The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades (21 page)

“Blue! Blue! What’s going on?”

Neil had cornered himself. He stood against the wall on his tip-toes, panting from fright. After a few deep breaths, he realized that the baby zombie was essentially harmless. In fact it was helpless. Neil had knocked it over when he had leapt up and now it was flat on its back, mewling and trying to right itself.

“Blue?”

“I’m fine,” Neil replied breathlessly into the radio. “It was…nothing. Just a spider.”

“A spider? Are you sure it wasn’t a rabbit?”

Neil stared at the radio, non-plussed for a second, thinking: Who would be afraid of a rabbit? Then he remembered their code words. “No, it wasn’t a rabbit.”

“Good. I haven’t had any rabbits either. We need to meet. I’ve been thinking.”

And I’ve been sleeping, Neil thought. “Sure. Same place we split up at. I’ll see you in fifteen, out.”

“Outside?”

“No I mean that was the end of the conversation. Out.”

“Oh right. Out.”

Neil shook his head. First he screams like a girl and then they end their conversation like that? They had practically broadcast their identities to anyone who was listening. Still, it was a short conversation and probably a confusing one.

“What the heck am I going to do with you?” he asked the hideous baby. It was in a jumper with a rotting diaper beneath—it smelled atrocious, but then again they all did. It was a toothless thing probably only eight or nine months old. It wasn’t scary now. The truth was, it was one of the saddest things he had ever seen.

It hadn’t been bitten and Neil would have bet that it hadn’t been scratched either. The mom had been infected and the tiny boy had drunk her breast milk. Which had turned first, he wondered. Probably the baby, and yet it had been kept alive. “Because who could kill a baby?”

It wasn’t even his baby and yet Neil was extremely reluctant to kill it. He knew he should, simply out of mercy, however all the usual ways—crushing its skull, chopping off its head, burning it down to ashes—turned his stomach just contemplating them. He was such a coward that he contemplated shooting it.

“No. It’d be a waste of ammo, and it would give away my position.”

In the end, he laid a baby blue blanket over it and stepped on its cranium until the thin bones cracked like a walnut and sent splinters deep into the brain. He felt like crying. “Always the hero,” he laughed at himself. On the way out of the house, he went by the master bedroom where he found the mother. She had a hole in her temple with powder burns around it. Next to her bed was a baby monitor. She had listened to her baby turn into a monster but hadn’t had the courage to do the right thing.

Neil left her corpse and walked the half mile back. He was late because he zombie-gimped at an even slower pace than usual. Deanna was hiding in the living room and peeking through the curtains like a child.

“You ok?” she asked when he came in. Compared to the brilliant summer morning, the inside of the house was dark enough that Neil had to squint to see her.

“I’m fine.” In all actuality, he really wasn’t. The two-hour nap hadn’t cured him of his desperate need for sleep and the baby…that poor little baby boy was still haunting him, especially the last nasty crunch under his foot. He could feel the sensation of the bones breaking as though it had just happened seconds ago.

“You look a little freaked out,” Deanna said. When he didn’t reply she went on, “I’ve been thinking. I don’t think we’ll find Jillybean like this, especially if she doesn’t want to be found. She’s too smart, which means we’re wasting our time.”

“What else should we be doing?” Neil asked. “She’s the only one left free.”

“Here’s what I think: we should break into the base.” Neil’s look could only be interpreted as:
are you crazy?
“No I’m not crazy. I had a real good view of the base and it was practically empty. People were leaving the entire time. I think most were going out to hunt for you, but there were others who were leaving for good. My point is, with the River King stuck on the other side of the river and so many of his men scattered everywhere, this is the perfect time to do something.”

A couch, covered in gold and brown paisley swirls, hunkered, forgotten in the living room; it looked as though it had belonged to someone’s grandmother. Neil plopped down on it sending up a plume of dust. He waved a hand in front of his face, saying, “What’s that mean, you want to do something? What kind of something? I’m sure the guards haven’t left and as long as they’re guarding the gate and walking the perimeter we don’t have a chance in hell of fighting our way in.”

“Maybe we don’t have to fight,” Deanna said, quickly. “Maybe we can trick our way in. They’re looking for Neil and Jillybean, not ‘Joe Blow.’ We can, you know, butch you up a little.”

“It’s an interesting idea,” Neil said, glossing over the fact that he had, once again, been called effeminate. “But still useless. Yeah, I’m sure they’d never suspect that I would be dumb enough to stick my head in the lion’s mouth but once we’re inside what would we do? We don’t know the first thing about what’s going on in that base. How many guards do they have? Where are they stationed? When do their shifts end? What kind of weapons do they have? Without that information, we’re just one untrained woman and half a man.”

