The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) (14 page)

“It was sabotage,” Jillybean told them, in a quieter voice. “
She
said so.”

“She who?” Neil asked. “Did Jillybean say that?”

The little girl nodded, her face suddenly vacant. “Yes, Jillybean said to expect this. She said that we shou…” In midsentence the girl just trailed off, her eyes staring at the tire.

Neil took her by the shoulders and shook her so that her head jerked back and forth. “Jillybean! Hey, talk to me. What were we supposed to do?” He shook her roughly and none of the renegades said anything. They had come up in dribs and drabs until there were twenty of them watching Neil shout into her face. “Hey! Answer me. What did Jillybean say we…”

She suddenly blinked and stared into Neil’s eyes. “Oh, hey, Mister Neil.” She gazed around at the others as if the cock had just crowed and she had awakened to find them gathered around her bed. “What’s going on?”

“We, uh. We, uh, just wanted to ask you about this tire,” he said, gently prying his hands from her shoulders and bringing them to his chest where they opened and closed like a pair of dying spiders. She looked at the tire as if seeing it for the first time in her life. Just as Grey had, she gave the bolt a wiggle before looking back up at Neil.

“It’s got a nail sticking out of it,” she said, after a moment of consideration. She then squinted up and asked: “What day is it? Is it still today?” This perplexed everyone in earshot. No one knew either the date or what she was talking about.

More gently than he had before, Neil took her, once again, by the shoulders. “You said something about the tires?”

“Oh them. Yeah, they are going to put nails in them just like they did the last one. We should check them before we leave. There’ll be more like this one. At least I think so.
She
was aposed to tell you that.”

“Ok, thanks, Jilly,” Neil said. He stood and looked down the line of trucks. A tired sigh escaped him. He opened his mouth to say something but before he could a gunshot split the air. Brad was shooting the zombies as they came stumping up to the Camry. Neil cast a quick glance over at the ones he had been going to kill—the nearest was fifty yards away. “All right. I need Veronica and Joslyn to check all the remaining tires for more nails. Fred, Michael, William and Grey will change out this tire and I will kill those zombies. Marybeth, climb up on the second truck and take the first watch. We’ll switch every twenty minutes. Any questions?”

“Just one,” Michael Gates said. “We don’t have any more spares and I’m scared to ask how much Brad will charge.”

Brad was just coming up to the trucks, a shotgun slung on his shoulder, clothed as he was in his garish silks, the machismo of the long gun clashed. “Charge for what? You guys have another flat? That is some bad luck.”

The renegades began muttering to themselves and again, just as earlier, he didn’t seem concerned. Casually, he put the gun across his back like a yoke and hung his hands off either end. He breathed out a loud sigh, as though he were filled with sadness over the loss of the tire. “A new tire is pricey, specially one this big. We have to haul it all the way from Topeka and that’s a drive both ways. I’d say it would run you over a thousand.”

This caused the muttering to step up in tempo. Deanna was among the mutterers. She was so angry that if she had been a man, she likely would have taken a poke at Brad. That’s why she was surprised to see Grey was smirking.

“Lucky for us, we don’t need a spare. We have six already.” He pointed at the undercarriage of the truck. It was ten-wheeled on three axles. “We aren’t carrying enough weight that we really need all the wheels. We could lose the middle two and the truck will run just fine.”

At the realization, a few of the renegades laughed and all of them grinned. Brad wore a tight smile as he said: “Well that’s great, just great. In fact, that’s super. I didn’t want to go to Topeka anyway.”

“No one in their right mind would,” Neil said. His was the largest smile of any of them. He clapped Brad on the back, leaving his hand there as if they were good friends. He then addressed the renegades: “Ok people, we all have work to do. Let’s get going.”

The group broke up. Most of them hurrying to find shade against the trucks. Neil went out into the field and, with Deanna backing him, he struck down the zombies as they came straggling up. It was ugly work and hot. Sweat gathered in his hair and what was left of his baby face glowed red. None of the zombies were particularly large or fast, in fact two had ‘turned’ as children and were missing significant portions of their anatomy. Together they only had the sum of three arms, two hands, eight fingers and a single set of lips. Even as un-whole as they were, they were still dangerous because of the disease they carried.

