He popped his head up and stared down at them with black, hungry eyes. In the dark, he seemed as much of a monster as the zombies. In a fury, Jillybean took a wild shot at him with her .25 caliber. She missed, but the shock of the gun blast scared the man back down.
“You sure you want to use a gun, bitch?” he growled from his side of the fence. “Because I don’t miss. I can put out your eye through this fucking fence. I could…”
Sadie wasn’t about to wait for him to finish his sentence. She grabbed Jillybean’s hand and ran across the yard for the next house. It had a back door but it was shut and she didn’t want to chance wasting even a second just in case it was locked. She took Jillybean around the side of the house. There was a gate here and it was wide open.
They had just sped through and were hurrying towards a car parked in the driveway when the black SUV came screaming up, this time stopping in the street. There was no question that they were trapped. Just as a spotlight burned through the night, Sadie shoved Jillybean down next to the car.
“Meet me back at the beach,” Sadie hissed and then jumped away from the car, letting the spotlight silhouette her before she took off at a run heading to her left across the face of the neighboring houses.
She was fresh and her get away should have been easy. The driver of the SUV had to either turn around on the trashed-out street or drive in reverse. Fool, Sadie thought as he stuck the SUV in reverse and floored it backwards through the zombies, the trash and the litter of cars. He was no fool, however. He was an expert driver and somehow dodged everything in his path and cut her off after she had gotten two doors down.
Behind her, two of the men were chasing. Where was the third? Sadie wondered as she turned back to the left. Had he found Jillybean? She vaulted a short fence, sprinted across a marsh of a backyard and then took on a much larger fence. At the top, she paused, seeing the third man. He was fifteen feet away, sitting on the fence that ran perpendicular to hers.
There was a second while they appraised each other; he was young and fit with long legs. Still, she was faster. He would hang with her for a few houses, a few fences and then he would drop back. With a grin at the prospect of showing him her heel, she leapt off the fence at the same time he did. She landed like a cat and took off but only made it three strides before her foot came down on a half-deflated soccer ball that had been hidden by the long grass and the dark. She stumbled and went down with the man charging hard. The short distance combined with his speed meant that he would catch her if she tried to get up and run.
They would struggle and it would be only seconds before he pinned her and it would only be seconds more before his friends caught up. What would they do to her? She had been caught by slavers before but she’d always had her father’s name protecting her, keeping her from being used. But he was dead. There was nothing stopping these men from taking turns with her—breaking her in.
Sudden cold terror filled her and before she had thought it through, she was digging for the .38 in her coat pocket. “Don’t,” the man warned, stopping five feet away, his right hand hovering over the grip of a holstered pistol.
How fast was he? And would he really hurt a girl? Todd had said these were slavers. They wouldn’t want to damage their merchandise. She hesitated only a second and then pulled out the pistol. The man she faced was a slaver, but he was also just a man. Their guns came out at almost the same instant and when she fired, he fired as well.
He staggered from the bullet hitting him, wobbled on suddenly weak legs and then fell, unmoving.
When she shot the .38, Sadie had been in a crouch from her fall. Now she was staring up at the sky. Her left lung making a gurgling sound with each breath.
Chapter 32
Jillybean
She was lying flat on her back and looking up at the rusting undercarriage of a hatchback when the two sets of booted feet raced by, chasing after Sadie. There had been a third man, but he was moving west, looking to cut off Sadie if she tried doubling back.
Jillybean could hear him mounting the fences, one after another. It was a perfect time to climb out from beneath the car. She should have skootched right out of there and made herself scarce, however she was in shock. Spot had been killed ten feet from her with just a fence between them. It might as well have been a sheet hung on a clothes line instead of the fence. A bullet would have pierced it just as easily—if it hadn’t been for Spot.
Spot died for her and she was sure she didn’t deserve it…and neither did the voices in her head. They were hissing and hissing and hissing, their words overlapping and crowding each other out so that she couldn’t tell what was going on and why she was just sitting there. She couldn’t think straight with all those voices blaming her.
