She had no choice but to try. Roughly, Sarah turned the girl over and watched the water drain from her lungs. She then lowered her back down, gave two breaths and began CPR again. Like a robot she went at it: thirty chest compressions followed by two breaths. She did this four times and after each sequence her hope faded a little more.
She was in the middle of the fifth when a man came wading up, carting an orange bag high on his shoulder. “You must is step back, now,” he said in the thick Russian accent common to most of Yuri’s guards.
He unzipped the bag and pulled out an AED, which was basically a portable defibrillator. With practiced hands he attached the leads to Sadie’s body and started the machine.
There was a pause as it charged and Sarah asked: “What is this? I mean why?”
“You make Yuri much money. Sit back and do not touch girl.” The man pressed a red button and Sadie jerked.
Anxiously, Sarah and the guard looked at the read out that monitored her heart: it blipped once and then went flat. Automatically Sarah breathed for the girl and began more compressions as the machine charged again.
“This girl lose money,” the guard said. “Yuri bet American Colonel three hundred gallon of fuel she win fight with black queen. Sit back.” He pressed the button again and Sadie jerked just as before, but now her heart began to sputter on the read out. “Damn! One more do trick...I hope. Breathe for her.”
Sarah did and the guard went on, “Yuri lose and is very mad. He is sore loser and so he bet double or nothing on you. You win and he is much happy. I ask to help you with girl; he say yes.”
“What made you want to help her?” Sarah asked, suspiciously. Too many people were working too many angles as far as she was concerned.
The guard was a handsome young man with nice eyes. They crinkled when he smiled. “She is very pretty. Maybe we go on date. Ok, let’s hope this work.”
The machine sent its charge into the girl, basically resetting the rhythm of her heart, which began a peppy beat. In seconds Sadie blinked and unbelievably didn’t even seem to see Sarah.
“Hey Nico,” Sadie said in a whisper. “What are you doing in my room?”
Epilogue
Sarah
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The many bruises that decorated Sarah’s body were all fading to green and yellow. On the outside she was hideous. On the inside she feared she was rotting or had been corrupted. Every day she cleaned herself thoroughly…perhaps more than thoroughly, perhaps she did so manically; it had become a compulsion for her. In the week and a half since her rape at the hands of Colonel Williams she had douched three times a day and had kissed Neil a total of four times. A part of her was afraid he would know what had happened simply by touching her. She didn’t like to look in the mirror.
She was not the only one bruised and battered. Sadie was confined to bed with broken ribs, a fracture orbital bone, and a persistent double pneumonia. Neil had run a low-grade fever from the moment he crawled out of the East River. His arm, where he was bitten, was infected and slow to heal. But their wounds were “natural” as Sarah saw it. Theirs would go away in time while she would be forever stained.
Only Jillybean had come through virtually unscathed. Sarah thought her an odd girl and had yet to bond with her. She was afraid to get too attached. Being a mother hadn’t been anything like it was supposed to be for Sarah Rivers: one daughter probably dead, another practically dead, and a third abducted by a cult of fanatics.
Sarah was simply a horrible mother, and for Jillybean’s sake, she had made every excuse in the world not to be alone with her, but now she was stuck. It was May first and the little girl had declared it to be her birthday.
They were living in Philadelphia, though not in the compound of the Whites. Sarah’s group of misfits was a political hot potato. Yuri had been pleased about winning his spur of the moment wager, however when he heard a rumor that Sadie had caused the fire that had destroyed so much of his livelihood he had instantly put a bounty on her head.
Understandably, the Blacks were not well disposed to the group either. In order to recoup some of his losses, Yuri had declared them equally responsible for the fire and had seized their goods. With the loss of their leader and six of their best men, the Blacks had asked for a ceasefire and the Whites were not going to jeopardize the opportunity for a permanent peace. They did what they could for Sarah’s family, but they did so on the sly.
This was why they were hiding out in Jillybean’s house of all places. It was not a particularly safe structure. The house relied more on high bushes to keep their movements unseen rather than sturdy doors to protect them. Yet they had no better option.
