The Undead World (Book 8): The Apocalypse Executioner Read online

  The Apocalypse Executioner

  The Undead World Novel 8

  A Zombie Tale by Peter Meredith

  Copyright 2016

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

  A Perfect America

  The Sacrificial Daughter

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Three

  The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1

  An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2

  Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3

  The Punished

  Sprite

  The Blood Lure The Hidden Land Novel 1

  The King’s Trap The Hidden Land Novel 2

  To Ensnare a Queen The Hidden Land Novel 3

  The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

  The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

  The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

  The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

  The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

  The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6

  The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

  The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8

  The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead Book One

  The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead Book Two

  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 Witch: Jillybean in the Undead World

  Chapter 1

  Jillybean

  Within a second of opening her eyes, Jillybean could tell that something was…not exactly wrong…but different. Without moving a muscle, she gazed all around, seeing nothing but a green haze and smelling nothing but musty wool.

  An old army blanket covered her completely, turning the air stale, making it taste used up in her mouth. Past the blanket, the usual morning noises came to her muffled, but beyond a few waking birds, a soft sighing wind that would blow itself out by midday and the creaking of a nearby birch, there was nothing to hear.

  Still, she didn’t budge. Ever cautious, she laid there for a full minute before she decided that, different or not, she was safe. Gradually she slid the blanket down, stopping just as the trail edge hit the small bump of her nose.

  “What happened?” she whispered, confusion twisting her little girl features. She sat up, staring in astonishment, her breath forming clouds in front of her face. “Ipes? Ipes what happened?”

  All around her the trees of the forest were strange in color. There were oranges and reds—but that couldn’t be. And the long grasses that she was nestled in were brown spears edged with frost.

  When she had gone to sleep, the forest had been green and the mosquitos huge and fat as humming birds. It had been summer and now it wasn’t. This had her insides going queer.

  Time flies when you’re having fun, Ipes said, as if the idea of fun was a bad thing. You’ve been acting the part of a cricket for way too long.

  This odd statement only added to her confusion. What she knew of crickets were that they could jump real high, they rubbed their legs together like a bad violinist and they tasted like earwax…like crunchy earwax.

  The thought of earwax brought back a memory of summer. Her and Ipes in a mass of ferns, bugs buzzing and sweat dripping down her chin with the sun straight up overhead. The rays felt as though they were smashing down on her and she could barely keep her eyes open.

  But she couldn’t sleep. There were monsters nearby, eating the heads off of flowers like the world’s most gruesome rabbits. She had huddled lower into the massed ferns that crept up from the river. Like a living shag, the ferns carpeted the earth in green, three feet in height. Everything was green on green, including Jillybean, who wore layers of camouflage that had been a week in perfecting. The blend was so exact that one of the monsters that was all of five feet away couldn’t see through the illusion.

  The diseased hunk of grey meat stood so close its shadow fell across her and for a long moment neither moved. She didn’t dare and the monster didn’t have the wit to.

  A bird cawed, an unnecessary intrusion that was more than an annoyance as the monster swiveled its head, the pull of exposed tendons making a creaking noise, sounding like ropes on a decaying sailing ship.

  It snuffled air through the half-healed remains of its nose. Jillybean kept perfectly still, knowing that the monster couldn’t smell fear or sweat or even an Olympic pool filled with ammonia. None of them could smell worth a darn, but it could catch the slightest motion.

  For a long time, maybe an hour, maybe two. Jillybean squatted in the ferns growing ever more sleepy and ever more hungry. Hungry enough to eat a cricket. One just happened to flit through the air to land right next to her hand. Her stomach made a gurglily noise as she looked upon it.

  Don’t, it looks gross, Ipes had said.

  To Jillybean it looked no more gross than a skinned rabbit or a plucked pheasant or the hairy legged spider she had swallowed on a dare from Ipes. She cupped the cricket where it made desperate squiggly motions against her palm.

  When the monster finally turned away, she had popped it in her mouth and crunched it into a gazillion pieces as she made a face. It tasted horrible, but worse was that the pieces of cricket had the consistency of popcorn husks. They stuck in her teeth so that the bitter taste lasted.

  Ipes put his hooves on his bulging, cookie-bloated hips. That’s not what I meant and you know it. Remember the fable of the cricket who whiles away the summer day in fun while the ant labors preparing for winter?

  It was vaguely familiar. “But what happened to the summer?” Jillybean asked, a note of fear in her voice. The last thing she remembered before waking up with frost all around her was damning up a river to catch cat fish, and it had been hot as blazes that day. She stood up and gazed around at the forest, not recognizing a thing. “Are we still in Missouri?”

  Oh sure, and don’t worry about the date thing, Ipes said, giving his head a sympathetic tilt. It’s happened before. Time gets away from you. I think it’s normal.

