“She really that smart? April swears she is, and there’s all them rumors, but she strikes me as just a kid. And kind of a messed up kid. She needs to stay. She needs to be normal for a while.” Sadie knew there’d be no talking Jillybean into staying. She started shaking her head. “Let her stay for a week,” Woods suggested.
They couldn’t waste a week. The days were already passing faster than she had anticipated. “We have to leave today, sorry.”
“On foot? We’re seventy miles from anywhere. Plummer is the next closest town and it’s even smaller than Colton. I’ve been there and it’s been picked over so many times there’s nothing left to it but the bones of buildings. Even if you could find a car that runs, I don’t think there’s a drop of gas between here and Spokane.”
Envisioning more mountains and more scrounging and more hardship took the wind out of Sadie’s sail and she plopped down on the couch Corina had used for a bed. The pink sleeping bag on it was still warm. She ran her fingers along the zipper trying to find the courage to beg. Hating herself, she asked: “Do you have a car we could borrow? I promise we’ll bring it back or maybe a better one.”
Woods sighed, scratching his scalp under his sheriff’s hat. “Sorry, I don’t have a car. The town owns four, well three. One blew a rod. It’s probably only good for parts now.”
Sadie hunched her shoulders in what passed for a shrug. “It’s okay. We’ll make do. I should probably go get Jillybean. She’ll want to say a proper goodbye.”
“Hold on,” Woods said, Putting out a hand that was as big as catcher’s mitt. “I can maybe talk the town into giving up one of the vehicles, on the condition that you stay for a week and that you honestly try to convince Jillybean not to go on.”
“Four days,” Sadie countered. “Together, me and Jillybean are very resourceful. We could be in Spokane in four days; maybe even three and I hate to lose even a single day. We don’t have a lot of time.”
He considered this while the light grew in the east. Sadie looked out the window seeing golden light beyond the trees. With the sun not quite up, the tree trunks were black, looking like hundreds of poles holding up a dense and low slung ceiling. For a moment she was under the illusion that the trees were the bars of a giant cage. Then the sun cracked the horizon and she had to turn away from the power of the sun.
“Okay, four days,” Woods said. “Starting today.”
“Yes, starting today. I’ll go tell Jillybean.” perhaps because he didn’t trust her he came along.
Jillybean saw them as they crossed into the next yard. She came hurrying over, holding her cupped hands together. “Look at this, Sadie! It’s a chick! Have you ever seen anything so cute?” In her hands was what appeared to be a golden piece of fluff. It made a squeaky peep.
It was indeed cute right until it pooped in Jillybean’s hand. The little girl squinched up her face and hurried to put it back with the others. “They also have big ones, but Corina says they will bite you if you’re not careful. I never knew that a goose would bite. Do you want to help feed the…” Her blue eyes clouded suddenly. “Why do you have that look, Sadie? Is it time to go?”
“Not yet,” Sadie said, throwing a smile onto her face. She had almost been in tears. Jillybean belonged here. She needed a normal life. She had to stay at least until Sadie could find a safer place. “We are actually going to stay for a little while, until we can get a car. Probably about four days, but it may be longer.”
“Longer? Why can’t we get a car somewhere else? We could go back to Butte. That was a big town. I bet we could get a car there, easily. And you know what? They probably also have drones and everything else. ‘Sides, we can’t wait that long. Mister Neil and everyone is counting on us.”
Behind them, Woods cleared his throat. Sadie’s smile became strained. “We were offered a car by Sheriff Woods, but it’s going to take a few days to get ready. After all they’ve done for us, I think it would be rude if we didn’t accept. In the meantime, you can, uh, uh, learn about farm life. We’re going to need an expert when we get to, well, wherever we get to.”
“I suppose that would be a smart thing to study,” Jillybean admitted. “I wasn’t getting anywhere with Relativity. Those cycle-pedias were really very kinda vague. That’s what means they weren’t, uh deep. They kinda just skimmed stuff, like gravitational time dilation. They mention it but they barely even ‘splain how it’s different from gravitational red shifting, which only is what means the pull of electromagnetic energy from its source. See, if you have a big enough star then the light coming from it has a lower frequency relative to a smaller star because even though it’s shooting out, it’s also being pulled back on account of gravity.”
