“So, what I did was okay?” He told her: Absolutely and then begged for her to get her tail in gear before any other bandits came. With a final glance back at the burning truck, she stuck the car in drive and headed due west.
The KIA smelled of spent gunpowder and so she rolled down the window and that was fine for a few minutes until the wind whistling past turned into a haunting scream that was ugly…and familiar.
“It’s not such a bad smell,” she reasoned and rolled the window up. Not long after, the flames disappeared behind the curve of the earth and she felt immediate relief.
When the sun came up and the road began to exude steam as the frozen dew melted, Jillybean began to look for a place to turn off and hide for the day. She was tired right down to the bone and yet it was an hour of dangerous daylight driving before she found a turnoff that led to something greater than a lonely little homestead where the Kia would stand out.
The road was laid out straight and true, heading exactly northward and ended at a dilapidated little town that still bore the stench of cow, the chemical eye-irritating odor of tannins and the particular dusty scent of ground hooves.
Jillybean passed four different “mass-processors” of cows without quite understanding what she was seeing. They didn’t register as offensive in anyway until she reached a penned off area that was simply carpeted in bones and moldering cowhide.
She guessed at what had happened: the monsters came, the people ran off and the cows were left to starve to death. “That’s awful sad,” Jillybean said, not realizing that the cows had been doomed no matter what.
The actual town was just upwind of the processing plants and she had to steer the KIA through an area where a hundred evil eyes could be watching her from the shadows—she held onto her “bomb shooter” as she drove. The grip had a memory that wanted to run up her hand and on into her body, but she shut it down.
“Find us a spot, Ipes,” she said through gritted teeth. There was a reason why she wasn’t letting herself think about the burning truck and she trusted that it would be a doozy. “I gotta protect my brain,” she said. “Something bad happened…something bad always happens.”
And why dwell on the bad? Ipes asked. I say from now on we only concern ourselves with the good things in our lives. We have our health, we have most of a plate of cookies, and we have the open road.
Just then, the road dead-ended at a trailer park. Well, tonight we’ll have an open road. Careful, there’s a monster in that trailer.
Even though the mobile home in question looked as though it had been torn in two, and had a gaping hole in one end, a monster stood at a bedroom window scraping at the glass as Jillybean passed.
As far as monsters went, it seemed like a very weak one. It was small and skinny and she guessed that it had been a sixth-grader before it had been turned into a monster. “That’s awful sad, too,” she said. “I wonder if it lived there.”
Hey! We’re supposed to be concentrating on the positive. When you see a monster in a house, then you say: look it’s come home. How nice. And look at these trailers, they’re so cozy that they’ll be a snap to heat. Now you try it.
Jillybean looked down the rows of trailers, each one flimsy and weak, each one with their thin, aluminum doors hanging open and most with their single pane front windows smashed inwards and drapes hanging out. There was trash scattered everywhere: old toys, rags of clothes, televisions with their screens shattered, shoes, though never a full set.
And bones. There were plenty of bones.
“Uh,” Jillybean stammered, gazing around at the mess. “The positive thing about this place is that, uh, there isn’t a lot of monsters here?”
Yes, exactly! And there’s no bad guys here, either. It’s just a little out of the way spot that should be perfect to spend the day in. At that moment, they ran over a glass milk bottle which shattered, sending shards into the front right tire which popped with a sound that was part bang, part hiss. Jillybean groaned and glared at Ipes as if it were his fault. And isn’t it good that we only popped one tire? he asked.
“Sure, I guess,” the little girl said as she got out to inspect the damage, which was basically absolute. The tire was ruined and the spare was under a trunk full of heavy supplies. She stared at the popped tire with heavily lidded eyes. “I’ll fix it first thing when I get up,” she said. “That’s what means I can’t keep my eyes open.”
