The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades (35 page)

I lied for a reason
, Ipes said, dipping his big nose down to his chest in shame.
I lied because of all of what’s been happening to you. I know your brain is not right and I was afraid for you to be alone
.

“And this is better?” she asked out of the corner of her mouth.

Absolutely, yes. If I hadn’t done anything you would have ended up as monster chow
.

He was right, she would have gone bonkers being alone. But that didn’t explain everything. “Tell me about the radio.”

The memory again: the rubber band snapped off, stinging her wrist and leaving a mark; she ignored it completely. There was only one reason to strap down a book like that and it was to keep something from falling out. Pages from the book was the obvious thing to keep from being lost, but Jillybean saw that the binding was practically new. There was something else inside the book.

“I forgot about the radio,” Ernest said. “Quick, turn on the scanner. I want to know what’s happening.” When she blinked at him, coming up from the memory, he mistook the look. “You can keep talking to the zebra, I don’t care, just turn on the scanner.”

She had put it in her pack, which sat between her knees. She pulled it out, switched it on and immediately heard the sounds of battle.

“Lead one, what are your casualties?”

“Maybe a dozen. It’s hard to tell. When are you guys going to get here? We got a bunch of stiffs on us, too.”

“We’re unhitching now. Keep them occupied for a bit longer. We’ll come up from the back and get them in a crossfire.”

Ernest exhaled, angrily and began to slow the truck. Jillybean wanted to ask why he was slowing instead of speeding up, but the last memory clicked into place: the bible fell open and where there should have been a thousand pages with tiny writing running in neat lines, there was instead a square hole in the middle of the book. In the hole was a radio. She clicked it on and heard someone talking, raising his voice, imperiously—it was the River King.

Who, and what, Ernest was became suddenly crystal clear. He was a bounty hunter. A sly one…one that was full of trickery and deceit. He had tricked Jillybean into being his friend so he could use her. He had talked everyone into leaving Fort Campbell, and it was he who had picked out the school. He had set up the ambush using the radio. He was nasty and greedy. He had already been instrumental in capturing fifty-seven prisoners, now he was after Jillybean and Neil and the rest.

And yet, in Ipes’ mind, Ernest’s evil presence was preferable to Jillybean going insane. That must mean she was very, very close to being insane. Not just a little bonkers like talking to a toy; it had to be worse.

However, she didn’t have time to think this through. The truck topped a hill and down below them the road to Baker stretched for just a few more miles. In between them and the town were the River King’s trucks and pontoons. One of the trucks had unhinged its flatbed and was belching smoke as it headed for the town as fast as it could.

“Well there goes that,” Ernest said, disappointedly. “We were just a few minutes too slow.”

He kept coasting along, his speed dropping as he neared the trucks. There was a small river in front of them, little more than a creek but it was fast flowing and deep. He stopped the truck over it and looked out. It had a fine view of open farm land that was going green as nature took over the cultivation process.

“It’s pretty out there,” he said. “Let’s take a look at the river.”

“But my friends,” Jillybean said. She could hear the steady pop of rifle fire in the distance; it seemed like a terrific battle was being waged and here she was doing nothing. “My friends need me.”

Ernest looked at her with sadness. It was full of fakery. “It doesn’t sound like they’re going to make it, but you shouldn’t worry, you have Ipes.” He plucked the zebra off the seat and slipped out of the truck.

“What? Hey…wait,” Jillybean said. She climbed out after him, her shivering progressing to a point that she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold her bladder soon. Ernest went to the guard rail and leaned against it, resting on his elbows, dangling Ipes over the rushing water.

“C-careful, he…he doesn’t like to get wet.”

“Come stand over here with me,” Ernest beckoned. Something in his hand was shiny, it caught the sun and shot into her eyes. She blinked, bringing the knife into focus. He held it casually next to Ipes’ neck. “Come on, you can’t hear the guns as much over here.”

The water was loud, but not so loud that the voice in her head couldn’t be heard.
He’s going to kill you, now. He’s going to stab you in the face. He’s going to put that knife in your guts and stir it around
.

