“I’ll stay with you,” he said, ignoring the pain that coursed through him. “I’ll take you to Bainbridge, but you have to listen to me. There’s only one way they’ll accept you, Jillybean. We have to go alone. Just the two of us. We have to leave Sadie behind.”
She froze, her features stuck halfway between misery and shock. “But she’s my sister and she never did nothing to anyone. She’s not like Eve was. She’s always been good. And I love her.”
“Jillybean…”
“And she loves me, too,” she said. She tried to stand, but her legs gave out. Falling to her knees, she grabbed Neil’s khaki pants. “And, and, and we promised each other that we would be together forever.”
“Jillybean…”
“And she loves you, too, Mister Neil,” Jillybean said, growing more and more desperate. He could feel her fingers scraping though to his skin. “She just told me. She’s right there. Look at her, please. Mister Neil, please, look at her. Please, she’s real. You have to believe me.”
Her begging was slowly tearing him apart, however the tears in her innocent blue eyes were daggers in his chest. He felt his own tears brewing, but had to blink them away. He had to be the adult. He had to push aside his own pain and grief for her sake.
“Okay Jillybean, if Sadie is real let’s ask her what she thinks you should do.”
With hope writ all over her face, she turned from Neil and looked to the side at an empty candy rack. The hope in her died quickly. “She agrees with you,” Jillybean whispered. Neil hadn’t expected this. He thought that he would have to argue more and he was so surprised that he caught himself glancing towards the candy rack as if he’d be able to see his daughter’s ghost.
“She says I have to let her go and move on. She says I can trust you, Neil. Is that true? Can I trust you? Can I trust you to take care of me?”
Again, Neil turned to the candy rack. It was exactly what Sadie would have said if she had really been there. “Yes, I’ll take care of you. I’ll always take care of you.”
Epilogue
The child stepped out into the new morning and despite the heavy dose of Tramadol, her head was pounding so badly that she felt as though she were about to hurl. Her legs were as weak as twigs and as she wobbled slightly, she was quickly grabbed by a man who emerged from the pharmacy a second later. From a distance, he didn’t look much older than a teenager. Up close, his scars and the pain that he tried to hide behind his eyes aged him.
He was obviously her father. The embarrassing kind, judging by the teal fanny-pack he wore. It had been sitting in a pile beneath the broken front window and as the others had been pink or purple, he had gone with the teal. Filled as it was with the girl’s pills, it made a noise like a baby’s rattle. The Tramadol was for the bullet wound that had gouged the outside of her skull, the Zyprexa was for the damage to the inside.
“You want a piggyback?” the man asked. The question was such a throwback to another life that at first the girl only looked at him blankly.
“I, uh, yeah please,” she answered when the term finally clicked. The man grunted and went down to one knee, using an M4 as a crutch. Like any daughter would, the girl climbed aboard his back and wrapped her arms around his neck. He grunted again when he stood, but not because she was heavy. The man was tired through to his core.
Although their destination was in the west, they detoured north, heading back to the bridge, each holding their breath as they walked up the on-ramp and were able to look across its span. Save for trash blowing like leaves in a light wind, it was empty just as it had been. Neither said a word.
It was dangerous to be up on the bridge. They could be seen and then hunted, and yet the man hesitated, pulled in opposite directions—but he had already made his decision and, much to the girl’s relief, he turned west, walking along a run of water that cut Seattle nearly square in two, passing empty dock after empty dock.
The boats were all gone taking most of the seagulls and harbor rats with them. For the most part, the waterfront was deserted, though there were a few zombies and some ex-slaves running from them. As much as the man wanted to help the frightened women, he couldn’t protect the girl and the women at the same time.
“They look pretty healthy,” he said, meaning the women. “They should be fine.”
“We should get into the water,” the girl suggested. It was well known fact that zombies couldn’t swim, then again, it didn’t seem as though the little girl had the strength to dog-paddle twenty feet. On the other hand, she didn’t look worried and that meant she was already planning.
