The Apocalyse Outcasts

by Peter Meredith

  This didn’t sit well with anyone. Sadie wanted to go with Neil in spite of the fact she could barely stand. Nico didn’t think anyone should go, but definitely didn’t want Sadie to go until she was better, nor did he want her watched over by a seven-year-old. Jillybean was quiet, however everyone could see what she was thinking: she wasn’t going to be left behind even if she had to teach herself how to drive, something that none of them thought was beyond her.

  “Then we all go,” Neil said after a draining argument. “We’ll give Sadie three days to heal up with this new medicine. In the meantime Nico and I will scrounge. There’s like a million homes and buildings in Philadelphia. We’ll get more guns and more fuel and another car, then we’ll go after Sarah. We’ll find her, hopefully, and see what happens after that. Maybe she’ll be thinking straight by then.”

  Jillybean raised her hand to be called on. When Neil nodded to her she said, “Ipes thinks we’re all jumping on conclusions, that’s what means…well, I’m not really sure what that means. Except, maybe we don’t know if Miss Sarah is really going to go kill some bad army man. Does her letter say anything about the colonel? Or does it just say she doesn’t like you anymore?”

  The air went out of Neil and he couldn’t bring himself to answer. Sadie asked, “Can I read the letter?”

  Like a child, he held it behind his back. “No, I don’t want you to. It doesn’t say anything about the colonel. It just says that she doesn’t love me and never did.”

  Sadie tried to get up, but Nico pushed her gently down. She craned her pale face around the Russian and said, “Neil, that’s not true. I don’t know what’s going on with her now, but she did love you. I know it. She told me all the time how she thought she was lucky to have you.”

  “Then why did she wr-write it?”

  It was something Sadie couldn’t understand. It made no sense whatsoever, though just then, with her fever starting to drain away the last of her energy, deciphering and comprehending motivations was basically beyond her. Heart-broken, Neil wasn’t much better, while Nico, who hardly understood American men, found their women beautiful but baffling in the extreme.

  This left Jillybean to interpret.

  “I have an idea,” she said and then immediately made a face and held her zebra out at arm’s length. “No, I’m not gonna hush up,” she said to Ipes in surprise. After a second she blew out in exasperation and told the adults, “Hold on.”

  She went to the far corner of the room and plopped the round-bottomed zebra there before coming back. “Sorry. Sometimes, Ipes doesn’t know who is the boss of who. He thinks because he’s older in zebra years that I have to listen to him, but I’m older in regular years, that’s what means he gots to do what I say. I think it’s different with mongooses. Don’t they live to be like a hundred? They’re sort of like an owl in that way. Wise and…”

  Neil held up his hand to her, stopping her running mouth with the gesture. “Weren’t you going to tell us something else? About what we were just discussing?”

  “Oh right. My guess why Miss Sarah would say those rotten things was because she knows you guys pretty good. She knows that if she just ran away to go fight the army, you’d follow her. But if you thought that she didn’t love you anymore that you’d let her go.”

  Neil replied with a simple, guarded: “Maybe.”

  Jillybean wasn’t done. “She knows Sadie, too. She knows that Sadie is like a German Shepherd.” Sadie raised an eyebrow at this and Jillybean was quick to add, “A pretty German Shepherd, I mean. But you are loyal to Neil more than to anyone. That’s what means you will think bad thoughts of anyone who thinks bad thoughts of Neil. You see? And you will protect Neil even from himself, which he needs doing sometimes. Miss Sarah also knows Nico. She knows that he will go along with whatever Sadie says.”

  Neil had his mouth open as he listened to the odd pattern of words coming from Jillybean’s mouth. When she was done he jumped in: “So she does love me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I think so,” Jillybean answered, nodding and shrugging simultaneously.

  “But she’s just trying to protect me and all of us, so we don’t get hurt,” Neil said thinking aloud. “That’s good. That’s a relief, except we still need to stop her before she gets herself killed. So I guess our plan is still in place. We leave in three days. Hopefully we can travel faster as a group than she can alone. She can’t have that much gas. She’ll have to forage alone; that’ll slow her up.”