Jillybean took two wobbly steps closer; she was just out of arm’s reach. She couldn’t help but stare at the knife.

“Closer,” he said, smiling, easily. “You don’t want me to drop him, do you?”

He’s going to kill you now. He’s going to kill you now. He’s going to kill you now. He’s going to kill…

“Closer.”

“Don’t drop him,” Jillybean said, holding out a hand.

“Come closer.”

He’s going to kill you now. He’s going to kill you now. He’s going to kill you now. He’s going to kill you now. He’s going to kill you now.

But there was Ipes to worry about. Jillybean stepped closer.

The knife, six inches of razor sharp metal, came slashing at Jillybean’s midsection where her belly was soft and pale, and oh, so tender. Her flesh might have all the toughness of tissue paper and her mind might be as unbalanced as a dozen stacked teacups, but she could be brave when her friends and family were in trouble, and there was no one more resourceful. Though in this case it didn’t take much—she had a gun and he had a knife.

“Huh,” he grunted, seeing the gun. His knife hand stopped inches from her as he grinned at the gun. “You won’t shoot. You can’t shoot. Look at Ipes. Look at what will happen if you shoot me. He’ll go in the river and be washed away forever. Come on, you don’t want that. You couldn’t handle that. Your brain, Jillybean. You’ll go crazy without him and I don’t want that to happen to you.”

He was back to his sweet self, but he didn’t realize that the sweeter he was the more she saw him as a liar and the more she wanted to kill him. The voice inside her wanted it very badly.

He deserves to die. He deserves to die very, very slowly. Shoot him in the knee, Jillian. Start there
.

The very thin pane of glass separating this voice from her normal self was now more like a window screen. She could smell the person in her mind and it wasn’t her mother. Jillybean’s mom always smelled of perfume and pretty flowers. The voice smelled old, like someone had dug up a coffin and she was breathing in the bones of the dead.

She could feel the itch to kill in the palm of her hand. In order to scratch it, all she had to do was pull the trigger.

Jillybean couldn’t do it. She had killed a man before and that had sent her into a fugue for hours. What if that happened again? What would happen if the owner of the voice took her over? She was sure the voice wouldn’t be as cute and cuddly as Ipes…and what would happen to Ipes? He couldn’t swim; he could barely float and that was only until his round bottom filled with water.

For just a second she took her eyes off of Ernest and watched the river rush past. If he fell in, Ipes would be gone in seconds. There would be no time to search for him either. If she managed to hold onto her mind, she still had to find some way to help her friends.

“Yeah, you don’t want to shoot me,” Ernest said, following her eyes. “The water is so fast Ipes will be gone in a snap. Think about that. Think about putting down the gun. You aren’t a killer.”

A face splashed in her mind: the bounty hunter with his eye shot out and a hole that went deep into his head.
You are a killer
, the voice hissed in her ear.
And you can kill again so easily
. It sent a shiver up her spine. She lowered the gun; it was heavy and she was weak. Still she kept herself tense and ready to kill again if she needed to.

“Yes I am a killer,” she replied. “I killed a man before. He was bad. But bad or not I don’t like what it did to me. I don’t want to kill you Mister Ernest. I want you to go away.”

He thought it over for a spell and then asked, “What are you going to do if I leave? You can’t save your friends, not all by yourself.”

“I can, I think. Those are the River King’s pontoons down there; I can threaten to blow them up.”

“You don’t have enough C4.”

“The River King doesn’t know that,” Jillybean replied. “Either way that’s none of your business. So…so why don’t you just leave? If you start walking I won’t shoot you. I think that’s a pretty good trade.”

He shook his head. “It is my business. If you damage the pontoons, I’ll be out a ton of money. And besides, I’m the one with the hostage.” He shook Ipes over the water. “I have a pretty good idea what this little guy means to you. And I can guess what will happen if you lose him. He’s holding you together, isn’t he? Without him you’ll unravel. You’ll go
craaaazy
.” He hung on the word.

She was sure he was right, but she was also certain he wouldn’t risk being shot. Not over some money. “It doesn’t matter. I have my friends to think about.”

