The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades (19 page)

The fire on her lighter went out and just as she relit it and reached once again for the fuel, something new rolled to a stop right next to her hand. The object took her breath away. It was green and mostly round but on top was a little square with a ring hanging off of it. “Whoa,” she said, her eyes very big in her gaunt face; the little ring made a clicking sound because her hand shook as she picked up the hand grenade.

Ipes was yelling in her mind but went ignored as her eyes followed the line from where the grenade and the jelly had rolled from. There was a lone backpack lying on its side next to the rusty hull. She ran to it, pausing only to scoop up the jar of jelly as it rolled by.

Just light the fire!
Ipes screamed in her mind.

“Ok,” she answered, feeling a new calm come over her. This wasn’t the first time she had held a grenade. The last time had been in New York and, even though she had never talked about it to anyone, or even thought about it, really, she had held that first grenade in her hand with a deadly cold desire for revenge eating at her heart. They had killed Ram and they deserved all the death and destruction they got.

She had the same feeling now, only it was more pronounced, just like all her other emotions. Without batting an eye, she flicked the zippo into life and sent it skidding at the puddle of fuel. It went up, not in some tremendous explosion, but in a growly roar of flame. She didn’t even flinch. The cold part of her had known the open barrel of fuel wasn’t going to spark some sort of cataclysmic event, it was that or it simply didn’t care. Either way it was in charge, at least for the moment, and for once, fear wasn’t being considered.

The fire belched black smoke and spoke in a loud grumble, as though it was eating and wasn’t happy about it. She ignored it, just as she ignored Ipes who was bleating on about jumping overboard before the whole boat went up in flames. She was too busy rifling through the backpack to listen. Mostly what lay in the pack wasn’t immediately useful: two canteens, some food that didn’t interest her like the jelly had and some stinky man-clothes. What did interest her was a second hand grenade which she stuck in her belt loop. There was also a gun that she found in one of the side pockets. It was a black one with a wood handle, and reminded her of the kind of guns that police officers used. She transferred it to her pack, setting it beside the jelly jar.

Hurry, Jillybean!
Ipes said, excitedly.
The fire…

“Shut up,” Jillybean snapped. She didn’t have time to hear any more of his chicken-like squawking. Yes, the fire had grown huge in the thirty seconds since she had lit it, yet she knew it wouldn’t get much bigger, nor would it be enough to sink the boat; it was burning on a steel deck. Once it ate up all the fuel, it would peter away to nothing. She had more planning to do, and more running. Above her she heard the pilothouse door open.

The guard had stepped out of the port side door and now stood gaping at the fire. Jillybean scampered to the starboard side stairs. They curved against the bulkhead at a sharp angle so that she couldn’t see the guard; she could, however, hear people yelling from shore and pointing at her. It was somewhat of a shock to see that the barge was only sixty or so yards from the eastern bank. She would have to fix that. Jillybean went to the starboard door and, cracking it, saw that the room was empty.

We can blow up the pilothouse!
Ipes said
. Think about it, if you tape the grenade to the steering wheel we could probably exploded it right off and then what would they do?

The idea didn’t sit well with her. In fact it made her lip curl. Where was the fun in blowing up the pilothouse? Where was the blast of fire? Where was the great kaboom?

We don’t have time for a kaboom
, Ipes said.
The guard is right there. We only have time to disable the ship. Nothing more.

“We have time to do more than just disable it,” she told the zebra. “We also have a way to use the C4.” The C4 would only blow up if there was a way to kick-start it with an initial explosion; and that, thought Jillybean, was where the hand grenade came into play. The only question was where she would plant the bomb.

Ipes disagreed.
That’s not the only question. How do you plan on pulling the pin of the grenade
,
if it’s attached to the C4? You’ll never get far enough away and you’ll get blown up, too
.

“Hush,” she chided. “I’m working on it.”

Her eyes lost their focus while at the same time, her mind opened up to a thousand possibilities. Jillybean did not know the capital of Missouri or the first thing about long division or why leaves fell from trees; hers was a natural genius. Unlike most people, she could readily comprehend the synergistic nature of the various items in her pack—in seconds, she saw how the tape would be used, and the string, and the grenade, and the C4. She even saw how she would use the grape jelly: it would be her reward when she sunk the boat.

