Ipes waived his stubby arms. But they will give me to Eve, and she slobbers, Ipes groaned. I swear she must have Basset Hound somewhere in her ancestry.
“Then I guess you’re coming with me,” Jillybean said. She watched as Neil pulled Ram aside to chat. “Now’s our chance.” Sarah was busy changing Eve and Sadie was watching the two men and had her back to Jillybean.
With deft movements, the little girl buried her new doll in the blankets, leaving only her hair showing. She then grabbed her backpack and hurried to Ram’s truck. There was no use being coy about what came next—she would either be caught or not. In a quick move she climbed up the side of the truck and slithered beneath the blue tarp.
Now what? Ipes asked.
“We wait.”
Ipes tapped his toe, or rather he tapped the part of him that represented a hoof. Either way it was a silent tap and one that was all for show. Do you think he’s in need of saving yet? Ipes wondered aloud. Jillybean blew out in a huff. Ipes went on, Why don’t you admit what this really is?
“What this is,” Jillybean said with her eyes blazing, “is a zebra on the verge of getting a spanking if he doesn’t stop being a pain!”
Nope. This is you trying to force yourself on a grown man. You can’t adopt an adult, just because he reminds you of your father.
Jillybean did not like the way this conversation was going, however she was in a mood at being abandoned by Ram again and said, “Why not? Why is it only the adults who get to go about adopting people? If he was a kid, people would be like: oh, he’s all alone, we should adopt him. But since he’s a grode-up we just have to let him be all alone? That doesn’t make…”
Just then she heard Ram walking back to his truck; he sighed continually. Then they were off and despite the tarp flapping above her, Jillybean was very soon cold enough to take out her fancy dress and throw it on over her jeans and ugly Eagles sweatshirt.
They stopped after an hour or so. Where they stopped surprised Jillybean. “Party Palace! I’ve been here before.”
Don’t you mean we’ve been here before? Ipes reminded her. I was there as well.
She ignored him. Her mind was far away remembering the fairy costume she had worn a year and a half before on Halloween. It had been pink and silver with gold trim on her fairy wings. Her mom had taken five-thousand pictures and had made Jillybean walk back and forth shaking her wings.
What’s he got there? Ipes asked a few minutes later. He had his long nose sticking out of the tarp. Ha! He’s got a monster costume. What’s he going to do with one of them?
Jillybean felt a silly disappointment. Deep in her heart she had hoped that Ram had stopped in at the store to get her something. He watched him try on his costume and later after they had made it into the city she saw him put on makeup.
This is called betting on the wrong horse, Ipes said. Ram’s gone crazy. Neil isn’t crazy, you know. Neil isn’t going to a costume party at night in the middle of a zombie infested…
“Shhh,” she hissed. Ram had finished his make-up and was right next to the bed of the truck. He took a couple of deep breaths and then began to act like a monster as he walked away.
Maybe I was a bit premature in my diagnosis of his mental facilities, Ipes allowed as he saw what Ram had done.
“Come on.” Jillybean crawled out of the truck and went to the cab which Ram had left wide open. After taking off the dress and folding it neatly, she slapped on makeup, making herself look like a sad little monster. Next she happily shredded up her Eagles sweatshirt so that it hung off her in tatters. Her hair was already going in every direction and so there was nothing left but to tuck Ipes into the pocket of her backpack and go lurching out into the night.
The hard part was catching up to Ram when she had to go at a monster’s pace. When they weren’t after prey, they moved with the speed of a vacationing sloth.
She would’ve gone at the dangerous pace of a slow walk if it hadn’t been for Ipes. The zebra kept her focused. Slower! Swing one arm. You look too much like a girl; are you trying to get us killed?
After an agonizing time they passed right by the building Ram was in and kept going, unaware. She was halfway down the block when a cry of someone in pain from behind stopped her in her tracks. Jillybean wasn’t the only one attracted by the sound. The shadows all around came alive with monsters.
