A groan escaped Ram as his hands came free. He swung them about trying to regain circulation but Jillybean’s potty-dance was too insistent. “Follow me,” he told her, before opening the metal door and darting out into the darkening afternoon. The clouds hung low and heavy. When they finally broke it would be a doosy of a storm.
Ram took the little girl up two flights of stairs and then found an apartment that was quiet. “Hold Ipes, will you?” she asked and did not wait for an answer. She shoved the zebra into his arms and then went into the bathroom. After a minute of pitiful groaning she called to him, “Mister Ram? I don’t have any toilet paper. What am I supposed to do?”
He had already given this some thought and had searched about, finding a box of tissues. “Here you go, Honey,” he said tossing the box into the bathroom without looking.
“My Mommy used to call me honey before she died,” the little girl said, coming out and shutting the door behind her. She then held out a hand to him. Ram blinked at it for a second and took her little one in his big paw. “No, silly,” she said with a smile. “Ipes? My zebra? He doesn’t know you very well and can be very ascared, especially of big people.”
Ram had forgotten that he was even holding the stuffed animal. “Well you have nothing to worry about,” he explained, handing over the zebra. “Me and Ipes became good friends while you were in there.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. And we both agree that you need to take some of this.” Ram produced a big bottle of Pepto Bismal and set it on the kitchen table. He had found it in the second bathroom while looking for toilet paper.
The very presence of the bottle seemed to pain Jillybean. “Not the pink stuff. Please, I hate the pink stuff. And I feel better now, really. My tummy’s ok it really is.”
“I’m sorry Jillybean,” Ram said unscrewing the lid. “You need to take this and Ipes agrees. He told me so. And he is very smart for a zebra.”
Jillybean dropped her face and said in a small voice said, “He says: Thank you. And he says I have to take the medicine, too. It’s apose to help my tummy. But I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it either,” Ram told her. “But I have to take it too. Do you want me to go first? Or do you want to go.”
After a moment to think she said, “Ipes says I should get it over with.” The little girl held out a shaking hand.
Ram touched her brown hair, stroking it gently as she held the bottle and looked at it as if it were poison instead of medicine. “It’ll be ok,” he said softly.
Trey came in and after tossing Ram the shoe he had abandoned in the playground, he leaned against the door frame to the kitchen, shaking his head. “You ain’t gonna be able to do it. Admit it.”
Could he kill this girl? This precious little thing with the big blue eyes and the nub of a nose; this tiny human who had already displayed such courage?
“For her sake, I have to.”
Chapter 18
Jillybean
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The pink stuff sat in front of her smelling like fakery as it always did. It looked nice, being pink and all, but it tasted icky.
“What do you have to do?” she asked Ram.
At this he laughed nervously and then pushed the bottle of Pepto closer to her. “Never mind that, Jillybean. Take your medicine. The quicker you take it the quicker you’ll start to feel better.”
He’s right, Ipes said. For a human he’s also pretty smart. Now bottom’s up. Take a big chug and just get it over with.
“Fine,” she grumbled and then, going against the prudent advice of her friend, she took a little sip. It wasn’t that bad! In fact it was good. Except for the tangy meat she’d had that morning, the Pepto tasted better than anything she’d eaten in weeks. It sure beat the hell out of pine needle stew.
“Slow down,” Ram said as she began to chug the pink liquid. “Too much medicine is bad for…never mind. Save me a swallow. You can have the rest.”
After drinking half the bottle and smacking her lips, something that Trey found hilarious, she passed the rest to Ram, secretly hoping that he would only want a little. He took two big, man-sized swigs, made a noise that she interpreted as: not bad, and gave her the bottle back.
“That’s better than I remember. And it sure hits the spot,” he added rubbing his stomach. He then looked to Trey, who stood with one hand on the butt of a gun that stuck out of his pocket, and then to Jillybean who held the bottle of Pepto the way a wino would grip his last bottle of Maddog 20/20.
“So what are we going to do?” Ram asked.
