“We don’t need to go too much further,” Jillybean said. “Do you remember Cairo? Oh wait, neither of you were with us for that part of the adventure. There’s a town up ahead. It’s got lots of cars we can get one and…you know.”
She fell silent, biting her lip.
Neil understood. They had succeeded in rescuing Captain Grey, but they weren’t done yet. There was still more danger ahead and more killing. The thought was depressing, especially since they wouldn’t be able to take a break.
The traders had a fourteen hour head start, which meant Neil would be driving again as soon as they found a car. He had been up already for the last fifty hours and was on the verge of falling asleep right there on deck as the river water began creeping over it.
“We better dock this thing, quick,” he said. “Hey, do we have to take all this stuff with us?” He dreaded the idea of having to move it all once again. He would have to do it alone. Jillybean was too small to help and Grey was still listless—his last few days had to have been ten times worse than what Neil had been through.
She gazed around. “I guess so, you never know what you’ll need, right?”
“But you’re the one with the plan. So, do we need all of this? It’s kind of a pain to lug it around if we don’t need it all.”
“I don’t have a plan,” she said with surprising anger.
Neil put up his hands. “Hey, I’m sorry. It’s just you always have a plan.”
“Not this time and I don’t want to think of one. Mister Neil, sir, I…I want to be normal.” She said it as if it were a bad thing; something that she had been avoiding. “I want to be a normal, real girl.”
Her pain was obvious and yet, Neil didn’t know what to do. He had never been one for military plans and he couldn’t turn to Grey; the morphine and his exhaustion had him nodding off. “Oh, Jillybean, we need you. Sadie needs you. You’re the only one who can cook up a plan on the fly. I bet it would be a good one. You can be a normal girl once this is over, I promise.”
“But it’s never over. You guys made it to Estes where you promised it was safe, but it wasn’t. Trouble followed you there and it will always follow you…unless you hide from it.” Her voice dropped to a whisper: “You have to hide like a mouse until you’re big enough to fight them.”
“Jillybean, sweetheart, we don’t have time for that. We…”
Her sudden glare stopped his lips. “Don’t call me sweetheart. I-I don’t like it. The River King called me that when he was trying to trick me into thinking I was crazy in the head.”
“When did he try…wait, you went on the base, didn’t you? That’s why you were late. And you talked to the River King? And what happened?” She answered by setting her jaw and refusing to speak. He could guess easily enough. “You killed him? Well, I guess that’s good, right? I would have done it. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I’m not ashamed. Why should I be ashamed? That’s what means feeling bad and I don’t feel bad. I feel tired. I just want to be done with all of this and I’m gonna be done with all of this.”
“Of course. Don’t worry, I’ll, uh, I will figure it all out.” Neil looked around at the sinking pontoon at what was left of their supplies. It wasn’t much when he thought about the five armored mega-trucks they’d be facing.
The vehicles were battleships with wheels. Their armor could withstand everything up to .50 caliber machine guns. Even Jillybean’s grenade launcher likely wouldn’t make much of a dent in it. Their self-sealing tires were protected by hanging sheets of chain. They had gun ports front to back and each was topped by a revolving machine gun turret.
They had been built to withstand both zombie and human attacks and three people, no matter how smart or skilled, didn’t stand a chance trying to take them on…unless one of the people was Jillybean and the other Captain Grey.
Neil was the one who didn’t belong. He gazed at the remaining items: two-hundred rounds of ammo, a few grenades, thirty pounds of C4, but only two blasting caps, three helicopter drones, the single AT4 anti-tank rocket, and the nerve gas, the use of which was out of the question.
He supposed that the rocket, small as it was, would be able to take out one of the trucks. And maybe the drones would be able carry enough C4 to take out two others, but that would leave them facing a pair of armored dreadnoughts which had been built to repel attacks. Neil had no idea how to attack them without getting shredded into bloody bits.
“How about you rest while I go get us a vehicle?” he said, steering the pontoon to the nearest dock that jutted out over the river. He made sure to tie the sinking side of the boat fast to the dock to keep it from slipping under the black surface.
Jillybean watched him with dull, sleepy eyes and didn’t say a word, which Neil took to mean he was tying up the boat correctly. Next, he hefted out the battery and a half gallon of gas and placed them on the dock.
“I’ll be right…” he started to say, but the little girl was already asleep.
Chapter 43
Captain Grey
After a great deal of prodding, shaking, and calling his name, Neil managed to wake Captain Grey. The captain looked around without understanding. Jillybean stood on a dock, rubbing her eyes with one hand, while holding Ipes next to her chest with the other. She looked tiny and vulnerable.
Neil looked misshapen; one side of his face was swollen and purple. He said: “Come on. You’re the one thing I can’t carry.”
It was only then that Grey realized the pontoon was empty save for a dark stain on the carpet. Blood, he thought, his mind unable to advance beyond the one word.
“Okay, yeah,” Grey answered and tried to sit up. He cried out and had to hold on to the back of a chair to keep from blacking out. His flesh felt as though it were on fire and it took everything he had not to cry out a second time as he pulled himself up and then climbed onto the dock.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” he said through gritted teeth as Neil helped to steady him.
