He looked in, his eyes roving around at the cramped and cluttered vehicle. “What are you talking about? How on earth am I supposed to know…”
One of his men interrupted him. “I know her. I just can’t believe it. You’re Jillybean, aren’t you?”
“Yes, thank you. I was getting nervous there for a second.” Her plan depended on her name being known. It was the only way she would have the upper hand.
“Did you really blow up the River King’s bridge?” another asked. He was just a shadow of a man behind his glowing flashlight. “I heard two stories. Some people say it was a spec op guy and some say that it was you.”
“Well, we both kinda tried to. And he wasn’t a spec op guy, he’s a ranger. His name is Captain Grey and he didn’t blow up the bridge. He tried to hold it hostage, but the River King had a second bridge, so that was out. So, I blowded it up with all this C4. There was mounds and mounds of it, like two-hundred pounds of it. You know why I blowded it up?” The shadow of a man’s shadowy head went back and forth. “Because the River King threatened people that I loved. Kinda like what you guys are doing right now.”
The first man she had been talking to; the leader, Jillybean guessed, said, “What are you talking about? We’re not threatening anyone but you, Jillybean. If you don’t put down that fucking bomb, you’re going to force us to shoot you. You don’t want that, do you? You don’t want us to splatter your brains all over the place.”
“No, uh-uh, I don’t, but they don’t seem to care,” she said in a whisper, tapping the side of her head with the detonator. “They’re listening. They’re always listening.”
“Who?” the man asked. His eyes first shifted around at the forest and then he bent to glance into the Camry at Sadie. “Who’s listening? Do you have friends around here? In other cars?”
Jillybean shook her head, going for the checkmate. “They are listening. The voices. They talk to me and tell me to do things. They like explosions. The bigger the better. That’s why they made me make so many bombs. You can see the bombs if you want. They’re in there.” She pointed up at the roof carrier she had welded to the top of the car.
He gave her a long look, staring even as he let his cigarette drop. He crushed the last of it to death under the toe of his work boot, revolving his heel, pushing it deep into the earth. “Voices are telling you to make bombs?”
“They like ‘em. They like ‘em a lot. And I don’t know…they tell me I have to. I have to make them and I have to…” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “I have to use them.”
“You really are her?” She nodded. He looked her twiggy, eight-year-old body up and down and then asked, “And you have more bombs up there?” She nodded again.
Holstering his pistol, he put a foot on the blocky side armor and hoisted himself up to look in at all the bombs Jillybean had made. At the sight of them, he grunted, “Oh shit.” Slowly, he turned to look down at her. He saw a crazy little girl. She saw a man who was beginning to realize he had made a big mistake.
“That’s a bad word,” she told him, still whispering. “They don’t like curses. No, not a bit. Curses make them very angry and maybe they’ll make me blow us up and if I do…” She gazed around at the forest and the slack-jawed men. “…It’ll put a hole in the world. A hole so big that it would swallow all of us. It’ll swallow us and this forest and most of the town back there. But I don’t want to do that. It makes my head hurt to think about it, so please don’t make me.”
She held up the radio detonator, her finger on the trigger.
He looked at the radio and even in the dark, she could see the fear growing in his eyes. “Okay, you don’t have to do this. This was a, uh…” He faltered looking around at the other men, some of whom were easing slowly into the forest or moving towards the truck. “This was a mistake. We’re going to just back away, okay? There’s no reason to do anything with the bombs. Just…we’ll just…”
That seemed to be the extent of his ability to speak. Holding his breath and walking on tiptoe, he moved towards the truck, keeping his eyes on Jillybean the entire time. When he opened the door and it let out a whine of rusted metal, he cringed in an altogether perfect manner.
Jillybean bit the insides of her cheek to keep from smiling. She had won and what was more, she had won without blood being spilled and bombs exploding. It was a first for her and she liked it.
