Ipes only cared about the food. Slim Jims? I guess they’re better than nothing.
“Don’t eat them, then. There’ll be more for me. Now, wait here. I don’t want you getting all gas-smelly. It is kinda gross.”
She left the zebra sitting on the dashboard as she walked in parallel lines up and down the parking lot, searching for the fuel intake ports. There were usually four of the little disks, one for each type of gas and usually they were situated all in a row so the gas trucks could get at them easily.
But this was an older station and she found the seven inch circular covers scattered here and there, each one clasped and locked with little Yale padlocks.
“Here we go,” she said when she saw the first. She dropped down, cupping a hand around her little mag light and shone it down at the lock: there was rust eating up the keyhole. She almost squealed in delight—no one had gotten to the underground tanks yet!
This was found treasure! It was just a matter of discovering how much gas she had found. She began working on ideas to break the locks off using levers and fulcrums and heavy chains, when Ipes yelled: Why don’t you look for the keys inside?
She found them behind the counter on a little hook beneath the cash register. Next to it was the delivery schedule for all the items the station sold. The last time the tanks had been filled was three weeks after the first monster sighting occurred in New York. The country had fallen apart soon after.
“Which means there could be…” She scanned the delivery slips attached to the clipboard and her eyes widened. “Seventeen thousand gallons.” She tried to whistle, but as she had never mastered the proper lip position, it came out in a breathy hoot.
“Let’s not put the cart on top of the horse just yet,” she said, taking the keys out to the first locked cover. It came open after a tussle and a struggle, but when it did, the chemical smell of gasoline wafted up making her pert nose wrinkle. “P and U!”
She shone her light down into the tube, but saw nothing but more tube. “I wonder how deep this is?” A weighted rope gave her the answer and it also showed that there was four feet of fuel sitting in the tank. It seemed like a lot though without the actual dimensions of the holding tank there was no way to know how many actual gallons sat waiting to be brought up.
“I bet it’s a lot, but it’s gonna have to wait. I would need a gas truck and those trucks have the gear system with the shift-stick thing and I can’t use that. But there’s also pull-able ones.”
By that she meant the smaller tanks that could be towed behind a smaller truck. She considered everything she would need: a generator, a drivable truck, a tank, and a fuel/water pump. It would be manageable, and she loved the idea of showing up in the Valley with five thousand gallons of gas.
“They’d forgive me for certain and they’d probably like me, too. What do you think, Ipes?”
They should like you even if you don’t bring anything. And you do have those guns and the bomb shooter. Besides there is also a time element that is prohibitive. What happens if it snows again?
He was right. It could take her a week to get everything she needed and with winter coming, days were more precious than fuel.
“And I guess it’s not going anywhere, right? If it hasn’t been discovered yet, it might not be discovered for years and I have time.” She set the cover back where it belonged, marked the position of the station in her memory and then drove away, gnawing on a Slim Jim.
It was old and tough as leather, and so she set a piece in her mouth and drooled around it as she drove. The night passed with slow miles drifting beneath her tires. She had a scare right around midnight as she saw a string of headlights coming straight at her.
Were they friendly people traveling at night so they could slip by the bandits and the slavers, just like she was? Or were they slavers cutting through someone’s territory?
A small, lonely part of her wanted to find out which it was. Could she sneak up close and see? And if they were bad, could she help to free any slaves. “I am good at that after all.”
No, I forbid it, Jillybean. They’re going the wrong way and they’re going too fast. You would never be able to keep up and it would be dangerous, way too dangerous.
She sighed, knowing that he was right. It wouldn’t be smart. She found a little dirt side road and went up it for a spell and then waited for the cars to pass. In order to make sure she wasn’t surprised by any passing monster, she turned the heater off and opened the three windows that could still go up and down. She made a face at the broken one, realizing that she couldn’t leave it like that. If she ever found herself surrounded by monsters, which she was sure she would, she couldn’t have such a weak spot in her defenses.
“Maybe I can finally weld.” The idea of joining two pieces of metal in any way she chose was strangely enticing to her, perhaps because shaping metal was somewhat like shaping the world. In a significant way, it reduced her limitations. Making the KIA safer was only one minor example of this.
Doesn’t welding use flames? Ipes asked, his paws nervously touching each other.
“It’ll be fine. Don’t be such a worry-wart. Wait, here they come.” They both paused to listen as the cars she had seen coming her way swept past with a great deal of rumbling. To her, they sounded like train thrumming down the tracks on its way home and she loved the idea of getting on that train and finding a real mom and dad and big brother. People who would take care of her and baby her, and let her grow up in a land without monsters and guilt and constant…
Since you don’t know how to weld, you’ll need a library, Ipes declared, cutting in on her fantasy. It was like a balloon being popped. What she wanted didn’t exist anymore. “Yeah, yeah, a library or one of those big man stores with all the wood and tools and stuff. They have books in ‘em, too. I saw them before and they’ll have the things we’ll need, probably.” With so many necessities just lying around, free to the first person to come by and take them, the concept of “fixing” things was rarely put into practice anymore and hardware stores were still relatively full.