Neil made a face that Grey assumed was supposed to be a smile. “At least you’re still handsome,” Neil said. “I don’t know what more they can do to my face unless someone takes a cheese grater to it.”
Grey tried to laugh only it hurt too much. Doing anything hurt and doing nothing hurt. He asked for and was given two more capsules of morphine before he crawled into the back seat of a Chevy Suburban and laid down.
It hurt to lie down, it hurt to sit up, it hurt to do anything but sleep and he was soon out cold, leaving everything in Neil’s hands. Jillybean had fallen asleep even before he had. Her eyes had been red, which made the dark circles under them stand out even more.
In spite of the pain, Grey slept for seven hours and woke with the sun blaring straight through the windshield. For a second, the view out the front was a little strange as it swept from forest to the tall grass in the median and then to the road again.
“You okay?” Grey asked, Neil.
“No,” came the soft reply. Neil glanced back and Grey didn’t think he had seen anyone so haggard looking in his life. “I keep falling asleep.”
Grey, who felt immeasurably better, volunteered to drive. As he eased into the front seat, he asked: “Where are we?”
“We just got into Kentucky. The roads are crap, which is good. Those trucks will be going even slower…maybe we’ll be able to catch up to them by this evening.”
To do that meant they would have to drive like maniacs. It meant flooring it whenever possible, whenever the road opened up and the zombies were fewer in number. It meant taking obscene risks on the chance that the trucks were indeed heading straight to New York.
Sadie was doomed if they weren’t. If the traders decided to go in any other direction, there would be no chance of catching them. There were just too many routes to the city. Grey would be forced to set up a very uncertain ambush in the city itself and that sort of firefight, even if they managed to win, would attract zombies by the tens of thousands as well as Yu
ri’s men and they were no joke.
The rumor was that Yuri controlled every avenue into and out of the city. He could close every bridge with just a radio message—and then the hunt would be on.
Grey did not have the strength for that; none of them did, which meant they had to catch the traders that day or the next. “And then what?” Grey muttered. He had seen what they had to work with and it wasn’t much. If he had more and better drones, he would be relatively certain he could perform a rescue, however the ones they had were little more than civilian toys.
They had a poor battery life, could only carry three pounds of explosives and had a max speed of only eighteen miles an hour. For these reasons, they were basically useless.
“Unless I can slow the trucks with the AT4,” he mumbled. He pictured one scenario: they got ahead of the trucks and set up an ambush. Grey would take out the lead truck with the AT4. Jillybean and Neil would then fly the drones directly into the path of the following trucks. Direct hits on the driver’s compartment would stop them.
“And then what?” The drivers had to have ambush protocols in place. They would likely flee and that meant a running battle against two armed and armored trucks. It was a battle they would lose.
“Okay…what if we ambush them where the road is narrow? Me and Neil take out the two lead trucks, while Jillybean takes out the last one. They’ll be trapped…but they’ll still have the advantage in numbers and weaponry. Damn!”
For the next two hours, he racked his brain as he drove at breakneck speeds, weaving in and out of thousands of zombies, stalled cars, downed trees, strange and inexplicable trash including shopping carts, three mattresses, a pile of lamps, and a washing machine.
“Where are we?” Jillybean asked, rubbing her eyes and gazing dully at the jumble of lamps that were piled in the middle of the road. “And what’s that for?” Her hair was more than just fly-away at the moment. It looked like it had exploded off the top of her head.
“The lamps? I don’t have a clue. But I do know we’re in Kentucky, almost to Louisville. Once there we’re going to have to flip a coin to decide which way to go. Northeast towards Cincinnati or a more direct approach straight east towards Lexington. I have a map up here and would love to hear what you think.”
She didn’t reply in any way he expected. “I’m hungry.”
Grey was pleasantly surprised to find that he was too. The night before, along with three liters of IV fluids pumped into his veins, he had downed four water bottles—and now he was hungry; he took this as a good sign.
Still, he wasn’t himself. He had a military ambush to plan and so far, the culmination of each of his plans always ended with the three of them dead and Sadie still in captivity. There was a chance that no plan would work. After all, they had very limited resources and even more limited personnel.
But they did have Jillybean, only he was loathe to ask her for help. It wasn’t right. She had helped, time and again, and she was always the main casualty.
“What’s there to eat?” he asked.
She turned around and bent over the seat, her little bottom sticking up in the air. “Not much. Mister Neil brought enough food for a week. There’s only a few cans of soup left. I know he’s been saving them for me, but you can have some. And I have two cookies left, ‘cept they gotted kinda smushed.”
“Some soup would be nice. Too bad we can’t stop to warm it up.”
Jillybean was just climbing over the seat, going slowly so as not to disturb Neal, who was sleeping in the middle row as Grey said this. She paused and said: “Well…”
She wore a mischievous smile as she climbed into the first row. He liked the smile, on her it was completely natural. “Let’s see what’s in the glove compartment…okay, good.” In a flash, she had a screwdriver twirling in the glove compartment and a minute after that, she pulled out a panel from inside.
