way too close.”
Sadie went back to the last truck in the line, however she didn’t say anything about Neil’s time frame. It would’ve been like telling them that Neil had decided Marybeth’s life wasn’t worth anything. She sat on the tailgate and watched as Grey dug in Marybeth’s abdomen while Michael held her hand and their daughter, Anne, pointed a flashlight into the mess.
Fifteen minutes seemed to fly by. A sweating Neil came up a few minutes later; he didn’t bother to climb up into the bed. He said to Sadie: “Please tell me they’re almost done.”
Grey answered for her: “I got two more sutures to go. She’ll bleed out if I can’t get them placed.”
“Fine,” Neil said, giving in, “but I want everyone ready to go the second he’s done. We have a long night of driving ahead of us and we can’t be...”
“No,” Grey said, cutting him off. “Marybeth won’t live through a long ride. There’s no way. Besides, the Duke has a hundred cars that can outrun us; they’ll catch us on the open road. The smart thing to do is to find somewhere to hunker down for a few days and let the heat blow over before we make a run for it.”
Neil opened his mouth to answer, however just then Joslyn let out a cry: “Headlights! There are headlights coming right at us!”
In a flash, Grey was at the tailgate, barking: “Everyone turn off your flashlights.” The lights clicked off and then everyone peered at the headlights coming their way. They looked like very low, twinkling stars to Sadie.
“We have to go right now,” Neil said to Grey. They locked eyes for a long, tense minute—on one side was the veteran soldier, the most deadly man in a thousand miles, on the other a small man wearing an old woman’s slipper on one foot and a purple croc on the other. They each were headstrong in their beliefs: Neil had the group to look after, while Grey was dead set on protecting and saving the most vulnerable of them.
They stared until it became uncomfortable, but eventually, Grey dropped his gaze and nodded. Then there was a flurry of activity as Neil started yelling: “Get in the trucks! Get in the trucks!”
People scrambled to climb into the closest vehicle. It was mayhem, with one truck over-flowing with people while the last one was only half full. To make matters worse, Michael Gates, began bellowing, demanding that Grey be allowed time to finish saving his wife. When Neil only shook his head, resolutely, Michael went mad and began fighting to get at Neil. There was murder in his eyes. He was so wild that Captain Grey was forced to slap a guillotine chokehold on him.
“Get out of here!” Grey yelled at Neil. “Get the trucks moving; he’ll settle down.”
Neil disappeared up the line of trucks where tailgates were being slammed shut and engines rumbled. Sadie waited at the last truck until she was sure that Michael wasn’t going to be able to get aw
ay and then she booked it in high gear up to the fuel truck, arriving just as Neil did.
Neil lost his slipper as he climbed in and had to go back for it. He threw it up into the cab and then followed it up; he ended up driving with a socked foot on the gas which didn’t make his ability to operate the weighed down fuel truck any better. The thing lurched and rocked as he fought his way through the gears and all the while the sound of the diesel sloshing behind them was an ever-present reminder that a mistake would roast them both.
But at least the chain had finally been cut away. It made steering the easiest part of that nightmare ride. With the lack of headlights and the intense dark and the desperate need to put more miles between them and the cars racing along in their wake, Neil was taking some serious chances.
They had little choice. The headlights which had started as tiny stars grew larger as the minutes passed.
“So where are we going?” Sadie asked. “If we stay on this road whoever is back there will catch up sooner or later.”
“I don’t know,” Neil said. He seemed so small behind the wheel—the thing was as wide around as a manhole cover and he looked like a child trying to steer a tugboat. “I really don’t. And does it matter where we go? All I ever do is lead us into one disaster after another. It makes me wonder why I ever wanted this job to begin with.”
Sadie patted him on the arm. “From what I hear you didn’t want the job at all. It was simply a choice between you doing it or letting Fred Trigg lead us. We both know he never could have gotten us even this far. You have to realize that’s the truth, just like it’s the truth you’re still doing a great job despite the circumstances we keep finding ourselves in. I trust you and I think Captain Grey trusts you, too.”
“And what about Jillybean,” he asked. “Do you think she trusts me? Or Marybeth or Becca, or Kay?”
She thought for a moment and then shrugged. “I think they all do in their way. They trust you more than they trust themselves. They’re all afraid to speak up. They’re all afraid to come up with an idea.”
This brought a dry chuckle from Neil. “So you’re saying they trust me because they don’t have any other choice?”
“Yeah...so which way?” Sadie asked, trying to change the sticky subject. “Those guys back there can’t see us. We could pull over somewhere under an overpass or behind a motel or something and they’d drive right by. We have the gas and the food to try to make it straight across country. Or...”
“Or we try to save Marybeth,” Neil finished her sentence. “If we did we’d need to find proper facilities for her.”
Sadie scratched at the dried mud on her cheek before adding: “And we’ll need antibiotics for her and for Becca. We’re not going to find that sort of thing out here on the prairie. We’ll have to chance a city. Is that what you want to do?” The idea made her queasy. New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta...all had been death traps.
Neil was quiet for a long time. Without the windshield, the wind blasted them in the face, drying them out. Sadie wanted to take her nails to the mud and peel it away but she waited. If Neil chose the city route she would need that mud if she had any chance of survival.
At last he whispered: “We going to go to Wichita.” Under his breath, he added: “God help us.”
Chapter 26
Jillybean/Eve
She ran in the night. It felt wrong. Running was what humans did. Every zombie knew that, and boy, were there a lot of zombies! They were going every which way, stirred up by the gun shots and the lights and the trucks and the horsemen.