“The real question is where to plant the bomb?”

In here would be perfect
, Ipes said waving his stubby hooves around the room.
All you have to do is tape the grenade to the C4 and then tape both to the wheel. Then you run a line of string from the grenade’s pin to the door knob on the outside. When the guard goes to open the door, bammo! There’d be nothing left of this room.
Jillybean felt a return of her anxiety at the easy way in which Ipes had described the murder of some unknown individual. The zebra tut-tutted her.
You’re the one who wants to use the C4
.

“Destroying the wheel won’t be enough,” she replied. “It wouldn’t be anything for them to rig a new steering device to the thingy…

The rudder
.

“Yeah, the rudder. I could do that in a snap. It’s got to be the fuel tank,” she said, and then froze. The guard was back. He had opened the door to the pilot house and now stood there glaring at her.

“You are a fucking pain in the ass, you know…” His words dribbled away to nothing as she produced the first of her two grenades. Just like she remembered it was a bit of a tug to get the pin out. She let the pin drop on the steel deck where it “clinked” loudly in the now silent room.

“Those are bad words,” she chided. “You aren’t aposed to say bad words.”

The man had turned pale as fish belly. He held out a single shaking hand to her, saying, “Don’t let go of that grenade. It’ll blow up if you do.”

“But I want it to blow up,” she said with such horrible, cold assurance that the man scrambled out of the door, tripping over the lip and falling down the stairs.

A great part of her—a gigantic part, that she could barely control, wanted her to toss the grenade after him, knowing that he would die. Ipes stopped her.
No, Jillybean!
he barked in his daddy voice.

“Fine!” she answered, petulantly. She went to the starboard door, stepped through, and then flipped the grenade toward the steering wheel. A strange giggle escaped her as she dashed to the ladder at the back of the boat. Her foot was just coming down on the third rung when the grenade went off with a sharp
clang!
It felt as though someone had smacked a sledge hammer against the other side of the wall she was climbing down and she was so startled that she nearly lost her grip.

Why did you do that?
her zebra asked.

“To get us more time,” she answered, not adding a heavy bit of truth
: because it was fun!
“Now he’ll be all ascared.”

You could’ve hurt someone
, Ipes admonished, riding high in her backpack.

Jillybean couldn’t believe her ears. “He coulda hurt me! And he definitely would’ve given me over to that stinky River King. Boy! Whose side are you on?” He mumbled something about right and wrong, but she cut him off. “You’re only trying to change the subject. Consider yourself in time-out for the rest of the week!”

It was going to be a difficult punishment to enforce since she hadn’t known what day of the week it was for nearly a year. She put it on the back burner now that it was almost time to prep the bomb.

Three feet above the waterline she paused at the fuel cover. It was a heavy metal circle with tar all over its edges. She didn’t like tar; it was messy and never seemed to come off without a great deal of fuss and bother. It was so repellent to her that she leaned back away from the rungs to see if there was any other way to blow up the fuel tank.

There simply wasn’t one that she could see.

Hooking one arm around the rung, she began pushing with all her scrawny might at the cover. It was like pushing against the side of a mountain. When her strength gave out, she went back up the ladder a few steps and used her foot to kick at the edge of the cover until it budged upwards.

“Thank goodness,” she whispered, finishing opening it by hand. When the cover was off and dangling by a rubber tether, she stared down into the foul smelling hole. The fuel was very close, maybe only a couple of feet down at the most; she got the shivers because who really knew what would happen when the C4 went off.

You know you don’t have to use the explosives, Ipes suggested. You could use the grenade or, better yet, you could use your twine as a wick and light the fuel on fire
.

She had considered these two possibilities but neither was very satisfying, or foolproof. Was there enough air in the belly of the barge to keep a small fire lit? Or was there enough oomph to the grenade to pierce its steel hide? She didn’t know, which meant the C4 was the way to go.

“Hold on,” she advised Ipes as she dug into her pack, one-handed. Preparing the bomb took only seconds. It was quick but not easy. Hanging off the back of the heaving barge, with her hands full she had to duct tape the hand grenade to the C4 without dropping either into the river. When they were slapped together, she then had to tie one end of her twine to the grenade’s pin—again a super scary step in the process. What would she do if she accidentally pulled the pin when she was cinching the knot down?