Neil muttered: “Just chopping wood, just chopping wood,” each time he swung the axe over his head to bring it around in a looping arc. Black blood flew. It was like sludge and Neil was speckled like a gecko when the last zombie came hobbling on one foot through the field. This one had been a woman. She wore a silver cross that glinted like white fire, and one sneaker on her remaining foot. She was otherwise naked and unappealing in every way.

As her disfigured leg ended mid-tibia, she moved at a list of some thirty degrees which, combined with her bobbing up-down, caused Neil to misjudge his swing. The axe cleaved off an ear before burying itself in the side of her neck. She didn’t even blink.

She kept coming with hands outstretched, managing to snag his sweater vest. He squawked in typical Neil fashion and leapt back causing the women, whose grip was like iron, to fall forward. She nearly dragged him down and, bent well over at the waist, he was forced to shimmy out of the vest to free himself.

“Jeeze!” he exclaimed and then stomped around the woman to get at the handle of his axe. A tug freed it and then he planted his foot on her back to force her down. “If I live to a hundred, I’ll never get used to this,” he said before looping the axe around a final time. The strike made a wet sound, like a melon being split. It had Deanna’s stomach turning over and, when Neil had to work the axe back and forth in order to free it from the zombie’s head, she turned around to find Jillybean right there.

“Hi,” the little girl said, brightly, as though there wasn’t a pile of bodies in front of her. “I missed you.”

“You missed me?” Deanna asked. “What do you mean?”

Jillybean’s little face scrunched in as if she was under the effects of a lemon. “I guess I don’t know, but it feels like we haven’t talked for a long time. Has it been a long time, do you think? Was it a long time since we blew up the bridge?”

“Four or five days,” Deanna said, trying to remember. She had always been time conscious before the apocalypse. Ever since, she didn’t know one day from another, but at least she was aware of time passing. Jillybean’s mental disorder seemed to be causing hiccups in her memory.

“Forget the bridge,” Neil whined. “Look at me! It’s on me! I think I’m about to puke.” He stood with his arms out and his face stricken and wrinkled in disgust. There was a constellation of bloody, diseased freckles across his cheeks and nose. “Is it in my eyes?”

Deanna shook her head. “It’s close.” She pointed beneath his right eyelid at the drop nearest.

He developed a sudden jittery tic where her finger had indicated. “Oh, jeeze! What the heck am I going to do? I got to get this stuff off of me, but we’re out of water.” He swallowed, making sure to keep his lips slightly parted and his tongue retracted—all in all looking like a dog retching.

“We’re out of water?” Jillybean asked, perplexed at the idea. “That’s not good because I’m thirsty real bad and you gots all that blood on you, which is real gross and all. You know what you can do? You could use dirt to clean up. You know, like a bird. Birds take dirt baths sometimes and have you ever seen a dirty bird? It doesn’t make any sense really, dirt to clean dirt, but they do it.”

Neil looked down at the ground with a hound dog expression. “Dirt? Oh jeeze,” he said, before grabbing a handful of dirt. Deanna was skeptical over the idea and yet she wasn’t the one with zombie blood all over her. Neil started with his hands and wrists. The dirt was abrasive and it was only a minute before his hands were “clean” meaning free of blood, but otherwise filthy. He moved on to his cheeks and neck where the dirt and sweat mingled to make mud.

Jillybean watched Neil with an amused expression as she pointed out each speckle. Deanna had to concentrate on not cracking up and this was not easy, especially when Jillybean suddenly said: “You know what might also work? Mister Ricky’s whiskey drink. He’s always taking secret sips, but he’s not all that secret, if you ask me.”

Neil spat out little flecks of dirt from the end of his tongue. He seemed to have trouble thinking and spitting at the same time. When his mouth was clear, he said in an outraged rush: “He’s got alcohol?” Deanna understood this to mean:
He’s got alcohol and you didn’t tell me?

Innocently, Jillybean answered: “Yep. And you know what also might work? Eve’s baby wipes. If they can clean up poop I bet they’d work on those icky speckles. Hey, Mister Neil? Why do you look like that? You look angry.”

He looked almost crazed with the smears of mud and his face red beneath and his eyes blue but wild. A strangled sound escaped him and his hands shook and were spaced as if there was an invisible neck about the size of Jillybean’s between them. It was at that moment that Brad sauntered up. His smile was back in place, only now it was wider than ever.