  To this Jillybean said, “You’re still in the corner.”

  “Huh?” Neil asked.

  “It’s just Ipes,” Jillybean explained. “He still thinks we’re jumping on the conclusions. Even though he knows better about talking in timeout he says we still don’t know if Sarah is really travelling to The Island.”

  “You know about The Island?” Sadie asked. The small, fortified island where the colonel ruled was not something any of them spoke of regularly and none had thought it a good subject for a seven-year old.

  “Are you talking to me?” Jillybean wondered. “I know about lots of islands. Australia is an island that’s upside down. There’s another island called Madagascar which they named after a cartoon. But Ipes is the only one of me and him who knows about this other island that you guys think Sarah’s going to.”

  Sadie lacked the energy to deal with Jillybean and closed her eyes. Neil took up the questioning. “Where does Ipes thinks she’s going if not to The Island?”

  After a second she answered, “He doesn’t know.”

  “What’s his guess?” Neil went on relentlessly.

  Jillybean shrugged. “He says he doesn’t have one.”

  This roused Sadie, who cracked an eye to stare accusingly at the stuffed zebra as if it were really alive. “That’s strange. Don’t you guys think that’s strange? I’ve never known that zebra not to have too much to say about anything.”

  “It’s not real,” Neil said in a low tone to Sadie.

  “You know what I mean,” she replied out of the corner of her mouth.

  Jillybean didn’t hear. She was staring at the zebra, intently with her brow furrowed. “I think it’s strange also too. What do you know, Ipes?”

  Neil looked at the stuffed animal. “Well? What does he know?” he demanded, when there was a long silence.

  “He won’t say,” Jillybean replied. “Except he says that Sarah’s not going to The Island. Oh! He’s so in trouble. I am very disappointed in him.”

  “This is weird even for me,” Sadie commented with another seal bark. She thought it was fine that Jillybean had an imaginary playmate, but they were crossing into dangerous territory by pretending Ipes was real. Unfortunately, they needed answers sooner rather than later. “Maybe we are asking the wrong question,” Sadie tried. “Will he tell you why he won’t answer you?”

  “Maybe because he does not know anything and can’t really talk,” Nico suggested. “Maybe little girl is like attention.”

  Neil shook his head at this. “No. It’s because he’s trying to protect Jillybean. I’d like to think he was trying to protect us or Sarah, but it’s Jillybean that he’s really invested in. Ipes didn’t say one word until we started talking about going to The Island. Only then did he start advising us against it.”

  “He says that protecting me is his only job,” Jillybean said, her lips drawn in and her eyes sparking at the zebra. “We’re supposed to be a family, Ipes, and families protect each other. Tell me right now, Mister! How long did you know Sarah was planning on leav…that long! Where is she going? Tell me this instant or so help me, it’ll be a spanking for you.”

  Sadie watched the eerie battle of wills until her eyes started to droop. “You don’t need him, Jillybean,” Sadie told her. “You know everything he knows. You just have to remember it.”

  Jilly scratched the side of her nose and said, “Normally that’s true. Normally, I remember things the second he reminds me of them, but I don’t know this secret. It’s a little
crazy feeling in my head,” she put her fingers in her hair and pulled gently. “It’s like there’s something just on the tip of my tongue; like the memory is just out of reach.”

  “You know that’s not good, right?” Sadie asked.

  “Of course it’s not good,” Jillybean agreed. “That’s why he’s in so much trouble. He should be telling me.”

  Neil suddenly let out a groan. “We’re getting nowhere with this.” He stood and began pacing, thinking. “If I was Sarah, where would I go? Would she go after the colonel for revenge? I wonder. That doesn’t seem like her, not with Eve down…that’s it! Ipes you pain in the ass. Sarah’s going after Eve, isn’t she? You’re trying to keep us from going to New Eden.”