Jillybean shrugged, and Ipes was equally clueless. They had been focused on survival for so long they didn’t know what else to do with themselves. Scrounging no longer mattered; nor was it important to worry over keeping her pine needle soup in the sun; or changing out the water containers in the face of the big rain that was coming.
Trey slapped his blue-jean covered thigh. “I don’t know what you guys are going to do, but I ain’t gonna sit here waiting for it to happen. I have to do something.”
“Is he like us?” she asked Ram. “Is he going to turn into a monster?” Ram flicked his eyes to Trey and then nodded. “Sorry, Mister,” she said with sweet sincerity. “At least we’ll be monsters together.” For her this was something to hang her hat on—being all alone was a far greater fear than being a monster.
“Call me Trey, not Mister Trey. And yeah, we’ll be monsters together.”
Ram, who had been re-stringing his shoe with a lace acquired from somewhere in a bedroom closet, said, “I have an idea of what we can do. We can try to broker a peace. I wasn’t lying before. The Whites want peace.”
Trey rolled his eyes. “You is such a dumb Mother-fuc…” he paused and glanced guiltily toward Jillybean before resuming in a more subdued tone. “Listen, it don’t matter what the Whites or the Spics want. The Boss-lady wants war. She wants her some vengeance. She wants the black people to rise up and take their rightful places. And ain’t nobody says dick to her. Oh, sorry, little girl.”
“Jillybean. My name is Jillybean.”
“Really? Your name is Jillybean?” This seemed funny to him and he cackled. Jillybean only nodded, not quite understanding the joke. Smirking, he went on, “White folks be crazy sometimes. No offence.”
That means he doesn’t want you to be mad at what he said, Ipes explained.
“Oh, I’m not mad, Mister…I mean, just Trey. Can I ask a question? Why does someone want war? Do you want war?”
“No, not anymore,” Trey said quietly. “I never really did. Nobody did. But Cassie gave us something that we really wanted: leadership. We wanted someone to take control. To give us a direction. We were just surviving and she had this vision for us to be so doing so much better. And look where I am now.”
“You should do something about it,” Ram said with eyebrows raised.
Perhaps out of habit, Trey went to the refrigerator and looked in, ignoring the stench that came out wafting out. “You don’t stop do you?” he asked Ram. “And that’s because you don’t know what’s what. They’ll kill me if I try to go back now. Same as if Jelly bean here tried to go back to the Whites or…”
“It’s Jillybean,” she corrected. “Jilly—Bean.”
He grunted out a laugh and shut the fridge, which was a good thing. With the Pepto doing its job, Ram’s stomach had just been settling down, but the smell was threatening to bring up a big pink wave of puke.
“Jillybean, sorry,” Trey acknowledged with a nod of his head. “Either way she can’t go back to the Whites, not when she got the virus all up in her. Same with me. If I go back to my people they’ll shoot me on sight. And if you try dude, they’ll tie you up until you turn grey and then they’ll set you free, up with the rest of the Spics. That’s the way Cassie likes it. She calls it psychological warfare.”
The kitchen went quiet at this admission. Jillybean understood enough to know the three of them couldn’t go be with other peo
ple.
“You can come back to my house,” she volunteered. “I have pine-needle soup that’s almost ready.”
“Did you say pine needle soup?” Trey accented each word in disbelief. “That’s soup made out of Pine needles?”
Jillybean’s head went up and down very fast and she began to jabber: “Yeah, it’s not so bad. What you gotta do is put a bunch of pine needles in water and let it sit in the sun all day, or maybe two days, you know. Kinda like sun tea, only it’s sorta bitter. And I got a place for us to sleep in the attic and its very safe and all, ‘cept you have to watch out for ole Mrs. Bennet.”
A derisive breath of air snuck out of Trey. “You can count me out. Having pine soup with a bunch of white folk sounds crazy to me.”
“No one lives there but me and Ipes,” Jillybean explained. “Mrs. Bennet isn’t a person, she’s a monster. She’s not allowed in the house.”