Jillybean knew that the mindset couldn’t last forever, because “things” didn’t last forever. After only a single year, America showed a significant decline. As she drove, she saw that the polish had faded and rust was beginning to set in everywhere.
The roads she drove on sported potholes and long cracks, out of which grass grew. In places, trees had fallen against power lines and fences leaned at crazy angles, keeping nothing in or out. Many houses and businesses looked, not just empty, but abandoned. Every town was a ghost town and every state was empty and sad.
She drove into Oklahoma with the sky behind her turning from black to indigo and even with all the pillows beneath her, she was stiff and her bottom was sore from sitting in the car for the twelve hours. Still, she drove on, risking driving in the early morning grey haze, trying to make it to a town called Vinita where she hoped to find her big tool store.
After slipping through so many one stop-sign towns, Vinita was bigger than she had reckoned it would be. It wasn’t an actual city, but it was built up and densely packed with homes and businesses. This meant danger. The population before the apocalypse had been north of five thousand people but for some reason there seemed to be double that many monsters lurking in among the cul-de-sacs, elementary schools, the Jiffy-lubes and all the rest that made up the town.
They watched the car go by with greedy hunger in their otherwise blank eyes. Jillybean must have looked like a rolling snack to them and they came rushing to feed. The broken window was now more of an issue than ever.
With a touch more light to see by, Jillybean was able to hurry the KIA through the neighborhoods just south of the main thoroughfare that jutted up into the town. The monsters lurched along in her wake, looking like they were marching in a fantastically disgusting and haphazard parade.
Ipes stared back the way they had come. You know that if you find a store, they’ll just follow you in. You’re going to hav
e to lose them.
She didn’t have the luxury of worrying about the ones behind her. There were dozens in her path that had to be dodged. “What kind of town is this with so many monsters?” Ipes didn’t have an answer to the rhetorical question. Despite his natural wisdom, the migratory and settlement pattern of monsters was beyond him. It was just a fact that they lived by: sometimes there were very few of them, sometimes there were bazillions.
Fearing that the KIA was too fragile a vehicle to plow down more than one or two monsters at a time, she took her first left, where she once again ran into more monsters. “Oh, boy, look at them all.”
Next time go right, he suggested. She took to the sidewalk to escape and did as Ipes suggested, taking a right and then another right. After that she pretty much went in circles so that, very quickly, Vinita looked as though it had been struck by a tornado of monsters. They were going every which way.
This made driving even more perilous and when she eventually found a Home Depot, she was only too happy to get out of the KIA. She parked just down the block from the hardware store and hurried into her monster gear. Her makeup would take more time, so she grabbed her kit and slipped out of the car with an entire battalion of monsters bearing down on her.
Sprinting for all she was worth, she raced down an alley between a strip-mall and the back end of a Holiday Inn. The hotel suited her purposes. She lost the following horde and ducked into a room with a door that hung on one hinge. It was dark, empty, silent. Still she kept her hand on the butt of the .38 in her pocket for close to a minute.
Only when she was sure that she was alone did she go to the curtains and open them very slowly to give herself some light. The scene outside her window was unnerving. There were hundreds of monsters just on the street in front of her.
Do the monsters in this town have some sort of homing sense that isn’t normal? Ipes asked. He was afraid and rightly so, however she wasn’t. She had her tricks and her make-up that would turn her into a proper appearing monster. They would never know that there was a little girl in their midst.
When she was a wild thing, her face grease painted in splotches of grey, and her hair teased into a rat’s nest, she headed outside. Other than her size, she looked like all the rest of them. There were very few child monsters her height or smaller. Generally, when children were attacked they were ripped apart so horrifically that there was rarely anything left over to reanimate.
She stumbled out into the early morning sun and made her way slowly up the block until she was just across the street from the immense stretch of empty parking lot in front of the big box store. She was wary of moving too quickly.
Even as brave as she was, every time she had been in one of those hardware stores she had been spooked out. They were always such great big places and the shadows so deep. Even in the day time, it was very dark in the corners and pitch black in the far side of the store. It gave her the willies thinking that anything or anyone could be hiding there.
In order to make sure there wouldn’t be any “human” surprises waiting for her inside, she spent a chilly forty minutes walking around the entire building, weaving in and out of the monsters that had flocked after the red KIA, which was just within eye sight.
Jillybean just happened to look back at it and was so shocked by what she saw that she broke character and stood straight, with her mouth hanging open. The KIA’s driver side door sat wide open and there was someone or something with their butt hanging out of it.
Her first impulse was to shuffle out of sight and hide. Her second impulse was to grab the .38 caliber “police special” and march down there and shoot whoever it was in the back.
Chapter 16
Jillybean
Neither option was possible. She couldn’t hide because that was her stuff! She had killed for it and she would again if she had to. And yet, she couldn’t just march down there and shoot the person in the back, either.
It wasn’t ethical, and besides, what if there were more of them. What if they were a three person team, two watching at either end of the block and one ransacking her car? She was going to protect her stuff, but she was also going to be smart about it.