“It doesn’t matter? Really? Then you’ll be ok if I do this?” Without warning he tossed the zebra in an arc eight feet into the air. Ipes floated like rainbow with nothing to catch him but the rushing waters below.

The move was so unexpected that Jillybean’s heart literally missed a beat and her breathing stopped. Ernest had a wicked look on his face as the zebra—as her friend, tumbled end over end.

He had done this on purpose and Jillybean’s mind screamed: WHY? The word was thunder inside her soul; an explosion that she couldn’t stop.

In the space of half a second, her brain fired an unprecedented number of neurons as she tried to simultaneously consider the ramifications of each and every action open to her. These considerations went beyond the simple: if I do this, then he’ll do that. She saw, on an escalating, multi-level, algorithmic scale, the options available to her not just at that moment, but to the
Nth
degree. Even for her mind, the challenge of calculating every single consideration of every single option represented an overload that was frightfully close to sending her into convulsions as a storm of mental electricity raged across her synapses.

The resultant pressure split her mind square in two.

Ipes had been an adaption, a coping mechanism that she had manufactured to deal with the fear, and the stress, and the loneliness of her post-apocalyptic life. What was happening now was completely different. What happened to her just then was straight up psychic damage.

She split down the middle, one side representing Maslow’s second level on his hierarchy of need: the basic need for protecting one’s physical self. The other side represented the remaining tiers: the need to be loved, the need for self-actualization and self-esteem, the need to belong.

In other words one side represented Jillybean as she saw herself, and the other represented a straight up sociopath who could steal without guilt, lie callously, hoard greedily, and kill without remorse.

The Jillybean side saw salvation in Ipes. He was her protector, the source of her wisdom and the only chance she had at healing the rupture in her mind. With one eye, she tracked Ipes as he flew gently over the railing. That part of her was so easily deceived because emotion distorted her thinking. She was literally more afraid for a stuffed toy than she was for her own skin.

The split in her mind was so acute that it carried over to the physical. Jillybean’s left eye watched Ipes and, like a chameleon, her right eye saw Ernest drop the knife at the same moment he had flung the zebra. With unbelievable quickness, he went for his gun. It appeared in a blink, a hard chunk of deadly metal, coming up to aim at her chest.

But the new side of her wasn’t caught unawares. She had fully expected exactly this. It had been a large part of her strategic evaluation of the situation. As cool and fearless as any gunfighter out of old west, she fired her pistol from the hip, a skill that took years to perfect…unless, of course, the target was three feet away. She couldn’t miss.

The bullet from her .38 tore through his chest. It wasn’t a neat little hole and there wasn’t a long teary good bye from the man as he slipped into death. A huge chunk of flesh and bone blasted out the back of his shirt. Rib shrapnel punctured his heart in three places and burst his lungs like two balloons. He was down on his back before he could comprehend what was happening.

The new person stood over him, smiling. “I bet you didn’t see that coming,” she said. He grunted and coughed up blood. She appreciated the way his face turned red and how his throat worked up and down as he struggled to find his last breath. She was utterly fascinated.

Jillybean, on the other hand, was appalled and horrified. “Don’t look. It’s gross.” She tried to turn her head but couldn’t move it more than a few inches. However, she could turn “her” one eye away, and when she did, she saw only the forest and the river. Ipes was gone. He was gone completely. He wasn’t even in her mind anymore. The rushing water had taken him and washed him from her subconscious as if he had never been. He’d been so real, so alive, and now he was nothing but a memory. There was a hole in her soul bigger than any bullet could create. It was tremendous and aching, and the only thing to fill it was this miserly, shriveled thing that was the new girl.

A tear leaked out of Jillybean’s left eye.

“Don’t be such a baby,” the new girl said. “He wasn’t even real. He was a manifestation, only. Kinda like a ghost. Now give me back my eye, there are people coming.” She blinked into focus and saw two men were hurrying up from the line of 5-tons and pontoons. They were just visible through a break in the trees; they were both armed with scary looking weapons.