Get blowd up
was the only answer that drifted across her mind. Exactly. She had to be careful but quick because the guard would come looking for her any second.

Once the twine was secured on the pin, she loosened the little brass ring with trembling hands until it was only barely being held in place. Finally, she stuffed the block and the grenade down the tube. It was a tight fit and she didn’t dare use too much force for fear of disturbing the pin.

Now all she had to do was jump in the water and swim as far away from the barge as the twine would allow. It had been a hundred foot spool when she had first found it a month before. It was probably half that now.

“Oh why did I try to build that kite!” she whined. Then there were the trip wires she had made to bedevil Fred Trigg with. Those had been fun.

Jilly, you have to stop procrastinating
, Ipes told her.
Get in the water
.

“I’m working on it. I’m just letting out the string.” She had been unraveling the twine as fast as she could, but it was only an excuse. Her calm had disappeared the second she had stuffed the C4 away. Now she only had one end of a piece a string which wasn’t all that far from the other which was holding back a cataclysmic explosion by the slimmest of margins.

Jump!
Ipes commanded. She jumped into the river; it was surprisingly warm; it was about to get a whole lot warmer.

Monsters began heading her way. They were everywhere and saw in her a very obvious human but she couldn’t worry about them, not when the barge was practically looming over her. As fast as she could, she began swimming, making sure not to pull on the twine any harder than she needed to. It was an extremely difficult thing to do that became impossible when the monsters closed in, blocking her way completely. They were three deep in all directions—even back toward the boat. The barge was beginning to spin in the current, releasing a slew of monsters right at her.

She couldn’t swim and she was too close to pull the string. “Ipes, help me!” she begged.

I don’t think I can
, came the reply.

As always, he was dressed in black, which matched his mood. The River King stood watching the barge twist and turn in the Mississippi. The sight was so utterly ridiculous that it was captivating. Everyone, guards and prisoners alike, watched with the same slack-jawed expression.

“That’s Jillybean,” Michael Gates said, unnecessarily. Even if they couldn’t see the small form of the girl scampering around the deck, there wasn’t a person watching that thought it could be anyone else.

Then came the fire on deck.

“What the fuck!” The River King wanted to pull his hair out of his head. “She’s right there, damn it,” he shouted across the water. How could the guard be so stupid? The guard’s name was Herb; he was a dim bulb, which was why the River King had left him behind, but clearly, he hadn’t even been up to the very simple task of guarding the boat. Instead of going after the girl, Herb was staring at the growing fire as if he was a spectator at a show rather than an active participant.

“The girl!” the king yelled, pointing up at the pilothouse where she had disappeared. “Forget the fire! Get the girl.” Herb looked back and forth from the fire to the pilothouse and then pointed at the fire. The River King stomped his foot and yelled at the top of his lungs, “The girl, get her damn it!” He knew that in the time it took for Herb to put out the deck fire, Jillybean could very well sink the boat around him.

From a distance, watching Herb was somewhat comical. It reminded the River King of a silent movie: Herb looked around the deck with exaggerated movements and then, when he saw Jillybean in the pilothouse went up the stairs determinedly with his head down, only to look up in shock when he opened the door. He stood there for a few seconds and then, to everyone’s amazement, he ran back down the stairs.

“What the hell is he doing?” one of the prisoners asked.

A second later the pilothouse flashed in the morning light as its windows exploded outward, spraying glittering, deadly shrapnel in all directions. This was followed by a loud bang which carried across the water. A groan escaped the River King as a foreboding of doom overcame him.
I don’t believe it, she’s going to sink it
, he thought to himself. He would’ve put money on it if he could’ve found anyone stupid enough not to believe the obvious.

Herb was slow getting back up to his feet and then was wary as he made his way back up the stairs to the pilothouse. Everyone could see him staring around in confusion. Jillybean seemed to have disappeared.

“She’s not done yet,” Michael said, with a smile widening his face at the edges, making him look more like a simpleton than usual in the King’s eyes.

