The Queen of the Dead Page 2

  He should have stopped and trusted in the camouflage. Instead he let out a human squawk of fear and ran, leaving behind a trailing scent of bathtub hooch and body odor.

  “What do we do?” Colleen asked, peeking her face out from the low hood of her suit. She was asking Mike when she should have been asking Jenn or Jillybean. It was true that Mike was exceedingly brave, and on board any boat he was practically a god, but on land he lumbered about nearly as blithely as One Shot and Orlando. On the other hand, Jillybean was as stealthy as a cat and Jenn passed through the world like a ghost.

  Mike paused to take in the situation as he saw it. Jillybean had seen all she needed to and had already calculated the odds of every possible action. “We do nothing.”

  “I was asking Mike,” Colleen snapped. “He’s not the one who talks to himself and…” She stopped as a great commotion could be heard coming their way. It was Orlando. He had foolishly run in a wide circle, losing his ghillie suit and managing to attract every zombie in the area which were now converging on the little group.

  “No one move,” Jillybean whispered, the beginnings of a grin on her face. Part of her felt an ugly dark pleasure at seeing Orlando running for his life. She tried to shake it off, but the feeling persisted. She cursed to herself; it was a bad sign that she was losing it already.

  The five of them hunkered down, appearing to the dead to be nothing more than odd mounds of shrubbery. Orlando wasn’t fooled. “Kill them! Kill them!” he shrieked, running right for his friends. His eyes were big circles of fear.

  Instead of shooting his crossbow at the dead, One Shot threw it aside and took off running to their right. Then Colleen’s nerve broke and she sprinted away in a panic, making a whining noise in her throat. Now the dead were going in three different directions.

  “She’s going to get herself killed,” Mike griped before racing after her and pulling her into a small ranch house.

  “If we had been looking for a distraction, we couldn’t have arranged anything better than this,” Jillybean remarked, casually. “We could practically skip down to the harbor now. It’s either that or we share their fate, which do you want?”

  Jenn didn’t like the idea of Mike sharing a fate, good or bad, with Colleen White. “You know the Coven is going to blame us if something happens to any of them.”

  Jillybean shrugged. “Like I care, but I see you do. Come on.” Staying low they hurried along the edge of the overgrown yards until they were abreast of the ranch house. Just down the street Orlando was trapped under a rusting scrap of metal that had once been a truck, while two of the beasts, both smallish seven-footers, were straining to heave it over to get at him. Not far from him, One Shot was hiding in an overturned trash can as more of the creatures stalked around in a fury.

  If One Shot played it cool, Jenn figured he would probably live; Orlando wasn’t that lucky. The dead knew exactly where he was, and they would get to him one way or another even if they had to tear apart the truck piece by piece.

  Taking Jenn’s hand, Jillybean led her to the ranch house. “Get inside,” she whispered giving Jenn a push. Standing next to Mike and Colleen, Jenn watched from the front window as Jillybean reached into her pocket, took out a fat cat’s eye marble, kissed it, and chucked it as far as she could down the street where it bounced with the familiar, clack, clack, clack sound.

  Immediately, the dead around One Shot’s trash can turned toward the sound. As the marble itself was too quick and too small to see, they began to follow the sound as did one of the beasts that had been tearing at the old truck. The other one, its huge lower jaw hanging open, was gazing after them, utter incomprehension in its filmed-over eyes. In that one second, it had forgotten all about the human under the truck.

  Grinning, Jillybean ducked into the little cracker-box of a house. “That was easy enough. What? What are you…”

  She stopped when she saw they were all still staring out the window with matching looks of alarm. Orlando and One Shot hadn’t waited to give the dead time to settle down like they should have. Instead, they were running for the ranch with all the zombies racing after.

  Mike began waving his arms in the universal sign for “Go Away!” The two were frantic and ignored the sign. Before they knew it, the two had raced into the living room, panting like dogs. Orlando slammed the door shut and threw his weight against it.