Chapter 36
Jillybean
It was comical to watch the truck’s driver trying to back out of the narrow road in a non-hurried, desperate hurry. He kept scraping against trees and smashing his tailgate on hidden stumps. When the bandits finally disappeared into the last of the smoke from the smoke bomb, a laughing Jillybean jumped into the Camry and gazed down at the iPad; Sadie already had Agnes tracing their movements.
“They’re heading out of town,” Sadie said, and then grinned. “That was pretty awesome, I have to say.”
Jillybean’s laughter dried up, suddenly. “You know not all of it was true, right? I didn’t hear any voices and I haven’t since the night…you know, the night you got shotted.”
Along with Sadie’s strength, her grin faded. “I know. You were just playacting. But you would tell me if they really did come back, right? I need to know just so I can help you. Hey, speaking of which, did I ask already?”
“You did and I did take my pill.” Aspirin was a pill, so she wasn’t technically lying. Still, Jillybean wanted to change the subject. “Is there a way around this little forest? I want to get out of this town before them guys have a change of heart. You know how they are. If one of them calls the leader a chicken, they might come after us.”
While Sadie was supposed to be studying the terrain, Jillybean backtracked down the narrow path. Reversing wasn’t her best thing, especially when she only had a seven-inch screen to guide her. She ended up hitting almost as many trees as the much bigger truck had. It wasn’t nearly so funny when she did it, though and yet Sadie chuckled weakly. Jillybean gave her a death stare.
“You know laughing can be bad for your health,” Jillybean said and then held up a balled fist. This only had Sadie laughing until she cried real tears.
“Stop,” she said around phlegmy coughs. “You’re killing me.”
The death stare dropped away. “For reals? I didn’t mean it, for reals.”
“No, I was playing,” Sadie said with one last cough. “I think I found a way around. Just don’t kill us first.”
As Sadie didn’t look all that well, Jillybean was afraid to glare. She let out a fake laugh instead and concentrated on not hitting anything else. Once they had backed out of the forest, Sadie directed her to a pair of worn ruts that curled around one of the homes they had passed earlier and soon the town was behind them, but not the danger. They had been warned that the town of Colton was basically surrounded by bandits and after this last scare, they decided that, as much they wanted to visit Anita and Corina and all of the people who had showed them so much kindness, it wasn’t a good idea.
Besides, Colton was forty miles out of the way and once they got there, they would feast and visit for hours. It would be a day away from traveling, a day away from their mission. It was with a heavy heart that they turned directly south until they found an east-west road ten miles deeper into the hills.
By then it was two in the morning and Sadie couldn’t stay awake. She put her seat back and slept, forcing Jillybean to drive, navigate and operate the drone singlehandedly. It was exhausting and by the time the sun rose, she was done in and unable to drive any further.
Unfortunately, the closest thing to shelter that she was able to find was a camp site at the base of a giant pointy hill called Fog Mountain. There was nothing to the site besides a single, ghastly smelling portapotty and a few rectangles where the land had been scraped level.
“Good enough,” Jillybean said to herself as she reclined her seat to its most horizontal position. The driver’s seat wasn’t very comfortable even for o
ne so small and her sleep was anything but deep.
Things did not get much better the next night either. The traveling was hard on Sadie and she spent as much time asleep as she did awake, forcing Jillybean to drive achingly slow. It was a hardship on the little girl who wanted her adventures to be over with. She was tired of living with the threat of bandits and slavers hanging over her head. And she was tired of sleeping during the day when the Camry’s temperature would climb steadily. And she was tired of being dirty all the time.
Even out in the wilderness where she saw more bears than people, she wouldn’t risk a fire except to bathe Sadie’s wound and even then, she kept the fire tiny, just enough to do the job.
Although the days felt endless and uncountable, only eight passed from the time they raced away from the bandits’s trap until they crept down out of the mountains to face the Red Desert of Wyoming. Bandits were not a problem here in this high plain desert, and neither were monsters. It was a land of prickly sagebrush and dull clump grass. It was a land unsuited for humans and, at first glance, seemed unsuited for any living thing beyond rattle snakes and lizards.