Woods mouth twisted back on one side in a half-smile as he said: “Whoa.”
Sadie knew that once Jillybean got going on a subject as complicated as this one sounded, she would go on for some time, especially if you asked questions. Looking confused didn’t help, either. She seemed to think that was a signal meaning: Keep going, I’ll get it eventually.
“Jillybean, honey,” Sadie said, “let’s go take your medicine.”
“I already did. Half a pill twice a day. If we’re staying for a bit, do you think Doctor Danahy will let me borrow her PDR?” Before Sadie could answer, Jillybean asked another: “Do you think she’ll show me how to set a broken bone?”
Sadie gave her sister a warning look. There was no way the people of Colton would let her stay if she began her gruesome experiments. “Let’s worry about the book for now.”
“Corina, let’s finish up here,” Woods said, pointing at the honking geese. “You have your own chores to get to before school.”
“School?” Jillybean asked. “Could I go?”
Woods started to shake his head, but then changed his mind. “Yeah, it’ll be good for you to be with kids your own age. It’ll be normal.”
As Jillybean got ready for school, Sadie felt more like a mom than an adoptive sister. She had every mom fear in the book: what if the other kids didn’t like her? What if they made fun of her for being smarter than them? What if they called her names? What if Eve got out, murdered the lot of them and then stacked their bodies like cordwood before burning down the school?
“She’s on medication now,” Sadie kept telling herself.
School in Colton lasted from seven until ten. Then there came a mid-day mass, a communal lunch and more school till about three. Sadie was able to sit with Jillybean during the mass, where she couldn’t speak unless it was to mumble along during prayers. She also sat with her at lunch, though again, there wasn’t much in the way of speaking. Jillybean shoveled food down her gullet as fast as she could before she was up and racing around with the other children.
“Looks like she’s getting along pretty well,” Rachael Woods said to Sadie as the two of them cleared away dishes. The few scraps that remained were being saved in an orange Home Depot bucket. They would go to feed the pigs being raised by a friend of Rachael’s.
“Yeah, it looks that way,” Sadie said, however, she knew better—something was bothering Jillybean. It wasn’t hard to guess the issue. Later that afternoon, Sadie waited outside the school. “So, what’s wrong with the teacher?”
Jillybean gave a one shoulder shrug just like her big sister usually did. “Nothing really, it’s just that Mrs. Whithers doesn’t like the way I do things, ‘specially in math. She says that I can’t make, uh, intuitive leaps until I’m a grode-up. Intuitive leaps is what means I can do math in my head. She says I’m supposed to learn like everyone else.”
“You mean really slowly?”
“Yeah.”
They walked for a while in silence, Sadie hardly even limping now. “I’ll talk to the teacher. She should know that people learn at different rates.”
“No, that’s okay. I don’t want to make the other kids feel bad. ‘Sides we’ll be leaving in a few days. I’d rather get working on this car. We need to get it up-armored and I’ve been conside
ring a roof mounted periscope since I doubt this town has much in the way of imaging equipment. I drew up the plans when everyone was working on fractions.”
She handed over a single sheet of paper that was scrawled with her childish handwriting. On it were a list of items and then secondary items just in case the main components couldn’t be found. “It’s like a refractory telescope, well it is a refractory telescope, just one that’s not designed to peek at the moon. And it’s not one but four, each with their own…”
“Sweetie, I have three days. Make it simpler.”
Jillybean mumbled something of which Sadie caught a few words: “…and a pneumatically driven piston, what could be simpler than that?” Louder, she said, “I’ll need to see the car. I hope it’s a Humvee car or a Land Rover car.”
It was a red Camry. Jillybean walked around it three times and then said to Sheriff Woods: “What else do you have?”