  It would never hold. “Out the back!” Jillybean cried. They hurried to the back door only to see two more of the beasts in the yard, sluggishly moving towards the kitchen door. Now they had no choice but to rush into the basement. Just like that, they had managed to trap themselves in a near-pitch black windowless hole in the ground. It felt horribly like a crypt to Jenn.

  The dead were on the main floor searching for them, tearing the place apart, ripping down walls and doors, throwing aside beds and dressers.

  “Look,” One Shot Saul whispered, pointing at the far end of the basement where light had begun to stream in. With the weight of the beasts on one side of the house, the whole structure was tilting in that direction like a soggy cardboard box. Two-by-fours began to split and somewhere a pipe let out a groan.

  Jenn took only a single glance before she turned her attention to a jagged crack that ran up the basement wall like a fork of lightning. Although there were many cracks in the house’s foundation, some fine and thin as if they had been drawn with a pencil, and others inches across and who knew how deep, this one drew her eyes.

  At the top of the crack, the frame of the house was split in two. In fact, the frame looked no sturdier than if it had been made of cork and had been hand-glued by a first-grader using a bottle of Elmer’s. Jenn Lockhart fixated on that split and tried not to cry. If the house was going to come down on them, it would start there. Everyone else, their chests heaving from the chase, stared upward as the house shook and dust filtered down through new beams of light.

  Jenn refused to take her eyes off the split. She was afraid that if she looked away and saw the house on the verge of collapse, she would scream. Her father had been killed in the same earthquake that had caused the cracks in the house’s foundation. A building had fallen and squished him like a grape, popping his eyes right out of his head, or so she imagined, and now she was in danger of sharing the same fate.

  “Damn,” Mike whispered. “I’m starting to think this was a mistake.”

  “Magoo is ‘starting to think,’ that’s something, I guess,” Jillybean remarked, dryly. When Mike glared at her, she looked at him blankly for a moment before jerking as if startled. “I said that out loud? Sorry, that was Sadie. It wasn’t me.”

  As if she had been yelling, One Shot shushed her, sticking a dirty finger to his lips. “They’ll pull up the floor to get at us if they hear you,” he hissed. “We have to find a way out of here.”

  Hearing the panic in his voice didn’t help Jenn who was struggling to stay calm. Nor did it help that Jillybean looked as though she was wavering between personalities.

  A huge crash from above shivered the walls and sent more dust down into the eyes of those staring up. Colleen’s face twisted oddly and froze that way for a few seconds before she sneezed violently into the crook of her arm. The way One Shot reacted, Jenn thought an artery in his head had exploded like a balloon. His eyes shot wide as he made a garbled, gobbling noise and clamped his hand across Colleen’s face, covering both her nose and mouth.

  In seconds, she was struggling to breathe. Orlando, who was kneeling between them, glanced from one to the other with dull-eyed confusion. Topping out at an inch over six foot, Orlando was the biggest man there, but it was up to Mike to keep Colleen from being suffocated.

  Mike slid out his hunting knife and laid the point on One Shot’s cheek an inch from his eye. “Let go of her.” Mike was cool, the coolest one in the basement and the blade didn’t waiver.

  One Shot’s hand went limp and Colleen shoved it away. “What the hell?” Now, she was loud, and One Shot silently begged her to lower h
er voice, going so far as to clasp his hands beneath his bristled chin as if he were praying. “No, I won’t shut up. They can’t hear us.”

  The zombies were making a tremendous racket as they tore the house apart—the tilt was getting worse. There was a four-inch gap along one wall as the frame pulled away from the foundation. Colleen turned to Jillybean. “You’re supposed to be smart, why don’t you think of something?”

  “I have been thinking of many things,” Jillybean shot back. “For instance, I was just now thinking what an utterly moronic…”

  Jenn finally turned from the gap in the foundation and elbowed Jillybean. The two locked eyes. Both sets were equally blue, however Jillybean’s were huge and had a lamp-like quality to them—they were also getting twitchy. “Stay focused, okay?” Jenn whispered to her. “We gotta keep the house from falling on us. That’s step one.”

  “Then do it. You don’t need her for something that simple.” It was Jillybean’s lips moving but Jenn didn’t think it was her doing the talking.

