The Apocalyse Outcasts

by Peter Meredith

  The group was still using the Dodge Ram that Nico had stolen from Yuri, which now seemed to Neil like a huge mistake. Thankfully, the truck was with Sarah and Nico and they had not come back from foraging yet. Still, this did not help him answer the man’s question. It made no sense for the pair to be without a car. “Our car? It’s, uh, out front. It’s uh a...”

  “It’s the white car,” Jillybean said when Neil began to flap his lips uselessly. “It’s a Toyota. I think that’s what it’s called.”

  “Yeah. The Toyota is ours,” Neil said in a rush, thankful that a seven-year-old was leading him through the interrogation.

  Behind him, Neil heard the bounty hunter give a short, bark of laughter. He spun Neil around and jabbed his M4 up under his chin. “You mean the white Toyota with its gas cap hanging out? Is that the Toyota you’re talking about?”

  Neil tried to swallow, but the gun was so hard against his throat that he could only make a gurgling sound. He opted for a little wiggling nod.

  Jillybean was watching what was happening, her big eyes wide in her mud-stained face, yet her voice was exceedingly calm. “Someone took the gas,” she said. “A stealer-man is what Ipes says.”

  The gun came down from Neil’s neck as the bounty hunter appraised Jillybean closer. “Ipes said that? Interesting.” He then stuck out his grease-painted hand and asked, “May I?”

  Reluctantly, Jillybean handed over the zebra.

  With a hard look at Ipes, the man said, “I got a problem here, little girl. You and this guy are telling me different stories.”

  “I don’t think we are,” she replied.

  “You are with your eyes,” the man explained. “His eyes are telling me there’s someone upstairs, and, since the car out front isn’t yours, that’s telling me you have friends who have gone somewhere. But you, Jillybean seem much more truthful. All except your eyes...they’re guarded.”

  “That’s what means careful, right?”

  “Did Ipes tell you that?” When she nodded, he nearly smiled. Just the edge of one of his lips cracked upward. “Ipes clearly means a lot to you, and I’m betting you don’t want to see him get hurt.”

  She shook her head slowly, fear settling on her face like a shadow. “I don’t.”

  “That’s what I thought. Now tell me the truth. Is there anyone upstairs?” As he asked this he very slowly began twisting the zebra’s head around on his thin shoulders.

  With a cry, Jillybean rushed forward, only to be pushed roughly down to the linoleum by the bounty hunter. Neil grabbed her and held her behind him. “There’s no one here, but us!” he yelled, hitting the peak of his courage.

  The man glared so fiercely that Neil took a step back. The hunter then gazed down at Jillybean and said, “I’m just trying to keep anyone from getting hurt unnecessarily. There’s someone up there and when they try to get all heroic I’m going to start shooting. You don’t want Mister Sweater Vest here to get hurt do you?”

  “No,” she said in a breathy whisper.

  “And you don’t want Ipes to get hurt either I bet, so tell me, who’s up there? Is it Sadie?” As he asked he started to twist the zebra’s head around again.

  Neil thought for sure Jillybean would crack and he prepared to launch himself on the bounty hunter, but the little girl held firm. “There’s nobody,” she whispered.

  “Who’s out with the truck?” The bounty hunter demanded, twisting harder, and now a seam opened up at Ipes’ shoulder. Neil held the trembling girl back.

  “We only have the Toyota. The keys are hanging by the door.” Jillybean spoke as if from far away, or maybe from a dream. It reminded Neil of the time she had saved him on the ferry. Even threatened with a gun as he was, looking at Jillybean was unnerving to Neil. It was as if he were holding a possessed child.

  The twist on the zebra’s neck lessened by degrees until the man held the stuffed animal in only one hand. Ipes looked dead; like a turkey with its neck wrung.

  How Jillybean could even stand, Neil didn’t know. She trembled from head to toe and now her eyes rained tears. With callous indifference, the bounty hunter tossed her the zebra. “For your sake, you had better be telling the truth. We’re going upstairs and if there are any surprises I’m going to shoot first and not bother with any questions. Do you understand?”

