The Undead World (Book 8): The Apocalypse Executioner

by Peter Meredith

  “How did I…?” she didn’t finish the question. A second before she had been barreling down the road and now she was standing in the middle of it. Behind her came a crackling sound.

  It was a fire. And now she smelled a reeking chemical smoke. And now she felt a strange pain in her throat, as if she had been strangled. And now she realized there was something in her hand, something heavy and hard. It was a gun.

  She wanted to look back at the fire, but something deep inside pleaded: don’t look back, just keep walking. Let this memory die.

  Chapter 19

  Captain Grey

  With his arms trussed behind his back, the pain in his chest was a constant nag that made every move, including breathing, a misery. The only halfway descent position that allowed him to take even half a breath without groaning aloud was lying on his side.

  Sleep was impossible until Lieutenant Wilson insisted that Captain Grey use his lap as a pillow. “I won’t tell Deanna if you won’t,” Wilson joked. It had been a whispered joke. Everything spoken between the men had been whispered.

  When they had first been captured, Grey ordered the men only to reveal their first names and nothing more. They all knew the score. Their enemies were many and their friends, few. If it was found who Captain Grey was, the entire lot of them would be sold off to the Azael or to the River King or to the remnants of the people of New Eden, who had looked for and found a new messiah.

  This was likely to happen, either way, but there was no reason to make it a sure thing.

  As Grey knew they would, his men had obeyed his orders. They spoke to their captors only when spoken to and only after getting permission. Not much had been asked, not until Sadie had come to rescue them.

  The night before, when Grey had heard the distant rumble of the truck coming in and out as it made its way along the mountain roads, he had cursed and tried to will her away. But she kept coming.

  “Who is that?” Smitty had demanded.

  “No one say a word,” Grey ordered. If Grey was valuable to their enemies, Sadie was three or four times as valuable. Everyone wanted a piece of her, including Yuri Petrovich far off in New York City.

  Smitty had threatened them with a knife that was so long and sharp it was practically a short sword. Two of the men were cut, but they were minor wounds and both men had only gritted their teeth, harder.

  As much as Grey liked and admired Sadie and her spunkiness, he fully expected her to be caught within minutes. She flummoxed them all night long and through most of the next day. Finally, Smitty broke down the problems she faced: “She doesn’t have a weapon and she doesn’t have a vehicle. If we leave, what will she do?”

  “She’ll begin searching for both,” Mike answered.

  “Exactly. More importantly, she’ll come out of hiding to do both.” When evening came, Mike hid while the others made a show of getting ready to leave.

  “Who drives at night if they can help it, Sadie?” Grey asked under his breath. “See the trap, Sadie! The signs are right there in front of your face.”

  Sadie was no Jillybean and was caught much faster than anyone could have guessed. Smitty turned the two laden-down trucks around and chugged back. “Everyone inside, hurry!” he hissed as they pulled up to the little house they had departed from not a half hour before.

  Before the zombies could follow them all the way down the gulch, the prisoners were bustled out of the back of the truck and into the house. Sadie stood next to a burly man who had her by the upper arm in a tight grip—her signature black clothes were disheveled and her eyes burned with hate. Both Grey and Smitty glared.

  “What’s been going on?” Smitty asked, his voice now cold.

  “Nothing,” Mike answered. “I had to make sure she wasn’t armed. I didn’t fuck her if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Smitty remained silent for a moment, his eyes assessing Sadie and her clothes and then Mike and his clothing which looked just as it had before they left. “Alright, good. I’ll take her from here. The rest of you feed and water the prisoners and get ready to turn in. I want to leave at first light.”

  Grey and the others were shoved back to their spot in the corner of the dining room while Smitty leered at Sadie. “What’s your name, darling?” he asked in a gentler voice.

  “First name only, Alice,” Grey barked. He caught Sadie’s eye, hoping to warn her of her danger.