  Everyone stared at Jenn; Colleen and One Shot wearing openly dubious expressions, while Orlando, looking as though he were watching live theater, pulled a hip flask out and took a slug. Only Mike seemed hopeful.

  “Maybe we can wedge some of this stuff up under the frame to hold it in place,” he suggested. The dark basement was, like so many others, filled with useless trash from the old days, Christmas decorations, fine, hand-painted blue China that had only been used once, a wedding dress, which appeared in the darkness like a condemned woman hanging from the rafters, and of course, dusty boxes that were liberally sprinkled with mouse droppings.

  Jillybean reached out to touch the wedding dress. Without looking back at Mike, she asked, “Really, Magoo? There are five or six thousand pounds of undead meat threatening to fall through the floorboards and you want to jack it up somehow and put a gravy boat and some Christmas bulbs under the floor joists? Come on! We get tired of you making Jillybean do all the thinking.”

  The ceiling above their heads groaned louder than ever and the joists began to sag.

  “Please, just tell us what to do,” Colleen begged. Jillybean only shook her head, as she traced the intricate lace designs. Her mind was twisting and folding in on itself, but there was one thing it knew just then: the dress was beautiful.

  “I can do this,” Jenn whispered under her breath. And she really believed she could. In the two weeks that Jenn had known Jillybean, she had been getting an intense indoctrination into the fundamentals of logic or as she thought of it: Jillybean was trying to make her smarter. “First identify the immediate problem. The floor is going to cave in because there are too many zombies in one place.” Just saying this aloud opened her eyes to a range of possibilities.

  “Orlando, can you reach up and pull down that thing?”

  He squinted his red eyes up at the rafters. “You mean the ski pole? You never heard of a ski pole before? Sheesh, maybe we should get someone else in charge of getting us out of here.”

  When no one else volunteered, Jenn snapped her fingers and held her hand out, palm up. With a shrug, Orlando pulled the pole down and gave it to her. She hurried to the far side of the house and tapped gently on the ceiling, blinking against the dust and the gossamer strings of spider webs that cascaded down. The effect of the light tapping was immediate: some of the dead stomped over to investigate the sound and the house righted itself.

  “Simple as pie,” Jillybean said, without taking her gaze from the dress. In particular, a delicate, pale pink organza rose seemed to hold her spellbound. It was the only hint of color in what had once been a uniformly white background. Like so much of the old world, the dress was now fading into grey.

  “So how do we get out of here?” Colleen asked.

  When Jillybean didn’t answer, Colleen turned to Jenn, who had no idea. The stairs were the only way to get out of the house which meant they would need a distraction.

  “I will lead them away,” Mike declared. “I’m the fastest. I have the best chance.” Although it was their only idea, it wasn’t a good one. There were zombies tromping all over the house making such a racket that there was no telling precisely where each of them was. If Mike got unlucky he could run right into one.

  When Jenn asked Jillybean what she thought, Jillybean replied, “I thought about getting married once. You remember Nico, right?” Once more, her eyes were out of focus and her smile was softly crooked, as if her face couldn’t decide what emotion was pulling the strings. Staring at the dress had her thinking about love—romantic love and Nico’s face had just popped into her head. Somewhere deep inside her mind, Sadie made a purring sound.

  “I never met him,” Jenn said. “But I bet he was nice. Hey, how about helping us here? Do I need to have you do some math problems?”

  Ever since the night of the battle Jillybean had been relatively sane, with only slight glitches now and again. This was easily the worst she had been. Thankfully, Jillybean had the foresight to supply Jenn with a number of complicated math questions which would set her mind back on the right track. In Jenn’s coat pocket were five problems written on a note card and for some reason all the questions had letters in them. She was pretty sure they were a mistake.

  Jillybean had tried to explain how the math worked, but Jenn had needed an explanation of the explanation, which had led to even more explanations until she was wound up like a watch and completely baffled.

  Even more baffling was Jillybean waving a hand, dismissively and said, “Hmm? Math? No, I hate math.” She reached up as high as she could and took the dress down. She put it up to herself. “It’s a little long, but it might do.” She gave the dress a snap, swirling the beams of light with endless motes of dust. “Everyone, turn around. I’m trying this on.”