  The forest was so foreign to her that she could have been in Siberia for all she knew. “How is this in any way normal? What happened to those kids? Remember the ones I rescued from the witch?”

  They left a long time ago, Ipes told her. Months ago, but that’s okay. These things take time. She was about to ask him: what things? When he answered: Healing. You needed time to heal, mentally, that is.

  “And…and am I healed? Is that why I can think now?”

  Oh, you’ve always been able to think. Thinking is not your problem. Coping is your problem. Understanding the unfortunate nature of humanity is your problem. Dealing with grief is your problem.

  “Grief?” she asked, as a spasm of fear ran up her back. Had someone else died? The list of people she knew who had died…or whom she had killed, was long. When she pictured them in her mind, they lined up in a velvety blackness as if waiting to get into a movie in hell. Another spasm struck her.

  No one else has died as far as I know. We’ve been ou
t here, hiding so there’s no way to know, but I would bet not.

  “Hiding?”

  I don’t know what else to call it. You abandoned those children and you keep us away from every settlement. We haven’t spoken to anyone in months.

  Jillybean’s mouth hung open and, for a long while, as the sun gradually rose through a murky haze of clouds, she could only blink, her lids flapping closed over her huge blues eyes in a slow rhythm.

  Finally, she asked: “And do I ask these same questions every morning?”

  No. Normally, you hop up and start playing. Since you didn’t, I figured it was a good time to mention the cricket and the ant fable. You have got to start preparing for winter or there will be trouble.

  She had a vision of gathering nuts in the hollow of a tree. A shake of her head cleared that picture. “I was sick in the head, but now I’m better. Huh? But how would I know if that’s true? How does a crazy person knows they’re not crazy?”

  The circular nature of the question was too much and she could only shrug it away. “Well, since I’m no longer crazy what should I do?”

  Find a hotel? Ipes suggested. I hate roughing it. You know we haven’t seen the inside of a package of Oreos in…I can’t remember the last time. And you should really think about finding a bathtub.

  Self-consciously, she put a hand to her fly-away hair and was shocked to feel the knots in it…and the twigs. Her hair felt like some sort of failed wicker experiment.

  “Wow,” she whispered, glancing down at herself. Caked dirt under her fingernails, filthy hands, clothes that reeked of old sweat and stained with what she hoped was bog mud. Next to her was an oddly familiar backpack that she was sure she had never seen before. It was as foul as she was.

  It was jam-packed with stuff and not the usual Jillybean survival gear, either. For the most part, it was packed with toys: a pair of matching Barbie dolls, a white and pink tea set made of molded plastic, a magic wand that flashed lights when she touched a button, a tutu and fairy wings in gold, sized for a little girl.

  “Where’s my knife? And my multi-tool? Where are my books?” She could remember she had been halfway through an eighth grade algebra book and was nearly finished with a text on the physical sciences.

  Ipes shrugged his sloping shoulders. You took the summer off, I guess.

  She was about to admonish Ipes for being silly, because no one took summers off anymore; survival was a full-time occupation, even for a seven-year-old, but as she opened her mouth her mind was flooded with images and memories. They came to her disjointed and out of sequence: Ipes sitting on a chair in a clearing, her hugging him and crying. The two of them sitting in a strange house chatting over freshly brewed tea. The two of them at a playground, squealing with laughter, as she spun on a tire swing.

  She saw them roasting marshmallows, playing tag, and hide and go seek. They put on a play about King Arthur and rode bikes. These wonderful memories played through her mind like a movie she had starred in and it was fantastic right up until the last memory: her and Ipes having a “who can make the biggest splash” contest in a clear blue pool. The pleasant memories ended with a strange flash of light. It was an explosion, a massive one and she saw herself lolling listlessly in a river of black water that was filled with dead bodies.

  “The River King’s barge,” she said in a whisper as a cold tingle ran up her, and her skin tented with a million goosebumps. “How did that get mixed in with those other memories?”

  Ipes remained silent, sitting on the green blanket. She shook off the unanswered question, and glanced around, trying to get her bearings. With the sun just rising, she knew the direction of the cardinal points of the compass, but that was about it. She had no idea where she was and no real idea where to go.

  Neil Martin’s face came to mind—he was young with clear blue eyes, a sweet smile and a baby face. For the briefest of moments, she smiled, only then the image of Neil changed. His face became scarred and scabbed and his eyes grew dark and his always pleasant air was now shaded by the burdens of worry and regret.

  This was the real Neil Martin. This is what he had become. “Because of me,” Jillybean said.

  Suddenly the other memories of the past summer faded as well. She saw herself sitting quietly in an empty playground where everything squeaked with rust. She saw herself sitting in a dark house with a tea set in front of her knobby knees; the cups were empty of tea and the marshmallows were old and stale. She saw herself in a garage, staring at a pair of bikes which sat on deflated tires.