  Jillybean nodded. Neil looked horrified, thinking about what was going to happen when they got up to the second floor and found Sadie probably crouched in her closet, hiding. The bounty hunter pushed them on with the barrel of his M4.

  The seven-year-old went first, cradling Ipes like he was a murdered infant. Then came Neil, trying to fight the urge to pee, and then came the hunter. He was slow and methodical. The gun shoved into Neil’s spine never budged even an inch. There wouldn’t be a chance at getting the jump on him.

  The first room on the second floor was pink with flowers on the walls and a unicorn on the ceiling. It had been Jillybean’s back when she had lived there with her family. Now it was the room Sadie shared with Nico. Jillybean walked in with her chin cast down in sadness, but also with her eyes playing about alertly—the bed was rumpled but empty.

  “This your room?” the bounty hunter asked Jillybean. Though she now slept in the attic in a nest of pillows and blankets and stuffed animals, the girl nodded, semi-lying with the motion.

  There were only two places to hide in the small room: under the bed and in the closet. Sadie was in neither, which was a shock to Neil. She must have heard them talking and had hidden, but where? If anyone knew, it was Jillybean. The little girl loved hide-and-seek and, due to her size, she was exceptional at the game. He tried to catch her eye to get some sort of hint, however she refused to look his way. Instead she followed the man’s instructions. He had her pull down the bedspread, swish the clothes back and forth in the closet, and open the curtains.

  When the man was satisfied, they moved on to the room Neil shared with Sarah. “This is my room,” Neil said. Unlike Sadie’s room, which was clearly a little girl’s room, this room was obviously a guest room. Thanks to Neil’s fickle and fastidious ways it barely looked lived in, something that the bounty hunter remarked upon.

  “Just the two of you and you choose this room?” he asked. “Not the master bedroom? I find that hard to believe.” As proof, Neil went to the dresser and pulled out a sweater vest that was almost identical to the one he was wearing. “The closet, open it slowly,” the man demanded.

  Neil did, fearing that this was where Sadie was hiding. She wasn’t there. Nor was she under the bed, in the hall closet, or in the hall bathroom. They all turned to the master bedroom at the end of the hall. The hunter took a firmer grip of his weapon and asked, “Who sleeps in there?”

  “My mom,” Jillybean replied in an empty way, as though she was beyond caring about anything. She opened the door to show him. This was the darkest room. Although it was a bright afternoon, the curtains were drawn, and everything seemed grey and stale and lifeless, especially the long human-shaped bulge under the covers.

  The bounty hunter finally trained the bore of his weapon away from Neil’s spine. “Come on out, nice and easy,” he said, speaking to the lump. It didn’t respond, nor would it ever.

  As tired and hurt and exhausted as Neil’s group had been when they fled from New York, no one had the stomach or the heart to move Jillybean’s mom, and so she had stayed, tucked up in her bed. No one gave her much thought, except for Jillybean, who would sit outside the door talking to her quietly in the evenings before bed.

  “She’s dead, Mister,” Jillybean told the man. “But don’t shoot her. She’s not a monster. She’s just normal dead.” The little girl went to the bed and touched the edge of the top quilt. “She got sick and then went to heaven.”

  “Really?” the man asked dryly. “I’m sure. Now, stand back.”

  Jillybean walked away from the bed and stood next to the closet door which had been flung back. Neil was pushed into the room to stand next to the dresser and there h
e practically jumped. Sadie, looking frail and sick, was flat against the wall, barely hidden by the chin-high dresser. Her tremulous breath came out of her soft and low, with a phlegmy rumble to it like a cat’s purr.

  Neil tried to hide her with his body, but knew that if the bounty hunter took two more steps into the room, nothing would stop him from seeing his target. At that moment, Neil regretted his warm sweater vest and comfortable Crocs. They made him feel soft and weak, especially in contrast to the hunter who was lean, tough, and merciless. Neil wished he could trade in his Crocs for combat boots and war paint, and that he had done something, anything to prepare for this moment. He couldn’t fight a lick. But he would try.

  And so would Jillybean.

  The little girl had seen Sadie and hadn’t reacted at all other than to go stand by the closet door. Now, Neil could see her leaning forward, readying herself to attack. She had done it before. According to Ram, Jillybean, using only a shirt, had attacked a stranger wielding a shotgun.