  Mike’s mouth fell open. “You’re doing what? No, no, wrong. You aren’t going to put on a damned dress. Not now, not with the dead right above us. We can come back for it, okay? Right now, we should be figuring a way out of here.”

  “No. Jenn can handle it,” Jillybean said absently, her broken mind still on the dress. When she looked up from it and found Mike glaring, she shrugged and started pulling off her clothes. Mike’s eyes went wide and a second too late, he turned around.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled at the wall.

  Jillybean only snorted, or rather the person in her did. Jenn suspected it was Sadie. That part of Jillybean was adventurous and foolishly brave. She liked pranks and to tease, but was also kind. Jenn would have liked her if she wasn’t a ghost. Supposedly, she had died protecting Jillybean and she was still doing so in death.

  Sadie cursed over the sound of fabric rustling. “I need help,” she said. “Girls only!”

  “Fine, nut-job,” Orlando muttered, turning back to the wall as Jenn and Colleen went to Sadie.

  There was a lot more dress than girl and Sadie seemed to be swimming in it. “I think the train is caught on something.”

  “Train?” Jenn asked.

  “I think she means the back part,” Colleen said. “It’s caught up on the veil.” As they worked to free the train, Colleen caught Jenn’s eye. “Speaking of weddings…”

  Jenn’s throat started to constrict. “We weren’t,” she said in a whisper of a whisper.

  “Since we are now, tell me, is it true that you and Mike aren’t actually engaged? You guys never did—it?”

  The basement was so quiet Jenn could hear her own pulse in her ears and feel the flush of her cheeks. “That’s none of your business. And Sadie, what are you doing? We don’t have time to try on dresses.”

  This was no longer close to being Jillybean. Sadie smoothed down the dress and twitched her shoulders, saying, “Until you can come up with a plan, we have all the time in the world. So, what do you think?”

  Even with all the dust and her wild hair going in every direction, she was beautiful. Perhaps not as beautiful as Colleen, who spent hours each day becoming so and could suck the air out of any room she entered,
but still beautiful enough for the three men to stare.

  As always, Jenn felt small and insignificant. “You look great. So, how about now you help get us out of here?” When Sadie declined the offer, Jenn pulled out her written math notes and struggled over them. “Here’s a question. There’s a three with a small three next to an X, and, and there’s a smaller x next to that, followed by a big, kind of curved C…”

  “What are you talking about?” Sadie snatched the paper from Jenn. She snorted, “A big C? That’s the beginning of a set of parentheses. And this is three-x to the third.” Her smirk began to fade as her eyes worked their way over the problem. In a minute she said, “Oh, that was simple enough. The…the…what am I doing in a dress?”

  “Being crazy,” One Shot growled.

  She was Jillybean again and with the pink of embarrassment in her cheeks, she asked, “And we’re still trapped? Jenn, you know getting to the harbor is important to me.” She began to pull off the dress with the same lack of modesty that she had taken off her shirt. Mike turned the others around to stare at the wall again.

  “I don’t know how to get us out,” Jenn admitted. “There’s no way to know where all the dead are. There could be lurkers. It’s not safe to make a run for it.”

  “There weren’t lurkers before,” Jillybean replied, zipping up her black jeans.

  “Yes, they were all congregated on one side of the house and the whole place nearly came crashing down.”

  Jillybean sat to pull on her canvas high-top tennis shoes, saying, “Ah, just so. And that would be bad in this case, why?”

  Jenn opened her mouth to blurt out the obvious—if they fell in we’d be trapped in a basement along with every zombie in the house—before she could, however, Jillybean’s hint finally caught. If all the zombies were in the basement, they’d be able to walk out the front door without a problem.

  “We’re trusting Miss Loony-Tunes?” One Shot demanded, when Jenn told them the plan. “I say we sit tight and wait it out. That is the smart move.” He put his back to the wall and slid down it until his knees were up to his chin. A second later Orlando joined him. Mike and Colleen looked uncertain which way to turn, so Jillybean helped with their decision.