“You don’t have much sense in that bare dome of yours, do you?” the River King remarked in an acid tone. “John, knock some fucking sense into him.” John was one of his least constrained goons; he never had a problem with violence. Grinning happily, he slammed one of his meaty fists into Michael’s breadbasket, doubling the man over.

“You want his scars to show, boss?” John asked, as he appraised, with an apathetic eye, where his next blow was going to land. Before the King could answer, one of the women among the prisoners gasped. She was staring into the river with recognition in her eyes.

The River King had a sudden flash of intuition: Jillybean was in the water, he was sure of it. “Which one is she?” he asked, drawing his pistol. The woman, fifty-ish and plain, wouldn’t fetch much in the slave market in New York. She started shaking her head, pretending she didn’t know what the King was talking about.

He wanted to beat her, or at least threaten her, but he trusted his intuition; she wouldn’t tell, possibly not even after he shot her. By then it would be too late. He ran his gaze back over the water. There were too many heads dotting the river’s surface for him to tell which one was the girl. He squinted at each, trying to see a real human among the undead creatures. After a few seconds he realized, he was being foolish. What did it matter if he shot a zombie instead of the girl?

“Shoot them all!” he ordered and brought up his gun, sighting it on an ugly slime-covered head. He squeezed the trigger and saw the water skip twice next to the zombie’s face. After that, the water seemed to leap all around the zombie as if it tremendous drops of rain were splattering all around it. Then its head came apart as it was struck simultaneously by a dozen bullets.

“Don’t shoot at the same one,” the King shouted. “Pick different targets, you idiots.” He waited to make sure that the men were following his orders—the water was leaping and frothing with all the bullets zipping into it. “Good,” he said, taking aim and pulling his trigger. This time the sound of his gun and the flash of light emitted from the black barrel were swallowed up by a gigantic explosion. The back end of the barge erupted in an ear-shattering, eye-watering detonation that blinded anyone who was looking square into it. The force of the pulse left his lungs momentarily empty and staggered him even though his feet were firmly planted.

The entire boat looked as though it jumped five feet into the air like a horse stung by an enormous wasp. When it came down, it did so in a great ball of fire and smoke that covered half the river.

For a few seconds, Jillybean was forgotten. Everyone stared in awe at the remains of the boat. The flames were a black and yellow roar that mesmerized as it drowned out everything else. It was half a minute before a new sound could be heard. Beneath the fire there was a subtle hissing noise as the superheated metal hull slowly began to sink into the Mississippi.

“That bitch,” the River King whispered to himself, as if suddenly coming awake and realizing his barge was lost. Anger flared up in him greater than anything he had ever felt before. He pointed vaguely in the direction of the water and yelled at his men, “Shoot everything that moves on that fucking river!”

They did so with a vengeance. With their faces set in angry lines, the men lined up at the river’s edge and opened up, going fully automatic. The noise was literally ear-piercing. The King grimaced and stepped back. Plugging his fingers into the sockets of his ears, he watched as the water again leapt and frothed; the froth was not all white. The zombies were being shredded into indescribable hunks as the men took the order with more of a nod to the literal rather than the intellectual. Zombies that were clearly dead—really dead that is—were being turned into pulp as bullets chopped them into pieces.

In a minute, the river’s surface was filmed with an ugly, deep, red and gray grease stain that had lumps of gray flesh floating in it. And still the men pumped a hundred bullets a second from their guns.

They would shoot themselves dry and leave them all susceptible to zombie attacks if he didn’t stop them and yet he didn’t want them to stop. His intuition, more than his common sense had a grip on him: he couldn’t help but think that if anyone could’ve survived the onslaught it was that damned Jillybean,

Eventually, the River King started waving his arms and yelling for them to stop. Above the din his voice was lost; he had to resort to going up the line, shoving each man to silence their guns. When at last it was quiet, he stared at the remains of the barge. It now resembled a tremendous smoking bobber. Its back end had filled with water and its weight was slowly pulling the rest of it to the bottom of the river. Already three quarters of it was below the surface.

Gently, leisurely, it drifted downstream until it got hung up on a shallow bar. “No,” the River King whispered and then tried to will it onwards. He didn’t need a second reminder of Jillybean’s rebellion; the bridge was bad enough. Her blowing up the bridge was embarrassing, but having the boat just sitting there in the river was even worse. People would begin to talk.