  This would be different, Neil was sure. This would be a blood bath.

  “No sudden moves,” the bounty hunter warned the room in general. He stepped forward and prodded the corpse in the bed with his gun. “Hey. Let’s go. Get up.”

  “She can’t,” Jillybean said. “She’s dead. Want me to show you?”

  “Yeah, pull back the covers nice and easy.”

  Jillybean pulled back the many blankets and revealed the long dead body of her mother. “She used to be prettier,” Jillybean said sadly. “She was the prettiest mommy in the whole world.”

  The man only grunted at this.

  “I told you this Sadie person wasn’t here,” Neil said. “See? Look under the bed and in the closet.”

  When he realized that if the hunter checked the closet himself he was sure to see Sadie, Neil practically jumped to the closet and swung the hanging clothes back and forth. He then showed the bounty hunter that no one was behind the closet door either.

  “See?”

  This time the man didn’t even grunt. Slowly he went down to one knee and checked beneath the bed. When he stood up, his expression was a mixture of confusion and disappointment.

  “Downstairs,” he growled.

  Jillybean paused to cover her mother, taking her time and tucking in the edges of the blankets as they had been. Neil wanted out of that room very badly. The phlegm noise Sadie was making seemed to be picking up and it triggered an emphatic response in him. Desperately, he wanted to clear his throat and cough, but was afraid that would trigger the same desire in Sadie.

  Only when they were safely downstairs did he start coughing loudly. This had the bounty hunter eyeing him. “I’m not trying to signal anyone, honest,” Neil said. “It was the smell.”

  Again a grunt from the hunter was all Neil received.

  They slowly made their way through the rest of the house, finishing up in the kitchen where Neil’s family kept their meager supplies. It added up to a few cans of food, a couple of candles and lighters, two guns, and the greatest item of value they possessed: the sixty-odd rounds of ammo that went with the guns.

  The hunter picked over the pile and made a noise of disgust. “I don’t know what to think. Half of what I see tells me you’re lying, but the other half tells me that it’s just the two of you living here.”

  Neil shrugged, not knowing what to say. He was sure that if he did say something it would only come out sounding like a lie.

  Jillybean wasn’t hampered in that regard, or any regard, judging by what she said next. “You could stay for dinner. Ipes hates you and so do I, but if you think we’re lying then that’s the best way to tell. Do you have any good food? We don’t. All we have is this right here and pine-needle soup. It’s on the back porch. I can get it if you want some.”

  This suggestion so shocked Neil that he knew his mouth had flapped open and his eyes had gone wide, but try as he might he couldn’t seem to change his expression. There was no doubt the bounty hunter saw the look and read all sorts of meaning into it, however, Jillybean was so earnest in her invitation that the man couldn’t help but be even more confused.

  He stood for nearly a minute before making up his mind. “No. I can’t stay.”

  Neil was a second away from breathing a sigh of relief, except the man started pocketing their ammo. He even unloaded the guns. “You can’t leave us defenseless,” Neil said. “We need that ammunition.”

  “So do I,” was all the man said. After giving only a single glance to the remaining cans of food, he left without bothering to take any.

  Stunned, Neil and Jillybean watched from the window as the man went up the walkway and then out onto the street, heading back the way he had come. When he was well up the block, Neil finally turned on Jillybean. “Why on earth did you ask him to stay for dinner?”

  She was on her knees examining the extent of Ipes’ injuries and didn’t look up to answer. “I asked him to stay so he would go. Ipes says it’s called reverse sy-ken-olgy, or something like that.” She then took a shaky breath and said, “Look at poor Ipes. He’s really, really hurt. We have to fix him.”

  “Sarah can help him,” Neil said. “She can sew. It’s going to be ok, Jillybean. Ipes needs to hold on until she comes home.” Neil could sew as well, but just then he was experiencing such a bad case of the shakes that he was sure he would end up sewing Ipes’ ear to his hoof.