It was sunset on what had been an exhausting day. She had driven all night and then had spent the day struggling to find fuel needed for the two-hundred and twenty mile trip through the Red Desert.
She was on the edge of the town of Pinedale, staring out at a dried-out husk of land. Behind her was the Camry, two tires missing and its front bumper resting on cinderblocks. Next to it was a sun-faded silver Corolla, the best, most fuel efficient car she could find in the rinky-dink town.
They were down to ten gallons of gas and the Camry, with its heavy armor, would never make it across the desert. She didn’t know if the Corolla would, either. It had been a cast-iron bitch to get running and now her hands were black and throbbing from changing tires and heaving the fresh battery in place. With a sigh, she went down to the aptly named Pine Creek to wash up and that was when she found there was more to the desert than she would have ever expected.
Standing up to their hocks in the cold mountain water was a herd of wild horses; dozens and dozens of them. Most were mottled shades of brown and grey, however there were a couple of pretty blacks and one that was nearly pure white.
Jillybean stood under the pines that guarded the little creek and watched them until the sun set and all the evidence that there were horses near was the splashing of their hooves in the water.
“There had been babies,” she told Sadie twenty minutes later. “Here, sit up. Take your pills.”
“Foals,” Sadie said, looking at the two big pills in her palm with some trepidation. She had been calling these new pills “horse pills” which Jillybean now took as a good omen. The “horse pills” were different from the Amoxicillin Jillybean had started her on after surgery. Three days before, Sadie had woken up with a rattle in her lungs and yellow drainage from her chest tube. It meant infection.
The gunk coming from the tube had turned to green by the time Jillybean had been able to find a pharmacy that was large enough to carry something beyond the basics. Needless to say, Sadie’s infection put more pressure on Jillybean to take care of everything and the strain of it was starting to show. The circles under her eyes had deepened and her face maintained a constant slack look as if she had been hit up side the head with a rock. She wasn’t the same tutu wearing girl who had proclaimed, I made it! earlier that month.
The horses had put the first smile on her face since before she could remember. “Okay foals. How hard do you think it would be to catch one? And how long do they need milk for? Probably only for another month, I bet. Then it’ll be oats and hay and that sort of thing. Do you know where we can get some oats?”
Sadie gave Jillybean a shrug and a cough. The meds were working—slowly. Still, slowly was better than nothing. “Maybe you should forget the horses.”
“You know, if we had horses we wouldn’t need to worry about gas,” Jillybean mentioned, her face set to “dreamy” as she imagined riding the rest of the way to Estes on horseback. Hers would be a yearling, brown with a black mane and tail. His name would be Rory, because she could almost feel the wind roaring through her hair.
The imagined ride utterly discounted the heat, and the blisters to her inner thighs, and the grueling, wasted hours plodding along, and, of course, how a week long ride would affect Sadie’s health. All Jillybean knew was that she loved horses. To her they were primally good. They were designed by God to be a basic part of humanity. A girl without a horse wasn’t a girl at all. She would love any horse she could get her hands on, even some of the funky grey ones with the weird spots.
“We don’t have time,” Sadie said, ending the inner conflict within the girl. She was right. Time seemed to be getting away from them. If the rumor they had heard concerning Captain Grey had beat them to Bainbridge, it made Jillybean wonder how quickly he had got his team to California in the first place. And what of the other team that had been sent to the San Fransisco area? Had they been back for weeks? If so, did that mean Jillybean and Sadie would be coming home to an empty valley?
“Don’t think about it,” Sadie warned, slurping hot ravioli. “Neil would not leave without us.”
With the setting of the sun, Jillybean had chanced another fire. Every house in Pinedale had a working fireplace and there was wood everywhere. She had heated up yet another can of ravioli. Once she had liked raviolis quite a bit; now, after days and days of living on canned this and canned that, not so much.