Nico did his best; installing deadbolts on the doors and shutters on the windows when the zombie numbers were at their lowest in the bright afternoons. In Sarah’s mind he was the only good thing that had come from the fiasco in New York. In the strange way of this new undead world he had fallen straight away in love with Sadie.
That love had saved their lives. Weak, injured, hunted, and possessing nothing but the clothes on their backs the group surely would have perished in New York, however Nico had come through for them, stealing a Dodge Ram with an extended bed filled with goods from his former boss.
Now the pair of love birds had matching bounties and were nearly inseparable. Except, that is, for that morning.
Jillybean, using all the manners and sweetness she could marshal, had asked for a special birthday favor—of Neil, not of Sarah. Neil was a soft touch as everyone knew.
This was the reason Sarah and Jillybean were sneaking up a creaking stair in some unknown Philadelphia suburban house, while Nico was out front guarding and smoking stale cigarettes. The house was altogether unremarkable which had Sarah wondering why on earth they had wasted the gas to come out to it.
“Was this a relative’s house?” Sarah asked. “Your grandmother’s place? Or was it…” The engine of her mouth came to a halt as they entered a girl’s bedroom and she saw what it was that Jillybean wanted. “Wow.”
It was a dollhouse of huge proportions. Jillybean had to go up on tiptoes and still she couldn’t peer down into the chimney. Not only was it impressively large, it was beautifully decorated, hand painted and furnished like a French palace.
“Can I keep it?” Jillybean begged clasping her hands and intertwining her fingers. “I know it looks real big, but Ipes says all we need to get it out of here is a hexagonal driver.”
“A what?”
Jillybean dug in her Belieber backpack and pulled out something that resembled a screw driver but with an odd tip. “This. It’s a hexagonal driver. It unscrews those things there on the hinges. Ipes found it for me. He wanted me to tell you that on account of you being so pretty. I think he likes you.”
Sarah touched her own face. She couldn’t feel the bruises but she knew they were there. Just like the stain was on her insides. “Well, tell Ipes that…” Sarah had to stop herself from carrying on a conversation with a zebra. “You know Ipes isn’t real, right?”
“Yes he is. This is him right here.” Jillybean held the zebra up as proof. Sarah looked to the ceiling as she tried to find the right words to explain herself, but Jillybean didn’t need the help. “Ipes says that he’s the outward expression of my subconscious mind, which I think is a funny thing for him to say, because he’s actually a zebra, though only a toy one.”
“Yeah, that’s what I meant,” Sarah said. She realized that she had been about to disabuse a sweet child of an innocent game. “He sure is smart for a toy zebra.”
“That’s what he says,” Jillybean replied as she went around to the back of the dollhouse. “He’ll talk your ear off about the inherent wisdom of zebras. Do you know he thinks that the instinct of animals is the highest form of reasoning. He says instead of wasting time on conjecturing and figuring and stuff like that an animal automatically knows what to do in any situation. He says they bypass reason and get right to what’s important. I thin
k he means that animals are smarter than people, but I don’t know about that.”
“He sure is smart,” Sarah said again. “In fact Ipes seems smarter than Neil and that’s saying something.”
Sarah sat down on the floor next to the front face of the dollhouse, and ran her fingers lightly over its features: the shutters beside the windows, the shrubs in the garden. The mailbox, whose door would come open like a mouth. She was fingering a tiny potted plant the size of a pencil eraser, when for some reason a great melancholy swept her.
“Is there any way I can talk to Ipes alone?” Sarah asked, suddenly. “I mean without you hearing?” Neil had told her about his rescue from the burning ship, about how the little girl seemed almost possessed by Ram. Just then Sarah needed and missed Ram badly.
Jillybean was quiet for a spell and then said, “Yeah, maybe. Is something wrong? Did I do something wrong?”
“No sweetie, no,” Sarah said. “I just need to talk to someone about private stuff and I don’t have anyone. No one who will understand.”
“Ipes will do it, but he says that grode-ups are weird.”
“Yeah, that we are.” When Jillybean didn’t respond and there was a long pause Sarah asked, “Ipes?”
“Yes?”