  “Bill, shut that man up!” Smitty ordered. Grey was punched in the stomach, but barely felt it. Even recovering as he was, Grey was a tough one. Though he had lost weight, he was still gristle and grit, and still had the reflexes to turn quick enough so that the blow didn’t land square. He was also smart enough to ham up the playacting so he wouldn’t be hit again.

  He was still coughing when Smitty shoved Sadie into a back bedroom with one hand. The other was already working his zipper.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Grey warned. Sadie was about to be raped, the first of many rapes that night. He had to take a chance to stop it. “You don’t know who she is.” The casual way he said this stopped Smitty. He turned hard eyes on Grey.

  “And who is she?”

  Grey shrugged as nonchalantly as he could, trying to buy every second that he could to think of something to save Sadie. “It’s not, uh, who she is that matters so much as, uh, uh, who she used to be with.” Before Smitty could ask “who” Grey followed up with: “Let’s just say, he’s got an evil reputation as a jealous man and power to back up that reputation.”

  “Someone from the Valley?” Smitty spat. “Like I’m afraid of any of you pussies.”

  “I said he has an evil reputation. Who in the Valley has an evil reputation? You should try listening.”

  Smitty’s lip curled and his fists balled as he advanced on Grey. “And you should be careful who you piss off.”

  Grey was still grasping at straws when he said: “That’s what I’ve been trying to warn you about.”

  “Wait, it’s not the Colonel, is it?” Smitty asked. His anger seemed to disappear in a blink. He glanced back at Sadie, an eyebrow raised. “It is the Colonel. There was a rumor that he lost a bunch of girls last year. You one of them?”

  Sadie had her eyes down, but she lifted them slightly at Grey before answering. He barely moved his head in a nod. The list of Sadie’s enemies was long, but the Colonel was not among them. Perhaps, in a diplomatic move, the Colonel could be persuaded to buy and release the group. Grey’s and his men were soldiers, after all.

  “Yes, I was the Colonel’s,” Sadie lied, “but he was too jealous. He had a man beaten for looking at me. It’s why I ran away with the rest. I was afraid he would go too far.”

  Smitty was quiet for well over a minute and in all that time, no one said a word. This was theater to them. Finally, Smitty ordered Sadie to describe the colonel: “In detail.”

  “Tall, slim, about forty-seven or so. Short, sandy brown hair, grey eyes, a sharp nose. He always wore a gold ring with a ruby in it.” She rattled off these facts so quickly that even Grey was surprised until he remembered that she had met the colonel on two different occasions.

  “And his scar?” Smitty asked.

  For a moment, Sadie looked confused, but then the corner of her lip jerked up in a smirk. “He didn’t have one that you ever saw, I can guarantee that.”

  This brought out a laugh from Smitty, but the smile was covered over by a look of cold calculation. “Hmmm, the Colonel. Maybe you’re worth a little more than I thought. You good in bed, is that what he saw in you?”

  Sadie’s haughty glare returned. “I’m not going to answer that. But one thing is for certain, you’ll never find out. You put your dick anywhere near me I’ll bite it right off.”

  Juan said something in Spanish that had Pecos chuckling. “He said he give a thousand to break in that filly.”

  “No one’s breaking in any one,” Smitty snapped, his beetle black eyes glaring around the room with such malevolence that the other slavers didn’t
dare look him in the face. “We won’t get top dollar from the Colonel for used goods. The girl stays out here with the rest of the prisoners and if I catch any of you pawing her, I’ll break your face. Juan, take the first watch.”

  They spent their second miserable night, just like the first, sitting, leaning against each other or lying in uncomfortable positions. In the morning, they were so stiff they could hardly stand.

  Since none of the slavers were interested in undoing the zippers of six men, their hands were cuffed in front of them. It was such a relief that Grey moaned aloud. He moaned again as he urinated onto a tree that sprouted up from the slope that ran down to the Poudre River.

  The water was frothing white and running fast. Had it been late July with the river swollen with the winter run off, he would have charged down the slope and jumped in. He probably would have been shot in the back, but it was a risk he would have taken for freedom.

