The Queen of the Dead Read online

  He sighed. It could be hours before they wandered away, so he found a soft spot of hill to relax on.

  Stu joined him, easing down with a grimace. “They aren’t going to Santa Clara. Jillybean may be crazy but she isn’t stupid. They’re off to Oakland, I’m sure of it. I just don’t know why. You’ve been there more than I have, what do you think they’re after?”

  Mike had no idea. He couldn’t get into Jillybean’s head when she was coherent, but now that Eve was in charge—well, they could be going to pick daisies for all he knew. He told Stu as much and for some reason Stu grew even quieter than usual, to the point of being sullen.

  “Sorry, I don’t know why they’re going to Oakland. It’s just a city, no different than San Francisco or Sacramento as far as I know.”

  Stu ran his hand through his long hair, saying, “That’s not why I’m mad. It’s just I thought we were different. You know, the Hill People and the Islanders. I thought there was something good about us, but I think I was just comparing us to all the rest. We’re better people than those wretches in Sacramento, and they’re better than the whoring thieves in Santa Clara and everyone is better than the Corsairs. But I don’t think we’re really good anymore.”

  “We used to be,” Mike answered, after a moment of reflection. “My father was a good man and so was Jenn’s. I was eight the year they died and I remember them pretty well. They were both like knights from the old days. They had, I don’t know the word for it…”

  “Honor?”

  Mike grinned. “Yeah, that was it. They both had that honor and maybe they made a lot of people better because a lot of people wanted to be like them.”

  “I know I did,” Stu said and sighed. “It’s too bad things changed. The dead got bigger and we got smaller and more afraid to do anything but try to stay alive.” For Stu Currans he had just used up his day’s allowance of words and he didn’t speak again as they spent the next hour watching as the canoe slowly disappeared. Two more silent hours went by as they waited for the dead to wander away from the docks.

  It was late in the afternoon, and the rain was beginning to pelt them by the time they were able to get to the harbor, only to discover that every one of their small boats was missing. They searched the buildings along the waterfront and came away empty. When they discovered the shell casings from Jillybean’s Sig Sauer along with curious scrapings in the algae right at the shoreline, Mike suddenly realized what had happened.

  “She sunk ‘em!” he cried. The idea that anyone would purposely sink even the tame little paddle boats struck a nerve. Although Mike was on land, he felt stranded. His rightful home was Alcatraz Island and yes, it was practically a certainty that he would never be welcomed back, he was still queasy thinking he couldn’t go back.

  Stu crossed to the dock to where the Saber sat in fourteen feet of water, her cabin flooded, and her keel broken. “Can you do anything with this?”

  “This? Can I do anything with her?” Mike practically growled. “No, not in the time frame we have. Jillybean will be long gone by the time we can raise her and there’s no telling how bad the hole is. Oh, I feel sick.”

  “Then we think of something else,” Stu said, resolutely.

  Thinking really wasn’t Mike’s strong point, but he tried. He and Stu stood there thinking for ten miserable minutes until Stu said, “We’ll cross the bridge and wave some flags to get your friends’ attention over on Alcatraz. Do you think they’ll give us a ride over to the other side of the bay?”

  “You kidding me? No.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Stu said. “We’ll do it anyway. It won’t hurt to ask.” Dejected and with the rain turning into sleet, they began making their way back to the complex, taking the long way around. They had just crested a particularly muddy hill when Mike chanced a look back and in the fading light, he saw a flash of blue far out on the storm-grey water. Grabbing the binoculars, he picked out a little child’s pool bobbing in the water just before the edge of the city blocked it from view.

  “That’s them! They’re heading for San Francisco! Come on.” He started off in a tearing hurry, but Stu’s leg was still weak, and he could only hobble through the cold, stinging rain.

  Stu’s pace was a trial for Mike. For a week now, he had been put in one ridiculous situation after another; always at the Coven’s request and always with a girl in tow. It couldn’t have been made more plain that Mike was to forget Jenn and look elsewhere for a wife. With Jillybean’s mental instability making things intolerable, Mike had barely seen the girl he had kissed so passionately on the night of the battle.