Although the boats were gone, they had left behind the usual boat paraphernalia—rope, oil drums, nets, and enough wood pallets to build a battleship. Under the girl’s guidance, the man roped and netted together four pallets and six empty oil drums, forming an ugly raft.
“It’s too big,” he said. “How am I supposed to paddle this thing?” All they had for paddles were slats of wood he had yanked from one of the more ricketier pallets. “Look, I’ve already got a splinter.”
“I’ll help,” she told him. He misunderstood and rolled his eyes. She put a hand on his arm and said, “Trust me.” With a sigh, he braced his legs and pushed the raft into the water, where it floated better than the man had expected. But floating was only half the battle. He would still have to paddle it.
The girl knew this. She cleared her throat and then yelled, “Sadie! I found a boat. Sadie! I found a boat.”
He looked at her, a sharpness to his eyes that she couldn’t help see. “It’s okay. I’m not calling her. I was calling…them.” She pointed down the length of the waterfront where two scantily clad women were running for the gently bobbing raft.
The girl waved and the women waved frantically back, screaming in panicked voices, “Don’t leave us!”
The two were just the beginning. Before they pushed off, seven women made it to the raft and six more swam to it as they made their slow way through the channel to Puget Sound. It wasn’t an easy craft to steer or to row, and it was a slog getting it across the two miles of open water to Bainbridge Island.
Long before they set foot on shore, the girl had passed out and it was up to the man to greet the gathering who were waiting for them. There were nearly eighty people lined up on the other side of the rolls of concertina wire. Among them was a woman of startling beauty, and yet her beauty was nothing compared to her grief. Her tears caught the light just so and sparkled as though electric.
Ten feet from shore, she asked, “Is…is he?” The man dropped his chin and when he nodded, it bumped against his chest. By his absence, she had already known the answer, still her breath sucked in and a trembling took hold of her. When she could speak again, she asked, “Did he do this?” She gestured towards the women on the raft. They had been sex slaves held by the vile Hatchet-Joe, who was known for his vicious cruelty. “Did he free them?”
For a few moments, the last battle raged through the man’s mind. There was only one person responsible for their freedom. “Yes. He could have left them and me…and her,” he glanced down at the child. “He could have left us to die, but he wanted her to live. And he wanted her to live here.”
“He always wanted her to be safe,” she said. “That’s all he ever wanted.” The woman stepped into the water, wading to the edge of the raft. She reached out to the girl and caressed her cheek, saying, “Wake up, Jillybean. You’re home.”
The End
***
Thank you so much supporting my work. I know that ten novels is a lot to commit to and I hope you enjoyed the series. If so, as always, it would please me greatly for you to leave a review, especially of book one.
Now, I think you need a palate cleanser. I suggest you try my new series: The Gods of the Undead. A lot of people seem to like the stories, but be forewarned: there is an obscene amount of blood spilled and skin flayed and love lost and all sorts of sadness. On the other hand there are also heroes and heroines, bravery and sacrifice. And
there’s adventure that spans the world as two people fight the undead from New York to darkest Africa.
As many stories do, it starts small with just one man.
The Edge of Hell
Gods of the Undead, A Post-Apocalyptic Epic
Prologue
Alex Wilson
Officer Alex Wilson had to pull his cruiser over. He didn’t need to, he had to. It didn’t matter that he was in the middle of a south bound lane on the FDR Drive. He had to see and he had to hear for himself what was happening.
He pulled over and cut the siren; the lights he left on, whipping around, cutting the night in blinding red and blue. At first all he heard was the insane babble of the dispatchers—in three years on the force he had never once heard fear in their voices. Normally, they spoke in lackluster tones that suggested they were bored to tears with their jobs.
Now, they were screaming into their mikes, ordering units from all over the city to converge on the bridges that spanned the East River, connecting Queens to Manhattan.
“What’s happening?” someone demanded over the radio. “Dispatch, say again, what’s happening?”