  His life expectancy wasn’t great one way or the other. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that he would be back in the fighting pits in a week’s time, if he wasn’t simply strung up by the neck first. The old Azael princes would kill him out of hand if they could get their hands on him—and there was seven hundred miles of what used to be Azael land to cross before they got to the Colonel’s island.

  One of his men caught his eye and raised a brow at the river. Grey shook his head. “Not yet,” he murmured.

  The loads of goods in the truck and the trailers were shifted around so that Grey and his men were put into the bed of the lead truck. A tarp was tied down over them that kept out most of the icy wind, but not all. At first they shivered, huddled in on themselves.

  Eventually, Grey ordered them to, “Get cuddly.” Though jokes were made, no one complained, it was just too cold.

  Sadie rode in front with Smitty and two of his men. She was warm and definitely safer than the men in the back were. A number of times they were thrown from side to side as Smitty dodged the truck all over the road to keep from hitting the zombies.

  Once they were surrounded by the beasts. The truck shuddered as it rolled into a crowd of undead. The stench was horrific and the moans were so loud that Grey could imagine they were pushing through a sea of walking dead.

  Scarred and scabbed hands reached up into the bed, causing the men to pull into the middle. Their training and discipline kept them alive. Not one of them made so much as a whimper the entire time they were in the horde. Afterwards was another story. Everyone one of them sighed with relief and then joked about what a close call it had been.

  The relief was short-lived. Five minutes later, the trucks stopped and there was a good deal of cursing coming from the front. Grey crawled on his forearms and knees to the front and lifted the tarp high enough to see that part of the mountain had fallen across the road.

  Curses from the soldiers matched those of the slavers. None of the captives wanted to get to The Island any faster than they had to, but at the same time the mountain roads were painfully cold and a new snow didn’t help matters.

  Just as they turned around, heavy clouds pushed across the sky and a sifting of white powder filled the air. It wasn’t one of the mega-storms that struck the mountains at least three times every winter, it was just a dusting, but with the swirling wind that couldn’t make up its mind which way it was coming from, it made for white-out conditions.

  Lieutenant Wilson poked up the tarp and whistled. “I got zero visibility out here and everything is slick as shi…I mean, it’s very icy. If I were driving, I’d pull over at the first opportunity.”

  Smitty must have seen the danger differently. Even though their speed dropped away, he kept them moving, detouring steadily north, hoping to come across a road that would lead them east, out of the mountains. Twice they struck roads heading east and twice they dead ended—once at a private ski slope and a second time at a pretty little lake surrounded by rustic cabins.

  They stopped at both, hoping to pick up more supplies, however everything of value had already been taken.

  During the second stop, Grey asked for and received blankets for his men. They also ate a late lunch of barely heated beans in one of the cabins.

  When they were forced back out into the snow, one of the soldiers, PFC Keene, nudged Grey and showed him something he had palmed: a gleaming silver paperclip. His thick “porn star” mustache twitched upwards in excitement.

  “Hide that,” Grey said, speaking low and glancing around to see if the young man’s foolishness had cost them a chance at escape. No one had noticed. All the slavers were bent forward, their chins tucked to their chests to avoid the stinging wind.

  One by one, the prisoners were shoved up under the tarp in the back of the lead truck. It was like sitting on a block of ice and the men began calling for the blankets. “Hold your stinking horses,” Smitty snapped, “or I’ll let you freeze for an hour, first.”

  The six soldiers quieted and it was only a few minutes before the blankets were brought over. As Grey struggled to wrap himself in a blanket with his hands cuffed, he gave Keene a warning look.

  “Not yet,” he muttered. Only when the trucks rumbled into life and began to slush forward through the snow did Grey nod.

  “Look what I found,” Keene said holding up the paperclip as if it were some sort of exotic treasure. “It was just sitting on floor of the cabin.” The soldiers leaned in, and comically, at least to Grey, oohed and aahed over it.