“Mother fucker!” he screamed in rage. “Mother fuckin’ fucker! I’ll kill her. I swear to fucking God!” He turned to stare at his prisoners, knowing that if a single one of them said a word he would kill them all. That was when he noticed something odd about them. They were all still there. Like sheep, no one had dared to make an attempt at escape and that was in spite of the fact that all of their guards had been completely distracted for well over a minute.

With his furious eyes on them, they moved now, cringing inward, huddling closer together, again so much like sheep, that it sickened him. They repulsed him with their presence and the more he stared the more an evil glint crept into his eyes. With the pistol hot as a branding iron in his hand he had to fight his trigger finger to keep from killing the lot of them on the spot. “No,” he said to himself, striving to retain some sort of self-control. It was a difficult struggle, made all the more impossible as Jillybean’s stupid face, smirking of course, kept popping into his mind.

I’ll kill her the next time I see her
, he swore to himself, silently. And he meant it.

He had long ago come to grips with murder; the first of which had been in conjunction with the Army pontoon bridge that was now his only salvation. That had been months before when the people cowering in Cape Girardeau had been little more than Neanderthal’s in their bi-level caves, afraid that their fires would go out because they lacked the skill to start them again.

Back then the River King was known simply as Steve. Sure, he was an up and comer, but there were others who had managed to accumulate guns or gas or food. Steve and his friends had little of anything. At the time, no one viewed the bridge as anything special, but then Lindsay Deagle had stumbled upon a string of big, green Army trucks sitting beside a nothing of a dirt road in nowhere Missouri. The other five people in the group wanted to drain the tanks of gas but Steve had stopped them, seeing the value of the bridge at once.

There had been talk up and down the river that the bridge at Cape Girardeau was the last bridge.
But what if there was another
, he had thought to himself,
and what if he controlled it?
This thought had led directly to anot
her: Hell! What if he controlled the bridge at Cape Girardeau?

No one had ever bothered looking at it as though it was an actual commodity before. From that moment on he had realized how he could make his fortune and all it took was the murder of the five people he had been with since the apocalypse began. Three had died by the sharp edge of his knife while on another “scouting” expedition and the last two had died being eaten alive after Steve had stolen their guns and left them for the zombies. They had died because there could only be one “last bridge.”

These had been friends of his. He had killed dispassionately, without malice.

It wouldn’t be the same with Jillybean. His hate was a force inside him that frayed at his self-control. “Get a fucking radio,” he demanded of the closest person to him. It was Ernest, the man who had delivered most of the prisoners to him. There were only a few missing; the most important of these were of course the most dangerous: Neil Martin and Jillybean.

The thought made him want to gag. At least Jillybean was smart, but Neil was nothing. He was a pipsqueak of a man, barely a boy in size, really, whose only claim to fame was being lucky. He wasn’t known for his bravery or intellect, or even his leadership skills. All three had failed him time and again. No, all he had was luck and if the River King had anything to do with it, that would fail him soon enough.

Ernest shrugged, a move that was close to insolence, before going to the first truck in line and bringing over a radio. He handed it to the King who took it with his left hand; with his right, he punched Ernest across the bridge of his nose, knocking him to the dirt. “This is your goddamn fault,” he seethed. “You hand me over these…these useless, worthless pieces of shit, but where’s Jillybean? Huh? Where’s Neil? That’s who I really wanted.”

“That wasn’t our deal,” Ernest said. Wisely, he remained on the ground, propped on one elbow. The River King didn’t think he would be able to control himself if the man tried to get up. “You said payment was for any of the prisoners. Four times what they’d fetch in New York. These were your exact words.” He spoke loud enough for everyone to hear, making it impossible for the King to go back on his word.

A thin smile crept across the king’s features while inside his heart burned with anger. “You’re completely correct. That’s what I said. And now I’m going to say this: I am going to double the bounty on Jillybean and Neil Martin.”

“So, eight times the normal amount?” Ernest asked, unable to restrain the eagerness in his eyes. When the River King nodded, he followed it up with: “Dead or alive?”

“No,” the king answered grimly. “Just dead.”