  Jillybean began to nod, slowly, her face troubled by what she was hearing. “Yes, Sarah is going to try to rescue Eve. That’s what Ipes says. He also says sorry.”

  “He should be sorry,” Neil griped. “Making us jump through hoops just to get a question answered.”

  “No,” Jillybean said. “He’s says he’s sorry because Sarah doesn’t think she’s going to live through the attempt, and neither does Ipes.”

  Chapter 9

  Sarah Rivers

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  By the time Ipes confessed what he knew, the house on Clermont Avenue had already been picked over by Sarah and abandoned. Yet, there were many choice items still available. It had been her idea to take as much as she could south in order to bribe or buy her way into New Eden, but guilt over having left Neil and Sadie kept her from taking half as much as she felt she needed.

  There were other houses that she visited later, which filled the gaps. During her scrounging with Nico she had managed to stash quite a few items away when he wasn’t looking. She had a list of addresses memorized, and these she hit in turn, one after another, going methodically along, pausing only when the zombie menace forced her to hide.

  She wasn’t a warrior and, before that day, never had a pretence in that area. She wore the Beretta on her hip and used it reluctantly. On a long string slung diagonally across her back, she carried a hand axe—it was the last thing in the world she wanted to use, at least on a zombie. Frequently, she dreamed of splitting human skulls with it. She had a memorized list of those names as well.

  “Petrovich, Williams, Abraham,” she whispered.

  Her words were quiet, barely slipping from the hollow of her cheeks. Across the street, just next door to a home on her list, was a pair of zombies. They had come stumbling from the back yard when she pulled up and she hadn’t seen them until she had gotten out of the Honda that Nico had brought back a few days before.

  Were they stragglers, or part of a larger horde? Did she dare to make a dash for the house? Or did she try one of crazy Jillybean’s magic marbles. Sometimes the marbles distracted the beasts and sometimes they brought more out of the woodwork. It was a crap shoot, one that Sarah didn’t have time for.

  There was a bounty hunter out there who was probably even then up in some water tower with a high powered rifle. Perhaps he was looking down his scope at her. The thought made the spot between her shoulders twitch, and in homage to her paranoia she looked up to the skyline. The fact that there wasn’t a water tower anywhere in sight didn’t ease her worries in the least. In her mind, perhaps due to the influence of Hollywood, the capability of sharpshooters was exaggerated to a point that was well beyond simple physics and into the realm of the magical.

  She wished she knew how to work a rifle like a Navy Seal. “Petrovich, Williams, Abraham,” she whispered again, picturing herself with a nasty black rifle that could hit a target dead between the eyes from a mile away. “Bam, bam, bam. The lady is a winner. What’s it gonna be? The kewpie doll or the necklace of teeth?”

  Just then she felt slightly ill, because in her mind she wanted the necklace of teeth. Once, she had been the kewpie doll; the prize men had showed off for. What had she ever gotten out of that? A lot of promises, a lot of empty talk about finding the right woman and settling down to start a family, a roll in the sack, and then a bunch of unreturned phone calls. That had been true misogyny, on a national scale.

  Colonel Williams? He wasn’t a misogynist. He was evil, pure and simple and Sarah wanted his teeth to wear on a necklace. She hadn’t known that she wanted such a horrible thing until that moment on the street. It gave her a sick feeling of desire. It was an evil feeling, one that couldn’t be denied, mainly because she did nothing at all to stop it. For a long time she had felt hollow inside, except for the parts that felt rotten and useless that is, but now there was something she could latch onto. She could kill. She had once before and could again, this time with a little more desire.

  Before she could come to grips with this new feeling she stepped out from behind the Honda and lifted the string of the hand axe from across her shoulder. One of the zombies came at her. It was quiet. Strangely the entire world was quiet. No moaning, no wind, no chatter of squirrels or piping of birds, no shifting sounds of her clothes as she rushed at the zombie.

