The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades (28 page)

The simple move made her suddenly furious, not with him but with herself. Here she was practically begging for a man’s approval, again! She knew the problem: the hated whore in her was making a strong comeback and had been since the rescue. It made her feel so pathetic that she wanted to puke.

She gritted her teeth against it and said, “Let’s go.” Without waiting on him she began to jog toward the low, tree covered hills where the shooting had originated. He caught up after a few steps and together they ran steadily through the town. It wasn’t long before she was winded and feeling a stitch in her side but, amazingly, she was doing better than the rock hard soldier.

He was breathing in a wheeze and kept going slower and slower. When she gave him a look, she was shocked. His neck wound had opened up and all down the front of his shirt was bright blood, shining in the sun light. “Stop,” she ordered, pulling on his arm until he reluctantly came to a breathless halt leaning against a tree. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he gasped. “Give me a minute will you? I might have lost more blood than I realized, but don’t worry I’ll get my breath back in a few seconds.” He was swaying on his feet.

“No,” Deanna said, deciding to take a stand against the whore in her. “I’ll go alone.”

“But you don’t know the first thing about scouting. What if something happened to…”

Deanna interrupted him, “I’ll be fine. I’ll stick to the woods and stay in monster mode.”

The captain was grounded enough to see reason, “I’ll wait here, but if you’re not back in thirty minutes I’m going to come after you.”

“Aye-aye captain,” she said and left him there. She went slower, moving at a pace that was better suited for her strength and endurance. The forest was close and thick, with plenty of zombies roaming everywhere, but they couldn’t handle the underbrush or the downed trees, or the dips and swells of the earth. They chased eagerly, but fell behind and she thought it a good sign of her mental status that she didn’t dwell on them once they were out of sight.

She had much more important things to worry about.

The sound of guns had given way to the throaty belch of diesel engines, big ones. She crested the hill and had a fine view of a long, wide open valley the main features of which were two long strips of black asphalt and an airplane hangar that didn’t seem like much more than an oversized garage.

From half a mile away Deanna could see the River King’s handiwork: the building was stained black by fire. Its roof was partially caved in, while out front were the remains of three planes—two itty-bitty Cessna’s and one that was slightly larger. Deanna guessed that it had once been a crop duster. All three had been put to the torch.

Just as at the trailer park, the scene had been perfectly staged to give the impression that there couldn’t possibly be anything of value in the wreck of a hangar, and yet a big green truck was even then pulling something out of it. From that distance she couldn’t tell what, but of course she had a good guess: part of the pontoon.

With fear crawling in her belly, she ran down the face of the hill with far more energy that she had running up the other side and in minutes she was close enough to see the pontoons clearly. They were green on the sides and a blue-black on top. They stretched fifty feet in length, twelve feet wide and about four high. There were three pontoons stacked one on top of the other sitting on each of the flatbeds being towed out of the hangar by massive 5-ton army trucks.

To the side of the hangar she saw three other trucks waiting their turn to be hooked up to the flatbeds. Deanna ran the numbers and calculated that she was seeing approximately 600 feet of bridging—half of what they would need to bridge the Mississippi at Cape Girardeau.

“We still have a chance,” she gasped. The River King needed all the pontoons while Deanna’s group would have just as much bargaining power with half a set.

Now, it would be a race to see who got to the other sections first. Unfortunately, Deanna’s group had five locations to search in the time it would take for the River King to hook up the remaining trucks and drive to the right stash. The odds weren’t good.

Deanna, still sucking wind, turned and ran back the way she’d come, her feet growing heavier with each step up the long hill. As she ran she worked out the depressing numbers: the two-mile run back to where she and Grey had left the others would equal about twenty minutes; there would be another five minutes lost in order to explain the situation and pick the exact right location of the pontoons and then they’d have to zip there with enough time to find them, hook them up to the trucks, and get out of there before the River King arrived.

It would be nearly impossible.

She should’ve been dead; she probably was dead. The boat had blown up so close to her that her guts should’ve been turned to jelly and her beautiful mind scrambled like an egg. Yet his instincts told him Jillybean was alive. “Instinct, or is it hope?” Ernest asked himself. The River King was into him for a gob of cash. Every time he considered the value of the prisoners he had been responsible for capturing, approximately thirty thousand, he shook his head in disbelief.

“Well, it’s not that easy,” the River King had said when Ernest had come to him to collect his bounty. They were just up the bank from the Mississippi and, in the background, the king’s barge was a smoking ruin. “There’s sort of a downside to that much cash. First off, I don’t exactly have it on me.” The King had dramatically patted his pockets.

“Are you thinking of welching on me?” Ernest had asked. His tone was mild—simply curious it seemed. “We both know things would go bad for you, your highness, if it got out that you can’t be trusted with paying your debts. It would be the final nail in your coffin, so to speak.”

“Yes,” the River King had said, slowly drawing the word out and making a face of disgust. “I know this, probably better than you, which is why our destinies are so entwined. I’m on the knife’s edge. Everyone knows it. And if I go down, you won’t get paid. Whoever sticks a knife in my back will make sure of that.”

What an unsettling idea
, Ernest had thought to himself.