“Giving yourself a facial, Neil?”

The strangling hands bunched and, with some effort, Neil managed to force a hint of politeness into his voice. “What can I do for you?”

“I just wanted to give you a heads up. Me and the girls are leaving for a few hours, while you fix your flat. It’s just too hot and we’re also running low on water. Would you like for me to pick some up for you? Just fifty rounds a gallon.”

“Fifty rounds?” Neil asked, aghast. Deanna was stunned at the amount he was asking. At that rate it would cost them five thousand rounds just to fill their containers, and that would only last a day!

In desperation, Neil looked up at the sky which was as blue and empty as it could be. Brad laughed and said: “Sorry my friend, there’s no rain in the forecast, just more sun and more heat. So what’s it going to be? I think fifty rounds is fair, especially since you guys aren’t nearly as thirsty as you will be in a couple more hours when the price will jump to sixty.”

“Sixty?” Jillybean asked with an incredulous laugh. It was an odd sound from a little girl. All three looked down at her and Deanna saw that she had changed. She had gone flinty and cold. There was a brittle edge to her that was sharp and dangerous. “You take that sixty and shove it up your ass.”

Brad hadn’t been mad at Jillybean’s swearing at all; it seemed to stiffen him. He had only said: “We’ll see if you change your mind when it hits a hundred degrees out here,” and then walked away. Neil had stood there hot and tired, with the mud on his face, stunned at first and then angry. Deanna looked nervous and agitated, though Jillybean was only guessing that they were feeling any of these emotions. The world around her was ghost-like and intangible; not quite fully formed. Physical beings were ethereal at best, ghosts that ate and spoke and pissed behind the trucks in steaming arcs, and their emotions were not just hard to fathom, but also difficult to register on her meter of sympathies. They had the feel of actors going through the motions of a performance gone stale through endless repetition.

The other girl in Jillybean had swallowed her up in the black once again, though this time it wasn’t nearly so all-encompassing as it had been. Compared to before, there was a lot more light in her prison of bone. It came in spurts, like novas or speeding meteors, or a flicking of a bulb by a naughty child. This light was accompanied by strange utterances. Sometimes sentences, sometimes questions, sometimes the garbled reflection of messages off an aged transom. They zipped in a bat-like echo through the ether of her mind:
Are we going to die of thirst? No, she won’t let us. Can’t we just get water anywhere? They poisoned it. Why can’t we leave the others? They are useless and stupid and I hate them. They will die soon and that’s good. What about Captain Grey? He can live. What about water?

Jillybean
realize that her other self was actually trying to think. It was laughable, as it had to filter though a mesh of hate. Even at the best of times,
she
wasn’t good at it.
She
had too much anger and fear, too much emotion to be good at thinking.
She
could plot, however.
We have to get away from all of them before they all die. Now, before Brad gets back. How? Tell them we have an idea. Tell them we have a secret. Tell them we can find water, but no one can know where we got it
.

“I can get us water,” Eve said, the words spitting out of her mouth with no ideas behind them.

Neil, who had been, staring after the Camry as it sped away, turned so fast that he almost fell over. “Where?”

Tell him, you can’t tell just yet. Tell him he has to trust you. Tell him you want a gun.
“No, I can’t do that,” Eve hissed aloud, mixing her thoughts with her spoken words. “That has to be secret.”

Jillybean was near the surface of her mind and she guessed it was because there was thinking to be done. Jillybean was good at thinking. The other girl wasn’t.
She
was good at hating. When
she
hated, Jillybean tended to drown down where there was nothing and the world above was tiny and odd appearing, as though she were looking through a coke bottle—things were warped and blurry, untouchable.

Neil asked again: “Where, Jillybean. Where can we get water?”

The bat-like echo again in Jillybean’s mind: “It’s a secret that no one can tell in words out loud. But I can show you and one other per…” She paused as another face flashed like a billboard in her mind. The mental picture was of Sadie.
No! Not Sadie,
Eve thought
. She’s fast and she’s a killer now. She killed all those men and that’s what means she’s dangerous. We can’t trust her.