  But that hadn’t stopped him from thinking about Jenn constantly, and now that she was out in a city filled with the dead, his heart ached, and it forced him on. He even offered to carry Stu only to receive Stu’s most formidable glare to date. “Sorry,” he said, and stared into the miserable blinding rain.

  It was two miles to the Golden Gate and another one and a half across it—a dangerous one and a half, at that. There were three zombies on the bridge, haltingly making their way south along it. As the zombies were heading in the same direction as Mike and Stu, they were forced to plod along in their wake with aching slowness.

  Mike’s imagination was all over the board, but with each turn of his mind he pictured something worse happening to Jenn than the one before. And yet he could not believe his eyes when he ran up to see an eight and a half-foot zombie hanging Jenn off the ground by an ankle.

  Despite being armed with only a rather puny looking crossbow, he yelled, “Come on, Stu!” and charged across the intervening roadway, leaping up onto the very SUV Jenn had been pulled from.

  He was now at head height with the beasts and with cool deliberation, he set the bow against the temple of the one that had hold of Jenn, and fired. As the temporal bones are relatively thin, the bolt sank deep, sending a convulsive wave through the creature as if it had just been struck by lightning.

  It fell, still holding onto Jenn, trapping her legs beneath its dying bulk as it continued to tremble and convulse. The other beast now turned to stare at Mike who was still covered nearly completely in his dirty ghillie suit and looked like a bedraggled mass of ivy, topped by a human head.

  For three seconds it stared, the meager wheels of its mind trying to fathom exactly what Mike was. Curiously, it stuck out a hand. Mike fled, running down the hood of the car and racing off into the night with the beast right behind.

  Chapter 7

  Stu stumped up, his useless crossbow in his hands. He stared after Mike and the zombie as they disappeared into the darkness. The boy was on his own. Stu’s leg throbbed, threatening to give out at any moment, and it took everything he had just to keep standing.

  Ignoring the pain, he slung the bow and began pulling six-hundred pounds of stinking, undead meat off Jenn. “You okay? Are you scratched?”

  “I-I don’t know, it’s hard to tell,” she answered, her eyes wide with shock. “I think I’m too numb to tell.”

  They searched her for scratches and found only angry red splotches ringing her ankle. They would become deep purple bruises before the night was over.

  She stood and tested her ankle, wincing as she did. “It’s a little tender. I think I’m good,” she said then looked down the length of the bridge. “Should we go after him? He might need our help.”

  Stu cocked his head, listening past the fast patter of the rain. There was nothing, not even the moan of the zombie could be heard. “No. He’s gone to ground. He should be fine.” He was sure Mike was seventy or eighty yards down the bridge, hiding behind one of the many cars. No doubt the beast was hunting him, but if he remained still and quiet the beast would eventually go on its way.

  “Where’s Jillybean? Is she okay?” Stu had felt an odd shock at seeing Jenn alone. But, by the time he had helped her to her feet, there was nothing left of it except for a slight tremor in his voice. He was quite sure, almost completely sure, that Jillybean was safe—she knew the dead better t
han anyone.

  “I think she’s under there,” Jenn whispered, lifting her chin at the SUV. The two eased down to peer beneath the vehicle and saw the young woman, lying on her stomach, her head resting on her arm, her large eyes wet as if the rain had been washing into them.

  “Is One Shot alive? Or am I a murderer, again?”

  Stu nodded. “He was alive when we left.” He didn’t know what to say after that. Jillybean had crossed a line that had been a decade in the making. In the early days of the apocalypse there had been many terrible things done in the name of survival, but after the first few years, things began to shake out and assume a more proper form. There hadn’t been a murder on either the island or the hilltop in all that time.

  There were fights, of course, and once, seven years back, a man named Florey had tried to rape Lois Blanchard, only to be stuck in the groin by the knife she carried. Bleeding and begging for mercy, Florey had been booted out the front gate. Some had taken to pelting him with rocks. Stu had not joined in, figuring his wound and his banishment were more than enough of a punishment.