The voice wasn’t Ram’s as Neil had described. Instead it was Jillybean’s but flatter, less child-like. Sarah took a deep breath before asking, “Can she hear you?”
“Our conversation will be stored in her long term memory, but will be irretrievable unless she needs it. For instance, if you were to tell me you were going to kill her I would alert her as soon as possible. However if you want to talk about your rape then, no it will be as if she had never heard it. So, in essence the answer is both yes and no.”
“How did you know about the rape?” Sarah was stunned by the words coming from the girl’s mouth. As far as she knew, only Sadie knew and it wasn’t something she would blab to a six-year-old about.
“Jill is very observant. She saw the bruising and how you’ve been behaving. She knows something wrong, but it is only on a subconscious level that what occurred is understood. Before you ask, how or why I will answer. I protect her innocence as well as her life. I suspect the same is true with the subconscious of most people, but I can’t be sure.”
Sarah couldn’t resist a sudden desire that had welled up in her: she had to see Jillybean. She had to see if the little girl had changed in the last minute. She had to see if there was a grown up version of Jillybean sitting on the other side of the dollhouse? Rising off the floor she craned her neck over the roof and there saw a little girl with fly away brown hair staring unblinking at the dollhouse.
Sarah sat back down. “I don’t want to talk about the rape. What good would it do? What I need is advice,” she said in a whisper, feeling like a catholic in a confessional.
“About your plan to leave?”
Air caught in Sarah’s throat. “Yes.”
“And you want to know which of your babies you should go after first? Brit or Eve. Have you considered Jill? She needs a proper mother and father.”
“She’s not my baby,” Sarah insisted. “I don’t love her.”
“I think you mean you refuse to love her.” Sarah shrugged at this and the zebra somehow knew. “My advice is don’t go after either. Look at what happened to Ram when he went off on his own. He wound up dead and you will as well. However, since I know you are set on this, I will tell you that Eve is clearly the better choice and for two reasons: you know for a fact she’s still alive, and you know exactly where she is.”
Just like the colonel and his men, Abraham and his band of whackos had been free to leave after receiving their vaccines.
“Eve it is. Thanks,” Sarah said, nodding now, feeling right inside for the first time in a week. “Do you promise not to tell Jillybean about this?”
“I told you that my job is to protect her. If she knew where you were going, she would follow you and attempt a rescue. She’s wonderful like that. It’s too bad you can’t see it.”
“I see it,” Sarah said. “But I can’t feel it. I’m broken now. That’s another reason why I have to go.”
“Good bye Sarah,” Ipes said. “Don’t ask for me anymore.”
“I won’t.”
“You won’t what?” Jillybean asked. She came around the dollhouse and stood next to Sarah and, in the manner of small children who weren’t learned in the lesson of boundaries, took Sarah’s hand and started tracing the lines on her palm.
“I won’t go back home without this dollhouse. That’s what.”
“Really?” the little girl asked jumping up and down. She paused with her head cocked as a puzzled expression swept her pert features. “That’s silly! Ipes says that maybe I shouldn’t hug you, but you look like you need a hug.”
Jillybean hugged Sarah and though she sensed the contact and the squeeze and the warmth on a certain level, it didn’t penetrate past the first layer of her mottled skin. Sarah didn’t feel anything. It was almost like she was dead inside. Whenever that dreadful numb sensation struck her, and it did any number of times a day, Sarah would put her hand to her hip to feel the one thing that mattered to her anymore: her Beretta 9mm.
If she couldn't feel the warmth of life, she could sure as hell feel the cold of death.
Fictional works by Peter Meredith:
A Perfect America
The Sacrificial Daughter
The Horror of the Shade
An Illusion of Hell
Hell Blade
The Punished
Sprite
Feylands: A Hidden Lands Novel
The Sun King: A Hidden Lands Novel
The Sun Queen: A Hidden Lands Novel
The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1
The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2
Pen(Novella)
A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)
The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)
The Haunting On Colonel's Row(Short Story)
The Drawer(Short Story)
The Eyes in the Storm(Short Story)
The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors Page 40