Still Jillybean ran. She didn’t have a choice; she had made a decision—the world was better off without her in it. This little fact she had kept from the other girl inside her. Jillybean had lied about jail. There would be no jail for her. She could cute her way out of it and if that didn’t work she knew that given time and a few simple resources, there weren’t many jails that could hold her.
The lie had been a trick for the other girl. She didn’t like jail. She couldn’t get out of them. She wasn’t cute at all and she wasn’t smart. With Jillybean constantly fighting her every thought she was scattered brained and couldn’t remember who she hated most from one moment to the next. She needed Jillybean to do her heavy thinking for her and yet Jillybean had expected more of a fight from her.
She wasn’t exactly a stupid girl. She was mean and evil but not stupid. But she didn’t want to go to Colorado where everyone was good and where she might go to jail, and really, she did want to see the theater with all the bombs and bullets in it, go sky-high.
That was exactly the kind of mayhem she liked.
When Jillybean kept running after she crossing the little ditch that the monsters had made in their endless tramping, she tried to stop Jillybean.
This is close enough, Eve said, with a giggle. Blow it up. The desire to see the explosion was so intense that Jillybean’s feet began dragging and the remote seemed to rise up to eye level on its own.
“Not...yet,” Jillybean panted. She was winded from the three-hundred-yard sprint, but she couldn’t stop. There were a slew of monsters in her wake and worse, she saw there were horsemen riding in practiced teams, driving back the other monsters from the courthouse where trucks and cars were being gathered in preparation for the chase. They would be ready in minutes.
Jillybean headed right for them.
Wait, what are you doing? Eve asked. You don’t want to get so close. Jillybean’s feet slowed even more; it was like running through deep water. The other girl began to get agitated. Stop or I’ll take over again and I won’t ever let you out.
“You don’t...know how...to work...the bomb,” Jillybean said. Immediately, she felt her feet spring forward, once again hers to command. She angled toward an approaching horseman who had his spear leveled and was knocking monsters back away from the grassy slope that ran up towards the building. Jillybean didn’t have any fear of the man or the horse. Neither was expecting a thinking being to be in front of them.
The monsters came on, slow and stupid; Jillybean was fast. She darted practically under the nose of the horse. It jerked its head and eyed Jillybean with one big, brown orb. In the dark, the rider didn’t even see her.
Now will you blow it up? the other girl asked. There was a petulant whine to her voice.
“I’ve got a better idea,” Jillybean answered. “We’re going to hold this entire town hostage.”
Why? What good does that do us?
“You want to be Lady Eve? That’s small potatoes. We could be a princess. Think about that.” Jillybean felt a sudden hungry longing and knew that Eve liked the idea very much. “Just don’t interfere,” Jillybean warned, “or you’ll screw this all up.”
Silence from within meant that the other girl was fully on board.
As she walked, Jillybean pulled her shredded dress over her head and used it to scrape as much mud off her face as she could. She went unnoticed until she came to the trucks that were filling with men who were armed as if expecting to lay siege to a fortress. They were very large and scary. Most wore scraggly beards and had hair like lion’s manes.
They loaded their trucks, oblivious to the little girl until she gathered the courage to step right up next to the tire of one of the trucks. Only then did someone point at her. Another person exclaimed: “It’s one of them.”
She held the remote up, however it went unremarked upon. Even Brad, who came jogging up to her, didn’t seem to notice it. “I’m surprised you stayed,” he said. “You aren’t too smart.”
“Didn’t we have a deal?” Jillybean asked.
“I had a deal,” Brad said. “You got a lesson in how not to be so gullible.”
Eve, hearing that she had been double-crossed straight from Brad’s lips, bristled and wanted to explode the bomb right then. “Not yet,” Jillybean hissed. She then turned to Brad. “I’m smart enough not to come empty-handed. Captain Grey set a bomb in this town. It’s somewhere really, really bad for you guys. I�
�m supposed to ‘splode it.”
“And what’s stopping you?” Brad said. Though some of the men glanced around, nervously, he did not seem concerned in the least. Jillybean suspected that, with the escape of the renegades, his chance at being Baron Crane had diminished considerably. He might have even been demoted, but what was below baron, she didn’t know.
“I want to renegotiate,” Jillybean explained, in a loud enough voice that everyone around them heard. “I want to talk to the Duke or I’ll blow the bomb and it’ll be on your head, Mister Brad.”
Some of the men snorted with laughter. Others looked amazed that the tiny girl was so composed. She was quite literally surrounded, twice over, by enemies and all she had to protect herself was a little black box. To add to her aura, she said: “I think you know that I’ll blow the bomb up, Brad. I heard you tell people that I’m crazy. I know what that means. It means I’ll blow up the bomb even if you don’t think it’s smart.”
Brad put out his hands and said in a softer tone: “We still have our deal. I was just joking before. I’ve already talked to the Duke and he said that from here on you’re to be Lady Eve. So, if you could just put that thing down we can talk about getting you a tiara.”
His lie was pathetic since he had already sneered at her and it didn’t help his case that a number of the men nearby were sniggering.
“I know you’re lying, Mister Brad and I don’t want our old deal anyways. I want a new one and I want something more or there will be trouble for you and for this whole town.”
Brad shrugged. “Blow it up then. Let’s see what you got.” She hesitated and he grinned. “Here’s the problem with your little bomb. You’re just a one-trick pony. You can’t blow up the bomb because you know the Duke will kill you if you do, and you can’t just stand there either. You look stupid trying to threaten us with a little hunk of plastic.”
The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) Page 30