Slower! Ipes cried. She had begun to go faster than was prudent. However she couldn’t go slower. The cry had come from Ram’s lips. He was in trouble just as she knew he would be.
“Sorry, Ipes,” she said as she pulled a magic marble from her pocket, kissed it, and chucked it across the street. Every monster head turned…except for hers. Instead she took off at a sprint back the way she came. In her wake the monsters weren’t fooled for more than two seconds. It was enough.
Jillybean pelted up to the building, turned the corner and immediately went back to monster-mode: moaning and shambling her way to the front and into the lobby. Behind her monsters came and began milling around, searching the corners or behind the stray cars or just staring blankly.
You’ve trapped us, Ipes accused. What are we going to do when we want to come back out?
“We’ll see,” Jillybean replied. She didn’t have the luxury to dwell on five minutes from that moment when there was so much danger in the next two. Like a shot she sped up the stairs. Her legs were too short to go two at a time so instead she pumped them furiously and arrived in time to hear two people, a man and a woman discussing Ram’s fate.
“What are they going to do to him, Ipes?” she asked. “What do the mean by grey meat? Are they going to turn him into a monster?”
Yes, I think so. But we...they’re coming! Back down stairs, he hissed. The pair rushed back the way they came. Stop, Ipes ordered just after they slid over the top of the desk. He studied it for five agonizing seconds—its height, its width, the edging scarred with age and abuse.
“What is it?” Jillybean asked.
The zebra hushed her for being too loud and yet not a second later he practically screamed: This won’t work at all!
“Work for what?”
My plan.
“What’s your plan?”
Ipes grabbed his spiky Mohawk of a mane with both hooves and cried, I don’t know! We have to separate Mister Ram from his attackers. If he goes outside with them, he’ll die for sure.
“What?” Jillybean asked, confused. “If he goes out all alone, he’ll die too.”
Don’t be silly, Ipes said. He dressed like a monster, remember? Just like you. So what we need is to get them to let Ram go out alone.
“They won’t do it,” Jillybean replied. “They’ll want to watch him die. They’ll…” Five floors above them they heard Ram and his captors on the stairs.
We have two minutes, Ipes hissed. Think of something!
“Me?” Jillybean cried. “You’re the one who always comes up with the plans.”
I’m all out of ideas, Ipes said in a little voice. Sorry.
“There has to be something,” Jillybean said. “We’ll try in here.”
The door to the second floor hall was yanked back and half off its hinges. The little girl went through it and found herself in a typical hall of a high-rise apartment building—other than doors and ratty carpeting it was empty. She rushed to the first door on the right, which also sat open.
Her eyes ran over the debris of someone’s life. The place had been ransacked for food or weapons, however beneath the chaos was a normal apartment: In the main room a TV on a stand was the dominant feature, all the furniture pointed its way. In the dining room was an old table sitting on older tile. In the kitchen was a spray of spilt salt on the counter beneath cabinets hanging open like so many mouths. On the walls were pictures and a calendar and knick-knacks and dust.
There’s nothing here we can use, said Ipes gloomily. Too bad. We can hide here at least. Maybe gather up those clothes and bury ourselves until…Jillybean? Hello?
Th
e girl stood with her mind working with the exactness of a Swiss watch; each piece of her shaky plan coming to her, unfolding one after another, fitting together seamlessly.
First the table. It had to be cleared and a corner raised. A book was too much, but the blade of a butter knife too little. With a grunt she turned the knife around and set the table leg on it. She tested the marble; it rolled too quickly.
Ipes saw where this was going. The salt in the kitchen!
Jillybean rushed to the other room and scraped up all she could. It was barely a teaspoon full. It wouldn’t slow the marble down enough unless…
You build a track, Ipes said finishing her thought. But you better hurry.
She couldn’t spare even a second to say: No Duh!
Breathless, she ran to the table and spread the salt down it in a long thin line—it was a very sparse, which meant she would be cutting things close. Next she grabbed up a pair of pants from the floor and a sock and two shirts. These she stretched out right next to the line of salt, leaving barely an inch gap.