Another picture flashed and with it came a wordless echo
: Say, Deanna then.
The picture of Deanna in her mind started bright and white hot, but it quickly began to erode. There was a thought that came with the picture:
We could kill her easy
.

“Deanna can come,” the other girl said, out loud, using Jillybean’s lips. “I can show her, too, but no one else. All those others will blab and that poop-face, Brad can’t know where we got it from.”

Neil embraced the lie and ran back to the trucks yelling: “I want the water carriers and everyone’s canteens and bottles in the second truck, right now!”

People were slow to act. Most of them stared in varying degrees of amusement at the little man until Joslyn asked: “Is that dog crap on your face?”

“No, damn it!” Neil snapped. “It’s…it’s never mind. Where is Ricky?”

Ricky was barked at for holding back the whiskey from the group; however, it was only a light dressing down. Neil was in too much of a rush to be properly angry. He ignored the excited questions from the renegades and pulled Grey to the side and spoke in whispers, pointing once at Jillybean.

She and Deanna hadn’t moved, they were still only a few feet from the jumbled pile of dead zombie bodies. “So where are we going?” Deanna asked. They weren’t near enough to anyone to be overheard;
she
didn’t have an excuse not to answer.

The other girl could think of nothing except hurting Deanna. She had no plan beyond murdering her and Neil, and she didn’t even have much of a plan for that.
Their guns
, she thought.
Take one and kill them when they don’t expect it
. A picture accompanied this thought: blood splashed on brown dirt, zombies feasting on warm flesh as crows jumped about in the background cawing and waiting their turn impatiently. The air hummed with flies.

Then what?
a voice asked.

I’ll be free
.

I mean, how will you get away?
Jillybean was surprised that the voice associated with the question was her own.

A pause in her thinking and then another picture:
Jillybean with sticks tied to her legs and Ipes sliding around on the dash. She was driving a truck that wished to be unbound from the road. It kept surging toward the curbs that held in the street and kept the asphalt from flowing away. It was a chugging and spitting sort of truck and could be described as unruly and ill-tempered, but Jillybean was more than a match for it and aimed it at the front of a building—a Piggly Wiggly where Neil was being held prisoner. Its doors were barred with wood and came up very fast and grew big in her eyes and then the crash and the glass flew and metal screamed as if in agony
…

“I’ll need sticks,”
She
said, instead of answering Deanna’s question. “Sticks or a…a handle from a rake or shovel.”

After a look that held a great deal of suspicion, Deanna left to talk to Neil. This was all Jillybean knew for some time. There was a flash of hate as Deanna took a peek back at the little girl and then utter blackness that enveloped her to such an extent she couldn’t feel her heart in her chest or the air around her.

Eventually, what felt like days later, Jillybean heard her name and felt a hand shaking her shoulder. She crawled out of a state of consciousness so thick it might as well have been tar.

“Huh?” she said, her eyes blinking, slowly as she looked around, confused.

“Where to now?” Neil asked, again. Jillybean thought it was an ‘again’ kind of question because it sure did have a familiar ring to it. Like one of those echoes in her mind that kept going and going…only this was real and that meant she was she.

“Hey, I’m me,” she said, as the realization struck her. She was in charge of her own body again. She gave Neil a grin and Deanna one, as well, but when Deanna only gave her a narrow look, Jillybean heard the other girl in her mind:
she doesn’t trust us. Figure out how to kill her
.

Jillybean saw in her mind why she had been allowed to come back. Neil didn’t have a weapon that the other girl could use. He had his axe and it was heavy. Deanna had a pistol in a holster strapped to her side. She kept her right hand very close to it as if she was ready to draw quick like a gun fighter.“But we need water,” Jilly whispered. “Even you need water, or you’ll die.” She was parched; her little tongue was dry as an old sock.

Above, the sun was a silver-blue glare, while around them was more farmland cut up in lines. To their right, the corn formed a green wall. To their left were little, green, shrubby plants that made food of a sort, this Jillybean was sure of, however the plants had no name in her mind.

As Deanna and Neil shared a look over her head, the other girl spoke in a ghostly voice in her head:
Find the water for us and then kill them both or else I will
.

