The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8

by Peter Meredith

  Her command just then was: “Grey, this is Mouse. Give us more time.”

  As soon as the words left her mouth, the truck responded, heeling left and then breaking off to the right. In time, it bought them seconds only. In one other aspect, it helped a great deal.

  “They’re pointing the gun forward, now,” Sadie said.

  Jillybean resisted the urge to look. The trucks closed on each other once more and now Grey was forced into the far lane. The grinding of metal came again as the trucks jostled for position, but now there was a new metallic shriek as Grey was pushed against the guard rail.

  “This is it, one way or the other,” Jillybean said. She had the bottles ready and nestled in her backpack, a lighter in one hand, her thumb ready to flick it into life.

  “Get ready, Neil,” she said into the radio. “However many bottles you gots ready will have to be enough.”

  “I have three,” he answered. “Well, two and a half.” His queasiness evident in his voice.

  Once more the silly fantasy gripped her and she said: “All it takes is one. Make it count.” Had she heard that line in a movie or was she just making things up as she went along?

  There were many holes in the turret and she stuck her eye to one and watched the enemy truck grind slowly up “her ship” as she thought of the truck. The course of the battle was seconds from being wrest from her control and, frantically, she burned through the neurons of her mind trying to think of any tiny idea that would gain them any more of an advantage over their enemy.

  “Give the word, Grey,” Jillybean ordered when nothing came. It was difficult to give up even the slightest control, but, in the driver’s seat, he would be the best position to kick off the battle.

  “Grey?” the captain asked, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “Since when do you call me, Grey?”

  “Since now? Ha-ha,” she said. “Sorry about that, Mister Captain Grey, sir.”

  “I was playing,” he answered, and now his voice was hard as if his vocal cords had melded with steel. “Six seconds…five…”

  Jillybean felt the fear of battle sweep her once more. Her hand shook as she flicked the lighter. The diesel’s flame in her eyes was surprisingly bright. She always equated diesel with a darker, dirtier flame, perhaps because of the noxious smell.

  But it was very bright and she leaned back from it lest her fly-away hair catch. Sadie had her hand out and the hand was a rock! She was ready as Grey counted down. At “two” Jillybean handed the first cocktail to her and at one, Sadie threw it.

  Her arm was strong and her aim was exact. The enemy turret was directly across from them, its gun pointed forward, the rocketeer standing behind it, ignoring them completely. They didn’t see Sadie launch the flaming bottle at them in a shallow arc…too shallow of an arc.

  It hit the turret and exploded like a Fourth of July firework. It was bright and shiny and loud, but the two men weren’t hurt at all, the flames roared over metal, not flesh.

  Sadie held out her hand, ready for the next. Jillybean slapped flaming bottle number two into her hand without hesitation and Sadie hurled it even as the gunner on the enemy truck started cranking his gun around to point straight at the teen who stood exposed and vulnerable.

  She threw the bottle, knowing that if she missed she would be dead in a heartbeat. It flew straight and true. The gunner wore a shocked face, his eyes tracking the bottle as it spun in the air directly at him. He did nothing but stare in the two seconds the bottle floated across the twenty feet that separated them. By the time he reacted, the diesel-filled glass was breaking across his gun spraying liquid flame everywhere.

  As the flames engulfed him, he screamed and went wild, turning this way and that, smashing into the sides of the turret and eventually falling through the portal and down into the truck.

  The entire turret was in flames and the man with the AT4 threw it down and climbed out of the turret. Not knowing what else to do, he raised his hands as though he could surrender on the roof of a moving truck.

  “Wait!” Jillybean commanded. Sadie had her hand out for the last bottle, but already the enemy truck was sliding back, its speed dropping. Fearless, Jillybean climbed to the top of the riddled turret and saw that Neil had come through.

  An inferno roared over the front of the enemy truck. Although he hadn’t scored a direct hit on the armored windshield, the engine compartment was engulfed in flame as the diesel ran down the cracks, setting fire to the interior.

  There was a “chuff” sound from the engine, and then a dog’s “bark,” followed by a loud “bang” and then the front of the truck was parallel to them. Impatiently, Sadie snapped her fingers. She wanted the last cocktail and who was Jillybean to deny her?

  The one time goth-girl stood like a hell-spawned Valkyrie with flame in her hand. She hurled it with all the vengeance in her soul, her face set in a hard mask of hatred.

  She had her enemy dialed in and this throw hit the armored cab’s armored “windshield.” Screams erupted from within as the truck shuddered to a halt, flames sweeping over every inch of the cab. Seconds later the fuel tanks caught on fire and men began bailing out of the truck and running for their lives.

  There was a shocked silence in the turret and then Neil asked: “Did we do it? Did we win?”

  Jillybean, captain of the ship, stood to survey her battlefield. As a victory, it was as complete as she could ask. “Yes, we did,” she answered.

  Epilogue

  Sadie’s fingers on her throwing hand were the candles of a birthday cake. Each was alight. Each on fire. Each numb with the completeness of their victory. She held them up in front of her face and gazed for a moment, not quite connecting the flames on her fingers and the screams coming from the enemy truck.

  They were two different things.