Lastly she went to the high end of the table and stood poised with the magic marble ready to roll.
Do it! Ipes screamed in her mind.
“Ssh,” Jillybean said. “I’m trying to listen.” The three people on the stairs came closer and closer, and all the while Ipes was going crazy.
Now! Roll the marble, please. Before it’s too late.
With her stomach knotted Jillybean counted to five and then let the marble go. It bumped over the salt, shuddering with each grain and picking up speed with agonizing slowness.
Jillybean couldn’t afford to watch its progress. Stooping to snatch up a black sweater she sped for the stairs, arriving while the three were only a flight above her head. Without checking her momentum she ran upwards.
Wrong way, Jilly! Ipes wailed.
Five steps along she found the desk wedged sideways, it was little more than a solid shadow in the dark. By feel only she clambered around it and curled herself in the space where a chair would normally go and then the adults were right there.
A grunt sounded in the dark, which was followed by the soft sound of someone light sliding across the top of the wood a bare two inches over Jillybean’s head. A light flashed; the beam making crazy angled shadows in the cubby. Then there was a louder thud on the desk, causing her to jump in fright.
They had thrown Ram over the desk. He began to groan.
“Stop your fucking faking,” the man who had taken him prisoner said after he slid over as well. “Or I’ll give you…”
Finally the marble had made its way to the edge of the table and now threw itself onto the old tile. It was a loud sound in the still night, but not as loud as Ram, who began yelling for Jillybean to run. In the commotion she peeked out from her hiding place and saw the two people with Ram: a man and a woman, both of whom were black. The man had a scoped deer rifle across his back, which he promptly yanked off. The woman had a shotgun that was so large it looked like a bazooka to Jillybean.
“Shut the fuck up,” the man said as he bashed Ram in the stomach with the butt of his gun. Ram dropped to his knees on the landing and started to make a noise as though he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to throw up or choke.
“He brought someone with him,” the woman said, keeping her voice low.
“No shit,” the man replied. “With a name like Jilly, it’s probably a girlfriend. Watch him. Bash him in the face if he says anything.”
The man turned off the flashlight and before Jillybean could get her night-eyes back he had disappeared down the hall, moving with such soft steps that the sharpest ears could not pick out his tread. Whether it was the loss of the man’s presence, which was significant, or the loss of the light, which was greater still, the woman quickly grew afraid. She swung her head from Ram on the edge of the landing, to the man creeping down the hall.
Jillybean began to squeeze from her hiding spot—Wait. Not yet, Ipes warned. Count to twenty. Let the man get further away.
Waiting would have been nice and it would have been safe, but only for her. She knew with a certainty that when Ram caught his breath he would yell out to warn her. When that happened he’d be hit on the head with a weighted hunk of steel and wood by a woman whose blood was primed with adrenaline. At the least, Ram would be concussed and would have trouble walking or even talking. At the most he would be knocked out. Being knocked out equaled death. Jillybean wouldn’t be able to move him in time to keep him from being pitched out into the street with the monsters.
With all the natural skill in her lithe body, Jillybean stole out from her hiding place just as Ram began to get his wind back.
“Jillybean…”
“Shut it or so help me I’ll bash your head in,” the woman said with the shotgun raised to strike.
With the sound covering her movement, Jillybean stepped away from the desk and rushed full on the woman with the only weapon she possessed: the black sweater she had grabbed from the apartment.
The charging shadow, which seemed far larger than it really was, caught the woman’s attention. She yelped and, with her heart hammering, she moved with the speed of panic, stepping back and swinging the gun around to shoot. Both actions contained all the commonsense common to panic—there was no room left on the landing to step and within a second Jillybean was too close to shoot with a shotgun.
This didn’t stop the woman from trying both.
Her right foot came down on air just as she pulled the trigger. The shock of the gun blast helped to propel her tumbling backwards down the stairs in a jumble of cries and grunts and sickening thuds, while above Jilly’s head the air fizzed with the passage of the shotgun’s pellets.