“You’re not half a man,” Deanna replied.

Neil lifted his slung arm as far as he could. “I wasn’t anything great to begin with and now I’m…let’s just try to be honest. I’m not Captain Grey. I’m not really a hero.”

“Stop selling yourself…uh…”

“Stop selling myself short?” he asked. She tried to grin away the inadvertent insult, but he didn’t care. “I am short. So what? I’ve always been short but that’s not my problem just now. My problem is my planner is missing, my fighter is captured, my heart is locked up and my soul is dead.
“My soul
, Neil thought. So much of his thinking went back to Sarah. It was hard for him to care about anything without her.

“You have me,” Deanna said, trying to cheer him up. “We’ve been a pretty good team, so far.”

The best reply he could manage to the compliment was, “We’re still alive.” He got up and went to the window that faced the base. The first thought that came to mind was: What would Jillybean do in his situation? He snorted at the question. There was no getting into her head and he didn’t bother to try. The better question was what would Captain Grey do? After a few seconds, he realized it wasn’t any better of a question. Grey was a military man with tons of experience in weapons, planning, leadership and warfare, both psychological and physical. Neil could flambé’ with the best of them but what good were his culinary skills now?

“Maybe I should settle for: what would Sadie do?” he murmured. The answer was simple: the Goth girl would do something foolish but brave. Not helpful. A new thought struck him: what was she doing right now? “If you were Sadie, what would you be doing right now?”

Deanna shrugged. “I—I don’t know. I’ve never met her.”

“Well I have,” Neil said snapping the fingers of his left hand as he realized what she was doing and how she was doing it. “She would be trying to contact me or Jillybean. She’d want to know if we were ok and she’d be trying to warn us or help us.”

“Then why haven’t we heard anything on the scanner?” Deanna asked.

Neil was two steps ahead of her. “The River King isn’t stupid. He wouldn’t let her keep a radio, not after you and Jilly blew up the bridge. And besides, if she was transmitting, everyone in fifty miles would hear.”

“So how…”

“How is she trying to communicate?” Neil broke in, grinning, feeling excitement hit him like a drug. He could picture her sitting in her room with only Eve as a friend and with only Eve’s belongings not pawed through by suspicious guards. “Eve has a baby monitor. The range is crappy, you’d have to be practically on top of it to hear anything, but it’s something. If I was her I’d be broadcasting every half hour.”

Deanna began to match Neil’s grin, only her face suddenly drooped. “Wait, don’t they have scanners on the base? They’d be listening in for sure.”

“I guess some people have them, but why would they use them on the base when they think we’re way out there?” He pointed out the window. “What we need to do is get a baby monitor and get in close to the base. And I just happen to know where to find a baby monitor.” That feeling of crushing the baby’s skull came to him again. It crawled up the nerves of his feet and right up the back of his leg.

Sadie lay snoring on her bed, one bare leg thrown off the side in a futile attempt to regulate her heat. The room’s temperature had been better when she could keep her door open allowing a cross breeze. Ever since she’d been “imprisoned”, she had wallowed during the days like a slab of braised beef. It was only mid-day and, had there been a thermostat in the room, it would have been pegged somewhere just nigh of a hundred.

Regardless, she was deep into a dream in which Jillybean was making her a sandwich but neither of them could find anything to put between the slices of bread. The dream had progressed all over the base. When the monitor began spitting out a ragged, static crackling voice, Sadie and Jillybean were in the arena crawling among the cheering fans trying to collect fallen food.

“Green this is Blue. Green this is Blue.”

The words boomed into her dream, seeming to come from a loudspeaker high above the crowd. The voice was surrounded by a roaring fire.
Jillybean hide! It’s a trap
, she screamed.
You can’t trust him
. In the dream Sadie stood up as rippling explosions shook down one of the walls and she could see the river and the boat going up in flames.
Jillybean don’t go in the water
, she wailed.
They’ll kill you
.

“Green this is Blue, come in Green.”

Her dark eyes flapped open. “Huh?” The dream was slow to fade. Her mind lingered on the burning boat and the edge of fear that had pervaded the dream; these were too real.

The monitor was hissing like a fry pan. She reached for it, and said, simply, “Yes?”

This one word answer seemed to confuse whoever it was on the other side. “Green?”

She shot right back, “Blue?” It didn’t sound like Neil, but then it didn’t sound much like anyone else, either. To make sure she asked, “What was I doing when we first met?”

“Robbing me,” Neil answered, immediately.

Relief exploded in Sadie’s chest; it made it hard for her to breathe. She had a thousand questions that she needed answered but, first, she went to the corner furthest from the door and slumped down. It wouldn’t do to be overheard now. “Is Jillybean ok?” she whispered. “Was that you guys on the boat? What happened? Was it supposed to blow up?”