You’ll do no such thing. You know the ‘what ifs’ same as I do. What if bad guys come or monsters or a flood or a flood of monsters? You will fix it now and the positive thing about that is…
He hesitated for so long to come up with something positive that the little girl balled her fists on her skinny hips and asked: “What? What could possibly be positive about changing a tire when I’m this exhausted?”
Easy. You’ll be so tired that you’ll fall right to sleep the second your head hits the pillow.
“That is good, I suppose,” she said without any enthusiasm. She knew she couldn’t let the tire go unchanged, however it was such a big job for a little girl that she wanted to just find a different car, transfer her belongings, siphon the gas, jump start it, and let the KIA rust away with the rest of the trailer park.
That seems like a lot of work, as well, and where would you get this ‘other’ car? He waved a hoof around. There were only two cars in sight and both of them sat on sets of flat tires.
A long sigh escaped her as she went around to the back to begin unloading her belongings. She cleared enough space to unearth the tire iron and discovered that she was too weak to loosen the lug-nuts. It really wasn’t a surprise.
She tried standing on one side of the four-pronged tire iron, but her fifty-three pounds wasn’t enough to budge the lug-nut.
Yay, we get to use our minds to overcome a problem, Ipes declared with feigned enthusiasm. Jillybean only glared at him as she went to the trunk once more.
Even as tired and cranky as she was, the problem of frozen lug-nuts wasn’t much of a problem for her. Grunting, she hauled out the car’s jack and brought it to the tire, but didn’t set it under the car as it was designed. Instead she put it under the right side of the tire iron and began cranking the handle, transferring her energy, little by little, into the jack.
Gradually, the jack’s load bearing platform went up and as it did, one end of the tire iron did as well, turning and loosening the lug-nut. She performed the same action on the other nuts and, in no time, they were off the tire.
Next, since the spare tire was far too heavy for her scrawny arms to lift, she levered it out of its nook in the trunk, using two broom handles she had taped together side-by-side.
There were more of these sorts of simple mechanical problems to be overcome before she had the spare in place, but they didn’t faze her in the least. She met each obstacle with a look of concentration and overcame each with a yawn. What would have stopped most children and many adults wasn’t even child’s play for her.
“Are you happy, now,” she asked Ipes, once the tire was changed and the car hidden away behind the mobile home she was planning on staying in for the night. She had chosen it because it was stuck in the corner of the lot, backing up to a scrubby little ravine.
Between the mobile home she had chosen and the main street that ran through town, she had set up two different “alarms.” Both were practically invisible: thin aluminum wire stretched across the road, holding anchoring stakes in place. The stakes were attached to saplings which Jillybean had bent far over, using rope attached to the KIA’s bumper instead of her own puny strength. The branches of the trees were strung with pots and pans.
In the still air, the sound of the pans would be heard for miles. Even with these precautions, Jillybean slept as if on her own hair trigger, ready to dart away along one of two different preplanned escape routes from the trailer.
She was as prepared for danger as she could be, however danger stalked her even in her dreams. The day wore away with her tossing and tur
ning, reliving a long-running dream over and over again.
In it, she was back in the KIA, her hands slick on the wheel, her eyes nervously darting to the rear-view mirror every other second as the headlights drew closer and closer.
“What do I do?” she asked Ipes, her voice strangely low and slow, her words elongated, each symbol stretched out like a record player turning at its slowest speed.
Close your eyes, he answered. Don’t watch what they do to you. Slip away, slip away, slip away to somewhere nice. Slip away to the picnic. Do you remember the picnic?
Of course she remembered the picnic: her daddy throwing the frisbee that seemed to float in the air forever, just out of reach of her outstretched hands; the wicker basket filled with food: sandwiches of every description, bags of Pringles, and Lays, and Doritos and more and more and more; the Golden Retriever that ran about, barking and swatting Jillybean with a tail as hard as a tree branch.
And her mommy sitting on a blue blanket. You’re a May-flower, Jillian, she said, and there’s nothing prettier than a May-flower.