“Just need a flashlight. Here we go.” She stuck her head and one arm into the glove compartment for a moment before pulling out again. She grabbed a can of soup and said: “Try not to hit any bumps for a few seconds.”
When she leaned back, she wore a wide grin. “There’s all these black hoses that gets real hot. I wedged the can in between two of them. It should be ready in a few minutes.”
“Thanks, hey, do you want to look at the map and see which way to go?”
Her grin slid down into a frown. “I guess it’s just a map,” she said and glanced at it and then shrugged. “It depends if any of them bridges are still up. If they have to detour all the way up to Madison, then they’ll be going to Cincinnati. If not, then I don’t know. Personally, I’d still go towards Cincinnati. The other way goes right through the apple mountains and they’re awful twisty and slow.”
“Appalachian Mountains,” Grey said, absently gazing at the map. “64 is a pretty big highway, but I don’t remember if it winds like some of those smaller ones. But there’s also fog and snow to consider. Okay, I guess we’ll go to Cincinnati, thanks.”
She replied with a half-hearted: “You’re welcome,” making his eyes narrow. Before he could ask her what was wrong, she said: “You’re going to ask me to help plan the attack on the trucks, but I don’t want to. I want to be a normal seven-year-old girl.”
“I can understand that, except you already are a normal seven-year-old girl. In fact, you’re downright average.”
“Huh?” she said wrinkling her nose in confusion. “I don’t think so. I blowd things up and I killed people. Little girls don’t do that.”
“As far as I know, You’re the only seven-year-old girl left, Jillybean and that means that not only are you average, mathematically speaking, you also set the bar for any girl thinking to turn seven. They will all look to you and your accomplishments and you’ve had many. You defeated the Azael. You saved the Valley. You saved your family from the River King, the weirdos down in New Eden and from Yuri in New York. You are an amazing seven-year-old.”
She grinned a crooked grin, showing a single dimple, and then cocked a shoulder upwards. “I guess I did some stuff.”
“You did. You saved me and I want to thank you for that from the bottom of my heart. And no, you don’t have to plan an attack if you don’t want to. Maybe you can listen to my plans and make some suggestions?”
“I guess,” she answered, less than thrilled by the prospect. He explained his plans and they were met with a frozen smile. “They start off good, I guess.”
He sighed: “But they don’t end very well, I know. My problem is I always end up with two trucks and more men than we can handle. Even if I had…” He was about to say Wilson’s name, but his death was too fresh in his mind. It was so fresh that every time he blinked all he saw was flesh and blood flying.
Grey cleared his throat and went on, “Even if I had a few more trained men, it wouldn’t make a difference. I could take out the turrets, but they’d still rip us apart from their gun ports. They’d have over-lapping fields of fire. Do you remember what that is?”
She nodded unhappily. “That’s when they can shoot you from different angles and there’s no place to hide and you get shotted and die.”
“Yeah, that’s it and that’s my problem. We have blasting caps and enough C4 to take out two of the trucks completely, but the AT4 isn’t strong enough to take out an entire truck, not unless we get lucky.”
“Ipes says we should be smart and not lucky. Luck comes and goes but smarts stays with us. Though sometimes I wish we could get lucky, too. Hey, how fast do those trucks drive?”
He shot her a look. “Why? You going to help me?”
“I can try.” She started her preplanning phase by asking endless questions: How fast do the trucks go? What would their spacing be like while on the road? How thick are the tires and the armor? How many men were in each? And most importantly, how long would the gas in the 4Runner last?
She figured it would make it to Cincinnati, but what then? Scrounging a full tank could take a day or two or even three. For tha
t reason, they had to go through with whatever plan she came up with as soon as possible.
After the questions came the preplanning lunch of soup: nice and warm chicken and stars, which they shared equally. And then Jillybean stared out the window for so long that Grey had to ask: “How’s it coming?”
She kept staring as she asked: “Do crazy people go to heaven? Ipes says they do, but he’s not an expert. He’s only a zebra.”
“You would go to heaven for sure…why do you ask. If you don’t think the plan will work, then we won’t make the attempt.”
“I say it’s fifty-fifty and that’s what means only okay odds. But the bad part is there won’t be anywhere to hide. If we lose, we die.”
Fifty-fifty was much better odds than any of his plans, but he didn’t like the idea of the little girl being exposed to those sorts of odds. “Why don’t you tell what the plan is and we can go from there?”
“Well, first I need to know if you’re afraid of heights like Mister Neil, cuz this plan goes outside the window if you are.”
“Heights? Jillybean, you know those drones only carry so much weight and we don’t have time to make life size ones and…” He stopped as he noted that she was looking at him as if he were crazy. “No, I’m not afraid of heights. Why? We’re not going to attack the trucks from the air, are we?”
Her look turned to one of puzzlement. “Your question is confusing. If I say no, that’ll mean that we aren’t attacking from the air, right?” He nodded and she said: “Then my answer is yes, from the air is the only way.”
Chapter 44
Jillybean
Of course, she knew drones couldn’t carry a person—well she could make one that did, especially a person of her weight and weight was really the largest factor when it came to travel by air. But there was no time for that sort of thing. There had barely been time for their one stop to get rope and more cigarette lighters.
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