  “Does anyone know how to pick a lock?” Grey asked. Every one of the soldiers shrugged as they looked around hoping that someone else would have a different answer. “Well, it can’t be that tough. Jillybean did it on at least one occasion and she’s just a little girl. So who wants to try?”

  With their fate resting on the thin metal, none of the soldiers were eager to volunteer and so Grey volunteered one of them: “Hendricks, you’re good with electronics, that’s kind of close.”

  Hendricks, who had been a signalman in the army and who had small, nimble hands, scrunched over, moving like an inch-worm in the cramped, low-ceilinged bed to get close to Grey. He put out both of his manacled hands and accepted the paperclip from PFC Keene in just the same way he would accept a communion wafer in church.

  “Hold your hands closer, will you, sir?” he asked Grey. He studied the lock on the handcuffs, squinting at the tiny keyhole. “The keys to these things are usually pretty simple. If I can remember right, I just have to bend the clip a little at the end.”

  The clip disappeared from Grey’s view as Hendricks tried to shape it properly. “Oh, crap, it broke. Here, Keene, hold this part. It’s a little more brittle than I thought it would be. Maybe it’s old.”

  “Straighten it all the way out,” Lieutenant Wilson suggested, “and then you can work the end into the shape that…hey, did you…it broke again, didn’t it?”

  “It’s not my fault. I think the cold is turning the metal brittle. Maybe if we warm up the pieces.” For five minutes, the pieces were held tightly to warm them up and then, once more they tried to make little keys only to break the clip even further.

  Everyone groaned in defeat. After more attempts, Hendricks held up one of the pieces. “This one should still work. Do you guys see? This one piece has a lip to it, just like a key.”

  But it didn’t work. No matter how much Hendricks jiggled and twisted the metal, the cuffs remained stubbornly closed.

  Chapter 20

  Jillybean

  The fire behind her crackled. In front of her was a wavering shadow of a little girl with a gun in her hand. Jillybean wanted to turn and look back and not just for curiosity’s sake.

  “What if there are supplies back there?” she asked the empty night. The answer was obvious: if there was gas to be had, it was now on fire. If there were guns, they would be dangerously hot, even to the point of “cooking off” and sending bullets spraying in every direction. If there was food, it was being flambéed.

  No, there wasn’t anything worth saving. “Unless
there’s people trapped in the wreckage,” Jillybean said. Then she remembered the gun; it was still warm.

  She walked back to the KIA, her neck as stiff as if she’d had her vertebrae fused. When she got to the car, she saw that Ipes was trapped under M79 “bomb shooter.”

  Once she pulled it off of him, he said: We have to get out of here! You can see that fire for miles. There was something she had to do first. Leaning between the seats with her bottom pointed at the windshield, she dug for the spare bombs and her extra .38 caliber ammo.

  “If the fire can be seen, it’s best to be prepared.” As she reloaded, her eyes were drawn to the fire. The flames shot fifteen feet in the air and were in the process of consuming a pickup truck.

  A ghostly scream echoed suddenly in her ear: Pull over, bitch! It made her jerk and she looked around to see if Ipes had heard, but he was just sitting in the passenger seat with his floppy arms hanging over the seatbelt that smooshed his belly in.

  Does this KIA make me look skinny? he joked. He hadn’t heard and she couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  “I think it’s okay.”

  What’s wrong? he asked. Are you worried about those guys? I wouldn’t be. They got what they deserved. I’m sorry but attacking a little girl in the middle of the night ought to be a crime.

  “So, what I did was okay?” He told her: Absolutely and then begged for her to get her tail in gear before any other bandits came. With a final glance back at the burning truck, she stuck the car in drive and headed due west.

  The KIA smelled of spent gunpowder and so she rolled down the window and that was fine for a few minutes until the wind whistling past turned into a haunting scream that was ugly…and familiar.

  “It’s not such a bad smell,” she reasoned and rolled the window up. Not long after, the flames disappeared behind the curve of the earth and she felt immediate relief.