Even with this “explanation” Trey still didn’t want to humor the girl. “I’ll take you home,” Ram said. “Do you know the way?”
“Ipes does. He has smart retentions about his memory. That’s what he says at least. I’m not sure what that means. ‘Cept he can amember all sorts of stuff that I don’t. Like he knows how many of the little tunnels we passed and I don’t.”
“You’re going back through the tunnels?” Trey asked, again with disbelief coloring his voice.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Ram replied. “Unarmed, it’s the only way we can travel through the city.”
Trey pulled back one of the kitchen chairs and dropped onto it, making it wobble dangerously; one of its legs was bound together with duct tape. “I can’t see why you just don’t stay here.” He glanced around at the spare apartment. It had not been much before the apocalypse; now it was little better than a trash heap.
“Remember what you were saying about not being able to sit still?” Ram asked. “That’s me right now. The fever should be kicking in any time and I feel like I should be doing something. Anything really. I’m just glad my stomach has settled down. What about you, Jillybean? How are you feeling?”
She had to pause and actually think about it before she answered, which he took as a good sign. “It’s better now that I pooped and we gots this medicine…”Now that we have this medicine, Ipes corrected…“I mean, now that we have this medicine. I feel a little better.”
Ram stood and turned his swollen face to the person who had beaten him. “I say we get going. Are you coming, Trey?”
“The sewers? Really? I don’t think so.”
“In that case good luck.”
Trey tapped his foot for a moment and then grudgingly said, “You too.”
There was an awkward moment between them, which passed in silence until Jillybean patted the black man’s hand. “Bye Mister Trey,” she said in her small voice.
Then the two of them, Jilly and Ram, left, stepping out into a quickening wind that was already cycloning debris around the apartment buildings. A few zombies were in evidence, shuffling quickly around a car; they were after a mangy cat that sat on its hood; they didn’t notice the man and the girl.
Ram stayed low, moving in spurts. Before heading for the sewers, they went back to his Humvee and took the only thing in it of any value: a tire iron.
With it he jacked up a manhole cover atop the storm drain that Jillybean had exited from. “Are you sure this is the one?” he asked for the second time as he scraped back the heavy metal disc.
He doesn’t listen very well, Ipes remarked.
Jilly shushed him and then addressed Ram, “Ipes says it is the right one. You’ll see. He amembers all sorts.” She gave a glance down into the hole where the black was thicker than soup and then after giving Ram a reassuring smile she began to climb down with Ipes clamped between her teeth.
“Wait!” a voice called out, stopping her while her head was just at the level of the street. It was Trey, jogging between the carcasses of the automobiles in the street. “Maybe I’ll come. I was thinking I didn’t have anything better going on and…you really came this way?” he asked in disbelief as he stopped next to Ram. His face was tight and clearly unnerved at the idea of going down beneath the earth.
We don’t have time for this, Ipes warned. There are monsters coming.
He was right as usual. Alerted by the running man, the streets were flooding with the beasts—they were like a locust storm. Jillybean gave a grunt of warning and then began to scale down the ladder as fast as she could. Ram saw them as well. He pointed behind Trey and then went down the rungs going so fast that he was close to stepping on Jillybean’s fingers in seconds.
When Trey turned and saw the zombies that had followed him, he cried out, “Mother-fucker!” Then he too was on the rungs.
“Don’t forget the cover,” Ram reminded him.
In a second the cover was in place and in the next second, the zombies were stomping around on it, making odd thunking noises. With the light shut out, Jillybean experienced the totality of dark for the fourth time that day and unlike the other times she went down the ladder smiling.
She had people.
Ipes was a fine companion, but he was still just a wise-cracking, no-it-all zebra. People needed people; it was a law, she was sure.
“I’m down,” she said as her lower foot struck the cement of the feeder line. She made sure to step lively out of the way. Ram was coming down, grunting and breathing heavily like a bull. Above him, Trey seemed frozen on the first few rungs.