Sadie glared at her and then turned, switching to a smile, which she leveled at Woods. “She means it’s perfect, thank you very much.” The smile fell away as she turned back to Jillybean, who dropped her chin to her chest.
“Sorry Mister Sheriff Woods, sir. It is a nice gift, thanks a lot. Uh, so what’s wrong with it? I mean other than the color and its lack of all wheel drive capability and the fact that its underpowered for our needs?”
A groan escaped Sadie. “It’s got a bad starter, okay? That’s why we’re waiting until Monday to leave.” Woods caught the lie and made a noise of disappointment. Thankfully, Jillybean didn’t hear it, she had dropped down to peer up under the car.
“You know we can get a starter from almost any car of about this size They are all sorta interchangeable and that’s what means they do the same job. Mostly the problem is the mounting, though sometimes they have that beak thing in front which we could probably switch out. Do we have any tools here? I could get that…”
“Jillybean, no. They’re using all the starters in town. We’re just going to have to wait.”
The little girl got to her feet again, still staring at the car as if the idea of not being able to fix it, right that moment, was getting under her skin. “You know, this is what they should be teaching at that school. Math and reading are good but everyone should have to learn about cars and farming and guns. Oh, and survival skills, too.”
“I’ll talk to Mrs Whithers,” Sadie said. And she did. For the next three days, Sadie did everything she could to smooth over any bump there could possibly be in the transition from Jillybean the adventurer to Jillybean the small town girl. It should have been easy.
Other than fearlessly speaking her mind, Jillybean was a natural fit. Hard work was nothing new to her, especially when it came to caring for the many farm animals, all of which she adored. The people accepted her, unreservedly and welcomed her input and suggestions, of which she seemed to have an endless supply.
Best of all, whether it was due to the Zyprexa or the serenity of the dale, she found mental peace. Not once did Sadie catch the girl muttering to herself…or rather not once did she catch the girl muttering to one of the phantoms in her head.
She muttered plenty when it came to her math homework. “Fractions are just dumb. Why have fractions when you have decimal points? It’s archaic and that’s what means its old…even older than you, Sadie. And why show the work? The answer is either right or wrong. Grr!”
Despite this, Monday morning arrived and even before Sadie was up, Jillybean had her small collection of clothes set out on her bed, ready to go. The pink dress she had been given was set aside—it had no place in the wilds. She wore a pair of Corina’s blue jeans that ended an inch above her ankles, the magenta cowboy boots, and a white t-shirt emblazoned with Pikachu.
“Is this some sort of cat?” she asked Sadie.
“Yeah, kind of a Japanese one. Hey, um, I wanted to talk to you about, um, staying here.” Jillybean looked up from the shirt and stared at Sadie in that way of hers that made Sadie feel as though her skin was made of glass and her thoughts were like little cartoon word bubbles that Jillybean could read.
Over the previous four days, Sadie had tried her best to get Jillybean to fall in love with the little dale. She’d had the little girl pet every bunny and eat every type of pie. There had been sleepovers and games. In the evenings, when the sun was just over the western horizon twenty children would play capture the flag or hide and go seek. The squeals of laughter could be heard for miles.
It should have been easy but Sadie had trouble blurting out: “I think you should stay here, while I go on.”
“That makes sense,” Jillybean answered.
This surprised Sadie. “Okay, good. Mr and Mrs. Woods said you can stay with them, and Mrs Whithers said she would let you dictate your own class schedule at school and…”
Jillybean interrupted. “I’m not staying. I was just saying that your oddityness of the last few days now makes sense. Colton is nice and the people are nice, but this can’t be our home. It’s not safe.”
“I wouldn’t leave you if I didn’t think you could take care of yourself in an emergency.”
Her downy brows converged at this. “That’s not what I meant. This place is not safe and it never will be. We are supposed to be finding a safe place for everyone and when we do, we’ll come back here and bring these people to it. And we’ll get Mister Neil and we’ll get everyone. But you can’t find it by yourself.” Jillybean was adamant and folded her skinny arms across her chest and stared with a raised eyebrow at Sadie.