  As an afterthought, she waved the fire into smoke, and then completely forgot the flames had ever been there as their truck chugged on, alone, unhindered, unmolested. She stood in the turret, her teeth set, her face grim and terribly stern for one so young. It was a long moment until she realized that the truck was chugging on to freedom, her freedom.

  “I’m free?” she asked, staring around, not seeing anything but a blur of colors and not hearing anything but the tha-dum of the road beneath their wheels. She felt like someone had smacked her upside the head with a bat. Ten minutes before she had been sitting in her stall, leaking tears onto the chains that bound her and wondering if she could wrap them around her neck and choke herself to death.

  Now, she was standing on the top of a dreadnaught, and she was young and free and she was SADIE! She was her own person once again. “Yes!” she cried, stamping her foot on the roof of the truck. “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” She didn’t know who she was screaming at it, but she didn’t much care. She was alive and free.

  She had been saved. Against all odds, she had been saved! She wanted to punch someone or something. She wanted to scream in joy! Sadie walked a circle around the turret, and found the thing to do was laugh. A great belly-laugh came up out of her. It was almost Santa-esque in its depth.

  Jillybean seemed just as stunned as Sadie by the suddenness of their victory. “We won,” Jillybean said, a strange smirk on her face. The smirk became a grin and then she, too was laughing, loud and shrill, a noise that wasn’t completely sane.

  The only sign of the enemy truck was a growing smudge of black smoke far down the road when the laughter finally died down. Jillybean sighed and then blinked as she remembered: “Ipes! I have to tell him we won! If I know him, he’s worried sick.”

  Sadie followed the little girl down the ladder as she chirped, happily: “We won Ipes. I had this cool plan. Remember the Witch? I used the…Ipes? Ipes?”

  She had rooting around in a jumble of stuff at the foot of the ladder but now she was frozen in place. In her hands was the stuffed zebra, only it was missing most of its stuffing. There was a fist-sized hole that went all the way through his round belly. His head hung b
ack and his arms were outstretched and limp.

  It had only been a toy. It had never really been alive and yet, just then it appeared truly dead. Jillybean whispered: “Ipes? Ipes? Ipes? Ipes?” As she repeated the name, she began to shake and twitch as though she were going into a convulsion.

  Sadie grabbed the girl and turned her around. Jillybean’s eyes were going in two different directions. “Aw, shit,” Sadie said, aghast. She had never seen anything like this in her life. “Jillybean! Hey, Jillybean! Look at me. It’s Sadie. There you go, look at me.”

  “Ipes is dead,” Jillybean said, her voice hollow. Her eyes were back in sync, however they seemed to look beyond Sadie and into a bleak future.

  “We can fix him,” Sadie answered. “I-I can sew a bit. Maybe enough to get him back to the Valley. There’s a woman…do you remember Valerie? She can sow him up as good as new.”

  Jillybean gently swayed her head back and forth. At first Sadie thought the rocking truck was causing the motion, then Jillybean said: “I’m not going back to the Valley. They hate me. They-they think I’m c-crazy.” Great tears ran down her cheeks and Sadie didn’t think she had ever seen anything as sad in her life as those blue eyes.

  “You’re not crazy,” Sadie insisted. “And I’ll punch anyone who says so.”

  “I say so,” Jillybean whispered. “Ipes was alive and—and that is crazy to say. I know it. I’ve always known it, and now he’s dead. I can’t hear him in my head. I can’t…” She broke down, falling to her knees and sobbing over the zebra.

  Unbelievably, Sadie found herself crying over this “death” as well. “Please let me try to fix him.”

  Jillybean looked up and her face twisted, going from sad to angry in a blink. “No!” she cried. “Don’t you get it? I want to be normal. I want to be a normal average girl and I c-can’t w-w-with Ipes…” Sadness swept in and mingled with the anger and she cried bitter tears.

  She was still crying when Neil came down the ladder. “Is she okay?” he asked. “Was she injured?”

  “No,” Sadie answered, stepping back and marveling at the little girl as she always did whenever Jillybean showed her near super-human genius. “It’s the opposite. She’s finally healing.”

  While Sadie stayed with Jillybean, Neil and Grey freed the slave-women and to their utter astonishment half of them were so afraid of the possibility of being recaptured that they begged to be allowed to go back with the remaining traders.

  “Now, that’s crazy,” Sadie said to Jillybean. The little girl rewarded Sadie with half a smile.

  The slaves weren’t entirely crazy, however. There were huge bounties placed on their heads and hundreds of people were gunning for them as they turned back west to the Valley. Their adventures were far from over. Still, Captain Grey was a fine leader and a brave man, and Neil was Neil. Sometimes he had the luck of the devil and when he didn’t Sadie was always there to bail him out.

  Jillybean remained quiet through most of these adventures, in fact, she barely spoke at all, and only once to herself. Three days after her rescue, Sadie overheard her say: “You’re not daddy and I won’t listen to anything you say.” The little girl hurried to sit with the ex-slaves after that. She liked to be around them and Sadie knew it was because they didn’t see her as a freak and she did her best not to appear so smart around them.