The little girl zombie crossed to the opposite side of the street, taking an agonizingly slow time. She paused frequently as most zombies did, however, she used these pauses productively to look for the person’s friends, whom she was sure had to be in one of the little 50’s style tract homes.
They weren’t on the street, dressed as monsters—she eyed each monster carefully—and they weren’t slunk low in one of the cars—there were only four of them and she quickly ruled them out. So that left the rinky-dink houses on the block. They were the only cover that was angled well enough to see the car and close enough to provide immediate support.
But they were all empty. All this added up to one of two things: either the person in her car was all alone or his friends were ten times more sophisticated than Jillybean and that suggested military, and why would any military person want to scrounge in someone else’s car?
Then the person is all alone, Jillybean concluded as she tottered across the street. He’s probably dressed up like a monster and he’s probably armed and dangerous. But he’s not the only one.
The person was small and oddly dressed. Jillybean would have guessed that since he was acting like a monster, he would have worn ripped up monster clothes, but the person wore what looked like a spider web of shawls, one over the other.
He had moved on from the front seat and was now in the back, busily unloading Jillybean’s gas and bombs and guns and what not—the what not being mostly food which was stacked next to a little handcart that Jillybean had just noticed.
In the handcart were odds and ends, the exact sort of things that Jillybean usually carried on her person: string, knives, wire, lighters, etc. Every once in a while, the person would hold up a can of food, or the flour and make happy, chuckling noises and set it next to the cart, but not in the cart.
Jillybean monster-walked right up behind the person and whispered: “I have a gun.” He didn’t react, but only went on rummaging. Jillybean had to poke him in the small of the back with the gun. “I said, I have a gun.”
“Huh? What’s that?” Startled, he straightened and turned around, only it wasn’t a “he” at all, it was a her. It was an ancient her. Jillybean couldn’t ever remember seeing someone so old. She had an explosion of grey hair on her head that went everywhere as if she hadn’t seen a mirror in years. Her face wasn’t just wrinkled, it was cragged. There were valleys older than Jillybean, running across her forehead and down her cheeks. Her glasses were huge on her face and amazingly thick and yet she still squinted down at Jillybean as though she were trying to see an ant standing next to her foot.
Not that she had far to look downward. Jillybean had grown all of an inch in the last year and barely cleared three and a half feet. This woman only topped her by a head, likely because she had a stooped and hunched back.
“A zombie with a gun? How strange.” The woman had a croaky, thin voice. There wasn’t the least bit of fear in it, either for Jillybean, her gun, or the monsters that were staring as they passed by.
Since the gun seemed useless as a tool to frighten the woman into compliance, Jillybean stuck it back in her pocket, saying, “I’m not a zombie or a monster. I’m a girl and all that is my stuff, thank you very much, and I’d like for you to put it back in the car, please.”
At Jillybean’s non-monster pronouncement, the woman leaned in even closer until they were almost eye to eye. “I see. You’re in disguise. That’s very clever.”
“Thank you. And, uh, my stuff? Are you going to put it back?”
“I wasn’t going to steal it, dear. I was going to make trades. Everyone needs something that they haven’t got. That’s the rule. So, I was going to trade some of my extras for some of your extras.”
Without permission? Ipes asked from beneath Jillybean’s monster coat.
“
Maybe she’s afraid of people?” she whispered back. “People can be mean; you know that.” The old woman had turned slightly away and missed the quick conversation. Jillybean liked that. With her poor hearing and her bad eyes, Ipes became a non-issue. Jillybean wouldn’t have to explain or make excuses.
Yes, the old woman was dismally unobservant, however the monsters were getting curious to a dangerous degree. “Do you have a home around here we can talk in?” Jillybean asked…twice. The first question went unheard and she had to raise her distinctly human voice the second time.
“Oh, yes, dear. Follow me.” The woman took her cart, which doubled as a walker, and proceeded to plod away, hunched over it. In spite of the fact that she wasn’t wearing a disguise, she didn’t look very human. Her shawls hung, hiding her frame and her hunch protruded upwards in an unsettling manner and the cart let out a high-pitched metallic squeal that she seemed oblivious to.
Jillybean started to follow but stopped when Ipes asked: What about the car and all your stuff? She’s going to want to trade, you know.
“Did she have anything I wanted?” Jillybean hadn’t been able to see into the cart very well since it was all a jumble.
Probably not. We should take off, Jillybean. Remember the hardware store and the broken window and all that? And I’m getting tired. We were up all night.
She was tired as well, but she was irresistibly drawn to the woman, especially her big eyes and her feeble voice. They were human eyes and it was a human voice, two things that Jillybean missed very much.
Following the old woman in the car was not easy and Jillybean, who was relying on the brake and not the gas, began to get a new appreciation for the story: The Tortoise and the Hare. The woman moved at such a painfully slow pace that Jillybean found herself yawning over and over again, her eyes watering as the woman took ten minutes just to walk the remainder of the block.
The Undead World (Book 8): The Apocalypse Executioner Page 15