“Slow down,” he cut in as soon as she took a breath. “We don’t know where Jilly is or how she’s doing. She’s free is all we know. The boat was her doing. What about you, Sadie? Are you still free? How’s Eve?”

That question slowed her tongue. Her father had been so angry about the boat he hadn’t just doubled the bounty on Neil and Jillybean, he had taken Eve away from her. She was to be given to that crazy couple, permanently. “This is on you,” he had said over the radio. One of his goons had come in after the explosion and forced a radio into her reluctant hands; she had known right away she was going to bear the brunt of whatever trouble was coming down the pike. His sneer could be heard through the hunk of plastic. “You could have stopped all of this just by supporting me. Just by acting like my daughter. When I get back we’re going to have words.”

“When will that be?” she had asked.

“As soon as possible,” he growled. She had taken that to mean he didn’t have a second boat up his sleeve. That conversation had been four hours ago and no boat had come chugging up the river to replace the one that was still out there smoking as a testament to the genius of Jillybean’s destructive ability.

“Eve is…Eve is…they…” The words did not want to come. She cleared her throat and spat out. “They took her. My dad sold her. He says it’s because of the boat and the bridge, but I know what he’s really after, he just wants the money.” Neil was silent for well over a minute, the only sound that he made was a single sniffle. He was crying, she knew it, because she knew him. He was blaming himself.

To change the subject, she asked, “What about the fire on the bridge? Did you do that or was that Jillybean?”

“That was…” he paused and the monitor rustled like it was being put in a bag. A few seconds later the sound was clear again. “That was me,” Neil said. “I heard that our people were heading into a trap and I was trying to warn them.” He then went on, in odd short bursts, telling her about what had been going on with him. Sadie knew he wasn’t being completely honest about everything. It was the odd way he used pronouns; he was protecting someone.

When she spoke about herself, she returned the favor. She hid the fact that she was planning on killing her own father.

She had a gun, she had a motive—she knew that it was only a matter of time before her father sold her just like he had sold Eve. She figured if she was going to die she might as well do the world a favor by taking him down with her. It would be easy. He had no hold over her heart and barely any over her memory. She could count on one hand all the fond memories they had shared together. Nor did he have a love as pure as the wind for her dead mother to concern her. That love had all the charm and purity of a dead whore bleeding in a gutter.

So she glossed over her plans and gave a sad rundown of Captain Grey’s status. “He’s fought for four days in a row now. His right hand is broken but it doesn’t seem to matter to my father. He’s forcing him to fight again tonight. Grey says that he’s alright, but I know if this keeps up, it’s only a matter of time before he loses.” They all understood what losing meant.

Neil was quiet again for some time and as the seconds clicked by her joy at hearing his voice faded. He was just Neil and Jillybean, wherever she was, was just a little girl. They couldn’t fight the River King and all his men. That was impossible and really, she didn’t want them to try. She didn’t want them to die for nothing.

“We’re going to bust you and Grey out tonight,” Neil said, finally. His words were tinny and high as though someone was squeezing his nuts, forcing him to speak. “We’ll do it at sundown and…”

From the monitor, there was a sudden mush of sound and underneath it Sadie heard a woman’s voice say two words: “Don’t use…” Then there was only static. Who was the woman? Was she the person Neil was trying to protect? And were there more people with him besides her? She pictured him in the basement of some nondescript house dressed in camo and holding a gun, while surrounded by eight or nine others, all hard-faced and mean.

Sadie held her breath as excitement got her heart pumping good. Maybe there was a chance to live. A chance once more to be free. Neil had always come through for her and he was going to again.

“What’s the plan?” she asked, when she couldn’t wait any longer, when her excitement at being able to strike back couldn’t stop bubbling up in her throat. She expected a ten-part, Jillybean-esque strategy that would have her grinning with sinister anticipation

Instead she got a whispered message that made no sense whatsoever! “C is one. Spell cat.” That was it.

Was that a joke? Was Neil drunk or high? “Huh?” she said into her monitor.

“Listen carefully. C is one. Spell cat.”

She wanted to scream: That’s not very helpful! She held it in only because there was a goon just outside her door. Frustrated, she blew out and whispered, “C is one, what the hell does that mean?”

Neil spoke urgently, “Green, you’re transmitting when you speak. D is two.”

Sadie held her jaws purposely closed, though she desperately wanted to yell into the monitor in anger. Didn’t Neil remember that she hadn’t finished school? D is two sounded an awful lot like algebra, a class she would’ve failed if there hadn’t been a nerd sitting next to her that semester who had let her cheat off of his work. His name was Perry and with his poindexter glasses and his constellation of zits, he seemed to exude an aurora of geek that repelled everyone. Sadie felt sorry for him and didn’t tease. In return, he fell hopelessly in love with her.