  “What is this?” she asked Ipes. “What’s…what’s real?” He shrugged again and she grew angry. “I thought you said I was healed.”

  I said you were healing, not healed. These things take time. You have to be patient.

  The image of Neil came to her once more, his scars standing out in ugly pink lines. “What if this is as far as I heal? People don’t grow hands back if they get chopped off. Maybe this is it.”

  Maybe you would heal more if you were around people who love you, Ipes suggested.

  An image sprang to mind: Jillybean crushing pills into powder and putting it into a baby’s bottle.

  “But…” she started to say as tears filled her eyes. There were no “buts.” She had killed her little sister. She had poisoned Eve’s bottle and had stuck it right between her pink lips. The memory was faded and grainy as if it was an old-time movie, but those had been her hands dealing in death. “Who could love someone who did that?”

  Sadie and Mister Neil, Ipes said without hesitation. They know it wasn’t your fault. Sadie said so. They’ll take you back.

  “What about the others? What about Mister Trigg and Mister Captain Grey? And Mister Michael, and all of them?”

  You have to try, Jilly. You’ll die out here all alone. Can’t you see that? Can’t you feel it?

  Jillybean hadn’t thought about it before that moment. Now, she took stock of herself: the dirt and the smell struck her right off the bat. She reeked like one of the bums she had seen in Philadelphia years before. Looking closer at herself she saw that her arms appeared oddly thin. Lifting her shirt, she noted that her ribs stuck out as though her skeleton was growing out of her skin.

  When was the last time she had eaten a proper meal? She couldn’t remember. This was perhaps why she had woken feeling so abysmally tired.

  “Yeah, I guess I better do something.” Her eyes fell on the jumble of toys that spilled from the backpack and a part of her wanted to dig through them once more, to lose herself again in the fantasy world she had built. Fake or not, it had been at least fun. This real world wasn’t fun at all.

  It can be, Ipes said. You have me, after all and everyone knows I am the funnest of persons.

  Jillybean rolled her eyes as she picked up the zebra. “You’re not even a person. You’re not even…” In mid-sentence, her face froze in place. The next thing she knew she found herself walking quietly through a forest, her near disaster conveniently forgotten.

  She couldn’t heal all at once and that meant she couldn’t admit what Ipes really was. He was a band aid holding her psyche together and if she lost him again, her mind would break and there’d be no coming back.

  Chapter 2

  Jillybean

  Before she could consider a trek halfway across the country, the little girl had to do something about her stink.

  Ipes couldn’t tell her how long it had been since her last bath. He claimed to have lost track of the days and she supposed that was very possible as she didn’t know what month it was, let alone the date.

  On a near empty road, she found a house whose front door had been cracked square in half, the lock and hinges proving sturdier than the wood.

  Inside, magnetized on the side of a refrigerator was a calendar. The picture on top was of a cartoon haunted house with the words: Happy Halloween written in ghostly lettering. The month was for October and that didn’t help Jillybean at all.

  “Is this for now or for last year?” It wa
s nippy enough out to be October. The year stamped on the calendar wasn’t any help, either. She’d been six when all of this had started and at that age years didn’t mean much.

  I say we act as if this is October until we find out different, Ipes said. In fact, we can pretend that today is Halloween and you can go as a little girl.

  Jillybean made a face of disgust. “That’s hardly a costume. Now, I wish I kept that tutu. A tutu is what means you’re a ballerina and that is costume.”

  I think if you saw a mirror you might change your mind about what is and what isn’t a costume. He led her through the house in search of a mirror and found one in the master bedroom. Her reflection wasn’t the first thing that caught her eye, however.

  An odd pile of moldering bones, partially wrapped up in a sheet, lay on the carpet of the room. A long-decayed arm stuck out as if it was reaching for something. “Ugh. It looks like someone was getting ready to bury it and it came back to life.”

  I think animals got at it. There’s teeth marks on the ulna that aren’t from a human.

  “Oh.” Jillybean had a soft spot for animals and didn’t like to think that they would eat people when they got hungry enough. She turned from the corpse and then stepped back in fright, ready to run. At first, she thought that a monster had somehow managed to sneak up on her, but then she saw that it was just her reflection.

  “Ho-lee mo-lee,” she breathed, turning her head this way and that, seeing herself as Ipes saw her. She looked like a beast, part monster, part yeti. She addressed the mirror, “Maybe you’re right. I think I should go to Halloween as a little girl.”

  Bathing in a house with a corpse usually wasn’t a problem, however she kept imagining the thing upstairs crawling across the floor towards the door. After poking around for food and coming up empty, she decided to bathe at the next house she found.

  After a ten minute walk down the empty road, Jillybean came across a home that was partially destroyed. A fire had eaten the garage and part of the main house. The remaining two-thirds leaned on its foundation looking as though a stiff wind would send it crashing down.