“I don’t know…I don’t know. I’m not supposed to tell, but…but they’re monsters, I think,” was the strange reply the unknown officer received.
Alex flicked off the radio and sat still with his head cocked. Even through the heavy glass, he could hear the pop, pop, pop of gunfire, only it wasn’t just: pop, pop, pop. It was a thousand pops going off all at once. Feeling a sudden churn in his guts, he climbed out of the cruiser and the sound of the battle assaulted him. He was a mile away with a wide river between him and the fire-fight and still the sound was frightfully urgent.
He didn’t rush off, however. The churning in his guts intensified, and only slowly he climbed back into the cruiser. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered and then stuck the car in gear. Gradually, he built up speed and far too soon for his liking, he was at the Queensboro Bridge and being directed to heel his cruiser in next to a row of forty others.
Even as he pulled in, another cruiser squeezed right up next to him and another pulled up next to that one. He slid out of the car feeling his stomach twist, going beyond churning; it was a curdling sensation that made him feel sick.
The officer in the next cruiser beat him out, rushing to pop his trunk. “What is it?” he asked as Alex reluctantly opened the trunk on his cruiser.
Alex couldn’t answer at first; the sound of the guns firing was now mingled with screams. So many screams. “I-I don’t know,” he said after taking a gulp of air.
“They said monsters,” another officer said, a little, fake laugh in his voice. It was a high, oddly girlish sound as if someone had a good hold of his balls and were giving them a healthy tweak.
Another officer, further down the row of cruisers was screaming: “Masks! Get your damn masks on! Come on, damn it!”
Masks meant there were germs in the air…zombie germs. The idea that just breathing could turn him into one of them was horrible and Alex dug in his trunk for his protective mask. It came in a pouch that he buckled around his waist. It took three tries to snap in place and as he struggled with the simple buckle, the sound of the firing came closer and the screams grew evermore urgent and loud. People were dying right on the bridge and yet Alex felt as though he was moving in slow motion. He couldn’t seem to get his feet moving despite then urgency in the air.
Some of the officers were pulling on their mask and others were hauling out shotguns or Colt M4s. Alex only had his 9mm Sig Sauer P226 and it felt altogether puny, certainly too puny to use against an army of undead.
He needed something bigger: a machine gun or a grenade launcher. Anything would be better than the pistol. “Hey,” he hissed to the officer who had pulled in next to him. “You don’t happen to have a…”
Just then, someone turned him around and screamed in his face: “Get to the line! Hurry!”
Alex was pushed and shoved onto the bridge where his fellow officers were lined up. There were forty or fifty of them, all looking green, all sweating and scared. Alex was sure he looked just as terrified. His hands shook as he tried to check on his second magazine. It dropped, clinking on the cement. Frantically he scrambled for it. He was deathly afraid, but of what exactly, he didn’t know. He had no idea what they were facing and yet he was practically pissing himself.
Questions ran up and down the line: “What’s going on? What’s happening? What are they? Are they really zombies? Really?”
No one knew, but it wasn’t long before they found out.
The bridge stretched east toward Queens. Normally, a person could see across the half-mile span without a problem but just then, the far end couldn’t be seen. A swirling black cloud engulfed it. And it didn’t just hover over it, it advanced against a gentle westerly wind.
Within that unnatural black cloud were creatures masquerading as people. They shambled forward, bringing with them a horrid stench of decay. It was so bad that even the veterans of a hundred murder scenes ripped their masks out of their holders and pulled them on.
Gagging from the stench, Alex held his mask to his face, but didn’t put it on. The mask would cloud his vision and he needed to see what he was dealing with. Monsters was what the dispatcher had said. Seconds later, he saw that she had been wrong. These weren’t exactly monsters—they were zombies. They could be nothing else.
The creatures stumbling though the swirling darkness had been people at one time, only now they were the living dead. They were corpses somehow imbued with life. They limped along, dragging ropes of intestine and leaving long trails of blood and pus behind them. Their decayed and rotting flesh hung in ribbons off their bleached bones.