“No, Sadie said they aren’t real. Sadie told me…” BAM! BAM! The two gunshots went right to her little heart and broke it. Her misfiring heart missed three beats in a row and then shuddered like an old jalopy, sending out spikes of pain that ran down the long bone in her left arm. She lay there gasping, her eyes staring right at the hatchback’s gas tank. It was inches from her face, the rust peeling off and looking like a disease.
It was right there, but she didn’t see it. Sadie was in trouble. One of the shots had been from the .38 she had been carrying, the same gun Jillybean had picked up in Oklahoma so long ago that it was becoming a ghost of a memory. Jillybean knew the sound of that gun as if it were her mother’s voice. Sadie was in trouble. Jillybean had to go to her to save her, but she couldn’t move. The pain in her chest and arm was too great, while the rest of her was so numb she felt disconnected.
Sadie was in trouble. These were the only words she could understand. It was the only thought that could cut through the maelstrom happening between her ears. The voices were howling in a great storm inside of her. She could feel them spinning like a tornado, banging against the walls of her skull. They were a great funnel cloud that was pulling Jillybean down into the depths of her mind.
She knew that, little by little, what was left of her personality and her memory and her sense of self would be pulled down into the darkness and all that would be left would be her body. An empty shell, waiting to die. Her bones would lie beneath the hatchback for all time. She would be like her mother—physically perfect, mentally broken beyond all repair.
Sadie was in trouble. These words cut through the ear-shattering cacophony and Jillybean knew she had to help her. Without Sadie, her life had no meaning. She had to do something, but her body was not her own. The only thing she could do was close her eyes, but when she opened them again she found herself standing in an open gate that led to a weedy overgrown yard.
Two bodies, seven feet apart, were splayed out and bloody. Both were unmoving. Both were shadow struck and vague in outline. Still, Jillybean knew that the one on the right was Sadie. And the screams inside of her reached a fevered pitch. No other sound could penetrate the noise.
There were three others in the yard. They stood over the second body and argued back and forth. She could see their lips moving. She could see the curses. She could read their lips: What the fuck? Hatchet-Joe is gonna be pissed. We should get the other one at least.
She was the “other one.” They were going to “get” her. Did that mean they were going to hunt her down? If she hadn’t been broken mentally, she would have laughed. There was no reason to “get” her at all. She was standing inside the gate and there was only one path out of the yard.
She didn’t even bother to hide and yet she wasn’t seen. She was basically invisible because of the fog and the heavy shadow thrown down by the two-stories of brick that stood above her like a grave marker. That’s how she saw the house and as the men trooped up, she wondered if her tombstone would look as immense when she was buried deep and staring up at it for all eternity?
There could be no answer that would cut through the screams inside her head. She didn’t even hear her gun go off when she pulled the trigger. The first man in the line of three finally s
aw her. They were close enough to touch. Jillybean knew this because she reached out with her tiny fist wrapped around the .25 and stuck its barrel against the man’s liver.
There was a flash of light, but no sound. Everything outside herself was perfectly quiet. The heavy fog-laden air had the serenity of heaven. The man with the blown-out liver dropped, his mouth open. She was sure he was screaming; there was little in life more painful than a liver shot—nothing except for what Jillybean was feeling at that moment.
The second man nearly barreled into the first as he fell. Jillybean knew this man. She had shot at him minutes before when he had his ugly mug perched on the fence. It had been right there, five feet away, looking like the melons she used to set up for target practice. And yet she had missed. She was sure there was some sort of psychological reason for the miss because she had practiced enough that a headshot was almost a sure thing at such a close range.
Was the psychological reason guilt or fear or some clingy part of her wishing for a return to the civilized world in which she had been born? She didn’t care. And what did it matter now? She was four and a half feet away from her target and her mind was almost completely disconnected from her body. Her index finger squeezed the trigger twice in a fraction of a second. Both shots of the double tap went into the man’s forehead.