Jillybean left Ernest and ran to the woods next to the little river where, due to her mud camouflage and shredded clothes she practically disappeared. The men certainly didn’t see her as they came up on the scene. They advanced slowly now, their black assault rifles held up and at the ready. One of them swept the forest with his eyes but Jillybean and the new girl stood like a statue and his eyes swept right on by.

Then the two men turned their attention on dead Ernest. “What the fuck?” one of them asked.

“I don’t know,” the other said. “But be careful.”

The new girl was like a panther as she came stalking out of the woods with the black pistol raised. She was going to shoot them in the back. To her they were strangers and their deaths would have value to her. They represented an obstacle and a possible danger, thus they had to die, no questions asked.

Jillybean wanted to stop her, but death was the new girl’s bailiwick, her jurisdiction, and within it, she could not be denied. She commanded the water to cover the sound of her feet, and the air to carry away her scent. She forced out all of Jillybean’s foolish notions of right and wrong, of fair play. She stuffed Jilly’s fear back down her throat and she pulled the trigger with all the compassion she would reserve for killing a mosquito.

She shot the man on the right, but he didn’t die right away. The bullet lodged in his spine and, although he was paralyzed, he was awake and alert when the zombies came and ate him later that afternoon. His friend was luckier; the new girl put a slug in his head as he turned, crying out in fear.

“Excellent,” she said, when the last echo of the gun blasts had faded into the backdrop of nature. She nudged the first man with her foot, liking the way his head moved but nothing else. She guessed at the paralysis and gave him a light kick to the temple to see if he could bring his head back to square; he couldn’t. He was forced to stare out at the river; only his eyes moved. They went in circles.

“Cool,” she said.

“It’s not cool,” Jillybean wept. “It’s horrible and you’re horrible.”

“I saved us. Where’s the thanks?”

“You murdered them.”

“Yes, and you’re welcome.”

Jillybean couldn’t believe the cold tone. It infuriated her and stopped her tears. “Get out of me!” Jilly hissed, grimacing and scratching at her right arm.

“You get out of me, bitch!” the new girl snarled. She stopped Jillybean’s frantic scrambling with a thought. “You don’t get it. I was here first. I was the one who found the nipple. I was the one they loved. I was the one they called
Precious.
You didn’t come along until later. You stole them from me with your stupid brains and your big useless thoughts.”

“Stole who? Mom and dad?”

“My mom and my dad!” the new girl raged. “They were mine and you stole them and you know what’s worse? You hid me. You acted like you were ashamed of me, like you were better than me.”

“I don’t even know who you are!” Jillybean cried. She stopped fighting. She was too bewildered to fight. Everything was happening so fast. Ipes was gone and there was so much blood all over the ground and the guns were still going at it in the distance. It was all too much. She was tired and wanted to sit, but the new girl pulled her up.

“Come on. We have to save Captain Grey.”

This did nothing to help her puzzled mind. “You want to save them?”

“They’re my friends, too. Come on.”

Jillybean allowed herself to be dragged back to Ernest’s truck. The new girl rummaged in his pack and pulled out the bible. She ripped off the rubber bands and Jillybean had that sense of déjà vu again. It was overwhelming…everything was overwhelming. She felt like she was being swallowed up by something ugly and primal. And when was she going to be allowed to grieve for Ipes?

“Never,” the girl spat. She took the radio out of the bible and looked it; Jillybean could feel her confusion as she stared at the knobs. She turned it over in her hands as if it was some sort of advanced alien technology that she couldn’t fathom out.

“Here, let me,” Jillybean said, taking over—figuring things out was her strength and it gave her control. She turned the volume dial to the right, clicking on the power.

“Gimme!” the new girl said, taking the body as her own again. “Hello! River King, hello. Where are you?”

“Who is this?” the River King asked, seconds later. Jillybean could tell by the slow, cautious way he asked that he guessed who it was and he had a bad feeling about it.

The question:
Who is this?
was a stumper for the new girl. Jillybean could feel the confusion inside. She couldn’t very well say: “Jillybean” because she wasn’t Jillybean. She was something else.