“You don’t know how to kill them,” Jillybean said in a hissing whisper, casting a furtive look up at Deanna, whose hand had slipped closer to the pistol at her hip. It made Jillybean wonder what the other girl had been doing or saying when she was gone. She was unable to connect the suspicious movement with her own mutterings. “You need me,” she added to the other girl.

Although Deanna’s brows furrowed, Neil thought she was talking to him and so he answered: “Yes. We need a water source, remember?”

“The waters are zombie soup and the wells are poisoned,” Jillybean said. A vivid picture leapt into her mind: they were high above a river that was simply clogged with a gazillion zombies. No one but Neil, who had been vaccinated against the zombie disease, could drink from it, and he looked as though he would rather die of dehydration than take a sip.

But what about the wells?

“Can you, uh, let me by, Miss Deanna? I need to check something out.”

Grudgingly, Deanna opened the door and slid out. She kept her eyes full on the little girl as she did. Jillybean went to the open door but did not climb down; she climbed up onto the top of the truck’s cab where the heat radiated upwards. It had to be over a hundred and ten degrees and her head swam. She squinted into the shimmering glare in all directions. There were farms and more farms. Some were cut up in squares, some in circles. The idea of a circular farm made no sense to her unless they grew pumpkins, which she knew to be round.

The farmland went further than she could see. They had been passing nothing but farmland for the last three days. If she had to guess, she would’ve thought they had driven by ten thousand of fields.

There was a farm not far away. From atop the cab she could see a silo and the tip-top of a white building, which she guessed either to be a farmhouse or a barn. “We need to go that way,” she said pointing at the building. She knew about farms. Since she had met up with Neil and Ram, they had stayed in barns overnight on several different occasions, though they never got to do much in the way of exploring, which she had always considered “cheap.”

But that wasn’t the only way she was acquainted with farms. She used to have a picture book called:
Sissy and Me on the Farm
. It was full of all sorts of information about the entire farming experience, as long as one was observant that is, and Jillybean was very observant.

They climbed into the truck and Neil guided the beastly vehicle down to the first turn-off and then down the gravel road, until they pulled into the farm proper. There was the white house with its shutters sitting at diagonals and the roof beginning to peel back. And there was the silo standing as an imposing sentry, and a low slung barn with the carcass of some great beast lying in front of its doors. It had been a bull, or a buffalo, or a wooly mammoth or some such, Jillybean didn’t know which.

In the yard of the house Jillybean saw half of what she was looking for. The other half was something she had never seen in real life; only in books such as
Sissy and Me on the Farm
. “Can you drive around a bit, Mister Neil? Like around the barn and the silo and the house and such?”

Neil gave her a skeptical look, but said nothing as he put the truck in gear. He wasn’t nearly as smooth as Captain Grey, who could walk the truck around as if it were sliding on ice. Neil somehow bounced the ten-thousand pounds of metal, rubber, and glass, as if he could only make it go by hopping it forward. In that bone-rattling fashion, they turned the curves of an “eight” around the building until Jillybean said: “Nope, it’s not here.”

With a sigh, Neil said: “Maybe it would help if you told me what you’re looking for.”

“Oh, that’s ok,” Jillybean said. “It’s not here and that’s ok. I was hoping not to see what we didn’t see.”

This caused both Neil and Deanna to look around, both wearing matching crease lines cutting up their foreheads. “Ok,” Deanna said. “What aren’t we supposed to see?”

“A well,” Jillybean said, happily. She couldn’t be happier by not seeing one. The truth was she had never seen a real well. She had only seen them in books, but she had seen the metal contraptions that reminded her of stick-horses she used to gallop behind back when her mommy and daddy had been alive.

“I don’t get it,” Neil said. “The wells are all poisoned. We can’t take the chance of drinking the water from one. Knowing Brad, he had set it up so that we broke down with a poisoned well sitting right down the road.”

“Yes,” Jillybean said, smiling. “There’s no well. But there is one of those hickey-doos.”

Neil was clearly flummoxed by the word “hickey-doos”, and the concept of a pump not in conjunction with a well had his face all scrunched, making his scars and the primitive stitching around them turn his face nearly as ugly as a zombie’s. “But…” was all he could say in his confusion.

Deanna seemed to be mired in the same sort of puzzled quagmire. She was staring at the pump with its long thoracic pipe and its horsey nose and the mane of a pump. “Won’t it be…”