They were horrors that had no right to live and there were thousands of them.
Someone yelled: “They-they’re zombies! Aim for the head!”
Alex was way ahead of him. He had the mask in one hand and the Sig Sauer in the other. He peered down the iron sights, waiting until the leading wave of monsters was within thirty yards. He couldn’t miss from that distance.
A captain screamed: “Fire!” The line of officers let loose with a ragged volley, some using handguns, some shotguns and some M4s. Those zombies in the first line were staggered, many falling, causing the wave of undead to slow as it stumbled over them. More shots created more mayhem and the bridge became an obstacle course of black blood and rotting limbs which slowed the attacking monsters even more.
Alex shot his Sig Sauer dry and in the three seconds it took to reload, the zombies were ten yards closer. Strangely, the thunder of the guns going off all around him and the acrid stench of the spent gunpowder calmed his nerves to a degree.
It didn’t last.
A foul creature, grey and stinking of death, pushed itself over the mound of wriggling bodies and came for Alex. He aimed and fired, certain that he had hit the zombie in the head; however, it didn’t fall or even slow.
“What the hell?” he whispered and then took aim again and now at twenty yards he knew he was a good enough marksman to plug the bitch dead center. He caressed the trigger, there was a shock that ran up his arm to his shoulder, and then he saw the thing’s head rock back, bone and brain and unknown crap flying onto the bridge.
Again it didn’t fall. It just kept coming closer and closer, close enough that Alex could see a gaping hole just off center of its forehead.
Alex wasn’t the only one just realizing that things were far worse than they realized.
“Oh, my God!” someone screamed. “They’re not dying!”
That wasn’t possible. In the course of two hours the world had turned on its head and yet these were zombies, flesh-eating, brain-chomping, undead zombies and everyone knew that you could kill a zombie with a head-shot. That was supposedly a fact, and yet the zombies kept coming, seemingly impervious to any bullet. Even the creatures that had collapsed earlier, were fighting their way to their feet.
Movement out of the corner of hi
s eye had Alex turning. Some of the men were running away! Everything was suddenly chaos. A few men ran, a few fired their weapons, a few stood there not knowing what to do.
Alex glanced down at his Sig Sauer for a brief moment, tempted to toss it away and run, but he managed to swallow his fear long enough to empty the gun into the corpse that was now only ten yards away. The 9mm blazed with orange flame as Alex hit the zombie with every round. It jerked with each strike, coming to a standstill almost within reach. Then the two just stared at each other; Alex trying to come to grips with this new reality, and the zombie trying to stand with a body that had been torn to shreds.
An officer next to Alex stood with his head wagging side to side, saying: “That ain’t possible.” His pistol sat useless in his hands.
Another officer, this one a round-bellied sergeant who had been too long at the desk, yelled: “Keep Firing! Keep firing!” He had a shotgun and when he pulled the trigger, the zombie in front of Alex flew back, its head coming off its shoulders. Every time the sergeant squeezed the trigger on the gun, his belly would jiggle and a zombie was blasted back.
Alex watched him with one thought in his head: I’m going to die. There were too many zombies and not enough men with shotguns. He started backing away. With only a pistol he didn’t think he stood a chance. A second later, it rattled on the pavement as he turned to run. The sergeant caught him.
“Stand your ground!” he roared into Alex’s face.
“Give me your gun and I will!” Alex yelled right back. It was suicide to stand there with only a pistol. Already a dozen officers were screaming with zombies latched onto them, tearing them to pieces with their teeth alone. Those officers with shotguns and M4s were able to hold back the flood of walking corpses, but anyone with only a pistol was already running or dead.
The sergeant hesitated, seeing the truth of the situation around him, but somehow he found the courage to hold out the shotgun. Alex eagerly snatched it and began blasting the walking dead. The shotgun was like a cannon, it thundered and flashed with every pull of the trigger, throwing body parts into the air.
The Undead World (Book 10): The Apocalypse Sacrifice Page 56