That left just one. He was the driver. He ran things with his crew. He was fast and smart and mean. He was a hulking thing and she was tiny. She fired first, he fired second; his shot following so close on hers that the sounds nearly mingled into one. Her bullet struck high up on his chest but perhaps because of his mass and the small caliber of the round, he didn’t even flinch.
His shot passed next to her left ear cracking the air like a whip. She didn’t flinch either. She heard nothing and felt nothing. Her next shot came with the rise of her barrel and plowed a hole into his cheek, blasting out the top two molars on the back right and coming out through his ear.
Now, he flinched and his next shot went a foot above her head. He began to fall back and she followed trading shot for shot. She never missed and he never hit. After she had pumped the sixth round into him, the gun stopped firing. It was empty. She dropped it and picked up his much larger Sig Sauer and turned back to the first man she had shot.
The battle had lasted slightly less than eight seconds and he was still mewling on the ground in excruciating pain. He would die soon, likely in the next five minutes. Liver wounds were bleeders. Everyone knew that. She shot him in the face as he begged. She didn’t shoot him out of mercy or hate. She shot him out of the last iota of self-preservation left in her—what happened if he wanted revenge before he died and killed her from doing what she had to?
It was funny, really, since there was only one thing left for her to do. She tramped through the grass that went all the way to her hip. It was thick and grabby, pulling her back, wanting to keep her from what was necessary. It was as if the earth was half-heartedly trying to stop her. Like it was only a gesture on nature’s part. But there would be no stopping this.
With each step the voices built and built worse than ever until she felt that her brain would vibrate to slime and ooze out of her ears, saving her the trouble of putting a bullet into her head. One way or the other she had to die. There could be no life without Sadie. No real life, at least. If she lived, she would be crazier than Spot had been.
“Who wants to live like that?” Her lips moved, forming the words, but she could hear her own voice. She was deaf to all things, even the sound of the hammer going back on the Sig didn’t register even though she had the barrel pressed to her temple.
Sadie was at her feet. Her face was white as a sheet except for a single drop of bright red blood at her throat. It had leapt there from a chest wound. Her black jacket glistened shiny, dark and wet.
“I’m sorry,” Jillybean said. Sadie had died simply because Jillybean had been trying to save Spot from the monsters. She had called out to him. Everything that happened in the next few minutes after that—the death of seven people—could be traced to that touch of weakness on her part. Her mistake had been that she thought even the insane deserved to live.
She knew better than that, now.
There was no hesitation. What good would arguing with her fate do? Without Sadie, her insanity would take over completely. She would never make it back to Colorado. At best, she would die alone in the wilderness, talking to trees, or serving pancakes to clouds. This was better. She wouldn’t feel a thing because she was already dead inside. And she wouldn’t see anything because the sight of Sadie was too much for her, so Jillybean had her eyes clamped down as hard as she could. And she wouldn’t hear anything because the voices were so frighteningly loud that a bomb could have gone off next to her and she would never have known.
And yet a soft whisper cut through everything. “J-Jilly? I-I can’t bre-breathe.” That soft whisper banished the voices right out of her head, leaving nothing behind, not even an echo. It was like a rubber band snapped in her head, and in that second everything became normal again. The night became strangely quiet and subdued. She could hear the monsters all around the neighborhood stirred up because of the gunshots and all the commotion. She could hear the ticking of the SUV’s engine on the next street as if it was slowly winding down. And she could hear the low gurgling wheeze as Sadie fought to draw breath.
The gun fell from Jillybean’s hands as she dropped down to her knees in the long grass. For just a moment, she was a wide-eyed kid kneeling over her dying sister. For that moment, she was useless. She saw Sadie’s blue lips, the distended veins in her neck and how her throat was bulging and shifted oddly to the right, but these signs meant nothing to her.