They slept in proper beds that night and the next day, bright and early, they went out to the Corolla. Each of them gazed at it without much enthusiasm. Sadie tapped the window. “Kinda thin,” Sadie said. A moment later, a shiver went up her back. “I can deal with a slaver’s bullet. The pain is sharp but it doesn’t last, but monsters? I dream about that…about getting, you know.” She didn’t need to go on. Jillybean thought about being eaten alive a lot. She dwelled sometimes on it, on the thousand mouths chewing her flesh and the pain, God the pain! The pain of each bite equaled to one tear and there were so many tears and so many screams and each only egged the monsters on and on and…
“I know,” Jillybean agreed, quickly, trying to cut off the conversation that everyone, but soldiers, always avoided. For some reason, every soldier Jillybean had ever met would, at the drop of a hat, produce their: “just in case” bullet. Without hesitation, they would recite under what parameters that bullet would be used. Sadly, in Jillybean’s experience, very, very few men had ever used their bullet as they expected.
It’s why she never carried one. For her, few things ever happened as expected and she was sure her death, when it happened, would be a complete surprise.
She pushed away these unhappy thoughts and went to the driver’s side door. It was light compared to the Camry’s armored door and it opened almost without effort. Her fingers caressed the thin, factory standard glass. The smallest monster would break it easily, not that there were small monsters anymore.
“It’s kinda a trade off,” Jillybean said. “The Camry wouldn’t make it halfway through the desert, so we either die of thirstation or we chance the bad guys and monsters.”
Sadie climbed into the car. “We’ll worry about the zombies when the time comes, right?” There was always a chance to worry. Every day there were plenty of chances.
They traveled during the day when all the world could see them, but the world wasn’t looking. Jillybean took the desert in one big bite, traveling as fast as she dared. For long stretches, they ate up the miles, seeing nothing at all. At other times, she was forced to creep along as the road seemed to have disintegrated from out beneath them.
When they were close to a river, they saw more horses and thousands of pronghorns, but only a few desert zombies. These were always sun blasted and stunted, and not much of a danger, nothing at all like their hardier kin. Jillybean actually felt sorry for them.
Sadie had to say to her: “No, we’re not going to feed them! Not ev
en the lima beans.”
The desert was an arduous journey, but because of the speed they were able to travel at it was a relatively short one. They pulled into Laramie with an hour to spare before sunset, plenty of time to see that scrounging for fuel would be a serious issue. To start with, there were thousands of homes, but only a few hundred cars. The people of Laramie had abandoned their city two years before and had left very little behind.
Jillybean spent hours wandering in the dark going from car to car and only ended up with half a gallon of gas. Combined with the trickle they had left in the tank, it would get them only as far as Cheyenne, a city she wasn’t really all that eager to visit. It was to where most of the people from Estes had fled.
With no choice, they left the next morning, spending the two-hour trip staring into the rising sun as it mounted the sky. Jillybean did everything she could to coax the Corolla at least as far as the city limits and it was with a genuine sigh of relief that they pulled into the dusty town.
“How do I look? Dead or nearly dead?” Sadie asked, after teasing her hair into their usual spikes. Since Jillybean was feared and, if not exactly hated, then strongly disliked by the people who had fled Estes, they decided that Sadie would have to summon the energy to beg, borrow or trade for fuel.
“You look good,” Jillybean lied.
Sadie was gone for an hour and during that time, Jillybean worked out the particulars of her version of a potato gun. Of course, as much fun as it sounded, she had no intention of shooting potatoes. She needed a delivery system for her bombs. As the heavy, triple sticks of dynamite wasn’t feasible as ordinance using ignited hairspray as a propellant, she designed a round using a percussion-triggered blasting cap and a single stick, surrounded by half a pound of ANFO. With the proper shape, she figured they would fly the length of a soccer field.
“It’ll need stabilizing fins for accuracy and a…” She was interrupted by Sadie, who came “storming” into the motel Jillybean had chosen for them. The goth girl staggered into the room and then staggered around the one stale smelling bed and at first she was so mad that she could only whisper curses.
The Undead World (Book 10): The Apocalypse Sacrifice Page 38