Jillybean remembered the picnic. Her eyes filled with tears as she remembered it—but it was the past. It was a glorious past, but it was a ghost to her, haunting and filled with sadness.
Angrily, she swiped her eyes with her sleeve. “No!” she hissed, savagely. “I am a May-flower!” It came out as a defiant scream, silencing the zebra, making him freeze, causing him to stare out at nothing with blank bead-eyes. “May-flowers bloom, Ipes, they don’t close their eyes and pretend nothing is happening.”
In the dream, Ipes sat so still it was as if he were part of the seat. He didn’t budge when a harsh light transfixed the KIA. The truck racing up behind them had a spotlight that sent forty-thousand candles blasting into the night.
To look back was to be momentarily blinded. Jillybean tried it only once and when she looked forward again, all she saw were orange blobs dancing all over the road. She wanted to fixate on them and watch them as they wobbled and stretched in slow-motion like the goo inside a lava lamp. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t ignore the road rushing under her wheels.
There were things in the road: tumbleweeds and trash and monsters and odds and ends of people’s lives. In the dream, she saw each in a way she hadn’t in real life. In real life, the things in the road were there to be dodged, in the dream they were there to dawdle over so she could put off what really mattered.
Pull over, bitch!
The spotlight poured over the KIA and there was no hiding the fact that she was alone. A lone girl whose hair waved and rippled in the screaming wind. They thought she was a woman. She sat high on her pillows and her hair was long and flowing and beautiful.
They thought she was a woman, an adult, but it didn’t matter to them. She was alone, girl or not, woman or not, she was all alone. She was easy pickings. She was their prey.
The wind blew her hair back because she had decided.
The wind blew her hair back because she had purposely lowered the window, just as she had purposely picked up the M79 grenade-launcher. “The bomb-shooter,” she mumbled in her sleep.
It seemed no bigger and no more dangerous than a toy, except that it was heavy. There was weight to it and heft. The heft made it serious. In the dream, it was very heavy and very important in her small hands. It was the tool of death.
A man screamed at her, his words swept away by the wind, but his tone came across all the same. He wanted her to stop. He wanted her to give up. He wanted her to close her eyes and think of a long-ago picnic so that he could do things to her. There were others in the truck with him and they wanted that as well.
They pulled alongside of the speeding KIA, guns aimed but mouths agape. They saw she was just a child—but did that matter? Yes. But only for all of a second. They saw she was a child and the last embers of civilization within them caused them to hesitate, but then they shrugged. They didn’t care.
To them she was a thing to be used and a thing to be sold. She wasn’t a person in their eyes.
They screamed at her to pull over and blustered with their weapons and their eyes grew huge as ping-pong balls when she answered by jutting the M79 out the window, like a child’s version of a cannon.
Child’s version or not, it was deadly when she gave them a broadside. In real life, she had expected the weapon to explode in a fury of fire and light as it shot its bomb, but it made only a muted foomp sound.
The effects, however, were out of proportion to the sound. The grill of the truck exploded, lighting up the night, and sending the vehicle spinning, at first, and then tumbling in the next second.
It rolled, glass flying, metal bouncing, flames spouting, men screaming. Mesmerized, the dream version of Jillybean slammed on the breaks of the KIA, her eyes huge in her face as she watched in the side view mirror as the truck tumbled over and over. When it finally stopped, it lay on its side burning furiously.
She stared for over a minute until Ipes said: You know, there could be survivors.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice sounding even more like a little kid’s than usual. She felt tiny as she slid out of the car and made her way with faltering steps to the wreckage. Someone was screaming. It had started as a moan and had progressed in volume.
There was a man in the truck, hitting a door with a weak fist as he screamed. He was pinned. The front seats were smushed in on him, trapping him. “Help me!” he screamed to Jillybean when he saw her.