  As her crime was so much greater, he feared for Jillybean, and it showed on his face—his rather boyish face, or so it seemed at the moment with the rain trickling down his newly shaved cheeks.

  “Will they let me save him?” she asked.

  “I think so.” He helped her out from beneath the car as Mike returned from his flight. Mike thought he was being stealthy, but they had heard him a good way off, accidentally treading on glass or kicking small stones.

  “We’re safe now,” he said, without taking his eyes off Jenn. She was a miserable thing. Her sagging, wet ghillie suit was clinging to her and her bedraggled hair looked like seaweed. She gave him a weary smile and he couldn’t help return it. The smiles and the stare lingered.

  Stu watched them smiling at each other as if they hadn’t seen each other in a year. He shot Jillybean a look, noticing that their smiles, the one spot of pleasantness in an otherwise terrible day, had revived her slightly. He hated to put a damper on the moment, but they couldn’t stay there all night. “There may be more of them. We should get moving.”

  The smiles faded and not because they had another two-hour march through a land filled with the dead. It was their destination that bothered each of them. They weren’t going “home,” because none of them really had a home. In a way, they were all misfits and, except for Stu, unwanted in their little communities.

  Mike would be arrested on sight if he went back to Alcatraz; Jenn had been tolerated before the Corsair attack, now her presence was barely endured; Jillybean, having committed mercy killings in Bainbridge, had been permitted to remain but only because of what she could do, not out of any particular love or loyalty.

  Stu was wanted by the people of the hilltop, however the feeling was no longer mutual. Their treatment of Jenn was well beyond shabby, their personal courage a shadow of what it had once been and their honor was not much than a small step up from what one would find among the villainous Santas—and it was a very small step up in his opinion.

  He would go back “home” because his own honor demanded it. “I’ll lead and Mike will pick up the tail,” Stu ordered. “We’ll use the path overlooking the 101.”

  Jenn shot him a look. Save for some ratty scrub, there was no cover along the path. If they ran into one of the dead they would have no choice except to fight. In the last few weeks they had been lucky to escape as often as they had. It was a luck that couldn’t last forever.

  They crept back down the bridge until it spilled onto the Marin Headlands. From there Stu led them to a path that had once been dirt but was now a narrow strip of mud with rubble piled high on one side and a long, steep drop on the other. It was treacherous to man and beast alike. They slipped and slithered along it for half a mile when they saw one of the dead.

  As it rushed at them, it slid right off the trail and tumbled down the hill, ending up in a sucking quagmire of brown ooze from which it couldn’t seem to extricate itself. It roared as they passed, and struggled mightily, only to find itself six inches deeper.

  This was their only run-in with the dead. At four minutes after eleven they were let through the gate. Jillybean had been toiling along as if she had an invisible piano strapped to her back, however the moment they were safe inside the walls, she seemed to get some extra energy and headed straight for the tiny clinic in the complex’s clubhouse.

  Other than a single candle burning next to One Shot’s bed, the building was both dark and cold, and other than the dying man, it was empty, as well. He lay in such a deep state of sleep that when she gave him a hard knuckle rub on the sternum, he only moaned softly.

  “What the hell?” she hissed. “Where is everyone?”

  Her eyes blazed with wrath and in the light of the candle they were a terrible sickly yellow. “Jillybean?” Stu asked, staring into them as if trying to see the girl beyond.

  “What?” she snapped. Her yellow-cat’s eyes, a malignant force by themselves, were full on him. She could tell he wanted to calm her and she did indeed need calming. Her heart was racing, with an occasional jolting misfire thrown in to remind her that the meds she was taking would eventually kill her, one way or the other. Other than the upsetting jolts, it was absolutely natural for her heart to be racing, considering what was being asked of her.

  She looked down at One Shot, estimating the damage she had caused. The bullet had entered his abdomen and could have gone anywhere. Without access to radioactive dyes, an X-ray machine or even a simple endoscope, she would have to cut One Shot nearly in half to find it. She would have to run her hands through the loops of his guts, going inch by inch, searching with her finger tips for any tears, of which it was almost a given, there would be a dozen or more.