The River King read his mind. “Yes, kind of hits you right in the family jewels doesn’t it?” Ernest had nodded, feeling a dull ache low down in his guts over the idea of losing so much. The River King went on, “Think about how I must feel. It’s like someone is using my scrotum as a punching bag, and the biggest ball buster of them all is still out there.”

“Jillybean?” Ernest asked.

The River King snarled, “Yes Jillybean! She’s…she’s killing me. I wasn’t lying when I said I’d pay eight times what she’s worth in New York. Hell, I’ll pay you ten thousand if you bring her head to me on a frigging platter.”

Ernest whistled. “Ten thousand. It’s a rather impressive sum, but maybe I should see some of what you owe me before we go discussing another job. You see, from my point of view you won’t last out the week, so paying me what you owe me now really would be the fair thing to do.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about what is fair or not, and I’ll last longer than a week. You can bet on it, Ernie. I’ve got at least one more trick up my sleeve. You see, I have a pontoon bridge on the other side of the river stashed away. You better believe I’ll be the River King once more. I just need to know that damned Jillybean is dead. She is a fucking monkey in a fucking wrench and you won’t see a plug nickel of what I owe you while she’s still out there. This is for both of us, really. Think about it.”

Ernest had thought about it, and had even begun searching for the little girl—fruitlessly—when the prison break had occurred. That had thrown him for loop and had cemented in him the need to find her as soon as possible. The River King’s regime was teetering like a high-wire performer tripping on acid and there was very simple logic involved: find the girl; use her to find Neil and the others; get paid. If he didn’t find the girl, or the River King got the axe, he wouldn’t get paid. Simple.

There was a chance that even finding her wouldn’t save the River King, however she was valuable, one way or the other. Whoever came out on top would pay top dollar for her.

But where the hell was she?

For a day and a half he went up and down the river searching for any sign of her, but it was as though she had disappeared off the face of the earth or had drowned in the black water and was floating down to the Gulf of Mexico. He kept looking, regardless. Was she on the western bank with the renegades? Probably not. Had she been a part of the prison break? Ernest didn’t think so. For one, rumors suggested that it had been an inside job, and for two, the prison break had been artless. A gun battle in the middle of a prison? What little he knew of Jillybean told him that wasn’t her style.

A swamp mosquito, a fat one, practically the size of a hummingbird, landed on his arm. Ernest squished it flat and then flicked the remains away, thinking, for the hundredth time:
Where the hell are you, Jillybean?

On the western bank, the renegades seemed to have vanished. On the eastern bank, the fifty-seven prisoners were back at the school in Elco, waiting as a dozen illiterates tried to puzzle out how to make a raft that would be big enough and seaworthy enough to cross the Mississippi without being swamped by a thousand zombies.

Ernest’s instincts was to keep his boat hidden, even from the River King. His instincts also told him Jillybean was on the eastern shore. She had gone to great lengths to keep the prisoners from crossing the river and she was probably still here looking for a way to free them.

“But she’s a damned ghost,” he said in a whisper. At the moment he was on the catwalk of a water tower hoisting a pair of binoculars to his eyes. He had a great view of Elco, including some of the overgrown farmland and low-lying swamps around it. He could even make out a portion of the school. He’d been there, scanning, for the last hour as the sun rose and he was starting to think he had wasted that long hour.

“If I was her, I would treat this tower like Suaron’s tower in Mordor,” he said, forgetting the girl was only seven years old and likely had never heard of Tolkien. “Okay, what do I know about Jillybean? She’s crazy. She talks to a zebra. She’s loyal to a fault, really to an irredeemably stupid fault. And she is smart enough to evade a grown man with a master’s degree.” He smirked, realizing she just might be a better hunter than he was.

Something clicked. “If she’s so good, let her prove it,” he said.

He would be the bait designed to trap her. As long as he played the part of Ernest the bounty hunter, she would remain elusive. But what would happen if he played the part of Ernest the fearful renegade escapee?

In under a minute he was down from the tower. He made for the forest and found one of the many streams where he daubed himself, inconsistently of course, with mud. He then started back toward the town, this time moving with enough stealth to avoid the zombies but not enough to come across as the expert hunter he was.

At about the time Sadie was poking her nose into the first trailer home and seeing the boxes and boxes of supplies, Ernest finally made it to the school where the renegades were held prisoner. He kept well back, scouting like a jungle native, pretending that he was on a stakeout. After a few minutes, he moved a hundred yards to his right, and again waited for just a little while before moving once more.

It was an hour of this before he heard the first sign of life, or at least something close to it. Three zombies came lumbering up to him. Thankfully, they were loud enough to have given him some warning; he hid behind the bowl of a tree. It was a good-sized one and should’ve been enough to keep him from being seen, yet the zombies walked straight to him and he was forced to crawl backwards to a log and hide behind it like a damned lizard.

The zombies, three ragged things with pus oozing from their eyes and their torn, bleeding skin hanging in strips, went around the tree, searching in the strangest way. It looked as though they were trying to catch a bug that kept jumping out of their reach. Then they left just as quickly as they had come. He had never seen anything like this sort of behavior in a zombie.