She had accepted it with a minimum of grace that paid off when he encouraged the cheating. It was obvious from day one that she was in trouble and, though he could have sped through the first test in minutes, he had lingered over it, writing slowly, using very large block letters and numbers. He had even worked out a method to cheat on multiple choice tests. He would answer a question and then pause with his pencil pointed in one of four directions: straight ahead meant the answer was “A”. To the right was “B” and so on.

Still she had barely passed the class finishing with a “D”. She had been more than happy with it. Now, she was wishing she had learned more.

“Be back in a minute,” she said into the monitor and then flicked it off. “C is one and D is two? Isn’t there supposed to be an equals sign?” She had paper and pen and so she jotted down the C and the D and the one and the two. Next she stared at it with a disgusted look. Ten minutes went by and the look didn’t change.

Finally she turned the monitor on again. “I don’t get it.”

Neil let out a long sigh and said, “Spell cat. Call me back when you can.”

She literally growled, Grrr! And then snapped off the monitor, angrily. “C.A.T how tough is that?” She knew he meant something other than the obvious. “What wouldn’t I give to have Perry here…” Her mouth fell open. This was just like the test! “C is one! That means, uh, D is two and E is three. So, if C is one, uh what the hell would A be?”

She had to write the alphabet out with numbers scrawled beneath. When she was done she clicked on the radio and said in a rush, “Hello? Uh, one, eighteen, twenty-five. Is that right?”

“Yes,” Neil said. “From now on, everything we say is in code.”

“Yeah, sure,” Sadie said, easily.

It turned out there wasn’t anything easy about it. Writing even the simplest of sentences took her long minutes of squinting down at the papers spread out in front of her on the hardwood floor. Interpreting took even longer.

How many are you?
she asked.

There’s two of us
, came the answer.

“Son of a bitch,” Sadie said, a little too loud.

Watch your language. Still broadcasting
.

“Son of a bitch,” she replied under her breath. Even in code Neil was parenting her—and warning her not to talk aloud. But still…there were only two of them! How could two people even think about making an assault on the base? As fast as she could, she wrote a code and then spat out the numbers in a clipped tone:
Three against how many? What’s gotten into you?

Neil spat out numbers in a straight, robotic voice
, Grey would do it for me. And I have daughters in there. Can you get to Eve?

Sadie had no idea where the weird couple was staying or even if they were part of the base. For all she knew they were simply passing through. “No,” she said into the monitor. She didn’t need to worry about being overheard just then, her voice was too broken to raise above a whisper.

Can you get out of your room?

She answered
, Yes, through the window, but only once.

Tell me what you know of the guard situation.

There wasn’t much she could say. Her window pointed east. From that vantage, there wasn’t a lot to see. What she could remember from her quick trip to see Captain Grey wasn’t much of a help either.
All I know is that there are three men at the gate and at least one at the guard desk in the main building. Sometimes men patrol.

The monitor was quiet for a few minutes and then Neil began spitting out numbers like an old-time stock ticker. “Slow down,” she interrupted. When he had finished she read:
Meet me in parking lot of first building just after sunset. I’ll be in black truck. No more transmissions until we are ready to move out unless important
.

“See you,” she said.

“Love you,” he replied.

Too late she realized she should have said that as well. “Love you, too,” she whispered into the monitor. It remained frustratingly quiet. “He knows I love him,” she said, trying to reassure herself. “And we’re getting out!” She glanced at the window and saw there were a lot of hours before sunset. To kill time she began to pack her belongings but soon realized there wasn’t anything in the room that she really needed. It was better to go light and fast.

“These can’t stay,” she said of the papers she had written her notes on. They were practically a confession. She went to the window and began to burn them. The smoke was black and was probably seen; it stank as well but what did she care? She didn’t care right up until she heard a man barking orders outside her door.

Her father was here!

Quickly she scattered the remains of the papers, hoping she had gotten rid of anything incriminating. He walked in just as she turned from the window. The River King was not himself. He was normally so cool that he seemed bored by everything but now, his black eyes were wide and scary in their craziness. Sadie actually blanched at the sight of them. Worse, his normally handsome features were twisted in fury, turning him ugly for the first time since she had known him.

He smiled nastily and held his hands out. “What? You don’t hug your dear old dad?”

She couldn’t remember the last time she had hugged him. Too late she saw the reason for the odd request: he was soaking wet. “You swam the river?” she asked incredulously.

“Practically. My men built a raft. It sank halfway across.”