She saw that the KIA’s jack, quickly applied, could have given him enough wiggle room to slip out—but then what? Why would she want to help this man? “Will he suddenly be like the lion with the thorn in his paw from Aesop’s fables and become my friend?” she asked herself. “Or will he grab me the second he is free?”
“Help me!” he screamed again, reaching with one hand toward her. “The fire…please!”
As if it weren’t there, she ignored the hand and watched as the fingers curled in, like claws. “He might become my friend, but he will still be a lion,” she concluded, “and a lion can’t change its spots.” She realized that if she saved him, he might not be dangerous to her, but he would still be dangerous to everyone else.
“Sorry,” she said and moved away. Behind her, his screams rose in fury and then went even higher as the fire crept towards him. She ignored him, knowing that the fire would take care of him for her.
She walked on, more careful now. There was another lion and this one was free.
A man with a mangled arm and blood gushing down the side of his head was slowly moving through the brush on the side of the road. He couldn’t crawl, he could only move by kicking out with one leg. His goal: an M16 was seven feet away.
Jillybean walked over to the gun and stood on its sling. The man glared as he asked in a slurry voice: “What are you looking at?”
“A lion,” she said, raising the .38 and peering down its stubby barrel. The questions: when had she picked up the gun and why had she picked it up, never crossed her mind. She killed the man with one pull of the trigger…and then she moved onto the next.
A third lion lay in the grass, this one moaning and just trying to sit up. “Lion,” she said, pulling the trigger once more. In the dream, the echo of the gun went on and on, slowly turning into strange metallic crashes that jarred her awake.
The alarms! Ipes cried.
She sat straight up in the bed she had commandeered. “I hear them,” Jillybean replied, as she focused her hearing beyond the frantic zebra and the sound of the pans banging against each other. Strangely, she didn’t hear a car as she expected.
As silent as an adder on the hunt, she slid out of bed, going to the window. There wasn’t anything to see or hear beyond the rustle of paper kicked up by a light wind. “Wait here,” she whispered to Ipes before creeping outside into the late afternoon.
The wind was crisp on her cheeks. It was a silent wind.
It did not carry on it the sound of cars or monsters or sneaking feet, not even Jillybean’s
. She made no noise whatsoever as she eased through the trailer park. The closer of her two alarms was still set. The further of the two had been triggered, but not by the hand of man. She came up close and saw there were deer tracks near it.
“And look, deer poop,” she remarked. It was a moment before she remembered that Ipes was back in the mobile home. “Oh, right,” she said, embarrassed.
She walked directly back to the mobile home and stood for a moment outside of it, staring at the trash, wondering if she should have picked up her own. The bodies she had left behind would have sat in the sun all day, they would have been picked over by vultures and ugly animals.
“They deserved it,” she said, but she wasn’t so certain. They had been bad, that was true, but did they deserve to die? And what about those bad men back at Fort Leonard Wood? She wanted to say yes, they deserved their punishment and yet her mind had blanked out the killings.
That suggested that they were wrong or she was wrong or something was wrong with her. “Probably something is wrong with me,” she decided. There was always something wrong with her.
Chapter 21
Jillybean
She drove into an eye-watering, but beautiful sunset. It wasn’t smart to drive while it was still light out and yet the sun drew her on.
It was the greatest of fires and she hoped that the light of it would burn out the image of the truck and the man trapped within it. Jillybean tried to shove the memories deep inside of her as if her mind was a trashcan and she was stomping down on an overflowing milk jug that kept spilling out.
Enduring the pain of the sun was in vain. The memories were still with her when the night extinguished the sun.
Ipes tried his best to get her to think about something else. He laughed and joked and sang and kept offering her cookies she didn’t feel she deserved. Depression had her driving mechanically, which, it turned out, wasn’t really any worse than her normal driving.
Two hours into the drive, they passed a truck-stop, sitting out in the middle of nowhere. She slowed down as they passed it, both her and Ipes staring out the window at the main building.
The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8 Page 20