  On occasion, her intelligence was needed and she still had a few tricks up her sleeves and a number of explosions left in her repertoire. Thanks to her they were able to cross the Mississippi in an inflatable bounce-house and she wowed them with her bicycle-powered battery recharger. And she was generous to a fault. She led them to a gas station in the middle of Missouri where they pumped out almost ten thousand gallons of fuel. She only asked for a few hundred gallons.

  “For Granny Annie,” she explained. They found a tanker for the fuel and sped their way across southern Missouri and into Oklahoma to find the old woman. Jillybean planned to stay with her throughout the winter, and in spring she told them she was going to Scottsbluff, Nebraska.

  Neil begged for her to come to the Valley with them, but she was adamant and when Sadie proclaimed that she would stay with Jillybean in Oklahoma, the little girl wouldn’t hear of it. “You love Mister Neil and Mister, Captain Grey and they love you. The Valley is where you will be happy. You will not be happy babysitting me.”

  “But I’m your big sister.”

  “You’ll also be a big sister to Miss Deanna’s baby. She’s gonna need you more than me. And we’ll see each other again. I plan on visiting, and maybe, when I get bigger, I’ll come live there one day. But I won’t come as Jillybean. I don’t think I can be her anymore.”

  “Then who will you be?”

  Jillybean shrugged. “Maybe Jillian. That’s who I was supposed to be when I got all grode up.”

  “You’ll always be Jillybean to me,” Neil said with a smile and a tear that he quickly wiped away before Grey could see. “Jillybean is a good person and a sweet person, and I love her.”

  Grey reached out and touched the girl’s hair. Taming an errant strand. “I do too.”

  “Maybe if you don’t want to be Jillybean,” Sadie said, “you could be Jillybean Martin. That’s an entirely new person with all the good parts of you and all the good parts of Mister Neil…if he’ll adopt you?” She glanced at Neil, who scowled momentarily.

  “That should not even be a question. Of course I’ll adopt her.” When Jillybean hesitated, he added: “I’ll adopt you even if you don’t come back to the Valley.”

  The little girl nodded, shyly. “Okay. Let’s do that.”

  It was a bittersweet moment as it came just before they dropped Jillybean off with the old lady, and there were more tears. Neil cried openly, possibly because Captain Grey shed a few tears of his own. Sadie gave the little girl one last pinky swear and one last hug and said good bye to Jillybean. She then surprised Jillybean by suddenly sticking out a hand. “Hi, my name is Sadie. What’s yours?”

  The little girl grinned, happily, pumping the hand for all she was worth. “My name is Jillybean Martin. It is nice to meet you Sadie Walcott.”

  “It’s not Sadie Walcott. It’s Sadie Martin, now. I should have the same last name as my sister don’t you think?”

  Jillybean smiled through her tears and for a moment Sadie thought she had gotten through to the little girl and that she would come with them back to the Valley, but Jillybean only kissed her sister’s hand and then let it go. “I’ll see you later, Sis.”

  “Be good,” Sadie answered, trying not to let her disappointment show. “And be smart. And come see us at least for your birthday. When is that again?”

  She knew and Jillybean knew that she knew. “It’s in May. I’m a May-flower, remember.”

  Sadie loved the innocence it took to say those words. The innocence was what made Jillybean perfect. “I’ll never forget,” she said, “As long as you stay a May-flower. Promise?”

  Their fingers locked one last time. “I promise.”

  The End.

  “The End” is another lie! The story continues in book number nine: The Apocalypse Revenge is being written even now! In the meantime—after you write your glowing review on Amazon(thanks BTW)—I really suggest you read: The Apocalypse Crusade.

  In an apocalypse there is definitely a beginning where mistakes are made and the seeds of evil are allowed to sprout and take shape. However, an end is not so certain. Once an Apocalypse occurs not even death is certain. Sometimes death is only the beginning.

  At first light that morning, Dr Lee steps into the Walton facility on the initial day of human trials; she can barely contain her excitement. The labs are brand spanking new and everything is sharp and clean. They've been built to her specifications and are, without a doubt, a scientist's dream. Yet even better than the gleaming instruments is the fact that Walton is where cancer is going to be cured once and for all. It’s where Dr. Lee is going to become world famous…only she doesn’t realize what she’s g
oing to be famous for.

  By midnight of that first day, Walton is a place of fire, of blood and of death, a death that, like the Apocalypse, is seemingly never ending.

  What readers say about The Apocalypse Crusades:

  “DO NOT pick this up until you are ready to commit to an all-night sleep-defying read!”

  “WAY OUT WICKED”

  “…full of suspense and intrigue, love, both innocent and romantic, hate, both blinding and unnatural, non-stop action, and a very real gripping and palpable fear.”

  Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

  A Perfect America

  The Sacrificial Daughter

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Three

  The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1

  An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2

  Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3

  The Punished

  Sprite

  The Blood Lure The Hidden Land Novel 1

  The King’s Trap The Hidden Land Novel 2

  To Ensnare a Queen The Hidden Land Novel 3

  The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

  The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

  The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

  The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

  The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

  The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6

  The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

  The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8

  The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead Book One

  The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead Book Two

  Pen(Novella)

  A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)

  The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)