“You’re right, I need you, but you need this place even more. You’re getting better here. Remember what you always said? Remember, you want to be normal? This may be the one place where you can be normal?”
“Maybe,” Jillybean said. “Maybe I could be normal here, but if you die and I’m not there, and I could have done something about it…” She left off, her eyes going far away. Sadie guessed that she was picturing a bleak future, one in which she was dead. Jillybean would blame herself, except there probably wouldn’t be a Jillybean left anymore. It would be Eve, or worse.
Chapter 17
Sadie Martin
Once the decision was made, the two girls went into overdrive getting ready to leave. A good chunk of the day was spent fixing the problems Sadie had created while working on the Camry. Over the past four days, while Jillybean had been at school, Sadie had gone around the town searching for scraps of sheet metal. Her plan was simple enough: she would borrow a welder’s torch and, just like Jillybean had done with Hank the Humvee, she would layer the sheet metal an inch thick all around the exterior.
She envisioned a rolling hunk of Back The Hell Off. She hoped that when it was done, people would fear it and fear whoever was inside it; they would take one look at it and get running. The end result wasn’t what she had expected. The Camry was…strange looking. With some of the pieces rusted and others corrugated and others previously vandalized by taggers, the car looked as though it had either been pulled from a salvage yard or was on its way to one.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Sadie failed to take into account certain basic laws of physics. She had extended the armor too far in areas so that none of the doors would open more than eight inches. Even more of an oversight on her part was that the metal protecting the tires was too close to the tires themselves.
Worse than the armor issues was the periscope concept that Jillybean had worked out in painstaking detail. In spite of the scaled diagrams, Sadie hadn’t been able to get any of it to work. Cutting and fitting the PVC piping was so much harder than it looked, while setting the mirrors in each was such a chore that Sadie wanted to pull her hair out after hours of trying.
When she finally got the four sections perfectly set up, she accidentally let one slip. When it hit the floor, she could hear the mirrors inside of it slip out of place. Holding back a curse, she picked it up and gave it shake, hoping that it was just one mirror—it was all of them and at least one was broken, meaning she would have to spend ano
ther hour trying to cut a perfect circle of exactly five and a quarter inches in diameter.
“It’s just one,” she told herself, but then she glanced at the other tubes, suddenly nervous. The tube had fallen from all of three feet. Were the other tubes just as delicate? She had gently set them aside and now, as if she were going to pick up a bomb, she lifted one and gave it a shake. She didn’t realize that she was holding her breath until she blew out in relief.
She went to put it back down when she had a thought: What if we hit more than just a pothole? She gave the tube another shake—still fine, another shake and one of the mirrors came unglued and rattled down the tube, fell out of the bottom and shattered. Now the breath she had been holding came out in a scream that had Rachael running to see what was wrong. She found Sadie sitting on the ground with her head in her hands.
“It’s nothing,” Sadie assured her. “It’s just…I don’t know how Jillybean does this. She takes all this junk and somehow turns it into stuff you can use. But I can’t. I just can’t. I was never good at arts and crafts or any of that bull…spittle.”
“I’m pretty good at this sort of thing,” Rachael said, holding out a hand. “Let me see those drawings and maybe together we can…” The smile fell away from her face as her eyes scanned the exactness and the complexity of the drawings. “Well,” she said after a few moments, handing the drawing back.
After two hours of working together, they succeeded only in coming to the mutual conclusion that the periscope idea wouldn’t work. At some point, Sheriff Woods came in to the garage. He stood with his hands on his hips, nodding gently. “That’s…that’s really something,” he said of the car.
What that “something” was, he didn’t elaborate, but Sadie didn’t really need him to. “It’s supposed to be kinda like a homemade tank.”
“And those tubes? They some sort of weapon?”
Sadie’s shoulders drooped. “They’re supposed to be periscopes so we can see out. The light comes in here, strikes a mirror at this joint and another midway along this tube and one at this joint and…never mind. It’s not going to work.”
The Undead World (Book 10): The Apocalypse Sacrifice Page 18