Intrigued, Ernest got up and went to the tree to see what it was they had been after and yet, despite going every inch of it, he saw nothing. He turned back…and nearly screamed. A zombie was right there, not five feet away.

His pistol came out of its holster so quickly it caught the creature between blinks. “Don’t shoot me Mister Ernest, it’s just me, Jillybean,” she said stepping back.

“Oh God, Jillybean,” he said, his finger slowly came off the half-pulled trigger. “You scared the heck out of me.” He meant it. His heart was going a mile a minute.

Grinning she came forward and touched his arm as if to see for herself that he was real. It was really him and it was really her, though she had gone through a radical transformation in the last day and a half. She was gaunt as a stick figure and her blue eyes were ceaselessly twittering, going from here to there, never holding to one spot for more than a second. Beneath one of the haunted blue orbs a muscles was bouncing up and down.

Her eggs had indeed been scrambled, he thought. He pretended not to notice. “How’d you sneak up on me like that?”

At first she didn’t seem to understand the question—another bad sign—but then the light bulb went off behind her eyes. “Oh, that was simple. I used the monsters to distract you on account of I didn’t know if it was you or someone else. You could’ve been a bad guy. And you know what? You scared me, too. I never seen someone pull a gun so fast. You were like a cowboy or something. Mister Captain Grey is more of a precision gun shooter. That’s what means he doesn’t miss but I don’t know if he’s superfast like you. How’d you get so fast?”

Ernest wasn’t about to tell the truth; he had practiced day and night because he had known early on, that killing, even the killing of his fellow humans, was going to be the new normal. “I think I was born that way,” he said and then changed his answer quickly, “or maybe I was pumped up by the zombies. Were you following them? Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Nope. Ipes was worried but I wasn’t because I have this.” She showed him a little tool that wasn’t much larger than her hand. At first he thought it was her idea of a weapon but then she thumbed a button on it and a little beam of light shot out.

“Holy smokes,” he said, laughing quietly. “A laser pointer.”

She reached out and touched his arm again, saying, “Yeah, that’s what it is all right. I saw a video, you know, back when they had TVs and stuff. It was about cats chasing this sort of light. It works with monsters
and
cats now.”

Ernest grinned at her. “My, you are clever,” he said, trying to fake genuine feeling. He felt nothing for her. What was the point? No matter what happened to the River King she would have to die. Eventually, she would find out what part he had played in her capture and when she did, there was a good chance that she would be vengeful. Jillybean bent on revenge would be an unholy sight.

“Thanks for calling me clever. I guess that means smart, kinda. But I don’t know if that’s true. I’m having trouble thinking up a real good way to free the prisoners. I have one way but I don’t know if it’ll work right. It’s only supposed to scare the guys who are, you know like guarding them, but I’m ascared that they might get too ascared and start shooting. That would be bad.”

There was no way in hell he was going to allow any plan to free the prisoners to go through, but he was curious. “Scare them? How?”

“Monsters,” she said scratching a speck of mud from her nose. “I have about four hundred of them ready to go but, once the bad guys start shooting, I don’t know what will happen next. Probably something bad.”

“Four hundred monsters?”

“Yeah, they are attracted to more than just cat-beams of light. They also like sound. I have a boom box going in a tree. They’re all gathered around in this big circle. It’s weird looking, you know?”

“I bet,” Ernest said. Inwardly he was marveling and doubling down on the necessity of killing this girl. It was like standing next to a Bengal tiger, but one that didn’t yet realize that it was a tiger. And of course when it did find out… “What are you going to do with them all?”

She beamed her laser pointer at a flower and said, “I have, like a hundred spotlights set up along this path that goes to the school. I got ‘em connected to all these square batteries; 9-volts I think they’re called. They were very heavy because of the fact that I had so many of them. Anyway, I was going to use the twinkle lights like before, but the store was out of them, which means I just got the normal ones and I’ll have to turn them on and off by hand. Maybe I’ll use extension cords. I don’t know yet. “

Maybe her eggs aren’t as scrambled as I thought
, Ernest said to himself. “Where did you get the batteries? From a store around here?” The only place in town was nothing more than a hole in the wall that had long ago been stripped of everything of value. It couldn’t have been what she was talking about.

“No, I had to go all the way to Fort Campbell. It wasn’t easy. I got this thing called a Smart Car, only it wasn’t so smart. You couldn’t fit barely nothing in it… Oh right, Ipes. I mean you couldn’t fit
anything
in it. I wanted to use a different car but I couldn’t get the engine battery out of the smart one and I had to leave all my good bombs back there at the base.”

“Good bombs?” Ernie felt something catching his throat. “No, wait, don’t tell me. I don’t think I want to know what you think are good bombs.”

Jillybean waved a hand at him as if shooing a fly. “Oh they’re not that bad. There are these really big blocks of C4. I think they’re called…”

“I said, don’t tell me,” he admonished lightly. “It makes me go light in the head thinking about it. And besides, this is all moot. We don’t have the manpower to rescue anyone. It’s just you and me; that’s not enough. What we should be doing is helping your other friends.”

“What do you mean?” There was hope in her eyes that hadn’t been there before.