  She could picture it with perfect clarity: his abdominal cavity would be a foul stew of blood, chunks of meat and fecal matter. It would be a hot, bubbling pool and she would have to bathe in it if she wished to wash away the sin of murder.

  “Jillybean?” Stu asked again.

  She started at the sound of his voice and shook her head, amazed at how quickly the darkness had sucked her down. “I’m sorry. I’m just a little flustered. Shouldn’t there be someone here watching him? And look at this IV for goodness sakes. The vein is blown. I-I need his chart. Is there a chart? Anyone see a damned chart? How am I supposed to know what meds he’s been given? Why…” She was getting loud again and the darkness was back, filling her.

  “Jillybean,” Stu said a third time and took her by the shoulders. “I need you to look at me.” He knew it was dangerous to ask a normal girl to “calm down,” and he wasn’t going to make that mistake with Jillybean. “We’ll find all that out. Let’s concentrate on what to do first. We’ll go in order. Step one is…”

  Before she could answer, Mike whispered, “What’s with your eyes?”

  Stu’s calm, quiet voice had beaten back the darkness, but it came roaring back at Mike’s question. Luckily, Jenn answered, “Her pills do that to her. I think they might have gone bad or something.”

  “It’s her liver that’s gone bad,” Jillybean heard a remote voice say. Once more she was beginning to sink. She clawed up out of the darkness and proclaimed, “My liver, I mean. And speaking of which, I’m going to need my backpack,” she said to Jenn. “The green one in my room. Would you mind?” The girl took a look at One Shot’s face, his grey, wasted face, with its blue rings beneath hollow eyes, and left.

  “One thing at a time,” Jillybean said to herself as she, too glanced at One Shot. “I-I need to know what’s been done for him up to this point. Stu, if you could please call on one of the Coven and ask. They still like you, I hope.”

  This left Mike alone with Jillybean, and One Shot, of course, but he hardly counted. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’m going to need my instruments sterilized so get water boiling.”

  Mike was eager to get away from those terrible eyes and, in no time, he h
ad a fire going and water boiling. He ran for clean towels to sop up blood and more candles and then even more candles because Jillybean had roared at him in a fury: “How can I see a damned thing with six candles!” She was trying to get a new IV going and in the wavering shadows, One Shot’s veins seemed to have disappeared altogether.

  Mike filled the room with candles, lighting it up perfectly so there was no way he could miss Jillybean slicing into One Shot’s belly. In no time she had blood up to her elbows and a spray of it across her face.

  “Gaw,” Mike whispered, his face contorted and his throat constricted so tightly that he knew if he vomited, he would probably choke on it. Even though the room was plenty bright, he said, “I-I should get more candles,” and fled bumping into Jenn on his way out.

  She gave him a smile that was cut short by Jillybean bawling: “I need you, Jenn!”

  Jenn did what she could to help, which was never really much of anything. Without suction, she dabbed at One Shot’s innards constantly with little puffs of cotton, she changed out the plasma bag that fed into One Shot’s arm and she held yards of intestine as her stomach see-sawed as if she were back on the Saber in the middle of a storm, something that didn’t sound half-bad just then.

  It was a long, exhausting night. At one point, Stu came by with Donna to watch, and immediately wished he hadn’t. They both turned green, as Jillybean began to cauterize the many small bleeders, filling the room with the horrible stench of burnt human flesh. Mike came and went doing his best to be both helpful and nowhere near the room at the same time.

  A little after three, Jillybean seemed to hit a wall.

  With One Shot, lying there barely breathing, his pulse thready and weak, Jillybean grew listless, in fact too listless to go on. Her hands fumbled through her instruments and her eyes drooped. “I need something to eat and get me the bottle of pills that start D-E-X,” she said in a whisper.

  Jenn found the bottle and wasted a few seconds trying to read the word Dextroamphetamine printed on the front. She had no idea what the pills were and thought they would be for One Shot. She was surprised when Jillybean dry swallowed two of them, and then was even more surprised as Jillybean was almost magically revived.