“Filled,” Sadie said between tiny sips of air. “Chest filled. Can’t…breathe.”
“Your chest is filled?” This seemed odd since blood was leaking out of her at a steady rate. If her chest were filled, it wasn’t with blood; she would be empty of blood soon. If it wasn’t blood filling her, then what was it?
While Jillybean’s brain struggled to figure out the answer, Sadie went on sipping air, faster and faster. She was sucking in, in, in—but not blowing out. She was filling with air. “I got it,” Jillybean said as she went from being “just a kid” to being herself again. “You have a tension pneumothorax, Sadie. I have to roll you over.”
She didn’t wait for a response. There wasn’t time. Jillybean grabbed Sadie and hauled her onto her left side. This would relieve the pressure building up inside of her, but only slightly and wouldn’t add more than a minute to her life if the underlying problem wasn’t fixed.
For that she needed her medbag, an operating room and a miracle. None of these were anywhere near the suburban house, which meant Jillybean had to improvise. She leapt up and ran through the tall grass for the back door of the two-story brick house. Luck was on her side; the door was open, as was the customary junk drawer. “Tape, check. Pen, check. Napkins…thank God, an exacto knife!”
She had her pocket knife and the blade was as sharp as she could make it; still, there was nothing like using the proper tools. In a flash, she was back at her sister’s side. “This is gonna sting,” she said, rolling her onto her back and slicing away a section of Sadie’s shirt, exposing her bloody flesh. “I’m going to cut through the intercostal space and open a hole in your chest wall. You have air building up in your pleural space. That’s what means the sack around your lungs is like a balloon and we gots to let some of the air out.” She had never done this before and the analogy she had used of a “balloon” had her freaked out that she would actually pop the membranous bag and she was pretty sure people needed it for some reason.
As she had been explaining what she was doing, she used the exacto knife like a scalpel, opening up the flesh, then cutting through the intercostal muscles and going deeper until the blood began bubbling. Bubbling meant air! Nothing had popped!
Jillybean had been holding her breath and now she let it out as she grabbed the
pen that she had taken from the drawer. It was a Bic with blue ink. She tore off the top, used the knife to wheedle out the ink tube and finally thumbed off the base, leaving the clear plastic hollow tube. This she pushed into the half-inch wide hole she had made until there came a long hiss of air from the tube.
Slowly, like a tire deflating, the air escaped from the pleural space. As it did, Jillybean taped the pen in place, using half a role of Scotch tape in the process.
Though she was still struggling for breath, Sadie was able to whisper: “Better.”
“Good,” Jillybean, answered without looking up. She was using the exacto knife to completely cut away Sadie’s blood-soaked shirt. The bullet had entered Sadie’s chest below her left breast. There was no exit wound which worried Jillybean because there was no telling where the bullet could have ended up. Chances are it was in the left superior lobe and that would mean an excellent prognosis. However it might have deflected off a rib bounced off a vertebra and headed south into the intestinal cavity.
Jillybean could kill Sadie simply by following a wound track like that. “First things first,” she said. Sadie needed to be stabilized. She needed oxygen and two large bore IVs started. Sadie needed an operating room and she still needed that miracle. Thankfully, Jillybean had a perfectly sound SUV parked only two fences away. Both of the fences were blasted into pieces as she drove the SUV straight into them. She stopped two feet from Sadie, not realizing that her right front tire was parked on the corpse of the man Sadie had shot.
Getting Sadie into the back of the SUV was a chore, but one that she could handle. The tough part was all the rest. Once she found a hospital, what were the chances that it had electricity in its plugs or light in its bulbs? How would she see? And how would she cauterize any bleeders? Surgery on lungs was a delicate thing. If any little bit of bone or metal was missed there would be problems. If one of the zillions of veins was left bleeding, Sadie could drown in her sleep.
The Undead World (Book 10): The Apocalypse Sacrifice Page 34