  Sadie appeared at the top of the stairs wearing her heaviest coat. It was deep black, making her face seem translucent in contrast. “Sarah can’t come home,” she said. “We’ve been too lax or someone saw us coming and going in the truck. If she and Nico come back, that bounty hunter will follow them right back here. You see? I gotta go out to the highway and stop them.”

  “No, I’ll do it,” Neil said. “You’re too sick. Now get back in bed.”

  “Uh-uh,” Sadie replied shaking her head. This caused her to stagger, and she clutched the railing for support. “You have to be here just in case that guy comes back. So that means I gotta go.”

  “No,” Neil said. He was about to go on, but Jillybean raised her hand.

  “Ipes says if one of us goes, we all have to go. We can’t risk getting separated. And besides, this house is no longer safe.”

  Chapter 5

  Sadie

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  As was so frequent, when the zebra wasn’t being a smartass, they took his suggestion. In their haste to leave, almost everything was abandoned. Ipes, in spite of his injuries, was vocal in his insistence that they leave within the minute. Through Jillybean, he explained that the man was more than likely heading back to The Sledding Hill, and from its peak he would be able see nearly their entire neighborhood, meaning he would see them if they didn’t hurry.

  Since there was little in the house that she was attached to, Sadie was at the front door within the zebra’s time frame. Neil, who couldn’t leave without his axe, and a change of shoes, and Sarah’s make-up bag, and the rest of the food, was there a minute later, huffing and puffing.

  A minute for Jillybean turned out to be an impossible time frame. Ipes had to be placed into a shoebox to keep him safe. Her magic marbles had to be bagged. Her dollhouse had to be lingered over and her tiny fingers had to trace its gabled roof once more, and finally her mother had to be kissed one last time.

  The little girl came downstairs, much changed. She alternated between tears and a grim silence that was disturbing to see in such an angel-faced little thing.

  “Not the front door,” Jillybean said. “It will be watched for sure. We can go out the back. There’s a break in the fence we can use to get to the next street over.”

  She led the way, stopping only a second to look up at the sky. The rain that had been threatening had finally come, though thankfully it was barely above a misting. No one paid too much attention to it, except Sadie who, almost immediately felt her lungs swell up and it seemed as though she were trying to breathe through a pair of sponges.

 
; Jillybean took no notice. She was fully focused on escape and evade. She had them scampering around the edge of the yard to keep as much cover as she could between them and the hill. At the opening in the fence they crouched behind an overgrown rose bush as each wiggled into the next yard. Neil had to shrug off the backpack he was carrying, and Sadie had to pull off her coat in order to slip through.

  She lay in the tall grass on the other side, coughing. “Take your medicine,” Neil told her. “It’s after four.”

  Sadie, who could only suppress her cough by breathing through her shirt, nodded to the suggestion, the useless suggestion, in her eyes. The penicillin wasn’t cutting it. She had been taking it for a month now and at best it mitigated the worst of her symptoms. Her cough persisted, her fever lingered, and the sensation that there was a little less of her everyday continued unabated. She felt as thin and weak as a fog on a summer’s morning, and she knew it was only a matter of time before the antibiotics failed completely and the pneumonia-driven fever would come on full force and burn the last of her away.

  “We have to hurry,” Jillybean pressed, as Sadie lethargically dug through her pack for her pills. “If he isn’t already, the bad man will be up at the top of the hill anytime, and if he has those bino-thingy’s to see through, he’ll catch us for certain.”

  Once Sadie had dry-swallowed two of her pills, they hurried through the neighbor’s yard and then to the street beyond. Jillybean pushed them on as fast as Sadie could go. Unfortunately they were seen by a small horde of about forty zombies. From all around the neighborhood, they came at the trio, attracted by the human movement.

  “We’ve got to get off the street,” Neil said, looking with concern at Sadie who was swaying in place. “Here, this house looks sturdy. We can hole up…”

  “No,” Jillybean said. She looked hard and stern like an army sergeant, in other words not at all like herself. Sadie didn’t like the sudden change, it was very unnerving. “We can’t stop,” Jillybean said. “The situation has changed. Although we probably haven’t been seen, Ipes is sure the bad man has noted all the monsters. He’s smart, he’ll know humans are around here and he’ll come investigate. If we hide, we’ll be trapped.”