Before the woman came to bone-breaking crash at the bottom of the stairs Jillybean was urging Ram to get up. “Hurry, Ram. I’ve got you,” the little girl cried, straining with all her might to help him to a standing position. In seconds they were hurtling down the stairs in the dark while above, the man with the rifle came rushing like a hurricane wind.
“Reba,” he bellowed.
Reba was on the landing below, moaning like one of the undead. Both Jillybean and Ram tripped on her sprawled form, but neither fell completely. They had one set of steps to go before light flicked down.
“Reba, shit!” the man cried. With his flashlight and his unbound hands, the man was faster. They could hear his feet skipping down the stairs coming two, three at a time. It would be seconds only before they were within range of his gun.
“Jilly, shoot him!” Ram yelled, unexpectedly.
“But I don’t have a…” Jillybean started to explain that she wasn’t armed when the man above them shot his gun blindly. It sounded like a stick of dynamite exploding. Defensively, he shot again, more or less at nothing but the dark. The bullet whined nowhere near Ram and Jillybean.
“Come on,” Ram said under the noise.
At the bottom of the stairs they burst through the door leading to the lobby. This space wasn’t much more than an open area with two banks of elevators and the door to the stairs. Ram paused to get his bearings and to think of a plan. There wasn’t time.
“Out here, Mister Ram,” Jillybean said pulling him toward the front door.
“But the zombies,” he said.
In the dark he missed her shredded clothes and the make-up on her face. “I’m like you,” she said moving up close. “I’m a zombie, see? And I can act like a zombie, too.”
He gazed down on her fondly. “Zombies don’t smile, Sweetheart. Now we better hurry.”
Just as their enemy came tentatively into the lobby, they stepped out into the night. In a second, zombies came at the pair. Ram took the lead, lurching awkwardly and moaning loud and pointedly to make sure Jillybean understood to follow suit. She did, though making sure not to get carried away as he was.
Their disguises worked. In seconds they were part of the crowd that gimped about in front of the building and when the man with the rifle stuck his head out
they acted just like the rest and moved toward him until he retreated back inside.
Only then did the pair act their way back toward Ram’s truck.
“You’re crazy,” Ram said as Jillybean struggled with the wire. His bindings were far too tight for her soft fingers and her skinny, malnourished muscles, but they weren’t strong enough for her mind. Using a flashlight to illuminate the wire, she studied it before pulling out the can opener from her back pack. Using its tiny teeth she was able to grip the wire and use the strength in her entire upper body to loosen them.
“There, you’re free,” she said, rubbing her fingers where the metal had bit. “But I don’t think I’m crazy. That’s what means insane, right? Cuckoo for cocoa-puffs? That’s not me.”
“Then you’re the bravest girl ever,” Ram said. He too sat rubbing his hands where the wire had bit cruel and deep.
“I don’t think that either. I was really ascared the whole time, especially when that guy shot his gun. My ears still hurt.”
Ram groaned at how she kept refusing his compliment, though he smiled as he did—he couldn’t seem to help smiling at her. “Well you are very brave to me,” Ram told her.
“Ok. You’re brave to me too, except Ipes thinks you’re not very smart coming here all alone like that. You need me, Mister Ram. So don’t try to leave me anymore. Ok? And why do you keep smiling?”
“Because I…” Ram stopped in midsentence and his face fell in sadness. “Because I think you’re a very special girl.”
He was going to say something else, thought Jillybean.
Whatever it was, Ram kept to himself. He grew from sad to grim as they sat there. “Are you thinking about leaving me again?” Jillybean asked, misreading the look.
“No. I‘m just not done saving people. We’re going to New York.”
Chapter 35
Ram
New York City
Driving on dark streets populated with dead humans and dead cars, led to a premonition of coming death for Ram. He had, for too long, tight-roped across the knife’s edge; his luck would not last forever. Nor would Jillybean’s.
The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors Page 32