  There was only the axe. She crushed it into the head of the zombie with such force that it sunk in four inches deep before stopping with a jarring sensation that ran right up to her shoulder. The zombie, still in a perfectly soundless state, crumbled to the ground with the axe embedded, pulling it from her grip.

  She gave it a half-hearted tug and distantly she heard the echo of her own voice in her mind as she let out an apathetic, “Shit.”

  A second later, the other zombie was there, reaching for her with long fingers on even longer arms. It had been a man once; tall and maybe even handsome. It still wore the shreds of a suit and on one foot was a Bruno Magli loafer—apparently, he’d been a clotheshorse apparently, once, her type of man. Perhaps he had even been one of the men she had dated, one of the men who had pretended to care, who had pretended to be interested in what she had to say, who had been quite willing to lie his way into her bed.

  As the zombie reached out towards her, there came a point where the evil in her soul intensified like a white fire as she remembered how Cassie had reached for her in the same way. Her dark hands had come at Sarah’s throat and it had felt so natural and easy to kill Cassie. It was as though Sarah had been born to kill her; as though it was her destiny.

  Now, it was the same with the zombie. Its hands reached, and without effort, Sarah took hold of the outer one at the wrist and forced it across its body. The zombie’s momentum changed direction at once. She further complicated its desire to kill her by stepping behind and kicking it in the back of the knee. It went down so easily that the entire sequence of events felt choreographed.

  There was only one question: for the coup de grâce would it be the gun or the knife? In other words, the old Sarah Rivers or the new? The old Sarah didn’t like things messy; she liked them neat. She didn’t care for things that were hard; she liked things that were easy. She didn’t want confrontation; she wanted team building and consensus.

  There was no choice, not really. The knife was hard and messy and it was the epitome of confrontation. A knife was personal in a way a gun could never be—you could feel a man’s dying pulse through the blade of knife. A knife knew evil like nothing else. It was comfortable with death and it bathed in blood like no other tool made by man.

  Sarah didn’t hesitate in making up her mind.

  In a flash of steel the hunting knife cut a line in the morning air as it streaked down to embed itself in the top of the zombie’s cranium. Like the other zombie, it wanted to tumble over leaving her empty-handed, but Sarah wasn’t going to give up this new part of her. She planted a foot on the zombie’s back and, like a modern day King Arthur, withdrew her blade with a flourish.

  She even went so far as to brandish it at the imaginary sniper staring down his imaginary scope and, for just a second, she envied Neil for being vaccinated. He could kill like this all day long. He didn’t have to worry about scratches or bites. He could just kill and kill in any manner he chose
. It all seemed so great for Neil, but then she remembered how he had come to be vaccinated and who’d had to die for it to have happened.

  This cast a pall over her moment and that heady, evil feeling that had flared in her abated, leaving only the hollow and the rot behind.

  Kneeling, she cleaned off her knife and then retrieved her axe. Next she went into the house to the hall closet where she found the six cans of assorted soup and the two boxes of mac-n-cheese she had hidden two weeks earlier. She hefted them into a cardboard box which went into the rear of the Honda and then she whisked out of there, making sure to take a different route out of the neighborhood than the one she had entered from.

  Total time on Third Avenue, even with killing two zombies: one minute and four seconds. If the bounty hunter had spotted her from some far away vantage, he would have an awfully hard time catching up.

  She hit two more houses in the same speedy way: in and out, quick. At the last one she parked the Honda out front, making sure to open the gas can to give it that empty look, and took an hour for lunch, sitting in an upper floor bedroom. She sipped on candle-warmed soup and kept watch.

  If there was a bounty hunter curious over her, he never showed. What that meant, she didn’t know. Had he moved on to another city searching for Sadie and Nico? Or was he just confused at the apparently random movements of the little Honda skipping around the south-west suburbs of Philadelphia.

  “Or maybe he was taking a nap and missed me driving around,” Sarah said to herself. “Or maybe he got eaten by a zombie.”

  There was no way of knowing what was going on. For all she knew there were a dozen bounty hunters running amok in Philly, killing everything that moved, perhaps even each other.