“How is this better? Why did we come this way? It’s so fucking dark I can’t see jack shit.”
“Watch your language,” Ram warned.
“My fucking language? Are you fucking kidding me? We’re all going to be dead by morning! Oh shit! I almost fell. I can’t see anything. How did you come through here little girl? Was it this dark before?”
Jillybean looked around trying to assess the level of darkness. It proved an impossible task. “Um…I think so. It feels just as dark. Oh, sorry, Mister Ram.” She had gotten turned around and had walked right into him. She felt his large hands touch, first her shoulder, then the back of her head, and then her face. She giggled into his palm.
Above them, but not so high as before, Trey cursed some more and then after a few seconds he clunked onto the cement. “Oh, hey. I’m down.”
“We should probably be quiet now,” Jillybean said, feeling on the walls down low for the tunnel that would lead to the larger trunk line. “If there are monsters about we’ll hear them first if we don’t make any peeps.”
She found the tunnel and started through it on hands and knees. When Ram found it he gave out a whistle of surprise and a grunt of effort. And then more grunts. He was the larger of the two men. Jillybean could imagine him getting stuck like a cork in a bottle.
“Oh this is unreal,” Trey said in a whisper. “Ram? Can you fit? You’re not getting stuck at all, are you? Ram? Are you stuck? Ram?”
Finally Ram answered. “The girl said to be quiet. So please zip it. And no, I’m not stuck.”
Despite the racket, they made it into the larger tunnel without attracting any monsters. Jillybean made a noise, “Hmm.” The tunnel was ankle deep in running water. It hadn’t been like that before. “This way,” she whispered to Ram who was on all fours like a very large dog.
Bent over in a slouchy way, she started walking into the stream and found that she couldn’t do so with her usual level of stealthiness. Her feet splashed no matter how she went. It didn’t matter if she lifted her feet high or shuffled along, she still made noise.
Don’t worry, Ipes said, calming her. You have two strong men with you. And me, of course.
After only a few minutes, it hardly mattered how much noise she made. The water speeding past rushed loud, so that they had to raise their voices to be heard.
“I don’t like this,” Ram said. They had barely gone more than a hundred yards and already the water level had quadrupled. It was over a foot deep and now was a drag
to their forward momentum. But at least it tasted good.
“What don’t you like?” Jillybean asked and then cupped her hand for another drink. Whenever she paused, she drank. In this way she was somewhat camel like. She had gone nearly the entire day without a single drop; now she was filling her hump so to speak, though in this case it was her stomach, which felt swollen like a swinging bag.
“The water level,” Ram answered. “There are things called flash floods in the desert. When it rains all the water is channeled into very few rivers and these become swollen and are very dangerous.”
But it wasn’t even raining, Ipes replied.
Trey must have heard because he said, “But it wasn’t even raining. This is probably from way up in the city.”
“That only makes it worse,” Ram said. “If it does begin to rain here we could be trapped. We should go back, now.”
“Shit!” Trey cried. He could be heard thumping into the walls of the tunnel as he turned in a panic. His splashing retreated in the dark. Ram laughed quietly while Jillybean took another drink and noted that now she didn’t have to stoop at all; the water was at her knees.
Ram may have point, Ipes said. Not to mention, I’m starting to get wet. Hold me up higher, will you? She did, tucking the zebra into the top of her sweatshirt so that only his nose and beady eyes stuck out.
Ram led the two of them back and it became as easy as sitting down; once the water got a hold of her it just swooshed her along. It was fun, except once she bonked her head which smarted enough for her eyes to tear up. Ahead of them Trey was cursing, however the water had begun to rush with such vigor that they couldn’t quite figure out what he was on about until they came closer.
Trey was screaming, “There’s too much water! There’s too much water!” He was certainly right. Above them the storm had finally broken out, unleashing millions of gallons of rain water. Down in the sewers the sound of the water had grown to a roar. From behind it pushed Jillybean with so much force that she was plastered up against Ram like a leaf on a windshield.
The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors Page 16
